France en Vacance

So, July has come and gone and we're now entering the home straight of the long summer holidays. There are more camper vans on the roads than lorries, and in this part of the country they are fighting the combine harvesters for road-space. At the moment it's forty - thirty to the combines. Add on the tractors and trailers teetering dangerously along over loaded with straw bales, and the wannabee 'Tour de France' candidates wobbling from side to side as they push up the one- in -eight gradients and it's the Highway to Hell on some routes.

Ah! 'Le Tour'. It has a strange effect on the French. They are by nature in love with the velo. It seems to be inherent in the male of the species. An urge to purchase a multi-geared monster, a flash helmet and appallingly fluorescent Lycra and take to the open road. Every week-end they flash by my window in a streak of yellow, orange or lime green come rain. hail or heatwave. A pelaton of cyclists have a peculiar sound as they swoop past. It's an eerie hum of skinny wheels on tarmac, and perhaps the muted chatter of conversation. Quite weird, like a ghostly daylight apparition. In technicolour.

This year Le Tour made an overnight stop in Lannemezan. I like Lannamezan. It's got a good range of shops, some cut-price supermarkets, and a big Wednesday market, so it's my kind of town. Each year towns all over France vie with each other to 'win' an overnight stop on one of the stages. It's quite a coup, and a financial boost into the bargain.

Thank goodness Lannemezan has a good selection of bars. I guess they'd all have been full of journos, and assorted Tour followers. Not the cyclists though . They're all too exhausted to do anything other than lie on the physio's couch and then turn in for the night, ready for the next day's punishment.

The Tour organisers must have a soft spot for Lannemezan, because they stopped there a couple of years ago, so cycling and the accompanying tourism seems to have replaced the production of mutton for which the town was famous in the last century.

This year the tour organisers declared there would be zero-tolerance towards drugs and their words must have been heeded, as there were only four disqualifications, which may be four too many, but it's an improvement on previous years. Performance enhancing drugs have always bedevilled the tour, and it had become so blatant that there was a danger that France's most famous contribution to the sporting summer was beginning to loose some of it's public support.

But this year the crowds along the route were a thick as ever with old-hands arriving four or five hours before the start, and pitching camp in the best places for seeing their heroes. You can always see which roads the tour has used over the years, as the names of previous overnight leaders are stencil-sprayed onto the tarmac, and sometimes on the walls of tunnel and bridges. There they remain long after the 'name' itself has retired - a reminder of past glories.

There was a bit of a niggle in the press that the whole carnival of Le Tour was becoming too much of a strain on local services. Certainly, the roads do seemed to be closed off for an inordinately long time before the race actually starts, and the route uses up an awful lot of policemen who could be otherwise occupied with speed cameras, but I can't imagine there will be any change in the plans. It's a festive occasion and too much a part of summer to be cut back.

We've watched a couple of stages over the years. The first time we were inadvertent spectators as we unwittingly strayed onto the route and were informed the road we wanted to take had been closed and would remain so until the whole shooting match had gone through. So there we were, in this little village, squashed against the wall in the narrowest of streets in a midday temperature of 30c + for over two hours.

But we weren't without entertainment. Long before the peleton appears we have the spectacle of the caravan of sponsors and back-up cars . This is the warm-up act and goes on for ages, a endless procession of trucks, trailers and pretty girls throwing out freebies to an eager crowd who risk death by hurling themselves into the road to retrieve a free sachet of coffee, a cheap baseball cap you wouldn't be seen dead in,a ballpoint pen that lasts all of five minutes or a keyring. Being British I refrained from such displays of avarice and contented myself watching grown men race to beat their neighbour to a children's puzzle book. As for the cyclist themselves they were there and gone in a rush of air which actually created a sort of wind-tunnel in the narrow street, leaving me to wonder what all the fuss was about.

The next time we watched it we were better prepared, with bottles of water and a camera for a start. We positioned ourselves on a wide bridge over the Garonne, where the crowds were thin which meant we had a ringside view ( and some where to sit as an added bonus). I surmised from the lack of spectators we weren't in the most exciting place, but we were quite happy. It was a distinct improvement on the previous occasion.So we waited...and waited. The freebie part of the morning arrived and drove slowly through, throwing out the booty to eager arms. The police, stationed on the roundabout at the junction were well up on the give-aways...they could spot a mineral water promo- van before it even arrived on the bridge and would be prominently positioned in readiness for half a dozen bottles to be handed over. They didn't bother with the pens, they'd probably got a whole storeful back at the station.

After about an hour and a half the clatter of helicopter blades announced the arrival of the media pack sent a frisson of excitement through the crowd. The peleton were on their way, and could be spotted on the other side of the river, flashing silver, green, blue through the trees lining the road.

David Bailey(on less exciting days, The Significant Other) made final adjustments to his camera and leaned expectantly into the road. I was watching his maneuverings with mounting alarm. The lens cap was swinging from the camera, he was precariously balanced with one foot on the road, and one on the verge and I could just visualise the carnage if he got himself tangled up with the lead riders. A couple of years before a woman with an uncontrollable handbag had a close encounter with Lance Armstrong's handlebars and he finished up in the gutter with several other riders on top of him. And only the year before I had seen a hilarious video of a golden retriever wandering across the road straight into one of the cyclists who crashed to the ground with a front wheel bent beyond redemption. The dog continued his amble across the road as if nothing had happened.

My squeak of "For God's sake get back" was lost in the crescendo of excitement as the riders, preceded by police outriders, wheeled right to the bridge and powered down towards us - a tsunami of alloy,lycra, bronzed thighs, and grim expressions. They sped down to the roundabout, then off and up, to the Col Ares for another masochistic day in the mountains.

And that was it, until next year when the route would be slightly different but the spectacle unchanging.The crowds drifted away and began the long walk back to their cars, the police cleared the barriers away and opened up the road and the Significant Other took a quick look at his photos. He was well satisfied and I was relieved. Man and camera had come through unscathed.

My Personal Battle with Francophobia

OK, so I'm biased. I'm a bit of a Francophile. For all her faults ,France is a bit like an elderly relative - prickly, impoverished( but in denial,) and definitely living in the past, but ancient aunts can be strangely lovable. And when some little ill-informed twit comes along and criticises her it really annoys me. If there's going to be any criticism I will be the one doing it.


Today's' Sunday 'Wail' really got me going. " British motorists face £100 fine for failing to wear fluorescent vests when driving in France".

What? Of course you don't have to wear a flourescent vest while driving ! You put the bloody thing on if you breakdown, for God's sake!

It's at times like this I wonder why on earth I bother to read British newspapers online. And as for buying one at the grossly inflated price that they're on sale for in French newsagents - forget it. I can buy a bottle of wine for less than that and get a good deal more satisfaction from it.

So. back to the article. What a load of Europhobic, badly researched journalism!

This quite acceptable law came in on July 1st, having been enforced in Spain for 2 years already. It's now law to carry a fluorescent vest together with a red triangle (which has been a legal requirement since God-knows-how-long). It's been widely discussed on ex-pat forums, and advertised on French telly for months. And I'm quite sure it's all out there in the UK via the AA or travel insurance sites...so where's the problem ?

Fluorescent vests are as cheap as chips (unless you're going to get Stella McCartney or Donatella Versace to design one for you) Go down to Halfords, or even cheaper probably, a garage forecourt, invest a couple of quid in a polyurethane vest in day-glo yellow and if you do have a breakdown and you happen to be on the Autoroute de Sud in driving rain you stand a chance of being seen by that artic that is thundering along a couple of yards from the hard shoulder that you're parked on. The law only requires you to have one per vehicle at the moment (as far as I understand it - but the jury appears to be out on that bit.)

The best way to avoid being stopped by 'le flic' is to display the vest in a prominent position in the car... hanging it from the back of the driver's seat seems to be the most popular choice . After all that's where it needs to be if you do have an accident or a breakdown. Not in the boot where you may have to risk life and limb to access it. If the gendarmes can see it, they're less likely to pull you over. I mean...we all know what that means (in any country). Full check of all your documents and maybe a look in the boot, a keen look at the tyre treads, and and a good deal of teeth sucking before they eventually wave you off. So unless you actually enjoy a bit of a run-in with the traffic police. and find it adds to the holiday excitement, buy a vest, keep it in the car and above all ,drive as if every other driver is a lunatic. Remember, France holds the dubious honour of being rated as having the worst drivers in Europe.

As long as you bear that in mind that lovely, stubbornly cantankerous old auntie can still provide you with a great holiday.

Pets Gallery

Just Lazin' Around

Sheba & Friend

Well, in Sheba's opinion more like an alien invader. She reluctantly shares her bed with a feline refugee, one of 3 kittens we found abandoned in a cardboard box whilst out walking. They were 'adopted' on the understanding they lived in the barn and kept the mice at bay. Unfortunately they didn't keep their side of the bargain, wormed their way into the house and took over. Sheba was not amused.

Rooney the Loony

In his best 'pharaoh dog' pose he looks as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. It does, as has been proved when he nicks a packet from the work top.

photos of Rooney:http://www.katelevesleyphotography.co.uk

The End of an Era

Adieu Sheba

For the first time for decades I have a hair, dust and pet-free house. Our lazy, dimwitted, eating-machine, other wise known to us all as Sheba, our ancient labrador has finally lost the battle with mortallity. Thus ended a long family history of labrador owning stretching back nearly 40 years.

I began to think she would out-live us all . She survived a change of country, three removals and three cats with her usual mixture of stoicism and resignation, and outlived her far more active brother.

One never knew exactly what was going on in her head, except that five o'clock in the evening was the highlight of her day. The hour at which the refrigerator door miraculously opened and her food bowl was transferred from floor to work-top. In the last few years she'd become very deaf and her eyesight was deteriorating but she never missed the sound of a tin opener attacking a tin of dogfood, or the the rattle of a dog lead which preceded an afternoon ramble.

She never was a happy car traveller. I can remember one nightmare journey when she was only a few months old. One of my daughters was desperate for us to bring Sheba when we picked her up from boarding school for half term. Her friends had all heard about Sheba-the-wonder-dog but apart from a photo which was displayed on her bedside locker no one had seen the actual animal. I should have been stronger. Instead I gave in, and lost count of the number of times we had to stop to clean out the car. Having disposed of her own body weight in waste matter on the outward journey, she whimpered piteously all the way home.Who had ever heard of a labrador that didn't like cars? With typically female perverseness, years later she calmly accompanied us to our new life in France, enduring a 700 mile journey crammed into the back of the car alongside all the extra junk we couldn't get into the removal van. And all accomplished without so much as a hiccup. There was a fair amount of flatulence around though!

She wasn't too keen on retrieving either. Throw her a stick and she might consent to run after it. Might even, on a good day, bring it halfway back, but after that it was : 'Oh, forget it ! Who wants to play that boring game anyway?' It has to be said, as a working dog she was a bit of a non-event.

But we miss her presence around the place, particularly when we come in after having gone shopping. She was always at the door, tail wagging, happy to see us back. We are giving ourselves a break from pets for a while. They are a comforting addition to the household, someone to enjoy a walk with, a ever -listening ear when you've had a bad day, but it has to be admitted they are a responsibility(or should be) and as such they are a tie. So regretfully we'll be dog-less for the immediate future, but it means we can take off on a whim without having to find holiday accommodation that accepts pets , and we can return to the UK without the hassle of pet passports, or forking out for boarding kennels.

Our links with labradors are still in place, however, as my aforementioned daughter has had her lab, Archie, for five years, and he has now been joined by a friend. Rooney(yes it is a 'chav' name but he was already saddled with it) was dumped outside a local vets with a front leg so badly mangled that it had to be amputated. A coursing dog with three legs is no use to anyone so poor old Rooney languished in a boarding kennels acting as an overspill for the RSPCA until the owner, who was a friend of my daughter's, recognised in her a sucker when it came to lame dogs(literally!) So Rooney landed on his three legs and is now housed in a new family, has a half share in a second hand settee and a brand new pal. And a beautiful dog he is too. Trouble is he knows it !

After such a bad start in life (he was probably less than a year old at the time) he is remarkably well behaved. Apart from his habit of self -service eating. Archie, like most labs. was an easy dog to train and despite having the legendary hoover-like appetite he has never pinched anything off work surfaces. Not so Rooney. With his long neck and body any edible article left on a kitchen worktop is almost certain to finish up in his stomach. Daughter came home from work the other day to find a box of eggs, un-opened, and miraculously un-broken nestling cosily in his bed. Maybe he had hopes of hatching them out.

An Uncomfortable Truth, or Wartime Propaganda?

The Paris metro 1940 (photo Andre Zucca)

left :The Swastikas Fly in Paris.(photo Andre Zucca)

A new exhibition, running until the end of July, has created something of a stir in France, and let more than one uncomfortable skeleton out of the cupboard.

The German occupation of France is a period in the county's history that many, particularly the older generation, would rather forget, and this public airing of nearly 300 images of life in Paris under a Nazi regime has divided opinion in the city.

The photographer, Andre Zucca, was employed for propaganda purposes by the Third Reich, of that there is no doubt. He was commissioned to take pictures which showed how well the occupying forces were integrating into Parisian life, and he was certainly an accomplished professional with an eye for a good photo-opportunity. But the photographs that are on show have been obtained from family archives and in fact were never published. So the argument continues...are they posed, or did Paris, and France as a whole, buckle down to life with the enemy and appear to be socialising, shopping and generally behaving as normal while the rest of Europe, and the UK in particular were being rationed and bombed out of their homes?

The answer to this is very complex. In this part of France my neighbours seem reluctant to discuss what they did in the war. In fact I've only heard the war referred to twice. Once, when I offered my 'opposite' neighbour some artichokes (the Jerusalem variety) she shuddered and said - " Mais Non" very vociferously. Apparently they were dished up on a daily basis in the war. The second time was when another neighbour was telling me her aged mother was gravely ill in our village old people's home. "She is praying to die" I was informed gravely. When I muttered "Qu'elle dommage" for something to say she, she shook her head and said, "Oh Maman had such a hard life...a loveless marriage, the War ..." I wasn't too interested in the loveless marriage, I would have liked to have continued the conversation about the war, but somehow the subject was changed and I never got the opportunity again. As for maman, she recovered and three years on is about to celebrate her 98th birthday!

It's incredible that this important (to me) piece of recent history is either hidden under the bed or ignored. After all, the 2nd Panzer Division was stationed at Toulouse, not 70 miles away. And it was the der Fuhrer Regiment of the 2nd Waffen SS Das Reich that were hot-footing (or hot-crawling perhaps) up to Northern France in 1944 to reinforce thier comrades who were trying to repel the Allied Invasion. On the way up they passed Oradour sur Glane, and the rest is history.

The catastrophic fall out from the massacre of the citizens of Oradour has never been fully measured. The French themselves were in denial for many years after the war, mainly because of the ghastly realisation that the troops who actually carried out the massacre, under orders from the Das Reich command were in fact from Alsace. Officially the Alsace was German but before the First World War it had been French. As there was less than a quarter of a century between the two wars the soldiers were mostly, by birth French. The collective guilt was immense.

The story of Oradour is steeped in mystery, and contradiction. The site is now a national monument, with the village left exactly as it was when the soldiers withdrew to Limoges and continued their journey north. I have never been there, but we often passed the sign-post to the village on our journeys to and from the UK as it's on the most direct route from the southwest. I don't know if I want to visit it or not. I suppose I ought to, as I refer to this period of history quite a lot in the book I'm still working on so it would help in my writing, but I know it won't be a pleasant experience.

There is an excellent website complied by Michael Williams http://www.oradour.info/ which I have used extensively for research. Do take a look if you want to know more about the shocking happenings that day in June 1944. For me, his is the most definitive account I have read, and the website is very comprehensive. His gallery of 190 photographs are so compelling I have almost convinced myself it isn't necessary for me to actually go to Oradour in person. Yes, I know that's the coward's way out!

It's Supposed to be Spring

I'm having a 'Victor Meldrew' moment...."I don't bee-leeve it!" Spring is supposed to be here, we're officially into summer time and the snow has come back on the mountains.

The violets are shivering on the roadside banks, the wild orchids are looking sad and soggy, and a glance towards the Pyrenees shows even the lower slopes sprinkled with snow. 'C'est bizarre!' as the French are wont to say.

You have to feel a smidgen of sympathy for the ski stations and the ski hire shops, the chalet owners and the bar keepers. Only a scraping of snow over Christmas, not much for half term. The stations officially closed on the 31st March and then hey presto! The biggest dump of snow all winter. Sod's Law I suppose.

Still, the weather forecast for the weekend looks a bit better, sunnier and up to 26c. Maybe it's time to dust of the barbecue and reach for the pernod. Or not...it could all go pear shaped again. So I'm not putting the thermal vests away yet.

Global warming....global freezing more like! Bah Humbug!

Another Bout of Procrastination

Gosh ! Is it really that long since I last posted ? I must be the worst blogger in the world.

So, what's my excuse ? Well I've been doing a lot of writing (honestly!) I've been putting quite a few articles on Constant Content just lately. I was spurred on by selling a few articles really quickly which gave me a real boost so I have been researching like mad, trying to come up with some 'hot'topics. Green issues are certainly hot right now, so I'm becoming very well informed on green travel, green babies, green fabrics. I was really surprised to find out that cotton production isn't as 'green' and ecological as one might think and can actually contribute to the global warming problem.

There's only one downside to writing for American sites and that's the state of the pound sterling and the dollar against the euro.

Oh, don't start me on that !! As soon as one or two ex-pat Brits are gathered together you can bet within three seconds the subject of UK pensions and the euro comes up. I even had two Brit Jehovah's Witnesses turn up on the door step last week, and what do you thing we talked about?....no, not the end of the world, or even blood transfusions....but , you've guessed it!! The falling value of the pound! Well, you have to admit you wouldn't get that in the UK.

It's certainly belt-tightening time at the moment, and we are working our way down the supermarket chains as I write. When we used to come here on holiday the highlight was shopping on the markets.. .well isn't that every one's raison d'etre for a holiday in France? But shopping at the Carrefour hypermarket just before the journey home came pretty far up the list of 'must-dos'.

When we came to live here...well it was a different matter. We weren't on holiday anymore. We were (ouch) on a tight budget. So our supermarket shopping was pitched with this in mind. We moved down the ladder...like going from Waitrose to Tescos, and shopped at Le Clerc...something I had turned my nose up at when we were 'en vacance'. That was fine for a while, then we had the change from francs to euros, and all those prophets of doom who had moaned on about prices going up were right it seems. I must confess I didn't notice it much at the time. I was just too grovellingly grateful to be free of having to translate " trois cent, quincante huit franc" as three hundred and fiftyeight francs, meaning £35.58 in familiar money. "Trente euro cinquante huit" is just so much easier when you're trying to write a cheque in a supermarket queue.

After a couple of years Le Clerc seemed a bit pricey so we transfered our loyalty to Atac, a sort of small Asda which has weekly offers and are very good for some surprising things. For example I bought a great computer screen there last autumn for 130 euros, so they are always worth a look- see when checking out prices.

Now we seem to have fetched up at Liddl and Aldi for our weekly shop. How much lower (price- wise) can we sink? Never mind, we console ourselves with the fact that we couldn't afford to live in the UK at all.

Which brings me back to all my hard work selling articles on the US market. What seems to be a 'nice little earner' in dollars looks decidedly pathetic by the time PayPal has paid it into my account. Thanks goodness we don't have to rely on it for a living.

So that's one reason I've been lax on postings. I've also been re-submitting a revised version of my opening chapters of 'New Wine ' on to the You Writeon' website, but the reviews have been so slow it's like watching paint dry!

But after a wet spring so far, summer must be just around the corner now so I may just be lured outside instead of sitting at the computer, but as far as this blog is concerned it's a case of ' can do better if she applies herself' as my old school reports always used to say, so will apply myself better in future.

Watch this space.....but not for too long!