Dirty Mary has gone away

One of the local characters is Marie la Sale – Dirty Mary. She lived alone, near us, in one of two small houses she owned. She may or may not have had running water and electricity in operation, although they were connected. She tended to wear several skirts, one on top of the other, numerous sweaters, all of them pretty filthy. And of course, she smelled. Hard to say exactly how old she was, but anything from late fifties upwards seems likely.

She was not, in any real sense, mad, but she was a bit odd. In a city, she would have been a bag lady, in the country she was just a bit stranger than most. People knew her, she was polite, friendly within her own terms, but largely in a world of her own. We were introduced to her by Mme Laforet, our neighbour, on one of many occasions when Marie called in on her. She would sometimes offer to help with the chickens and ducks, or some gardening activity, but she was never much use. Mme Laforet tended to get a little exasperated with her from time to time, but to be a good neighbour felt she had to put up with her ocasional visits.

If we saw her in the village or the lanes, we would always stop for a short chat, and she remembered who we were, how we usually got to France from England, and other details, so she was never entirely confused.

Over the years she became progressively smellier, stranger, and harder to talk to. For a while she would appear wearing bright red boots she had bought from somewhere, another time she had a small dog for a year or so. She would talk more to herself, and retreated progressively further into some other world. Once, I encountered her in the lane from the village, and for over 100 yards we walked towards each other. When we were a few yards apart I said 'Bonjour, madame'. She squeaked, and jumped back a couple of feet. She clearly had not noticed me and was utterly surprised by my voice. She regathered herself, and we had the usual brief conversation, but it was all a bit odd.

Now she is in a retirement home, having been taken very ill. I hear that she is doing quite well. She probably never asked for, or would accept, help from the social services, but really would have benefited from some support. Now that she is getting it I hope she is more content. He history is quite sad. Clearly never the brightest of people, she married a local man. A few weeks later he was killed in a traffic accident, and she never really recovered her equilibrium.

Now her houses are beginning to decay; they were never in a particularly good state, but being empty for a year or so the wind has had an effect. Even the old animal feed container tied to the gate as a letter box is now broken.

In our street in London, there is another little old lady who lives alone and has some bizarre behaviour from time to time. The street is three story, late Victorian terraces, many, like ours, converted into flats. Her house is occupied just by her. A couple of windows on the upper floors are blocked off with plywood, and there are other signs of decay and lack of maintenance. The house next to hers has just been renovated completely, and then sold for over £1.5 million.

She used to be a teacher, someone told me, and when she retired her house needed work. She gave all her money to a builder to do it up, and of course he promptly disappeared, leaving her with nothing but a small pension. She is still fit, and rides a bicycle around the neighbourhood, although she looks seriously weather beaten and in need of a bit of maintenance herself.

A few years ago, mysteriously, many of us discovered the steps and porches of our houses were wet in the mornings, even though there had been no rain. Strange, but not a problem until the weather turned cold, and the water froze. A couple of people slipped, and it was clearly dangerous. Turned out that this woman was going out in the middle of the night and washing everybody's porches. No idea why. Some people had a word with her, and she stopped it.

At one time, these old ladies might have been seen as witches. Now they are just lonely, confused, and often in need of small forms of support that bureaucracies find difficult to deliver.

Abbaye de la Lucerne d'Outremer

Not far from La Haye-Pesnel, near Avranches, is the Abbey of La Lucerne-d'Outremer. Built in the twelfth century, it has recently been restored, and there is even talk of installing a new religious order there.

The name Outremer means overseas, as in the DOM, les Départments Outre Mer, the former colonies of France. It earned the name because during the Hundred Years War the abbots generally sided with the English. This was part of the long lasting connection – and confusion – between what was French, what was English, in the land we now call France.

Whilst probably every British person remembers the basic facts of 1066 and the Norman conquest, the following two or three centuries of war, alliances and occasionally peace, is rarely taught these days. Yet the whole of the more romantic parts of English history that people know from classical novels, folk tales, and not least Shakespeare's history plays still has some bearing on how the two countries developed.

If you have heard of Robin Hood, the Black Prince, Richard the Lionheart, Henry V and Agincourt, you have heard something of the time and its characters and events.

After 1066, William the Conqueror's grandson, Henry was still Duke of Normandy as well as King of England. The France of the 11, 12 and 13C was a small area, mainly around Paris, with some feudal overlordship of other parts, but not direct control. Affairs were managed by wars, alliances, and especially marriages. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Duchess of Aquitaine, Countess of Poitiers etc etc, was the wife firstly of King Louis VII of France, and then Henry II of England. The daughter of Phillip IV of France, Isabella, married Edward II of England, and was the mother of Edward III; and she was the sister of Kings Louis X, Phillip V and Charles IV of France. Family gatherings for these families at the beginning of the 14C would have been a a bit fraught.

One interesting little fact is that there was a successful Normandy invasion by the English in 1417, when Henry V took Caen, and later Rouen. Throughout the Hundred Years War, Normandy changed hands fairly regularly, English at first, then French, then English, then French again.

During this time, there were obviously many divided loyalties. Some parts of Normandy were owned by what had become English nobility, who expected loyalty to England, other parts had owners, and/or feudal overlords, who were French. And of course many families, as with the two royal families, had complex connections by marriage with both sides. The Abbey of La Lucerne was just a forceful example of being ultimately on the wrong side.

The Abbey itself is worth a visit – it reopens on March 15 for the summer. The church is still largely Norman, or Romanesque, style, with thick walls and columns, and round arches. Now that it has been patched and cleaned it is rather splendid.

We went on a tour guided by a young French girl: many historic sites seem to have tour guides who appear to be students earning some money, and usually they are very well informed and interested in the place.

The acoustics inside are dramatic. She pointed out a number of the features inside the church, and her voice was amplified with extraordinary clarity by the building. Far clearer than any public address system I have ever heard, and with that wonderful resonance and almost echo that you can only get from reality rather than technology. No wonder the peasant populace were terrified of the priests: voices louder than anything heard anywhere else, resounding around them, and with no apparent effort by the person speaking.

Some of the monastic buildings remain, with a number of interesting details, such as carving in some of the roof beams in the refectory, and a splendid large dovecote. This is now empty, (there is a photo in the album top right), but there is another dovecote at the Chateau of La Lande d'Airou (privately owned and not open to the public normally), which has a restored circulating ladder assembly inside. This is so finely balanced that a child can move it, but is allows someone to reach every nesting hole in the walls without effort. Well worth a visit.

Don't mention the war

In the same way as the disaster of Omaha Beach means that the other four invasion beaches can often be overlooked, the enormous importance, and overall success, of the D-Day landings obscures the fact that for the preceding four years, France was occupied by foreign soldiers.

The occupation had many implications for ordinary people. Some were active collaborators, as in Vichy and the Petain puppet government, some were passively cooperative, some avoided the German rule as much as they could, and of course some joined the Resistance. Every town and village had people in all these categories, and even now there are sensitivities and undercurrents not obvious to outsiders.

Many people do not want to talk about the war and the occupation, including those who were not born then, but who know of aspects of that time and how what members of their families did, or did not , or were suspected of doing. Who knows how we would have behaved in that situation? Certainly, the example of the occupation of the Channel Islands shows some of the issues.

If you look carefully in many of the towns in Normandy, you will find the occasional plaque on a wall stating that the person named was shot by firing squad at that place, or hanged, or otherwise killed. Many people were taken away, to prison, forced labour, or worse.

If you visit St Lo, you will find the centre, where the Saturday market takes place, inside the wonderful medieval ramparts, but completely destroyed by the American bombardment in June 1944. All that remains of the old town centre is the church tower, deliberately not repaired, and part of the gatehouse of the old castle. In the gatehouse is a large brass plaque, recording the names of everyone from St Lo who died during the war. It starts with French soldiers killed in action during the defeat by Germany, then has members of the resistance killed in action, resistance members executed, and all those deported to concentration camps: many of these are just the family name 'and 4 children'. The last two categories are civilians killed during the bombardment, and members of the resistance held in the prison. Liberation was not cost free.

My now deceased neighbour, Madame Laforet, was one person who had lived through the occupation, and able to talk about it. She mentioned that her eldest son had to be hidden in effectively a pig sty at the bottom of a distant field for some months, because the Germans were rounding up all the teenage boys for slave labour in Czechoslovakia; virtually none returned. She talked of other occasions when animals and crops were taken, of people disappearing.

She also talked about the invasion itself, pointing out where an allied bomb had fallen just the other side of the garden, and how a German sniper had killed two British soldiers in the lane. The sniper was killed by a German tank, commandeered by a young woman from the village.

Some other people, mostly women, who were children during the war, have memories of fear, hunger, and people vanishing, some to other areas to resist, some to prisons, some dead.

By the time the invasion moved away from Normandy, many towns were completely destroyed, many people had been killed, and a few scores were settled.

A French politician, I believe – I can't trace the quote – said that after the war, there were more members of the resistance than there were people. Human nature being what it is, I don't find that surprising, and there could have been few people who did not emotionally support the resistance, even if they like most of us lacked the courage, or the freedom from responsibility for others, or the right opportunities, to participate actively.

The Memorial museum at Caen is a museum to peace, not like the Imperial War Museum with its toys for the boys, and has a hugely moving range of displays of life under the occupation. It is at junction 7 on the Caen Peripherique (ring road) and is informative, sad, and ultimately I think encouraging, and an excellent antidote to many of the other commercial museums which glorify the fighting, the weapons, and the glamour of combat which is experienced only by the uninvolved, the uncaring and the unimaginative.  It has produced a film of the D-Day events, with archive film from both sides shown on a split screen. One side shows the landing craft, the other the blockhouse and gun emplacements being manned. Where one side shows soldiers being machine gunned by planes, the other shows the view of the piloy=ts at the same moment. More reality.

Winter with a vengeance

Following the unusually miserable cold Christmas and New Year, as shown in the two pictures above, I started this post on the weather in Normandy. However, it has rather been taken over by the snow in London: back for a meeting which was cancelled.

Generally, the Normandy climate is not much different from southern England: Rouen average temperature 9.9 C, London 11.0, Caen 10.9, rainfall 26 inches, 24 inches, 25 inches, even though being further west and further south one might expect a little improvement. Not exactly the South of France, but a typically temperate climate. 

My house turned out to be sitting at the top of a range of hills, and at 300metres above sea level is high enough to be on average about 1 degree cooler than the rest of the region. The other effect is that as this is the first real range of hills inland from the Atlantic, we get quite a lot of rain. Normandy in general is pretty wet – there are postcards and tee shirts on sale which make fun of this – but we seem to have more days damp than dry. Sometimes it is just the usual crachant Normand – Normandy spitting – of somewhere between fine spray and very damp air, sometimes we are actually inside low clouds, and sometimes it is just this side of total immersion.

We have learnt that we are in a micro-climate, and that whatever our weather, it is usually better at the coast thirty kilometres away – more sun, warmer, less wind. But in general the weather is mild, and short of extremes.

This winter, though, has been colder for longer than any other. Twenty days where the temperature was below zero. The saving grace was no rain or snow, and most days were ultimately bright and sunny, even if too cold to do much. A key problem was dense freezing fog in the mornings, with visibility just a few feet. We have had worse.

Three years ago there was very heavy snow, and we were in fact stuck in the house. I tried to leave, because we were to collect a couple of friends arriving on foot at Ouistreham to stay over New Year with us. The road at the end of our drive is a bit of a hill: down ends in a cross roads, up is a t-junction. About thirty five metres up, the car just stopped moving up. I put the hand brake on and the gear in park, and got out to see how to rectify the situation. As I was standing behind the car, it seemed to give up on adhesion all by itself, slid towards me, and then into the ditch. I had left the door open, and that jammed against the hedge so that only one wheel was in the ditch. Still took three hours to get a tow truck to rescue me. And every passer by (four in two hours) who kindly stopped their car to help couldn't get going again either. A snow plough attached to a lorry made things worse by compacting the snow rather than moving it; eventually salting did the trick.

A few years earlier, there was another severely cold spell. We were leaving for the ferry back to England when our neighbour, Madame Laforet, came out of her housing waving and shouting. Turned out that she had a burst pipe pouring a lot of very cold water all over her spare bedroom, just behind the living room. Apparently the mains tap lived in the cave under the house, which itself was built just before the revolution. Mains water did not get connected until the sixties, and electricity a year or two later.

This cellar contained an illegal still, a couple of very large, in fact huge, barrels of cider and a lot of unidentifiable stuff. All over the ceiling were pipes, running in every direction, and up and down the walls, with taps everywhere. It seems that every time a new water using facility – a sink, a shower, a wash basin, a toilet etc – had been installed, a new set of pipes were laid.

The ceiling was the floor of the room with the leak, and consisted of very old floorboards which had shrunk over time, and had big gaps. The cold water was therefore falling on me all the time, and it was very, very cold. It was also running over the electric wires, which may or may not have been live. I went around with a torch, turning off every tap I could find, and nothing stopped the leak. Finally, I found a tap under some sacking and other rubbish in the far corner, and that stopped the water.

La Mere Laforet was cold and wet, and for the first time since we had met her she looked old, frail, and depressed, poor thing. We had a ferry to catch, all my clothes were in a suitcase in the boot of the car, and I was soaking wet. However, we phoned her son to come round to help her, drove off calling in at the village plumber to get a repair organised, and then crept very slowly over black ice to St Lo and the dual carriageway to Cherbourg. Passed six other cars in the ditches on the way.

Health and Efficiency in France

Unsurprisingly, the French health service is different from the British. This blog is not meant to be a practical guide to anything, but you can find a useful overview of how the service works here. The French journalist Agnes Poirier who writes in English for the Guardian and other UK papers, did an intriguing piece about the differences between British GPs and their French equivalents recently.

Fortunately, I have not yet had to make much use of the health service in France personally, but I have had some dealings with it. The first occasion was with an emergency, involving my neighbour Mme Laforet, who was then in her late seventies. I knocked on her door one morning to see if she needed anything from the village, and found her standing over her sink, looking pale, and with a tea towel wrapped around her left hand. She said she didn't want anything, but I noticed blood dripping from the towel. I asked her what had happened and she said that she had been cutting weeds with a sickle and had cut her hand. I insisted on looking at the injury, which turned out to be a dreadful slice virtually cutting off her thumb, and bleeding very badly.

I found a new towel and wrapped it tightly around her hand, and said she must go to the hospital at once. She wasn't keen, but eventually I persuaded her to phone the clinic in the nearby town, the nearest place where she could get suitable treatment immediately. This being France, and the time a little after noon, the clinic was about to close for lunch, but a doctor said he would wait till we got there.

The doctor spent a couple of hours cleaning the wound, stitching it up, and fastening a complex metal brace to keep the join firmly closed. He wanted her to stay overnight for observation, but she refused, because she had to see to her chickens, and the ducks. He made arrangements for a district nurse equivalent to visit daily to check her out, and we left.

A couple of hours later, I wandered down to see how she was getting on, and found her in the garden, with her sickle in her hand, and a plastic bag covering the bandages and metalwork on her injured hand. She said she was bored just sitting still, and the plastic bag meant there was no risk. I think an hour or so later the local anaesthetic wore off, because she went back indoors and just sat there for a few hours. The happy ending is that she made a complete recovery, although her thumb remained bent in a peculiar way.

My other experience had a more sad outcome. A good friend we had made in France, Jean, had some stomach problems that required an operation. We visited him in one hospital, then another, larger one after another operation, and then a third. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, from which he died.

Seeing him in the different hospitals did show that the standards of care and cleanliness were the same high quality in all three. The food, as one might expect, was pretty good, as always, three courses, with choices, ordered earlier in the day. It was always hot, properly prepared and edible. Unlike my local – teaching - hospital here in London, where half the time there is only cold food or sandwiches, where patients get the choices made three days earlier by the previous occupant of the bed, and where there have been instances of malnutrition in patients who have been unable or unwilling to eat the food, and where even if they have the nutritional content has been dreadful.

Whilst it might seem unfair to compare provision in smaller institutions in the less populated areas with a major institution in a huge city, I believe the French hospitals were infinitely better in terms of hotel facilities – all wards for example are rooms for one or occasionally two patients, with their own showers and toilets. To get to see a specialist seemed to be quick and easy, with no waiting list issues. Obviously, I have no way of evaluating the in patient hospital diagnosis, treatment and so on, but it was always easy to get a second opinion, and the issues were discussed with the patients and their families. I do not believe there is any satisfactory reason why this cannot be done in the UK. When the NHS is spending 12 billion pounds on a misguided IT project that is unlikely ever to be delivered completely, will still cost more than the latest budget, and will never deliver anything like the benefits needed to justify it, I do admit a small amount of despair.

A final example is a friend in London who developed the Dupuytens's Contracture and had waited for over 18 months to see a specialist, who then put him on a waiting list for treatment, which when it happened involved an operation to cut and slice his hands. And it made no difference. By chance, he heard of a specialist in Paris, who had trained under Dupuyten. He rang him, and was offered an appointment in a week.

At this consultation, the doctor explained that the operation was a mistake, and that effective treatment involved a local anaesthetic, and diminishing the calcium build up causing the problem by manipulating a needle in the finger joints. My friend has now had three or four treatments, at a cost of 60 euros per session which he intends to claim back from the NHS, and all bar the his little finger, which has been bent the most severely for the longest time, are virtually normal.

Having regularly been to my local hospital, as an out patient, over the last three years, I can say that in London I feel that this hospital feels full of illness and inefficiency, whereas in France the hospitals are less frightening, more welcoming, and seem to be more efficient. Of course, all this is merely anecdotal rather than evidential, but I have yet to encounter any problems.

If you go to France – or anywhere else in the European Union - make sure you have an EHIC card to get free or reduced cost healthcare. You can apply here if you haven't already got one.

God's Town of the Saucepans

Villedieu-les-Pôeles has a long history, and is famous for three reasons. Firstly, in the 12C it was where the Knights Hospitaller – the Order of St John Of Malta – was set up in Europe, and secondly since the middle ages it has been a centre for copper working.

The third reason for fame, or rather notoriety, is that for the second half of the twentieth century it was one of the grands bouchons – the great traffic bottlenecks – of the French holiday season. The only major road from Paris and the north to Brittany went through Villedieu; unfortunately, at the edge of the town there is a major junction controlled by traffic lights. On the major holiday weekends of the summer, in July and August, huge volumes of traffic pass across France. The result was that every year there were long tailbacks from Villedieu, in one or both directions, sometimes up to 30 kilometres. The opening of the A84 autoroute from Caen-Rennes has bypassed Villedieu and ended the problem. In fact the old road now is effectively deserted even in high summer

It is an unexplained aspect of the French personality that in circumstances where the entire population takes to the roads on the same weekends, and when they know there will always be major traffic problems, both from known bottle necks, and from roadworks, accidents and other temporary events, they still all insist on driving on the same major roads and motorways, and spending lots of time stationary. They just will not use the lesser roads. If you want to progress through France in July and August, stick to the slightly smaller roads – the Routes Nationales, the N roads, or the Routes Departmentals, the D roads: little traffic, much more interesting, and stress free. The Michelin maps are good, and the Michelin Green guides will enable you to discover all sorts of fascinating places.

But back to Villedieu-les-Pôeles. Originally, it was a small village called Saultchevreuil (Deer Leap) on the side of a hill overlooking the valley of the small River Sienne. There is an old church there still, with the occasional little concert, but the village has effectively gone. For the usual reasons of family connections, politics and obligations that governed England and France at the time, Henry I Beauclerc, who apart from being the son of William the Conqueror (Guillaume le Conquerant) was also Duke of Normandy, Anjou, Acquitaine and much else, gave the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, one of the two military religious orders of the Crusades (the other the Knights Templar) some land around the River Sienne, which became their Headquarters. That explains the very large church (for a town with a population even now of just over 4000), and the renaming of the place as Villedieu, Town of God. There is still a pardon, a religious parade and ceremony, every ten years (I think) where the remnants of the order reassert their rights etc.

It may be that the middle east connection with the Knights brought back metal working skills, but for whatever cause copper and pewter products became the main trade of the town from the early middle ages. The quality was famous, and the trade had three effects. One was the addition of les Pôeles – the Saucepans -to the name to distinguish it from the dozens of other Villedieus in France; such a godly lot before the revolution. The other was that the nickname for the population, who if not hammering away at metal themselves were surrounded by the noise, of les Sourdins – the Deaf ones.

The main street used to be nothing but copper shops, but many have now gone. There are still workshops, making things by hand, some of which are open to visits, and there is a market leading factory, Mauviel, operating since 1830, still producing excellent stuff. I have half a dozen Villedieu copper cooking pots, and they are extremely good. About a third of the price of the same items in UK cook shops.

Happily, Villedieu survived the second world war: the mayor was able to persuade the allies not to bombard it by driving safely through the centre. As a result, unlike Vire, Villers-Bocage, St Lo, Mortain and many others that were destroyed, the central late medieval part is still there. There are many ancient courts off the main street, a pedestrian street (Rue Dr Havard) runs parallel,and many very old homes with huge granite lintels over the doors, which are usually quite low.

I like Villedieu, it is still quiet, feels like a community, and even has its own group folklorique, Les Triolettes, who travel around fetes and celebrations with music and dance. Well worth stopping off on your way to Brittany or the South.

Coincidence, interesting, or boring?

The piece below was posted yesterday afternoon. Last night, on BBC television, I saw a programme called QI, which included reference to the same stuff. Does that mean that I am connected to the zeitgest, or that my ideas are commonplace?

QI stands for Quite Interesting, and the programme is a panel game hosted by Stephen Fry, a British National Treasure. The idea is that the panel, of four comedians, discuss questions around a particular subject, and get points for answering specific questions correctly, and extra for mentioning something considered quite interesting by Stephen Fry. They also lose points for giving the obvious answers to questions, which are also wrong as common knowledge often is, which means that sometimes the final scores are all negative.

Last night's programme was around the subject of France, and part of it was done in rather poor French, but French nonetheless. Two of the specifics were around the stilt walking shepherds of Les Landes, who covered long distances on stilts to locate their sheep in the flat land of the Languedoc marshes, up to the mid nineteenth century, and the fact that at that time only about one fifth of the French population actually spoke French, the rest speaking Breton, Occitan, Basque, Provencal and other local languages, and extreme dialects.

As part of the discussion on language the panel were asked what they thought brushing and relooking meant. They were also asked what les people meant, which is a word I forgot to include. It is the French term for 'celebrities', the subjects of Heat and OK magazines, and the tabloid newspapers in the UK, so you will often see headlines in French magazines and newspapers talking about les people, with photos of actresses, singers, and usually Johnny Hallyday or Eddie Mitchell.

I think I have to assume that the timing was just coincidence.

Franglais and Anglish

English words and terms seem to be becoming ever more common in France. Partly this is because of the general internationalism that affects every country. A lot of it is because television, films and DVDs are increasingly influencing everyone. In the UK, American terms, phrases, ideas and practices are being seen everywhere, particularly among children and young adults. Teenagers especially are it seems learning about the shallow culture of rich US kids, and the restricted views of small town American middle classes, at the expense of their own history and culture.

In France, the state requires a significant proportion of films, television and radio programmes to be made in French by the French, which is admirable and important. Nonetheless, English, and particularly American English, seems to be appearing everywhere. Incidentally, language school in Paris, and I imagine elsewhere, offer the choice of learning British English or American English. No doubt in another 50 years the two versions of English will be as separated as French and Spanish.

As with French words in English, English words contrive to acquire a slightly different meaning or use when transported. Some mean much the same, such as 'le Normandie Horse Show', with its auction of 'les yearlings' and its competitions in 'le jumping', some are the same, but with strange spelling, such as the advertisements in the dogs for sale classification for 'les bouldougs' – bulldogs.

Others are downright weird, and I thought it might be amusing to list some of those I have seen. This is the first of what will be an occasional series.

Relooking: A word that has recently crept in to common usage, for a new service offered by beauty salons and hairdressers, joining shampooing and brushing (blow drying). One of the local museums said in its annual report that visitor numbers were slightly down in 2008, in spite of the museum having been 'relooké'. It means makeover, or redesign.

Tweety Girls: this is the name of a magazine aimed at girls between ten and twelve. I have been afraid to look at a copy in the maison de presse to see if the term has any meaning, and I am certainly not prepared to ask a passing pre-teen girl.

Until a few years ago, French children could only have their births registered with an approved first name, mostly those of saints. Because of immigration and different names from different societies and languages, the rule was abandoned. One unexpected side affect has been the use of names from English, but with Frenchified pronunciation. Two examples I heard recently, both for girls: Shah-duh, which was written Jade, and Dacc-uh-tah written as Dakota. Ah well, there seems to be a trend in England for girls to be given invented, often hyphenated, names. And the American comedian Chris Rock asks why black American women name their children after the sounds they make while giving birth. Languages and cultures will always continue to develop and change.

The bocage: in trouble?

In most countries, fields are separated by hedges of trees and shrubs, or by fences. In Normandy (and also parts of Brittany, Picardie, and Devon) the separation is usually by earth and stone barriers with trees, called bocage. The word comes from bosc, meaning woodland, as in the English word bosky, meaning wooded. They are part of what makes the countryside so attractive.

The geology of much of Normandy includes rich earth, but with lots of stones of varying sizes randomly distributed,. This is good for building, but gets in the way of farming. Since the fifteenth century, fields have been marked by dragging the stones to form barriers, covering them with soil to a height of 1.5 to two metres, and planting trees, such as oak, beech and hazel on the tops. The advantages are that these barriers are solid all year round, unlike ordinary hedges which can be relatively easy for animals to get through, are not affected by individual trees dying or falling leaving gaps, and require little or no maintenance, or raw material costs as fences do.

The trees also provide firewood and timber, and have a value. The plan cadastrale, the equivalent of the UK Land Registry, marks every field with an indicator of which side owns the bocage. Two of our neighbours fell out very seriously when one sold a field to the other, and cut down the trees the day before the sale was completed. The buyer considered this robbery, because he would have paid less for the fields without the trees, the seller considered the sale was of the field, not the trees, and the buyer had no right to the wood.

The bocage is made up of quite small fields, which is now becoming a problem. In about half of France, the law dictates that people can only leave real property – buildings and land – to their spouses, and then equally to all the children. You cannot will it to who you like. The result has been that over the generations, farms have become smaller and smaller, as they have been divided up with each successive generation. Sometimes, one child will buy out or rent from the others to keep a large enough farm, but today there are two very serious issues. Whilst it used to be that 20 hectares of land was enough to support a family, these days it is nowhere near enough, what with milk quotas, fuel and maintenance of tractors, and taxes. Families even up to quite recently could be largely self sufficient, growing all their own vegetables, keeping a pig and a sheep or two, and a dozen cows. One of our neighbours made her own butter and cheese, an annual pig provided ham and pate for the year, and apart from delicacies and essentials such as clothes, water and electricity, hardly needed any cash. That standard of living is no longer acceptable.

Part of the effects of this historic process is that any one farm will have its fields all over the place, rather than as one big parcel of land. Farmers can spend a large part of their time driving their tractors from one field to another, moving cows and sheep quite long distances, and generally being limited in how they use their land. One farmer we know well has about thirty small fields spread all over three communes, a distance of five or six kilometres.

The other problem is that with ever more joint owners of land and houses, it can be impossible to sell. It is not just, as with one friend, getting all six siblings to agree to sell a house, but that often there can be forty or more distant cousins all owning one field or building, many of who are completely unknown and untraceable. This is one of the causes of some houses being abandoned. And of course, family feuds are not unknown, and one intransigent person can prevent all the others making a deal.

The French government are trying to help by brokering matching sales of fields: Farmer A sell a field to Farmer B who has the two next to it, and Farmer B sells a field to Farmer C, who in turn sells one to Farmer A. The complication is that of course each farmer thinks the field he is giving up is worth far more than the field he is receiving, irrespective of any government sponsored financial adjustments. The one irrevocable fact of farming throughout the world is that every farmer devoutly believes that 'my land' is always worth far more than 'your land', because it is better earth, better maintained, gets better sun and rain and so on.

The roadways between fields – well tracks, mostly – have been worn down over the centuries, by horses, cattle, sheep, wagons and people, and are often two or three metres lower than the fields on either side. In England these sunken paths are often called 'hollow ways'. In summer they can be effectively green tunnels.

The bocage presented a serious problem during the Normandy landings from D-Day. Looking at maps, the military, especially the Americans, assumed that their tanks would just drive right through the countryside. The senior British, French and other officers who had visited Normandy before the war, or done their research, knew how wrong that was.

Firstly, the tanks, particularly the US Shermans, would just rise up at the front, exposing the unarmoured underside, rather than passing through, stopping that sort of progress. The second point is that the hollow ways were narrow, so tanks could not turn round once they started along one, and they could only fire their guns straight ahead; the barrels could not be swivelled. Proved to be a bit of an issue.

Today, there are two factors causing the increasing loss of the bocage. Farmers are increasingly wanting larger fields for efficiency, and easier use of mechanisation. This is being driven by a sad trend to keep many cattle indoors, and feed them silage, mostly maize, and chemical feeds. This means growing large amounts of maize, which is harvested by large machines, which need large fields. The cattle produce less milk, of lower quality, but I believe fatten more quickly for beef. Once the bocage has been cleared, it will never return.

At the same time, local councils are finding that they have a little bit of money each year, and are using it to 'improve' visibility in country lanes. This is done by widening some parts, which means ploughing up the bocage, adding a couple of metres to the road width, and putting up wire fences on the new road edges. They are also removing twists and turn where they can, and in many places just replacing the bocage with fences that can be seen through. The idea is to reduce traffic accidents. Doesn't seem to work: people just drive faster on the new straight bits, and don't slow down enough on the bends.

I think that progressively much of the more obvious bocage will disappear: in the last ten years the roads from the nearest town to where we live have mostly been modified, and it is less interesting a journey as a result. Animal husbandry might change, but increasing awareness of and concern for the welfare of the beasts will help to diminish the trend.

It seems, however, that progress almost always involves swapping something rare and special for more of something cheap and worse.

Mont St Michel 1300 years of history - plus.

A World Heritage Site, one of the modern Seven Wonders of World, Mont St Michel in Normandy near Avranches was first used as a Christian site 1300 years ago. In fact, it was also a religious site before the arrival of Christianity. One of the very successful policies of the early church was to take over existing religious places as soon as they gained enough power. By so doing, they created an impression of continuity, and used the familiarity with the site of the local people. Plus of course it made it much harder for the original religions to carry on.

Many of these takeovers are identifiable today, because most of them were dedicated to St Michael (St Michel), the slayer of the dragon, a metaphor for the old faiths. The early Celtic religions often used hill tops and other prominent locations for their shrines and meeting places, and if there is a church on a hill, it is most likely to be the Church of St Michael.

The Abbey and church on Mont St Michel, built in various stages during those 1300 years, is spectacular and overwhelming; the highest part is known as La Merveille (The Marvel). Not just a church, but an entire small town, and enormous, and above all in the most striking location imaginable. It is in fact so complex that when I went on a guided tour I lingered a litle too long in one part, and the tour had vanished; it took an hour to find a way back out. There are several of my photographs of the place in the gallery at the top of this blog, which can also be found here. Every time I visit the Mont, or go near it there is a different view, or different lighting, and I probably have hundreds of pictures.

A few years ago I visited Egypt, and went to Giza to see the Pyramids. Having seen so many pictures of the iconic group of three overlapping triangles, seeing the real things was somehow very weird. That familiarity of the image made it seem as if that is all there is, an image. It was as if having seen all the Left Turn road signs over the years, I was one day to encounter the 200 metre high original Left Turn of which all the signs were copies. It is the same with Mont St Michel: the outline is so familiar, a jagged triangle that is easy to draw freehand from memory, sitting in the sea or miles of wet sand, that the real thing becomes unreal.

The village where I live is about 30 miles from Mont St Michel in a direct line, but 50 miles by road because of the Bay. Of course, whenever we have visitors they want to visit the Mont, and even the most wonderful of places can be seen too often, so these days we tend to provide them with guide books, itineraries, and ideas on all the other nearby interesting places.

We were driving out of our village with one visitor, an old friend from Canada, and she suddenly squeaked 'I can see Mont St Michel!'. We told her she was mistaken, we are far too distant, and there is at least one range of hills in the way. Every time we saw her over the next couple of years, we would suddenly point, whether we were in London or anywhere, and say 'Look – Mont St Michel', and laugh. Very unfair.

Then, one very clear day in winter, we saw Mont St Michel from the same place. With a very detailed map we discovered that our village is on the top of a range of hills that is slightly higher than the range between us and the Mont. At one specific place, it is just possible to make out a little grey triangle, apparently hovering in the air, in the far, far distance, if the light is right, and you find the gap in the trees. Most embarrassing.

One of our neighbours then told us that the musician Jean Michel Jarre had a huge concert and light display on the Mont, and quite a few villagers gathered in a particular field to watch, and listen on their radios to the simultaneous broadcast. Apparently, so many people wanted to go to the concert that the roads were jammed for miles in all directions, and most of those with tickets missed it.

Like St Iago de Compostela, in Spain, Mont St Michel was a major pilgrim site, and indeed one of the stops on the way to Compostela. There is a little village, not far from us, called St Michel de Montjoie (Joie means, unsurprisingly, joy), which grew up at the first point where pilgrims from Paris caught a glimpse of the Mont. It is also the site of a Museum of Granite, and part of the Route du Granit walk. Much of the granite used in Paris came from here.

For some reason, quite a lot of British people either know nothing of Mont St Michel, or think it a minor attraction, like the Cornish St Michael's Mount, which is like comparing the parish church of St Pancras with Westminster Abbey. If you ever go to Normandy, or Brittany because it is effectively on the border, not to stop off at the Mont would be a dreadful loss.

Foxes, urban and rural

Over the Christmas holiday, a French man in his forties, with learning difficulties, was on a visit to London with a group. He became separated from the group, and disappeared. He had no money, no ID, no mobile phone, and did not speak any English. Happily, he was found, three days later, in South London. He did not explain what he had been doing, or how he got where he was found. All he wanted to talk about was the foxes in the streets of London.

Of course, every one knows about the urban foxes, but over the last four or five years there seems to have been almost an explosion. I live near Hampstead Heath in London, and one sees foxes in the streets most evenings after dark. These are city foxes: cocky and hard to intimidate. They walk along the pavements, and if you follow them they take no notice unless you gain on them, when they either break into a casual saunter, or wander into a garden out of sight. If they are coming towards you, they usually cross the road, not out of fear but because they really would prefer not to be seen with you. I have seen a couple sit down in the middle of a suburban road in broad daylight, watching builders put up scaffolding, and another lying along a wall between gardens sleeping in the sun. And of course, it is always easy to smell where they have built their dens. I have even been woken up by the screaming of two or more foxes in the gardens.

In Normandy, by contrast, I have seen foxes on only two occasions, both as they slunk along the far side of fields. They are around, and there are many paths made by them as they follow a regular route around their territory, particularly where they scramble over the bocage hedges. They are secretive. That is because many people keep chickens, which roam around freely so that foxeds are shot on sight, and because many farmers still hunt. Not on horseback with hounds, but on foot with rifles, and motley dogs, and mostly they are hunting for the pot. Winter weekends the hunters are a common sight, trudging through the morning mist and fog in ones, twos and threes, every so often firing at something, and missing. At the nearby forest, during the weekends in the season, there are signs warning that the people are hunting is in progress, and to beware.

La Chasse is very important to those to whom it is very important, but there is less and less to shoot. The hunting societies now artificially raise hares, pheasants, partridges and even deer, to release when the season starts. The increase in prosperity, the rise of supermarkets and the use of cars means that it is not really necessary to hunt for food to survive, although there are of course always interesting game that you cannot easily buy.

Because the Societés de la Chasse have traditionally been quite powerful, they have many rights and privileges, and they are governed by quite extensive regulations. However, nowadays, fewer young people are interested, and older hunters are dying off. There are now many people who do not approve of hunting, and where there were signs at the gates of fields saying that the hunting rights were reserved to the Societés, there are more and more signs saying 'Chasse Interdite' (hunting forbidden).

The downside of regulation for the hunters is that as their power wanes, the regulations start to work against them. The owners of land can register their refusal to allow hunting. The hunting season is being shortened by the Préfectures who set the rules. Limits are being imposed on what creatures can be shot, and how many. For example, a Societé can only shoot so many hares in total, but no one hunter can shoot more than one, only two wild boar may be killed, and so on. Even if the Societé had actually raised the creatures themselves. The details are usually published in the local papers, and displayed on the larger mairies.

Many hunters are unhappy, but there is little they can do. In a couple of generations' time, hunting will be virtually gone. I for one will not miss it.

The changing face of the French Christmas?

Twenty years ago, Christmas did not mean that much to the French. Of course, the church made a lot of the religious aspect, but celebrations were much more limited than in the UK. Where there were lights in public places, they were mostly strings of white bulbs across some streets, or more often, outlining the roof, doors and windows of churches and public buildings.

In fact, these subdued illuminations were often quite elegant, in a minimalist way. Driving through the countryside one would frequently see in the distance a church or mairie in outline, like a simple line drawing. In the streets there would often just be branches from fir trees, stuck in holes in the pavement, with little parcels attached, and sometime sprayed with white or glitter paint. No one stole the packages, or damaged the branches.

There have been many changes since. As prosperity has increased, and the supermarkets and other major retailers have grown, so the forces of commerce have brought about a new form of Christmas, requiring much spending communally, commercially and individually, to the extent that it has become more like Britain. (The same thing has happened with halloween, which did not exist until the supermarkets used it as a marketing exercise and a new revenue stream.)

Every year has seen more street decorations, strings of multicoloured lights everywhere, across streets, wound around lamp posts, on buildings. There would be complicated designs, with messages, blinking and flashing, more and more complex each year, every town and village trying to be a little more colourful than the next. Many were boring, many were often interesting and striking.

People began to decorate their houses inside, and put up Christmas trees. Six or seven years ago, some individuals began to decorate their houses on the outside, with more and more lights, reindeers and so, just like so many lost souls in England. No infant school can end the term without a visit from le Pere Noel – in fact for a week or two the whole region seems to be crawling with Father Christmases, like London is with foxes. And now some villages are complaining that people are stealing the light bulbs and even complete sets of lights, such as garlands, angels and stars.

One common external decoration on private homes is a three foot high Sanhta Claus, climbing the outside of the chimney, or by a window. Whether because they are quite difficult to attach, or because of the winter winds, many of them end up dangling awkwardly from a rope. It rather looks as if there has been a widespread outbreak of lynching dwarf Father Christmases, which is not the most festive of images.

This year there may be the beginning of a retreat. Whilst in most places the lights are brighter, the arrangements bigger, the number greater, some towns are rethinking their approach. This is partly because there is a greater awareness of the environment and energy implications, partly because of the world financial position, and partly, I think, that it has all become rather silly.

One factor is changing their displays to light emitting diodes (LEDs) rather than incandescent bulbs. These are much cheaper to run, cheaper to make, and because they are small and have to be used in groups any individual failure has little visible impact. The problem with LEDs used to be that they were not very bright, but technological improvements have increased their brilliance, and enabled arrays of individual LEDs to be created simply, and in different colours. The strings of lights that you can buy for your Christmas tree, that blink, flash, and chase each other, are LEDs. In fact, the halogen bulb in my desklamp here failed, and the replacement is an array of LEDs instead of halogen.

Some towns, such as St Lo, are reining back their displays overall: they have their lights for 16 days only, they turn them off at 10 p.m., and they have limited the illuminations to some rather tasteful white streams of lights hanging like a waterfall from a footbridge over the river Vire, and a few boxes and lights around the commercial centre.

Maybe we are seeing the start of taste and good sense prevailing over the interests of big business. If that could happen anywhere, it would probably happen in France first.

Oysters at Christmas

You might find the occasional turkey on sale at Christmas in France, but the real festive requirement is for oysters. So great - and temporary - is the demand that most of the supermarkets put up marquees in their car parks in the last two or three days before Christmas, solely to sell oysters. This year, 2008, baskets of two dozen no.3 oysters are typically selling for 12 euros, and people are buying several baskets each. In London they were available at a pound an oyster. Typically, the French eat over 120,000 tonnes of oysters every year.

Here in Normandy there are quite a few oyster farms along the coasts, and especially around the Baie de Mont St Michel, including into the Breton side. For example, Cancale in Brittany is famous for the quality of its oysters, and there are stalls on the harbour and beach selling all the different varieties – Numbers 1 to 3, creuses, and others, to very, very discerning customers. At about noon every Sunday, there are many gentlemen arriving fresh from Mass, to buy the oysters for Sunday lunch. Many of them have their own oyster knives, and will try a number 3 here, a rare variety there, often ending up buying their four dozen or whatever from a favourite producer.

I can't say that I really share the enthusiasm. There is something about eating food that is not only raw, but alive, that causes me a little difficulty from the aesthetic point of view. I enjoy them cooked – there is one local restaurant that does them with cider and Camembert, grilled for a minute or so, which are pretty special, but just occasionally I will choose raw ones.

A couple of years ago we had to call round to see a local farmer, Georges, about an issue with our fields that he was using, on Christmas eve. He and his wife invited us to lunch on Christmas day (the real big family meal is dinner on Christmas eve), and insisted we come. When we got there, there were 19 other people for lunch, so it was no surprise that he had meant it when he had said that two more would be no problem. People locally prefer benches to individual chairs, because you can always find space for one or two more on benches.

Georges was standing at the sink, with a huge platter on the draining board, a little knife in his hand, methodically opening oysters from several baskets, and placing them on the platter. I think that was his only contribution to meals, other than making cider, calvados apple brandy, and pommeau (cider, sugar, calvados, seriously lethal), and preparing the shallot vinegar for the oysters.

In the event, I suppose I ate more than half a dozen of the oysters, spooning on a little shallot vinegar to ensure they winced and were alive, washed down with very dry cider. After the oysters, fish poached in wine and cream, then three of four chickens that had been running around the yard the previous day, then cheese and salad, then traditional apple tart. Excellent all round, and near enough to our house for me to walk home the long way, from one side of the road to the other and back again, the entire kilometre..

But not a sign of a turkey, there or anywhere else, any year. Anyway, best wishes for Christmas, and a prosperous 2009. Bonne annee.