Summer erupts

When I walked out of the house this morning, I knew summer had started. Somehow I had been aware of this before I even stepped out of doors since I had shunned my usual glum black overcoat for a light jacket. It was fantastic to walk to the station under a blue sky, with the leaves suddenly erupting around me in dense showers of vivid green. The chestnut trees are in flower with trophy buds of pink and white. There is so much actvity in nature that you can almost feel the earth tremblng.

Good Things About France No. 2: Cheap Public Transport

Yep, not only cheap, but also good and reliable public transport. Compared to Britain, the cost of bus and train transport in France is peanuts. Ten years ago I was paying £270 a week (about 400 Euros) for a monthly train pass from the suburbs into London. Here I pay 45 Euros for the month. Admittedly the journey is only half as long but it still means I am paying a tiny amount compared to London. It is intended that these fares become even cheaper next year for the old, the young and the unemployed.

The only down side of public transport in France are the regular strikes (one day every few months) intended to keep the management on their toes. No one in France ever gives up a work related benefit. Someone told me that about 100 years ago a law was passed to allow train drivers to retire at fifty in view of the damage to their health from shovelling coal into steam engine burners. Apparently they still retire at fifty to this day.

Choucroute

Enjoyed some of that Alsacien speciality Choucroute this evening. It consists of cabbage cooked in white wine and a variety of sausages and pork. To be washed down, of course, with German beer. The supermarkets run a promotion for choucroute in January. My wife says she made a special point to ignore it, even though she knows I love choucroute, just because she doesn't like it. I had to buy this lot myself.

Angers and Apocalypse

On the way back from Le Pouliguen, we stopped at the city of Angers and visited the imposing Château. You have to try and imagine the towers with pointed rooves on top to see how it would have been in the medieval period. Inside is preserved the second oldest tapestry in France, the Tapestry of the Apocalypse, a vast work in brilliant colours which details the fate awaiting mankind as surmised in Revelations, or 'The Book of Apocalypse' as French bibles translate it.

Where the French disappear to in August

We have been taking a few days of holiday in the seaside port of Le Pouliguen on the coast of Loire-Atlantique (that is the region where the river Loire enters the sea, about halfway up the west coast of France, close to the city of Nantes).

We expected to find a traditional seaside fishing port, but instead we discovered a resort town. Not the type of resort you find in Britain and elsewhere with large hotels along the sea front, but a little town of largely empty seaside villas. As soon as we arrived in Le Pouliguen we got lost amongst winding roads lined by these closed-up villas (all French houses have shutters) and so were immediately impressed by the 'ghost town' character of the place. Apart from the odd 'pension' or 'chalet', hotels seem to be absent.

After four days of travelling around the region of Presqu'ile (so called because the area is 'nearly an island' surrounded by salt marshes, we found it was not just Le Pouliguen which is like this but the whole of the Loire-Atlantique region. There are an amazing number of second homes in this part of France. So this is where the French disappear to for a month in August! It makes sense really: they wouldn't be staying in a hotel for a month would they? That would cost around 5000 Euros for a family at current rates. But how strange to have all these thousand upon thousand of houses locked up for the other eleven months of the year. We also saw harbours full of sailing boats such as Le Pouliguen and Piriac-sur-Mer, all waiting for the sun to arrive. In fact, this is a playground of the rich.

And the price of happiness in the form of a three-bedroom holiday villa in Le Pouliguen? About 400,000 Euros at best.

Good Things About France No. 1: Louis de Funes

At the risk of starting to seem rather critical about France, which would not really be an accurate representation of the way I feel about the place, I thought I'd start a series of articles listing all the good things I've discovered about France which are not that well known.

The first one is Louis de Funes. This guy is a really funny French comic, a bit like a Gallic version of John Cleese. I have watched a couple of his films which are both very good. The first is 'Oscar' which is the film of a farce originally put on in the theatre in which a goonish millionaire tries to outwit a potential son-in-law who arrives with a valise full of jewels in return for the hand of his daughter. Louis developed the part of the millionaire by playing the role hundreds of times in the theatre, and it shows in his brilliant performance which is really fundamental to the succes of the piece.

The second film is 'La Grande Vadrouillle' which is about a bunch of British airmen who bail out over Paris. In a series of unlikely adventures they escape from Paris into the countryside and eventually to the unoccupied zone. It is also hilariously funny, especially the scene where the 'Bosch' dance around a French restaurant on their chairs. Need I say more?

Social Dumping

I had lunch with a colleague today and he asked me what I thought of Camilla becoming queen of England? I asked him who has agreed that she would be queen? Was it government, the church, or the current queen? He didn't know. He just said: Well, the rules say she can be queen. Rules? What rules? Since when did any country have rules? It seems to me that governments are more than ever in a state of making it up as they go along. I told him that I wasn't following the news in the UK that closely any more. I was more interested in what was going on in the France.

We started talking about the European Constitution and how it is going to be a close thing as to whether it is accepted by France when it goes to the vote in May. Apparently the French are not keen on the idea that members of the European Union will be able to work in different parts of Europe, carrying around with them the social costs of their home country. That is to say, when they work in France, where the social costs are high, they will be relatively cheap to employ. This will no doubt act to bring down the cost of labour in Europe, but also weaken the social service system, which is what the French are unhappy about.

My colleague referred to this situation as 'social dumping'. He gave the example of Polish people who have been coming to France to find work. I didn't understand what he meant by 'social dumping' and I asked him who it was who was doing the 'dumping'. Well, it's the countrys like Poland, who are 'dumping' their cheap labout on the rest of Europe, he explained.

I find 'social dumping' an ugly phrase, and I don't believe that the numbers back up the idea that this is becoming common place. People who come to France don't have an easy time. We ourselves have met some Polish friends who seemed to be very dependent on their employer. Even though he was an architect, normally a well payed job, they lived in a tiny flat and upped sticks and moved to Toulon with only a week's notice a few months ago.