Aux armes, citoyens

On Saturday I went the The Salisbury, un pub anglais, in La Baule to watch the England-France rugby match with a group from the hockey club. Chris, the other jouer anglais was there as well so it was two Anglais with about forty French supporters (well, technically two and a half Anglais as Chris had brought his four month old son along as well). Of course, England asserted their superior skills and won 17-9 - which has set Chris and I up nicely with the rest of the team for the remainder of the season :o)

One thing about the French TV coverage that I found interesting (Fr meaning) was that subtitles were given for the National Anthem (“Que Dieu protège notre gracieuse Reine, Longue vie à notre noble Reine, Que Dieu protège la Reine”). I wondered why that isn’t done for La Marseillaise on the BBC’s coverage – apart from the usual Anglo-Saxon belief that the rest of the world should speak (and presumably sing) in English of course. 

However, maybe the real answer is that it’s not considered suitable for primetime television may be found in the translation for British followers of La Marseillaise that I found online …..

La Marseillaise

Come, children of the fatherland
The glorious day has come!
The bloody flag of tyranny,
Is raised against us.

Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of these savage soldiers?
They come right into our arms
To cut the throats of your sons and your wives.

To arms, citizens!
Form your battalions
Let us march, Let us march!
That our fields may run red;
steeped in tainted blood.

Windows

[Note to French and English readers: “Interesting” means different things in the two languages. In French interesting/intéressante means attractive, something you’d like to do; in English interesting means something questionable, challenging or not quite right].

So this is an interesting (English meaning) subject for a blog entry …… as most of my focus and effort in the last eight days has been finishing the windows. When we decided to replace all the windows in the house we found a good supplier of solid wood frames in a bois exotique called Movingui. I’ve never heard of Movingui before but it’s much cheaper than oak and we saw a sample and specified it unfinished with a protective basecoat (Barbara is very definite that she doesn’t want anything that needs painting). The solid oak front door and barn door that we had built by Jonathon Elwell in the UK were beautifully finished when we received them in Sikkens light oak so over Christmas I bought 5 litres of basecoat and 5 litres of UV protector coat at a truly eye-watering price to try to match up the shades and make the movingui look like oak.

French windows are built differently to British ones; likes doors they are fitted with lift-off hinges which makes cleaning, maintenance and finishing really easy and so almost all the work can be done from the inside without ladders. I’ve finished two complete sets with four coats, the first coat made the wood come up an alarming shade of orange but now I’m part way through the third set and the finished colour looks remarkably like ….. light oak :o) The windows are out from my bedroom tonight so that could be a bit chilly.

A very welcome visitor returns to La Basse Cour

Saturday 19th February, 19:10pm

A Red Letter Day!

I've just seen the first bat (chauvre-souris) of the year flying across the field. It looked bigger than the tiny pipestrelle bats that were nightly visitors last year and would fly inches above our heads but, as always, bat identification as they zoom past in the near darkness is (for me) almost impossible. The bat detector is buried somewhere in the house so I'll look that out soon. There's no evidence of a bat roost in our buildings but bats hibernate in different places to where they roost and our barn walls would be a perfect hibernation location but we have preferred to leave them in peace and haven't mounted a search for them. I must remember to talk to Christophe Palou, the architecte, about them when we meet to discuss the build programme for the barn and see how to work without disturbing them.

Harbingers

här’bin-jǝr, n a forerunner; a thing which tells of the onset or coming (of something); a pioneer (Chambers)

I’m not sure if I’m noticing more changes in the environment around us because we’re living in the middle of the countryside, whether it’s because I’m spending longer outside or whether it’s simply because this year I’ve got more time to look.

This week, triggered by the warm weather we’ve enjoyed and the increasing amount of sunshine the garden and grounds are bursting into life everywhere. On Thursday the temperature reached 14C and the sun shone all day. 

Tempted out by the warmth were; the first butterfly I’ve seen this year – a brilliant yellow Brimstone, a pair of iridescent black and violet Carpenter bees who had been hibernating in our barn, the first daffodils and – a complete surprise – a bank suddenly turned blue with a carpet of violets that I hadn’t seen before. The roses we bought at Peter Beales on a freezing cold day in December have burst into life along with the red, white and blackcurrant bushes we dug out of a frozen garden centre in Bury St. Edmunds just after Christmas. The buds on the fruit trees from the nursery in Questembert and the ones that were delivered from the UK are swelling – the peach and nectarines look as if they will be the first to flower – and, of course, the grass is growing fast.

And Lucien has started work on his potager – the clearest sign possible that winter is beginning to turn into spring.

Rain Later?

One of the difficult things at the moment is getting a good local weather forecast here.

Normally I’d use MétéoFrance’s internet site but, during my monthly talk with Alex at France Telecom two weeks ago, he said that there were unspecified “technical difficulties” and our connection date – which had gone from 10^th December to 10^th February was now 1^st April – which seems a date improbably plucked out of the air. The local newspaper Le Telegramme was a little more illuminating the next day: « Muzillac : L’internet à haut débit cafouille » (note to English readers ; cafouille = get into a mess).

My next possible source would be newspapers, I’ll return to French newspapers in the future but Ouest-France has a detailed forecast for today and then a single symbol for each of the next five days. As the area covered ranges from the south of the Loire to Cherbourg on the channel this is, at best, approximate and so understandably they tend to cover all options often using a black cloud with the sun peeking round it.

Radio forecasts are of erratic detail in the UK (and even BBC radio 4 seems to have abandoned the Channel Islands (Les Isles Anglo-Normandes) which would at least provide a forecast for somewhere within 200 kilometres of us). Radio France-Info has a regular forecast that’s clearly read by someone who practicing for a speed reading competition, good for my French listening skills but all of Bretagne is covered by a single rapidly delivered sentence (sometimes, even less helpfully, he (it’s always a he for some reason) simply refers to les prévisions pour l’ouest). The shipping forecast with its comforting slightly old-fashioned terms (“the general synopsis at 05:05 today ….”) gives a general view of weather patterns and we are 15km from a bit of sea that is in the Biscay shipping area – but Biscay extends 450km west and south of us so again that’s very general (and, usually in my experience, whatever weather we have Biscay is always “rain later”). I’ve even managed to find on France-Info the French version of the shipping forecast which starts at Viking ("Veekeeng"), ends at Irish Sea and has francophone versions of the channel areas (pas de Calais for Dover, côte d’abricot for Plymouth) and a whole new set of exotic sounding sea areas in the Mediterranean.

And then there’s TV; we have 135 English language channels on Freesat HD (128 of them unwatchable) but no access to French TV at present as the original plan was to get it delivered down the phone line with the internet service (see above). BBC TV forecasts are quite good and at least go into some detail but extracting useful information for us in southern Morbihan requires specific skills. At the start there’s an Atlantic weather chart which includes western France on the screen for about three seconds, then the UK maps frustratingly cut off just below the Brest peninsula so I have to try to work out if those showers along the north Brittany coast are part of a bigger weather pattern that includes us or simply local. Then, after the detailed UK regions, another extrapolation exercise from the weather for north Brittany, the Cotentin and Normandy to work out the possible future weather for us.

As a result, days like Thursday and Friday this week sometimes catch me out. As the southern UK (and north Brittany, the Cotentin and Normandy) laboured under heavy cloud cover and showers we enjoyed two glorious days with almost unbroken sunshine and a temperature of 14C. However, the weather system that brought the huge rainfall and strong winds last night was visible for two days in that three second bit at the start of the forecast ….

Le Discours d’un Roi

I went to see the film Le Discours d’un Roi (The King’s Speech) in Vannes at the weekend. The cinema in Vannes is opposite the old walls which are floodlit beautifully at night and the town looked wonderful. Also the Saturday evening showing I went to was completely full and the ticket desk was saying only ten places left when I got in. Colin Firth’s performance is remarkable, he won best actor at the British Academy awards on Sunday and the film picked up another six awards including best film, best supporting actor (Geoffrey Rush) and best supporting actress (Helena Bonham-Carter). It was a great film for spotting the supporting actors including Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Gambon as King George V, Claire Bloom as Queen Alexandra, Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill (much better than it sounds) and Roxana Marquez (the girl from Outnumbered) as a young Princess Margaret. Mark Kermode has just been on the radio to say that Colin Firth is a near certainty for an Oscar – hope that’s not a bad luck omen.

Fully integrated

There comes a time after moving to a new country when a watershed is crossed and you really feel integrated and part of the local society and community. Michael Wright in C’est La Folie” said that, for him, it was when he began to dream in French.

I’ve just passed that stage; for me it was receiving on Friday a letter from Readers’ Digest saying that I was definitely and certainly the only person in Noyal Muzillac who had got through the first two stages of their draw and was eligible for the next stage of the draw to win €300,000 and all I had to do ……… you know the rest.

The fire burned brighter last night ;o)

Puis nous tutoyer?

I first started to learn French, the language of Voltaire and Molière, at the age of 11, I’d never been abroad then and wouldn’t until my first visit to France seven years later. I remember that learning a foreign language, even when taught by Mrs Barlow, seemed somehow exotic and different. (This experience wasn’t repeated later in my school career when I attempted, and twice failed, to learn Latin from Mrs Barlow).

One of the big linguistic differences that French has over English is the usage of formal and informal versions of “you” – vous and tu - the analogous forms in old English would be “thee” and “you” which had certainly never crossed our eleven year-old consciousness. The two forms have an implied seniority and almost a class structure and Mrs Barlow solemnly instructed us on the grave dangers of insulting a Frenchman (or woman) by addressing them as “tu” at an inappropriate time. In the structure of the French language, an eleven year old schoolboy is inferior to almost everyone and so “vous” was always the safe choice for me. Add to this the easier –ez declensions for the vous form, a long period of holidays where I only talked in shops or formal settings, some business use (always in the formal version) and dealing with immobiliers and notaires and my instinctive response in any conversation is to use vous/ -ez.

All well and good until I joined the hockey club, here there wasn’t even an introductory vous on meeting people – it was straight into the tu form and some puzzled looks when I instinctively used vous. So I worked really hard on changing a forty year habit and trying to remember the second person familiar irregular verb declensions.

And then this week I ploughed straight into a conversation with Joelle, a friend of a friend who I’d met twice, using tu only to realise she was using vous to me. I know how to get out of that sort of situation – of course the French language has a way to deal with this – as there are two specific verbs for calling each other tu (tutoyer) or vous (vousvoyer). Hence my correct response should have been “donc, puis nous tutoyer?” – but somehow those forty years of not wanting to give offence were too engrained (what happens if they don’t want to tutoyer …… ) and I said nothing. Next time maybe …..

It’s a minefield this language thing.

Weekly Update

It’s February – already! No specific subject for this post but rather a diary update.

Hockey last Sunday was another first for me – a 147 mile away journey to Entrammes. Apart from one cup match I played in Durham that’s the furthest I’ve ever gone to play a match of hockey. We played badly but beat Laval 2-0 and badly again to lose 3-6 to Entrammes who are the best team I’ve come up against so far with two outstanding players. La Baule have made a good showing in the league and are third now with two games to play. Finally on Thursday I managed a full training session without on Friday being unable to walk upstairs properly – the legs are working again :o)

The rest of the week has mainly been spent on gardening, I’ve dug over the old bed underneath the (apricot ?) tree and transferred many of the plants we moved from the Fleet garden. As well as planting out many plants into the garden I also found that we had a lot of lilies and hostas that had multiplied so there are nearly forty pots of plants sitting on the concrete outside the barn – it looks like a real Nursery! I’ve also removed a huge lilac that had gone rampant in the wrong place and started re-arranging the woodstore in the open barn. And cleaned the green car (first time since June …….).

I spent a day helping Kevan and Gloria before their move next week, they have some of those inevitable tidying and finishing jobs that everyone means to do all the time they are in a house but only get round to just before they leave.

And I made contact with another British expat in the area. I’ve been looking for a French language or conversation group to join and Sue put me in contact with Lorraine who lives in Le Guerno and ia a member of a group in Questembert. I’m going to go along next week to find out more.

And a quick review of January:

Maximum Temp:         12C

Minimum Temp:          -5C

Rain days:                   7

Number of bird species seen:  22