Quiz Question

I was reflecting on the last post and remembered a bizarre statistic I read last month.

Ask a French person the six cities with the largest number of French nationals living there  and they’ll happily run through Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille and so on but will they get the sixth one?

Scroll down for the answer.

Strangely it’s London!

Rare plumage

On the way back to the UK at Saint Malo I saw several examples of a normally rare sight. Our right hand drive Honda is registered now in France with French plates and a RHD car with French plates betrays its owner as one of the 230,000 Brits now living permanently in France. In the summer it’s a rare sight at the ferry port but, like birds flocking for their annual migration, the pre-Christmas return to the mother country provides the opportunity for multiple sightings and a shared knowledge between the owners; “so, why did you leave then?”

Like so many EU regulations the one on vehicle registration is a bit woolly. Technically, once a vehicle has been in France for six months it should be re-registered, of course this involves une formulaire and various pieces of paper – the essential items for dealing with the bureaucracy here. Equally unsurprisingly many people don’t bother, it’s easy to get a French insurance policy on a foreign registered car and, if the lights are changed, the car will pass a controle technique (=MoT test for UK readers) so provided the gendarmes don’t take an interest why go to the trouble of re-registering? My Dutch friend Isabelle, who’s lived in France for years and speaks English so well she teaches it in Nantes, still drives an old Golf with Dutch plates. “Just too much trouble” she told me when I asked her why she wasn’t on French plates.

Even woollier is the EU law on driving licences. In a strange European version of the Bermuda Triangle my driving licence is currently stateless. The law says that if you change residency between EU member states you may apply for a driving licence in your new country of residence (the “may” was added to “reduce unnecessary bureaucracy”). I’ve chosen not to apply for a French licence and so I’m driving legally in France on a British licence – so far so good. But, in a truly bizarre twist, DVLA won’t issue a UK licence to a foreign address and so my old UK licence continues in a sort of limbo state. Worst of all, as the address shown is my old UK address and I may be committing an offence in the UK if I drive in the UK with a UK licence that doesn’t show my current address, but I’m absolutely fine in France or any of the other 23 or 25 or however many it is now member states. This is so complicated that I, like many other Brits in France, drive round with a printout of the EU Statutory Instrument in my car in English and French as a kind of “starter for 10” with the gendarmerie should we ever be stopped.

Might have “reduced unnecessary bureaucracy” but it’s not helped the paper shortage ;o)

Plastered - Again

Regular readers will be aware how significant a thing plaster has become in my life. I’ve blogged before about French plaster and British plaster, one thing they have in common is that they are both made from gypsum and have been in general use for a few decades. Another common feature is that they don’t deal well with damp and moisture – at some time or another everyone’s been in a damp house where the plaster is coming off the walls.

So let me introduce you to the original plaster that has been in use for thousands of years. Lime based plaster has been around for a long time, it was used by the Romans and then came back into fashion in Britain in the seventeenth century. It was traditionally the preserve of rich people and applying it was a skilled job. Lime plaster differs from modern plasters in several ways; it’s much slower to “go off”, it goes on in a much thicker layer and it is moisture permeable which means it allows the walls to breathe – vital on a stone wall with no damp proof course. One end of La Basse Cour was used as a house whilst the animals were housed at the other end and here we found some parts of the walls that had been originally rendered in a sandy lime plaster and then painted with limewash.

We had decided that the lower floor would be plastered on top of the hemp render using traditional lime and so Lloyd and the guys (Lewis, Steve and Geoff) from eco-renovations came back in to plaster out the downstairs.

Starting to apply the plaster in the (future) kitchen area

Finished wall in the kitchen area

Finishing the north wall plaster

Starting work on the south wall