Questions, questions

“So are things cheaper in France?” – it’s a question I’m often asked, on this occasion by Sylvia at Fox Garden machinery (our 20 year old Hayter mower – “by appointment to HM The Queen” - had broken and the combination of age and foreign make meant I had brought it back to the UK for service and repair).

Well, it all depends. My personal view is that, as a huge generalisation, the French like the sales process and they certainly like to think they’ve been sold a bargain. If the bargain lines up with what you want then yes, things can be cheaper in France. But otherwise there still seem to be big overheads in the process and, regrettably in many ways, it’s cheaper to return to the UK for many of our purchases.

“Can’t you get these in France?” asked the delivery driver who brought us the shower screens. He made a good point when I said that we could but the cost was higher and it seemed to me that distribution costs were a major part of the difference – “isn’t the price of Diesel much cheaper over there?”.

One item is that it’s almost always necessary to pay for in France is delivery, regardless of the size of the order or the distance travelled. The UK kitchen appliances arrived in the four hour window on the day we’d requested two months earlier (actually five minutes early) with, of course, free delivery.

Customer Service is valued in France but in a slightly skewed way to my way of thinking. I buy as little as possible from our local DIY place, Weldom. Not because it’s prices are too high (which they are) but because finding anything there is made so difficult by the staff. Not that they are unhelpful – quite the opposite – browsing is made nearly impossible by the continual requests “Have you found what you want?”; “Can I help you with anything?”; “Are you OK there sir?”. The shop must be overstaffed - there is usually only one checkout open and once I counted 11 floor assistants trying to help the dozen people in the shop.

On the plus side as I prepared to come back to the UK this week I had a call from Jacqueline at Mecadom who maintain and repair – Hayter excepted – all our garden machinery. The lawn tractor has a hard life cutting our 6000m2 and had lost all drive down the field, I’d asked for a service and urgent repair as the field was rapidly becoming a knee high savannah. “We had to replace the courroie”; “Ze Belt” she added when I looked puzzled. When I complimented her on her English she said she couldn’t speak it at all but ¾ of the manuals she had to order things from were in English so she knew the names of lots of parts. Despite the huge backlog of machinery in the workshop when I’d taken it in they’d turned it round in eight days, charged me less than the UK cost, not charged me for fitting the belt and found me a spare fuel tank cap for free (must have left ours on the field somewhere after the last refuel ….).

So, yes, there are things that are cheaper in France and customer service can be good but, often, you have to look hard.

Back and forth in a retail crisis

"Could you tell me what you have in the truck please sir?"

It was, of course, inevitable that I should be pulled in at Portsmouth customs on my way back to France. I was driving a big utilitaire (rental van) back to France after a flying visit to the UK.

"Do you have any guns, explosives, knives or other weapons?"

No, obviously not. But, in some ways, what I had in the van tells an interesting story about the relationship between France and the UK. And may, in its own way, become explosive in time.

In the back was our kitchen including all the electrical goods, a new jigsaw, several bags of horticultural compost, two shower screens and two cases of Marston's beer. Apart from the beer (just because I wanted an occasional British taste for our Apéro) everything else was bought in the UK for financial reasons.

The kitchen was significantly cheaper to buy in the UK compared to the quotes for the same quality that we had received in France and was fully assembled (hence the need for the big van ….). The comparison for the electrical goods was very revealing; we knew exact makes, models and types that we wanted and I’ll take the price of the oven as an example. The UK price was 65% of the French price, the difference on this one item alone paid half the crossing price, amazingly the difference on the built-in microwave oven more than paid the van rental. It’s true that we were only doing internet price searches but the price differences were startling and these are on two products that, when we purchased them, turned out to have been made in Germany. So, it’s cheaper to ship something to the UK and then ship it to France than ship it to France in the first place …. ?

The worst thing was one of the fridges that was cheaper to buy in the UK turned out to have been built in …… France.

Perfect Symmetry

One of the things that we wanted to do when we moved the La Basse Cour was grow more of our own food. Despite the odd problems (Tomato and Potato blight, total inability to germinate many seeds last year, pigeons) this has been a big success and we've enjoyed a long list of fruit and vegetables grown by our hands. It's hard to pick out favourites but I do enjoy the excellent symmetry of growing leeks.

We practice vegetable gardening a l'anglaise which means we grow almost everything from seed rather than growing on small plants bought from Point Vert or the markets. Leeks are one of those plants that can survive for a time as bare root seedlings and so bunches of 10, 50 or (my record so far) 100 can be bought. But we prefer the seed route so at the end of March we start a short drill for leek seeds and, as this year, they germinate just as the previous year's crop is coming to an end so they are in the potager for exactly 12 months. We harvested our first leeks in October and our last ones at the beginning of May - that's six months harvesting for a quarter of a packet of seed.

Here is the very last of the crop harvested on 5th May - my readers in the North-East of England would probably regard these as scallions - but we were pretty pleased: