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

Cinéma Français

I went to a French cinema on Friday evening for the first time. Les Cardinaux in Damgan is a small one-screen cinema that only shows films in the winter on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Les Cardinaux looks like a hut from the outside and is small with only 150 seats. It’s quite possible (as I did) to accidentally turn right rather than left at the entrance and end up in the projection room rather than the auditorium. Actually the entire audience could have watched it from the projection room as, apart from me, there were only two other people at the performance!!

 I don’t think I’m ready for a film in French quite yet so the trick is to look for films in VOSTF (Version Original avec sous-titres français) and so I went to see Four Lions. At least it’s called “Four Lions” in English but in French mysteriously the title became “We Are Four Lions” – I’d welcome any insight from the French readers as to why that should have been changed.

Watching a film in VOSTF is a bit confusing, do I watch in English and ignore the sub-titles or read the sub-titles and use the English soundtrack to fill in the words I don’t know? (We are) Four Lions didn’t make the Oscar nominations for good reasons and includes a lot of, shall we say, industrial language. So by reading the subtitles I did achieve my objective of expanding my French vocabulary – although not necessarily with words I’d want to use in social settings ……

Permis de Construire submitted

I signed the application for the permis de construire (planning permission for UK readers) for the barn conversion today. A big milestone. Here’s the architect’s impression of the south elevation after the work:

Return of the cows

« C’est beau, mais ce n’est pas printemps ! » Lucien, our neighbour from over the road, said to me last week during one sunny, pleasant but not yet warm afternoon. (A mes lecteurs français – n’hésitez pas de corriger mes mots français dans ce blog (par courriel ou comment) – et pardon en avance pour mes erreurs dans la langue de Voltaire ;o)

Living where we do I feel much more directly aware of the changes in the weather and the progress of the seasons than I used to be in Fleet. The farmers around us follow a specific pattern as well. This is mainly a dairy area and the milking herds follow a routine between being in the fields for twelve hours and then moving into the big élévages for milking. The herds are usually brought in by hand or quad-bike. Nicole, the wife of our local farmer Dominique, has a unique style when she brings the cattle in; shouting “Allez-y, allez-y” as she walks down the road. The sight of sixty cattle five hundred metres away pricking up their ears and then standing up and walking over to meet her at the gate always makes us smile. And then, after the snow came in December all the cattle everywhere disappeared indoors where they stayed until Monday this week when they appeared again in the fields of the farms all over our commune. Of course, the farmers are all reacting to the same things; weather, grass growth and the cost of feeding the animals indoors but, this being France, I really wouldn’t be surprised if there was a centrally defined calendar the farmers have to follow.

The backing soundtrack in our area throughout January has been the buzz of the chainsaws as the farmers use the quiet period to work on the trees on the boundaries of their fields. The oaks are pollarded in a way that leaves a single thin vertical branch growing upwards from the point of the pollard. The timber is then cut up and carried off to the woodpiles to become next year’s seasoned wood for heating.

The weather has been nice, tempting the cats out for brief periods sunbathing on the back wall before resuming their mouse patrols as the weather cools in the afternoon. But Lucien’s correct, it’s not yet spring.

Soft fruit and doctors

I wasn’t sure what title to put on this as there’s no single theme to this post – it’s more of a diary update. The settled weather (cold and frost overnight, sunny and pleasant during the day) continues along with my digging programme and I have now planted all the soft fruit (petit fruit) so raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, white currants (groseilles) and gooseberries (groseilles a macqeraux) are all safely in. The apples (pommier), fig and grape vine are soaking ready to go into the ground today.

Working in the area that will be the potager at the front of the house is a good place for exchanging conversation with people as they walk past on the road. A neighbour (well, a kilometre away – which passes as a neighbour here) came in to see me this week, she introduced herself as Sue, is English and with her husband Steve and Stanley the dog she lives in a house that we have cycled past many times.  They have been here for eleven years and have three gîtes.

My licence has been approved by Féderation Français Hockey and I was asked to play in La Baule’s next fixture on Sunday provided I could get a medical certificate. One thing I’ve been slow on is transferring into the French Health system (been saying “I must do that next week” since August) so I went to the Caisse Primaire Assurance Maladies (CPAM) in Vannes first thing to register – it was all very efficient and took about a minute; 45 seconds of which was trying to get a good photocopy of my birth certificate. I’ll receive my Carte Vitale (health card) by post. Then I went into the doctors to get an appointment for 17:45. The maison medicale is very new and next to the Mairie – I think the floor tiles are the same make as ours but all one size. When I went back for my appointment there was no receptionist and only one doctor left who was seeing patients and answering the phone at the same time – everything was very relaxed and very different to the manic Fleet surgery I’ve been used to. I saw Dr. Ambroselli (she is the third and newest doctor in the practice starting in September 2010) and she was kind enough to allow me to speak in French right until the end when she said: “Vous parlez Français bien. It’s a pity, I was hoping to practice my English!” she has very little accent, has friends in Southampton and knows Hampshire. Anyway, after rechecking my blood pressure twice she’s given me a certificate for hockey, tennis and cycling (but not competition cycling – I need a different certificate for that) so that should cover most things I choose to do. €23 for fifteen minutes and I’ll get 70% back when I get my Carte Vitale which I thought was a bargain and about a third the charging rate of my dentist in the UK.

Over the years we’ve made a little use of the French health service; Trégunc when Adam had a sickness bug (very good); St. Nazaire when Adam had viral meningitis (excellent) and Vannes for Barbara’s head injury and helicopter evacuation (emergency response good but hospital poor). Our surgery in Fleet had six doctors, various nurses and clinics and always reminded me of a busy London station. Maybe it’s just a numbers game, Fleet had six doctors’ surgeries, maybe thirty GPs in all serving a population of 20,000, Noyal Muzillac has two doctors’ surgeries and four GPs serving a population of 1200.

Our friends Kevan and Gloria who run the chambres d’hôtes in the village have sold up and are moving to rented accommodation up the road in Limerzel while they get pet passports for their family of four cats and work out where their future will be; in France or the UK. I’ll be helping them on Tuesday to move their big items with a van from Intermarché.