Just back from a week in
Nowhere-in-France. It’s received wisdom
that everywhere in France has its own microclimate. At least, that’s what just
about any Brit living in France will tell you. It’s like a sort of competition.
It just takes one person to say “ooh, we’re eating on the terrace in 28 degrees
and it’s only February 3rd!” and suddenly they’re all at it…”It’s 40
degrees here, we’re all in swimwear and the rest of Europe is snowbound, but of
course, we have our own microclimate…” Well, last week we came out quite well
in the competitive microclimate contest, with almost none of the predicted
rainfall. Good for us, but not for the general wellbeing of the surrounding
countryside. It IS amazing, though, that
you could drive 100 metres in any direction away from our house and find that
suddenly it was raining – or conversely, that it was raining chez nous but
sunny in the next hamlet.
Anyway, it wasn’t just
the weather that was up and down. So was fortune. I had my first French car
accident. A woman in one of those Toyota 4 x 4’s that looks like a total
eclipse on wheels executed an overtaking manoeuvre on an empty road, and
managed to practically sever my wing mirror from the car. I had to give chase
for a good few Km at speeds I normally only travel on motorways, all the while
flashing my lights at her, before she finally pulled over. Ironically, the
place she chose to come to a stop was right outside the cemetery. Considering I
was the one whose car got damaged, she was almost apoplectic with rage,
accusing me of just about everything from deliberately swerving into her..(er…hello?)
to not pulling over to give her room (on an empty road where I was already on
the correct side of the road and she could have got TWO of her
total-eclipses-on-wheels past me without scratching the paintwork: if she’d
really tried), finally tailing off into accusing me of making her late for
work! By the following day, when we had
a rematch to sort out the insurance claim, she’d had a personality transplant,
and agreed to pay for the damage to my car without claiming on the insurance.
Good call.
Over the Easter
weekend, we took a little drive up the road to the coast. It was a bit windy,
but otherwise a glorious day, and we took a route which allowed us to bypass some
of the local sights which always make me smile: the roundabouts. I don’t know why, or how it started, but
France seems to excel at creating fantastic, interesting, clever traffic
roundabouts. Given my experience above, and the general quality of some of the
driving, I’m not sure I should be applauding this inventiveness: it can only
serve to distract drivers from what they should be doing. However, I do love the roundabouts around our
coastal resorts, and it’s fun to tell people that they should “Carry straight
on at the massive boy pulling the little boat”, or “take the second exit at the
big paper boats” or “go past the giant fir cones and bricks”.
Have a look:
