Bringing down the Barriers- Part deux

And so to another,  rather less pleasant,  experience with the perimeter of my French estate. I feel I have been quite calm and collected about this so far, but as it is an Anglo-German conflict taking place on French soil, I am concerned that somewhere the social niceties of neighbourly etiquette have been lost in translation. Bear with me whilst I explain.

Last winter at about this time, I was undecided as to whether to visit Nowhere-in-France. I sent my neighbour an e-mail saying that I may or may not come, and she replied, suggesting that it might be in my interests, as the house next door on the other side had been sold, and the builders were renovating it. This, in itself, would have been a Good Thing, but apparently they’d opened new windows in the rear wall of this house. The rear wall forms part of our perimeter wall, and is (was) a beautiful feature, with five or six “niches de poule” along its length, where I’ve been able to sit summer plants in the niches. Until now. Apparently, the builders had broken through two of the “niches” and inserted my least favourite architectural feature: glass bricks.

I was anxious to see this, so booked my flights and went over. And, sure enough, two of the niches were indeed now filled with glass bricks, although they were still niches. It looked hideous, not least because the builders, without access to the wall on my side, had left huge globs and stalactites of plastic filler hanging down. And then I went into the barn where we keep firewood, to discover that they’d inserted a new beam through the wall, and great lumps of wall had fallen through onto the barn floor! I was later to discover that the neighbour on the other side had fared even less well, as the other end of the same beam had apparently made an appearance through the wall behind the wardrobe in their bedroom!!

Now, I may be being a bit too “British” about this, but frankly if my builders were about to wreak havoc on my derelict property and possibly impact or impinge upon my neighbours, I might just have popped round or stuck a note through their letterbox to explain and apologise in advance for any inconvenience. You know, just to get off on the right foot and all that! But not my new neighbours, oh no. They remained conspicuous by their absence.

Owing to the hole in my barn and the stalactite-and-glass-brick combo, I popped round ready to tackle their builders, who were on site. In fairness, they were pleasant and helpful, and within hours they’d come over and filled the hole in the barn wall, and done the making good on the glass bricks on my side of the wall. However, they were a bit slapdash with the latter, and wiped the glass off with the same cloth they’d used on the cement, leaving very little chance of light permeating through the cement-smeared glass. Peevishly, I decided that this was not my problem, and left it to dry. After all, it made the glass bricks less apparent….

One thing I did discover, thanks to the builders, was that my new neighbours were German. They would, like us, be using their newly-acquired property as a holiday home, and as the works were nearly complete, they were shortly due to arrive. On this occasion, I didn’t get to meet them.

Fast forward to the Spring of last year. Once more in France, I discovered that the house next door was finished. The man of the couple was apparently in residence. Under the previous occupant, the small front garden had had a set of double gates opening onto it, where a car could easily be parked. However, the new neighbours had walled in their whole garden, leaving them nowhere to park…except outside my barn door. Which was what they had apparently chosen to do! 

As it happened, on my list of projects for that trip was to repaint my barn door. This was going to be difficult with someone else’s car parked across it, so I popped round and rang the bell, and made my first acquaintance with my new neighbour, whose name I forget, but for ease and alliteration, I shall call him Herman the German.

I explained that I needed him to move his car, as I wanted to paint the barn doors. He was very accommodating, and agreed to do so. He also explained that he’d bought the barn next door to mine, and was intending to create his own garage. In the meantime (and I quote) “You don’t mind me parking here, do you?” I think that in French, this sort of thing is generally referred to as a “fait accompli”. It’s also the sort of question that can leave one  with the same dilemma as questions like “Do you still beat your wife?” as, however you answer,  it leaves you sounding a bit churlish unless you say “Oh, not at all, that’s fine”. I managed NOT to say that, but, wrong-footed, I failed to say what I should have said, which was “And now that you’ve got rid of your own parking space in order to make a bigger garden, I’m just supposed to let you park across my barn doors, right?”

I stuttered a non-commital reply, explaining (I thought) that it was OK for a while, but that we did expect and need unfettered access to our barn. And that, I thought, would be that. After all, they had bought a barn to make their own garage…

Summer….and I was back. Oddly, considering that the gate was locked, and that my house is surrounded by the now famous wall, I was surprised and puzzled to notice that the glass bricks were now sparkling clean. It appeared that my new neighbours had scaled the walls without so much as a word, and cleaned their windows from my garden. I was miffed and ready to enquire . H the G was still parking outside our barn, but almost as soon as I arrived, he left. Only to be replaced by other Germans, who parked their car – yes, you guessed – outside our barn. I realised that H the G was renting his house out as a holiday let, and had clearly told his tenants that it was fine to park there.  A red mist descended…

Thus it was,  reader, that on one of the hottest and most humid days of last summer, whilst the tenants were out, I purchased 3 fence posts, a length of chain and a “No Parking” sign, and set about reclaiming my own property. I should add that the ongoing presence of a car on my little bit of land had prevented me doing any routine maintenance of the patch, and once I’d erected my barriers I set about weeding and mowing the grass. It’s a tiny space, but you will understand how things were if I tell you that there were waist-high nettles and flattened grass, and that it took several hours and the removal of over nine wheelbarrow-loads of debris to tidy it up.

Fast forward to last week…H the G now has a spanking new garage door. It must, however, be a bit far for him to walk to his front gate, because he (or someone…but I know where my money is) has removed the 3 fence posts I erected, together with the chain AND the “No Parking” sign, and there are clear tyre tracks from a parked car on the grass. In my book, that’s a declaration of war. It’s taking the German “beach towel on the sun-lounger” stereotype way too far.  I’m starting to feel how Poland felt….

Whilst the builder was round to quote for repairing my wall, I got him to quote for a concreted-in post and a metal eyelet in the wall, to take the new, thicker, stronger chain that I will be acquiring to hang between them. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get barbed wire and searchlights..

Bringing down the barriers....Part 1

 My stay in Nowhere-in-France was, on the whole, uneventful, as I reported previously. Despite the cold, our little house had stood firm against the elements and (more importantly) so had the pipework, despite some obviously frozen pipes which refused to allow cold water to reach the upstairs bathroom for the first couple of days. Unfortunately, however, not everything had stood firm…

Arriving just before dusk on day one, my primary concern was to light fires and stuff. As I could see my breath indoors, this seemed like a plan. The neighbours had invited me over for dinner. In fact, they’d even offered me a bed for the night, should I have felt that sleeping in sub-zero temperatures in a house where the heating had only just been reinstated was too much. They reckoned without my girl-guide levels of preparation and my newly acquired bargain electric blanket. I was, dear reader, prepared to tough it out. Once I’d wrestled the electric blanket and its eight miles of attachment cord onto the bed, over and around the mattress and anchored it firm, I was already feeling a LOT warmer. Time to venture out and around the perimeter of our tiny French estate. (Don’t get excited. I can reach the perimeter in any direction in about five brisk strides). 

Before I could start my perimeter-striding, however, there was a knock on the door, and a rather sheepish-looking neighbour waiting on the threshold. We did the French kissy-kissy thing and exchanged greetings, and then my neighbour said “Have you seen your wall?”. I had, in the sense that it surrounds our house and garden, and thus is quite hard to miss, but as I hadn’t yet done my perimeter tour, I had to confess that whilst I could vouch for the wall being where I’d last left it, I hadn’t “seen” it in any more detailed manner.

“Well..” he went on “I had a bit of an accident yesterday. We didn’t think it was worth telling you by e-mail as you were about to arrive, but come and have a look”. He led me to the wall, where I saw that what I’d taken for a dirty mark on my way indoors was, in fact, a large and very visible crack. The closer we got, the more spectacular it looked. Once we were standing outside in the road and examining the damage, it was clear that the top section of the wall was almost entirely detached from the bottom along about 8 metres of its length.

“I was reversing the tractor with the bowser on the back, and trying not to let it slide on the ice” said my neighbour “And I thought I’d just hit the kerb. I don’t usually bring the bowser over, but with the cold, I was bringing everything closer to the house.” He went on to explain that he thought he’d just clipped the tiles on top of the wall, but on closer inspection he realised that he had come perilously close to demolishing the wall entirely! I felt quite sorry for him, but we agreed that things could have been worse, he and his tractor had survived unscathed, and the wall could be fixed. As his brother-in-law is a builder, and we both share the same insurance company, he promised to deal with the insurance and get a quote for the repairs, and I know that all will be well.

I attach for your delectation and delight a few snaps…

The Miraculous Expanding Jumper

The move from Nowhere-on-Thames to Nowhere-in-France went remarkably smoothly, all things considered. Probably the only tricky part was cramming all my thermal clothing – plus a newly-acquired electric blanket - into a tiny bag to beat the budget-airline baggage restrictions. This involved wearing a LOT of clothes, but the temperature was so low on my day of departure that it wasn’t a real hardship. The real hardship would have been getting up if I’d fallen over. I was wearing so many clothes that I would probably still be lying on the floor of Stansted airport departures, waiting for someone to either take pity on me or mow me down with one of those little electric buggy things, had gravity claimed me and dragged me to the floor.

There is something about managing to board a Ryanair flight with all the stuff you packed in your hand luggage that’s immensely satisfying. I was a bit concerned, and had practised, in my mind, exactly how I would strap the electric blanket to my body in the event that I was stopped and told that my hand luggage exceeded regulation dimensions. Frankly, I don’t know why I ever worry. I’ve flown to the other side of the globe for a fortnight with hand luggage, so visiting a house where I’ve already got plenty of clothes for a week is no problem. Except, of course, when the outside temperature has dropped to “arctic” and you’re having to call your thickest woollies into service. 

What I failed to factor into my plans, however, was the Big Thaw and the attendant massive increase in temperature which meant that I had no need to travel back dressed as if for a week in Siberia. This posed a problem, as my big jumper alone filled up all the space which had been occupied on the outbound leg by the electric blanket I was leaving in France. Not only that, but the jumper refused to pack flat. This, despite the use of one of those special plastic bags which allow one to expel all the air and thus condense one’s clothes into a sort of brick.

I eventually managed to cram the thick jumper into my bag, squeezed into a brick in the plastic bag. Sadly, the plastic bag began, only part way to the aircraft, to show distinct signs of no longer wishing to fulfil its role. This meant that as I edged forward in the boarding queue, my sweater and all the other clothes in my bag took it upon themselves to start spontaneously expanding….

I managed to reach the aircraft without drawing too much attention to myself, despite the fact that I was carrying a piece of hand luggage which seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and was discernibly growing as if someone was using a bicycle pump on it. I shoved it quickly into the overhead locker, and was pleased that the person who opened the locker on landing wasn’t knocked to the ground as my jumper and other items of clothing broke free from their plastic prison and resumed their normal shape and size before the eyes of the rest of the unsuspecting passengers.

Phew!

Oh yes…I bet you’re wondering how I fared in the cold-weather-one-upmanship competition? Well, it was minus 12^o  for a couple of nights, and below freezing for a day or so, but once I’d lit enough fires, I hardly noticed the cold. However, my trip was not without incident. I shall shortly bring you tales of broken walls, broken fences and a breakdown in international relations..

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye...

Tomorrow I’m off to France. If I ever get there. We’re in the grip of a cold snap. Well, it’s cold to us, but if you live in Siberia, then what we’re currently experiencing would probably have you reaching for a t-shirt and shorts. As it is, people across Europe are locked in competition. The mere mention of the current outdoor temperature wherever you happen to be produces a flurry of “Ha! That’s nothing, it’s minus 27 here and my tongue has just frozen to the roof of my mouth!” “Ha! Call that cold! I had to have my pyjamas surgically removed by the fire brigade this morning because they’d frozen to my body overnight!”

Not to be outdone, I’m heading for my house in the French countryside, where the heating is currently switched off and, according to the neighbours, the fridge has stopped working in protest, because it’s realised that the outside temperature in my kitchen has now fallen below the temperature inside the fridge itself and, being a French fridge, it has decided not to waste its time any further and gone on strike. The internet tells me it’s going to be around -10 to -12 C for the next couple of nights over there, and that the daytime temperatures are unlikely to rise above freezing. I could stay here in the relatively balmy south-east of the UK, where we are forecast a slightly warmer zero to +3 degrees, but then, in the “Who’s the coldest” stakes, I’d be out of contention. It’s a question of pride. Why, even TH has been in on the act. He’s spent the day in Zurich, and the first thing he said as I walked in the door tonight was “It was *&^* cold over there! Minus 10!”. 

Actually, I’m lying. The first thing TH said to me when I came home from work was “Grummmhungbruung”. Or something similar. Owing to his absence in Switzerland, you see, he has been unable to address the problem of his car. I discovered yesterday that his battery was flat, when the nice man from BT came to install our new superfast internet connection. The nice man needed to put up a ladder outside the house, but TH’s car was in the way. I offered to move it forward, which was when I discovered that the battery was flat. So, when I came home this evening at 9.30 pm, it was to find TH outside in the cold, removing the battery from his car so he could charge it. 

So, I’ll be back soon with tales of How I Survived the Cold. Unless I’m recovering from having my pyjamas surgically removed..

Oh, the “Grummmhungbruung” ?? It’s just the way TH talks when he’s holding a torch in his mouth.

The Wrong Kind of French

It’s that time of year….you know, the one where someone from Network Rail  or some BBC reporter stands in a street full of snowdrifts and tells us we’ve got no trains/electricity/gas/sanity because of “the wrong kind of snow” (who knew?). Over much of the UK and Europe, people have been waking up (or even going to bed) to a blanket of white. Most of them seem to have eschewed the idea of grabbing a blanket, hot water bottle or extra firewood in favour of a camera. Facebook is a veritable winter wonderland of “views from my window” shots of whiteness. I am typing this very blog entry whilst gazing out onto my white-ish back garden. Spots of colour are peeking through, though, ‘cos it’s already melting. I’d add a photo but it’s already too late and one person’s snow-covered garden looks very much like another’s, so I feel I’m sparing you.

But I’ve just found out that the snow isn’t the only thing of which we can have a wrong kind. No, apparently, there’s also the wrong kind of French. 

My morning scan of some of the Internet’s vast number of Francophile forums revealed that a number of  people appear to be having problems mastering the French language because, back in the UK, they’d poured their hearts and their money into learning the wrong kind of French. And to top it all, the French haven’t been sent the memo, so they’re being most uncooperative and speaking some lazy colloquial version of their own language, showing no regard for those who have learned proper French as she is spoke.  In a typo sent from heaven, one person complained that her French acquaintances appeared to be speaking “patios”.  An interesting thought, but about as unlikely as a talking conservatory.

I’ve been to this place called Patios, though. And no, it’s not a Greek Island. People aren’t speaking patois as often as they are slang, and I well remember having to come to terms with the realisation that French slang has an alternative word for almost everything. On my first long-term stay in France in the mid-1970’s, I met so much slang that I was initially convinced I’d been sent to the wrong country. After a while, though, it does fall into place. And it’s not nearly as confusing as discovering that your college tutor, happily married to the same woman for a fair number of years, calls his wife “Vous”. Now, if that doesn’t fly in the face of what the textbooks say, I don’t know what does.

Now that I’ve become what might loosely be described as a “teacher” (I admit to feeling somewhat embarrassed to use the term in case a real teacher comes along and I get found out), I do see both sides of this situation. Of course, when we learn a foreign language, we are taught the correct way of using the grammar and of forming sentences with grammatically proper structures. But, as we know with our native language, rules are made to be broken. I’ve just counted the number of sentences in this post that start with a conjunction, for example, and if I was a better person, I might feel shame. But I’m not ;-)

With my adult learners, though, I seem to run into a regular problem. Many have a strong foundation in French, well-remembered from their schooldays. They also have the benefit of maturity and wisdom commensurate with their age. Why, then, do they so often seem to go into some sort of mental meltdown if I tell them that they MAY have learned to say “X”, but that the majority of French people say “Y”?? Sometimes, I will get as far as being able to convince people to use a more relaxed and informal turn of phrase, only to meet them again for the next lesson and find that they’ve reverted to speaking like Louis XIV because that’s what they learned thirty years ago.

There is a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon in one of my favourite French films ever, “Etre et Avoir”,  (To be and to have) the story of a teacher in a single-classroom school in rural France. Originally made as a documentary, it charts a year in the life of this school and its extraordinarily dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to do so. Even with subtitles it’s well worth watching.  It contains the following scene, which goes some way to show that the French do try, very hard and from an early age, to learn the RIGHT kind of French, but unfortunately, the wrong kind of French is deeply ingrained. Meanwhile, this side of the Channel, we’re learning the right kind of French and, if numbers of British migrants to France increase enough, who knows, one day we might be able to save the French language from dumbing down…..

I can’t find a clip of this with English subtitles, and you’ll need to watch it from about 2 minutes 20 into the clip, but the children are using the word “ami” or “amie” (friend) to learn the difference between masculine and feminine noun endings. However, one small boy is NOT prepared to give up easily on using the word “copain”  (mate). He will probably be in his late teens by now (as the film was released in 2002), and actively engaged in confusing well-meaning British people who have learned all about “ami” and “amie”, but are blissfully ignorant of “copain” and “copine”…

Tidying up is bad for your health

 

Visitors often say that my house always looks tidy. I’m not really in a position to judge, but since sons #1 and #2 more or less vacated the premises, I see a small improvement, and also a corresponding lapse in standards when they reappear.  Then there’s the odd (very regular) occasion when the cat brings in a mouse and leaves the bits he doesn’t like at the side of his plate. Only the cat believes that the hall carpet is the side of his plate, so owing to his lack of opposable thumbs or human emotion, I spend a disproportionate amount of time with the Vanish and a cloth, scrubbing at the stains and muttering expletives under my breath.

Visitors, of course, are blissfully unaware that they only have to open a drawer or cupboard to unleash a veritable explosion of clothes, household objects and assorted haberdashery which has been hidden away in order to preserve the veneer of tidiness. I do try to keep things tidy, even when they’re hidden away, but sometimes I just take the lazy option and stuff them into any available space in the spirit of “out of sight, out of mind”. And “out of mind” is usually fine until I start looking for things.

Take last summer, for example. I came back from a couple of months in France to discover that a whole stack of important documents seemed to have disappeared. I didn’t actually blame anyone else, but nor was I prepared to shoulder the responsibility knowing, as I did, that even in my most stupid of moments I wouldn’t have thrown them out. They included my Premium Bond Certificates and the paperwork for a savings account. After giving it a month to see whether they turned up (as stuff usually does, eventually) I gave up and rang the institutions concerned to get copies. So imagine my surprise when I discovered, some 3 or 4 months down the line,  that I had carefully filed them in a new file which had been sitting on the shelf all along. 

And that’s my problem. Over the past couple of months, I have noticed that my ability to lose things has increased exponentially, and my ability to find them has diminished in equal measure. Yet I swear, I put them away with care and some thought. However, my ability to find where I did put stuff has turned into a pastiche of that famous Mastermind sketch by the Two Ronnies where Ronnie Corbett is answering the question prior to the one he’s currently being asked. Allow me to explain..

A few weeks back, I hunted high and low for the installation CD for my printer, as I needed to install it on another computer. It was nowhere to be found, but I did manage to come across the cat’s vaccination record. When, a few weeks previously, I realised I’d lost the cat’s vaccination record , it was nowhere to be found, but I did track down the registration document for my car, the search for which I’d put on hold.  When THAT search was in full swing was when I found the missing Premium Bond certificates…

I am seriously considering beginning the search for a suitable home for the bewildered.