Editor's blog November 2007

Lack of crime, gentle pace of life, unhurried mealtimes ...these are common reasons British incomers give for moving to France.

It is true that in some aspects France still differs from Britain: shorter working hours, family meals, quiet Sundays. But much of what so many love about France is, in fact, an appreciation of the countryside rather than the country itself.

If you have moved from UK city life to the French countryside it is easy to confuse what is rural and what is specifically French. You can still leave your car or house unlocked and pass the time of day with your neighbours in much of rural Britain - the country living is different from city living in any country.

But another reason many believe that life in France is so much kinder than in Britain is that thanks to the language barrier and satellite television which allows incomers to continue watching UK television, many remain unaware of greater France: looming strikes, racial tensions, economic crises, threats to healthcare and social security systems. In fact, the stresses of urban and rural France are much the same as they are in the UK.

This state of blissful ignorance may suit you just fine. Or perhaps you find it slightly bizarre that there is a life going on around you about which you know very little?

While the political shenanigans in Paris are complex and far removed, grassroots - local - democracy in France is active and far more effective than in the UK where few people know the name of their local mayor or where to find them.

French municipal elections take place next March and you, as an EU citizen, are entitled to vote (see Sue Collard’s piece on P. 11 for how to register). Once we are signed up with a voice that counts, local councillors will stop seeing the British as a group who have gone into political purdah, but actively encourage us to join the debate.

You can also stand in these elections. There are already several British councillors in Normandy, elected in 2001 when British incomers were fewer on the ground and still something of a novelty. If more British stand now that we are more numerous, will this cause alarm? According to my mayor, older residents, while welcoming British neighbours, would feel alarmed if the incomers started to wield local power.

This is understandable, of course, although our concerns are likely to be those of our neighbours rather than specifically British - witness the number of British residents already active in landfill, wind farm and high voltage overhead cable action groups (see pp 6-7).
If you want to know where your local candidates stand on these and other issues, sign up to vote and ask them. Or challenge them!

Editor's blog October 2007

Give up alcohol; drink red wine. Eat eggs; eggs are full of cholesterol. No sooner has one thing been advised than up pops another report proving just the opposite.

The global warming debate is just as confusing with wild claims, over simplifications (not to mention a summer which felt anything but globally warmed). The latest serious report says the world will soon - although no one is sure how soon is soon - be uninhabitable.

Nevertheless, some 90% of scientists seem to agree that global warming is caused by our burning more fossil fuels than we should leading to a build up of CO2 in the atmosphere which is heating the planet. Whether this process will continue or stabilise, whether we can reverse the damage, how long we have to do this or whether it is already too late are all still under debate.

What is sure, however, is that here in rural Normandy we have a privileged view of the glories of this planet that we have. I was going to write that Autumn, with its mists and sunsets and turning trees, the smell of wet leaves and bonfires, is my favourite season. But every season, as it arrives, is a favourite season. Winter brings a stark beauty to the landscape and the promise of huddling round the fire and dressing up warmly. The first signs of Spring, a bud on the Camellia, an early snowdrop, a change in the air, herald an annual miracle. Summer is always longed for with its endless evenings and lazy warmth.

I have lived in countries without seasons and missed them. And countries without a dawn or dusk. Although not by temperament an early riser, school timetables mean that I see the winter dawns and the slow awakening of another day, whatever joys or disappointments it may hold, is endlessly reassuring. Twilight - or, to use a perfect word, the gloaming - when so easily a “bush becomes a bear” and when the early scuttlings of night creatures break the silence, is always mysterious.

The future is uncertain, pause to appreciate the present.

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To those readers who have asked if there was an August and September edition of the Rendezvous, and to those who found both issues difficult to get hold of, the answer is: yes, we continue to print 10 000 copies a month but the magazine is now so popular that many of our distributors run out within the first few days of receiving their delivery. We are therefore extending the 24€ for 12 months (to a French address) subscription offer until the end of this month after which the price - along with the size of the magazine! - will rise.

Of course you can still pick up your free copy if you are quick off the mark or prepared to drive around looking for the magazine. But why not simply subscribe and get the Rendezvous early, delivered to your door? You will find the the subscription form on page 20 or here.

Editor's blog September

Are your children more French or English? My daughter, who has lived here since she was nine years old, begged recently to go and stay with friends in England for a couple of weeks so she could spend a few days inside a British classroom: “I know I am English but sometimes it’s difficult to feel that I’m English” she said.

Indeed, it is said that you feel yourself to be the nationality of your secondary education. By this token many of our children will grow up to think of themselves as French rather than British. They may get French girlfriends and boyfriends and later spouses and within a generation their British roots will be no more than part of their French family history.
But many British teenagers in Normandy are planning to return to the UK for either jobs or higher education, so perhaps the secondary education formula only holds when you feel that the country of your secondary education is your home country.

The current wave of British incomers to France is unique in that we are neither traditional ex-pats - who tend to be posted abroad by employers and to send children either back to the UK for schooling or to a local “British” school. Ex-pat children rarely attend local schools.
But nor are we immigrants in the traditional sense of the word. We are neither refugees, from war or dictatorship, nor economic migrants in search of better paid jobs.

As quality-of-life-migrants or, to use a neat description I heard recently, “affordable space migrants”, we are happy to integrate but do not seek to assimilate - we don’t want French passports nor to call France our home country.

We fall somewhere between the ex-pat and immigrant stools and our children are both part of and apart from the host culture.

Like, say, immigrant Pakistani children in Britain who may be be western dressed and ballsy by day but retiring and subservient at home, our children are French by day and English at home.

Which will prove the more enduring may be hard to predict. I know a brother and sister, now in their late teens, who have lived in France since they were toddlers. Same family, same upbringing, yet the boy insists he is 100% English while his sister has applied for French nationality.

But while, as Lynn Maidment points out on P5, those parents who want to ensure that their French-domiciled children grow up comfortable with their own cultural references may need to make an extra effort to nurture their British roots, the dual culture experience is of course far from negative.

Children are highly adaptable creatures and, whether, ultimately, they see themselves as French or British, the ability to slip chameleon like between cultures is an extremely useful training for an adult life where the facility to get on with different peoples is a quality which may bring both personal and professional rewards.

Editor's blog August

Each generation marvels at the ability of their children to be bored. My father, apparently, had nothing but a hoop and a spinning top and the only time he got away was camping with the scouts. My sister and I had books and board games, bicycles and Lego, family outings (to a local stately home usually), wet weeks in Wales and a whole hour of children’s TV.

Today’s, of course, have package tours and kids’ clubs, in-car entertainment, mobile ’phones and media centres in their bedrooms. And still they’re bored!

Thank goodness for that. While on pages 6-7 we suggest ways to alleviate summer boredom, it is important to remember that boredom is an essential part of growing up and a child’s self development.

Without boredom there is no imagination. No creativity.

Listen to successful adults recall how childhood boredom spurred their success. Top footballers with nothing better to do than kick a ball around the garden; film directors or musicians who filled long hours by forming a band or corralling their cousins and siblings into putting on a show. Fashion designers cut up scraps to dress dolls. Writers, artists, photographers filled empty hours with sketches and scribbles.

So if you are not rich enough to buy every latest gadget or fill every week of the holidays with adventure activities, if you’re too busy or too tired to play non-stop Blue Peter mummy, heave a sigh of relief now. Children whose every waking minute is packed with fun are doomed to mediocrity and social failure. They will grow up with no internal resources, no understanding of self or the world around them.

A former high-flying colleague was so determined her child should be constantly stimulated she detailed her nanny to take the toddler on a non-stop cultural tour of galleries and museums and concerts and extra-curricular lessons so that he never had a minute to “get bored”. Today she has a nightmare fifteen year old with a two second attention span and unable to entertain himself.

In our increasingly child-centred world we have come to see a failure to keep our children entertained as negligent parenting.

But children, just as much as adults, need time to just “be”.

‘It may frustrate us to watch a child apparently aimlessly rearranging her dolls, even more so when we see teenagers just “hanging out”’ says leading child psychologist Kathleen Cox.
‘We itch to tell them to go and do something constructive. But on the contrary, they need this “empty” time in order to develop as human beings.

‘The child lining up their dolls or reorganising their Yu-Gi-Oh! may be working through issues that have occurred in the classroom or playground. The slouching teenagers are in fact learning about social interaction, hierarchies and a sense of who they are.’

Remember though, “useful” boredom is unstructured: it is the child left to their own devices: to rearrange their bedroom or mooch about the garden or stare into space.
“Structured” boredom - another day spent cutting and pasting in a play club
where they don’t want to be or being coerced into a game when they’re not in the mood - is just plain boredom.

Editor's blog July 2007

July 14 is, of course, Bastille Day. French flags will fly across the country and virtually every commune will have a fete and some fireworks.

This comes just ten days after the 4 July mass barbecues, national anthems and stars and stripes waving all over America.

Other people have national holidays. And it’s huge fun, of course, to join in if you happen to be in the right place at the right time. But do we envy them? While the Irish have made St Patrick’s Day an international event and a handful of Welsh sport a daffodil on March 1, there’s rarely any bunting and streets parties in Britain these days. We only see the cross of St George just before England loses a football match and the Union Jack has been largely highjacked by the far right.

Now, however, there are calls to reclaim the flags and get out, if not the maypoles, the trestle tables at least.

In the wake of the July 7 London bombings and the shock of discovering they were carried out not by foreigners but by British citizens who felt so alienated that they wanted to blow up fellow Brits, the left has started to take a healthy interest in patriotism. First Gordon Brown mooted the idea of a British Holiday. Recently Jack Straw wrote an excellent article in favour of creating a “British Story” that would allow all citizens understand why we are allowed to feel proud to be British. Now two more cabinet ministers are calling for a national holiday.
And it is true that as Britain grows more culturally diverse the idea of defining and celebrating an inclusive sense of Britishness is persuasive.

America, a country largely made up of immigrants, all of whom share an equal right to swear allegiance to the flag and proclaim themselves American, is always held up as a great example of a successful “melting pot”. In France, municipal workers are forever running up and down the flagpoles to deck the streets for the latest jour férié - indeed even socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal toyed with making it compulsory for every French household to keep a tricolour in the cupboard.

But have these celebrations of national pride achieved anything? Recent rioting in the suburbs of France’s main cities reveals an underclass of alienated, largely immigrant, youth. The hurricanes in New Orleans exposed a shocking mass of Americans living entirely outside the system.

But perhaps the reason that a British national holiday just doesn’t grab the imagination is that the idea is just so... unBritish? Our reputation - apart from those beer & football matches - is that of a modest, self effacing, undefined lot. We don’t have a written constitution, we don’t carry identity cards (yet), we are masters of irony, or, the “British” sense of humour.
Britain is still viewed - not my words, but those of numerous diplomats I have interviewed across the world - as an experiment in democracy that began in the 1200’s, the first since the Ancient Greeks. And that is worth treasuring. But how do we celebrate it?

July 14 is a perfect opportunity to mix with your neighbours, try out your French and make new friends. Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts about whether or not Britain should have a national holiday send them to editor@therendezvous.info or La Vincendière, 14500 Truttemer le Grand.

Editor's blog June 2007

You can live in many parts of the world without giving WW2 much thought. Not so in Normandy. Virtually every town, village, field and crossroads has a story to tell. Anyone over the age of seventy remembers both occupation and invasion - the sight of foreign soldiers on their land. Farmers still regularly turn up the detritus of war - indeed an unexploded 500lb bomb was found just last month on the edge of the A 84.

But as the numbers of veterans and witnesses dwindle, Normandy wants to ensure that the event which changed the course of the war is not forgotten after the few remaining participants are gone. Whilst not ignoring the fallen, the idea is to promote the idea of June 6 as Normandy Day and put the accent less on commemoration and more on a celebration of freedom.

A cynic might suggest that the motive is also not to lose the significant revenues generated by both military tourism and a big June event. But Normandy’s tragedy was the war and certainly today’s Normans are at least as entitled to reap some benefit as, say, shopkeepers in Stratford-upon-Avon whose tills rattle because William Shakespeare was born there.

Encouraging us to celebrate freedom - and to understand the price paid for it - is the right way ahead. It is also an enormous challenge.

It is very difficult to get people to appreciate what they have always enjoyed. Citizens of the former Soviet Union were appalled at how lightly Western visitors treated their free access to information and knowledge. Today’s Russian teenagers have no concept of a grandparent’s terror waiting for a midnight knock on the door. Can someone who has never been short of money really understand what it is like to go without? One who has never been hungry appreciate the luxury of a well stocked ’fridge? If you have never lived under a dictator can you understand the fear generated by the sight of a uniform?

Most of us are lucky to have known only freedom of choice and well stocked bellies. So it up to us to make an extra effort to try and appreciate how fortunate we are and grasp what it is we are celebrating.

It is when we don’t, of course, that the mistakes of history are repeated.

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Two years ago, three of us started talking about launching a magazine. One year ago, having (almost) got to grips with the paperwork involved and having found our wonderful printers, we launched the first issue of the Rendezvous and wondered if anyone would be interested?
The response was overwhelmingly positive and today we print our anniversary edition and the company has doubled in size. We are pleased that those who initially dismissed the magazine as a “separatist Brit” venture see that that was never the intention; we are delighted to count many French among our readers and subscribers.

The success of the Rendezvous is thanks to you, our readers, our advertisers and all those who have voluntarily helped us out in so many ways. Thank you.

Editor's blog May 2007

Time pressures prompted me to ask a friend to help with some research this month, including getting the numbers for the French version of the RSPCA. After some thought, she declined: “if incomers can’t speak enough French to find out for themselves what are they doing here? And it doesn’t any of us any good if we get a reputation for marching in and shopping our neighbours?”

Leaving aside the media’s mission to inform and the delicate line that an expatriate treads between respecting the host nation’s traditions and upholding their own values, what we’re talking about here is the sticky issue of integration and a sometimes bizarre “I’m more integrated than you” one-upmanship.

As a generalisation, “immigrants” want to adopt the nationality of their new country whilst “expatriates” have merely chosen to live in a country other than their own.

By this definition, most of us here are expatriates; let’s be honest, few of us move to France in order to “become” French. Equally few of us arrive determined to ignore the fact that we are now living in a foreign country. Some British are keen to meet their fellow countrymen, others go to great lengths to avoid doing so. Either way, the majority of us hate it when drunk, loud compatriots doing bodge jobs illegally and spitting on values that the French hold dear get us all a bad name and most would argue that it is pretty appalling to live in France without making an effort to learn the language.

But as to either “becoming French” or remaining “quite unchanged” by living in France: neither is possible. You cannot live in another country without both changing yourself and changing those around you.

Identity is not static, it is constantly evolving.

For example, I lived in Russia for ten years and have been in France for five. I am still English, but not the same English I would have been had I stayed in England since, inevitably, I have absorbed foreign attitudes and cultures. My children are English and Russian and French and at the same time they are none of these - they are a new breed.

Our French neighbours drink English tea and look at photographs of our previous life in the Welsh mountains or listen to my husband talk about childhood holidays in the Russian forest while their children are introduced to Dr Who. They, like us, are richer for the exchange.
Normandy will be changed by the numbers of British incomers, just as our “British identity” has been moulded by the cultural exchanges of both our colonial past and waves of immigration into Britain (not to mention the Norman Conquest).

Watching the apple trees come into blossom outside the window I feel perfectly at home in Normandy. Sometimes I ache for Moscow. I couldn’t live without Radio 4.
Living in France, you will neither remain entirely British nor become entirely French. You will, however, become a different person.

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Regular readers will notice that My Restoration has been retitled French Project. This is so that as well as your renovations we can also write about your interesting enterprises and business initiatives.

Editor's blog April 2007

An alarming piece of news: no more unpasteurised cheese in France. Health and safety have got to even the French. (At the same time, paradoxically, as fast food and ready meals are making similar inroads.)

This news comes in the same week as Britain announces that it will now, routinely, take and store fingerprints of the under 11’s and that an experiment with “speaking cctv” has been deemed such a success that these cameras will be installed across the UK: should you drop a piece of litter in your local town centre a little Hitler jobsworth in a booth the other side of town can activate your nearest cctv camera and bellow “Will the man in the grey suit pick up his McDonalds carton NOW”.

We started with the nanny state and now the nanny state is employing big brother. Some of us moved to France just to get away from these insults to our intelligence.

I love the fact that my boulanger wanders round his kitchen with a fag hanging from his lips and high maintenance women sit their dogs on their laps in French restaurants. Obviously not because I want croissant with ash or soup with dog hairs, any more than I want to catch salmonella or listeria or e-coli or whatever it is you get from untreated cheese.

And I hate people who drop litter, too. But I would rather people didn’t drop litter because they understand that it is a nasty, anti-social habit than because they are afraid of getting caught on camera.

If you sanitise life too thoroughly and enforce, rather than invite, social behaviour there is no need for people to educate themselves in order to make informed choices, to learn how and when to take risks; no need for anyone to develop a conscience as they are no longer asked to choose between good and bad behaviour. You create, in other words, a nation of imbeciles. A people no longer able to think for themselves. It is the end of risk, courage, bravery, change - human development.

OK, so we were only talking about a piece of cheese, but we anti-Utopianists need to be vigilant. However, just as moonshine Calvados is illegal but every other farm has a distillery, I am confident, this being France, that a nod and a wink will always lead us to comfortingly dangerous cheeses.

Editor's Blog March 2007

You may have been wondering why our beloved Normandy is undergoing a festival of road repairs? Don’t worry, it’s the same all over France. And it means just one thing: the elections are coming. Presidential elections kick off on April 22 with a second round expected in May. A few weeks later, in June, come parliamentary elections to elect the 13th National Assembly of the Fifth Republic.

Whilst we may have chosen France for its quality of life, good manners and excellent food, the French are not feeling nearly so comfortable about themselves right now. What used to be characterised as French “arrogance” stemmed from France’s supreme self confidence: French was the international language of culture and diplomacy, French cuisine was indisputably the best in the world, and then, post war, France sat herself at the very heart of Europe by founding the European Union with her new ally Germany.

France, the French were quite sure, was the best country in the world and cared not a fig for the opinions of others.

Today, the mood is different, as Maura Stewart discusses on page 7. The French language is under attack from an anglophone business and internet dominated world: even France’s top international companies conduct their business in English to President Chirac’s famous distaste. The EU, chaired by Germany, is waiting to see how France will vote but is nevertheless forging ahead without it’s founder. Temporarily at least, France has lost her place on the world stage.

Internally, unemployment is high, immigration issues prompted shocking riots on the streets of Paris last year, the excellent health system is too expensive to run and enterprise and job creation are being stifled by anti-entrepeneurial employment laws and prohibitive social charges. In London last month Presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy dubbed the British capital “France’s fifth most important city” because of the numbers of bright young French who who have fled there to enjoy its economic mobility.

Deep down most French know that a radical shake-up is both necessary and inevitable, but having watched the Thatcher years unfold from across the channel they dread the disruption even while they may envy the economic result.

Meanwhile the soft soled elite padding down the Parisian corridors of power are about as popular as the stony faced apparatchiks who swept in and out of the Kremlin in the final days of soviet communism.

Both main presidential contenders are promising a break from the nepotistic past (even though they are very much a part of it).

On the right, the UMP’s Nicolas Sarkozy is a pro-English, pro-American Thatcherite in favour of free enterprise and economic mobility. Centre-left, the Socialist Party’s Ségolène Royal is a Blair-style conservative-socialist who wants to reform the existing socialist model.
The radical left has already lost it’s chance to have it’s say by splintering and failing to select a credible candidate. The ghost at the feast is Jean Marie Le Pen on the very far right who is hoping to cash in on the pervading gloom and France’s wounded confidence.