Editor's Blog January 2008

Do you really want to change out of your working clothes, get the car out (in the rain) and spend the evening eating poule au pot and struggling with the farmers’ patois? Is it worth slogging an hour across Normandy for that book swap you said you’d go to? How many times have you flicked through the listings, circled an event, but not got round to going?

It’s always easier to stay in. And with e-mail and Skype you can keep in touch with old friends and live a virtual social life when building a new one seems like too much effort.
If you have been used to a professional, city life it’s easy too to be a metro snob and turn your nose up at parochial shindigs. I remember my horror when, having spent the previous years working in the cultural meccas of London, Paris and Moscow, I downsized to rural Britain (to introduce the children to fresh air) and found myself in a village hall with strip lighting being offered tea and Rich Tea biscuits -at 8pm! Yet through a phone number swapped in this unlikely setting I met a woman with whom I had a hundred and one things in common - including that she had shared university lodgings with my best childhood friend and her husband I had had great fun working together on a BBC documentary. They lived just six miles away and our two families grew inseparable.

"Remember: if it’s not happening for you - make it happen."

And here in Normandy, we recently dragged ourselves reluctantly to a gallery opening where my husband met a fellow Russian through whom he discovered that his best friend from Moscow state school No. 34 is now working as a mathematician in Paris.

Amazing coincidences, surely? But the point is that if you sit at home in front of the telly you miss life’s great coincidences.

Every time you leave the house you will be rewarded: discover a place you didn’t know existed, see a view that lifts the spirits, meet someone who may become a friend or introduce you to another who will.

So if you make just one resolution for 2008 it should be this: accept every invitation. No matter how dull it sounds, you never know what it may lead to.

This magazine, of course, was founded precisely to help everybody get the most out of life in Normandy by letting you know what is going on, where you could be going and bringing people together.

This issue is no exception. Follow the example of our estate agents in the French property feature: they got their jobs by getting out and about. There are more tips on the essential business of learning French or, if your language is good, finding out what makes your community tick. In art de vivre Brigitte takes the fear out of inviting French friends to dinner - or why not join the Normandy bird count? Or follow the example of the hundreds of readers who have already made friends through our Noticeboard: if you are looking for others with shared interests, want to start a local get together or, as one reader has, open your house for an “at home” to meet people in your area, put your announcement here.

Remember: if it’s not happening for you - make it happen.

Read the Editor’s blogs online here at the-rendezvous.blogspot.com
and send us your photos for the Rendezvous Photo Journal (details p.15)

December Editor's blog

Is religion dead? It is true you may manage to eat your way through the festive season without even hearing the name God or Jesus. Even the Christ in Christmas conjures sentiments of Mammon or visions of jolly red-faced men with sacks on their backs rather than of a divine infant.
2007 has seen a swingeing counterattack on religion by high ranking intellectual atheists.
But the question surely is: Does God Exist? rather than is religion dead? Religion is alive and kicking. In America, Christian fundamentalists, the self-proclaimed “moral majority” are seeking to dominate the primaries and dictate the choice of Republican candidate: even a Mormon so long as they are bigoted enough. In Britain, they are trying to replace science with Christian evolution in schools. Then there is the Islamic question which states, correctly, that all Islamic terrorists are Muslims but forgets that this does not mean that all Muslims are Islamic terrorists.
Closer to home, I was surprised when a Jewish lady, wanting to put a notice in this magazine to meet fellow Jews, asked for a box no. rather than risk putting her contact details in print. Surprise turned to shock when some of those replying were equally afraid to pass on their addresses and gave only a mobile telephone number. In 2007? In civilised Western Europe? This is appalling.
It is contempt for the bigotry that uses religion as its excuse that prompted three contemporary authors to attack the very concept of belief. Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith all entered the best seller lists this year.
True, fundamental dogmatists, both Islamic and Christian, are today apparently more hostile to democratic secularism - the separation of church and state - than at any time since the Enlightenment.
However, the vehemence of this trio of attacks on faith and religion has caused widespread unease.
Heading the condemnation of Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris determination to prove that religion is not just redundant but positively evil, is British national treasure John Humphrys. His years of working as a journalist had caused his own loss of faith, he admitted. Yet these sneering attempts to disprove God infuriated him. In an attempt to rediscover the existence of a god, of whatever faith, Humphrys asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and a leading Muslim academic to try and convince him.
They did not succeed. But, surely, argues Humphrys, who now calls himself a failed atheist, the existence of conscience begs the possibility that something greater than ourselves exists?
In any case, he asks, is there really anything to be gained by convincing millions of decent, god-fearing, non-fundamentalist believers - of whatever faith - that the trappings of their belief and church are mistaken?
As a moral code by which to live, religion is a comfort blanket to many. A belief in goodness.
Atheists, of course, argue that conscience is a scientifically evolved device which allows society to function. And that they are superior to believers since they do good without any hope of future rewards or fear of eternal condemnation.
Whether or not God exists is clearly not a question we are going to answer here. Faith is a matter of personal belief.
But Christmas is also the season of peace and goodwill - which we can all believe in.
So I make no apology for putting Happy Christmas on the cover of this month’s issue - not least because it is far more jolly than the anodyne alternative: “Seasons Greetings”.
In doing so, I wish peace and goodwill to our readers - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, Agnostic - all.