Greedy Bankers Are Checking Into Private Clinics To Avoid The Paparazzi

Editor's April Blog

Is it true that when the English get angry we Write A Letter? asked my daughter, as the French poured onto the streets for yet another manif. (demonstration) and a spot of violence.
Barricades and bawling may not be our way but as British sleaze rolls out, you certainly get a feel for what gives other nations their revolutionary inclinations.

While British MPs are busy syphoning taxpayers’ money into their expense accounts to fund fictitious second homes, we learn that the Euro MPs , paying careful attention to their expense forms, can bank a cool couple of million during the course of a parliament. (Gives a new meaning to the words “euro MP”).

Meanwhile, Lord Myners, financial services secretary to the Treasury, is the minister in charge of clamping down on corporate tax avoidance via offshore accounts. And guess what? He himself ran a big tax avoidance company in Bermuda, banking up to 200,000€ a year for his services.

Are we surprised? Of course not: Lord Myners is the bloke who nodded through his mate Freddie Goodwin’s £zillion pension - his reward for bankrupting a bank! (A pot of £16.9 million plus a £1.8 million tax break, if you want the exact figures.)

It’s not clear, however, why Goodwin needs a pension since he is not in the habit of spending his own money. Why would he, when he could spend the bank’s! According to a whistle blower inside RBS, he redecorated the lobby outside his office with “watered silk” wallpaper costing £1, 000 a roll (what is it with high office and multi-million pound wallpaper - remember Lord Chancellor Irvine’s £650,000 refurbishment bill ?) after a cleaner made a brass polish stain on one of the panels. He spent £100,000 a month on part time chauffeurs, flew in fruit from Paris daily and twice re-carpeted his boardrooms with £1 000 per square metre carpet to get the “right shade” of amber. (Now no-one minds if the super rich want to create jobs for drivers and carpet-layers with their own money - you just don’t do it with other people’s.)

Then he ordered the bank to buy some executive parking spaces at the local airport so he wouldn’t have to walk too far from his private jet to the car...

Talk about a let them eat cake scenario. (OK, Marie Antoinette didn’t actually say that.) But you only have to look at the opulence of the Louvre or, in Russia, the Hermitage - (compared to our own little shoe-box sized Buck. Pal.) - to understand why populations turned to murder.

The overt greed of those who are cheerfully bringing economies to their knees is sickening. (As is the raft of big companies going into voluntary administration and then popping up under a different name five minutes later, bankrupting a string of little businesses along the way.)
Whatever happened to the concept of being able to sleep at night?

Happily, revenge is nigh. We may not go in for revolutions but we have our other methods. A grand tradition of puncturing pomp and hypocrisy at the stroke of the pen. Or long lense.

Yes, the rat pack is onto Sir Goodwin. A paparazzi snap of Fred the Shred enjoying himself is now worth more than a pic. of Britney or even Brad, Angelina & the kids. And not only is Sir Fred, now the unacceptable face of the greed which created this recession, in hiding while journalists and photographers decamp from Amy Winehouse’s doorstep to his many doorsteps in the UK and Spain, but a host of other fat cats - like the banker who spent £40,000 in a Soho club just last month - are likewise sweating as the tabloids prepare their ambushes.

The thing is, celebs are pretty canny about how the Press catches them out; greedy bankers don’t know how it works. Some are even checking into places like the Priory in a panic. Don’t we feel sorry for them.

The Press, I assure my daughter, is good for more than printing letters from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. (Although better a letter to the Press than to your local expenses-fiddling MP?) A well-placed titter, a cold shoulder: just as effective as a bullet.

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We are delighted that our January sales were bang on target and February figures even better. So thank you to our readers for your continuing support. Some are having difficulty finding the magazine. It should be alongside other English language publications - ask your newsagent, as there are those who are familiar with their stock and others who aren’t.

Alongside this magazine we are printing a free Going Out & Marketplace supplement and have published the first in a series of Normandy guides (see back cover). Look out for the 65th D-Day Anniversary & Going Out guide, Normandy Restaurants, Depot Vente & Brocantes and Starting a Business in Normandy.

With this raft of initiatives in hand, we will naturally be monitoring closely where your interest lies, adjusting out print schedules accordingly and keeping you informed along the way.

© Published in the April 2009 issue of the Rendezvous magazine.

ever noticed how men swim the same way they drive - over-taking, cutting in, then holding everybody up

Editor's March Blog

It’s that time of year when a glimpse of daffodil cheers the heart and hints that maybe - who knows? - the sun will put in an appearance this summer.

It also reminds us, however, that lardy winter bodies will soon be unwrapped and put on show.
Making a stab at getting in shape makes sense and it’s not just about how you look, or the fact that looking better makes you feel better.

This year, more than ever, we need to be physically and mentally robust. There may be little we can do about the global economic crisis. What we can do is look after ourselves well enough to be able to cope with its effects on us and those close to us. Being in poor physical shape leaves you more prone to despair.

So, time to peel away from the wood burner and sniff the air outside. I can preach! Some, of course, are irrepressibly active and naturally subject their woes to a punishing physical regime. Others among us are more inclined to escape via a glass of wine and a good book, curled up on the sofa. The invention of cars, we feel, surely made legs redundant.

Can those of a more static disposition morph into active types? Apparently so. You only have to do something new - drink tea without sugar, go for a walk, for example, - 13 times or for 2 weeks for it to become a new habit.

Take my husband. One day he hit forty, drained a last bottle of vodka, stubbed out his cigarette and announced he was going to run the London Marathon. He took to crawling out of bed in the dark, donning a miner’s lamp and dragging the dog out of her basket for a morning run. The following April he fulfilled a life long dream when he crossed the finish line on the Mall. He has run it again several times since and yes, running is a new addiction. He gets twitchy if more than a day passes without the mental release of a 10 km run.

Me, I prefer swimming. When I say swimming, I mean actually swimming, not the palaver of going swimming.

Not the business of getting undressed in a tiny cabin, balling up your clothes and then finding that you have crammed them into the one locker where your token doesn’t fit or the lock is bust.
Not the dash through the freezing foot-bath nor the eyes of the life-guards summing up your excess pounds; not the knee in the stomach as you try and pass someone in a swimming lane laid out for stick insects.

Ever noticed how men like to swim the same way they drive? Compulsively over-taking, cutting into the gap in front then holding everybody up.

When lanes are organised from fast to slow, men will always pick the fast lane even if they can barely muster a sluggish breast stroke while women, even aspiring Adlingtons, opt for the slow or middle lanes.

You see these men on the pool side, limbering up and gulping energy drinks. Natty little swimming trunks, bodies waxed and tanned, go-faster goggles: you just know they’re going to throw those testosterones into the Man-Butterfly - the one-man wave-machine.

So you let them go first, then they run out of stamina half way down the first length and you have to stop dead to avoid a kick in the face.

(OK, OK, don’t all write in. Women can be just as annoying. I mean, if you want a gossip, why not meet for a coffee and a fag rather than catch up in the shallow end?)

But, if you treat yourself to a jacuzzi afterwards, (the whole point of going swimming, surely?) there’s Mr Man-Butterfly again, draped across the tub so you have to sit sideways with your knees bent. Either that or he’s in the sauna cranking it up to extra hot.

Then at the end of it all, there’s the timed shower which peters out just when your eyes are screwed closed and full of shampoo, trying to put socks on when the floor’s sopping wet and finally emerging into winter with wet hair.

So when I say I like swimming, what I really mean is that I would swim at least daily, possibly more, if I had a private heated indoor pool of my own. Sadly, it is a renovation project which will have to wait.

There’s always a good excuse to put off a new exercise regime. Banish it - and get moving!

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Once again, we have been rewarded for being too lazy to pick up the last of our apples in autumn. On cold days, the garden is a sea of birds come to feast on the rotting fruit. And there’s more than enough to go round so they don’t even have to fight over it.
Meanwhile, the red squirrel makes a daily visit to add another walnut to her collection.

© published in the March issue of the Rendezvous magazine

I had this idea while using the car scraper to clear ice from the inside of the bedroom windows

Editor's February blog

During the last cold snap there was a burst mains pipe, in Wales I think. Did anyone see the news item? By the time the TV cameras rolled in the community had lived an entire day without water.

“I haven’t been able to wash or run my dishwasher. It’s disgusting” complained one gentleman in that “something must be done” tone of voice. If he wasn’t old enough to remember the war, he certainly lived through the winter of ’63 and for sure there weren’t dishwashers around in his youth.

In another flat, a mother and kids - all in t-shirts so clearly no problem with the central heating - said they had been forced to buy bottled water to flush the loo. Out on the street a bunch of villagers were clustered around tanks shipped in by the water company (so they weren’t actually without water, only running water). Shivering in crop tops and bare legs, and clutching near naked babies in their arms they complained about having to come out in sub-zero temperatures to fill buckets.

Put a b***** coat on, then, and wrap that baby in a blanket! Do people have no survival skills?
Have they never been camping?

A friend here in Normandy has been waiting two years for her husband to install a kitchen sink - she does the washing up in the shower. Another family is still using the old outside staircase to reach their upstairs. Indeed, half the people I know here are either in and out of caravans or decamping from room to room as they build the dream project.

That’s the answer then: ship these whingers out to spend a week in a half-renovated house in Normandy! Call it a sort of outward bound experience. Turn it into a reality TV show.
I had this idea while using the car scraper to clear ice on the inside of the bedroom windows. Not knowing, obviously, that oil prices would tumble and we were in for the coldest winter in recent memory, we had the brilliant idea of not using the central heating this year.

During the very cold spell we dug out the electric convectors and decided to hell with the electricity bill. Ha! Our “rewired” house allows simultaneous use of precisely one radiator and one other electrical gadget. Go wild and try to run, say, the kettle at the same time as the DVD player and the entire supply trips. You waste 5 minutes of your life: thirty seconds stumbling to the mains switch and 4 minutes 30 seconds waiting for the low energy light bulbs to remember they are meant to emit light.

The cold, of course also sends outdoor creatures scurrying for warmth. Our resident mice no longer wait for us to go to bed before sauntering out to check the cheeses on offer. They fail to understand that, in return, they are meant to wait inside the trap until the door shuts. “Forget cheese” advises a colleague. “We ended up super-gluing Smarties in our traps. The final insult was when we found a mouse sitting in the cat saucer eating the cat food.”

I told our own useless felines that there’d be no more cat food on the shopping list while the house is full of tittering mice. They marched off, disgusted, and dragged back the corpse of one of our French neighbour’s rabbits.

The dogs, meanwhile, are so determined to prevent any heat being wasted on human beings that they press up against the petrol heater and periodically set themselves on fire. We use the old t shirts that we hang over the computers to protect them from falling plaster dust to put the flames out.

Even if you know compatriots with perfect, “normal” homes you can be sure they spent a year or so in a caravan or living in 1 1/2 rooms along the way. Many Brits grow so deranged during this renovation process than no sooner have they finished a house than they sell up and start on the next.

Why we all chose this madcap existence (something to do with quality of life, wasn’t it?) is another question. And when we could be living in a centrally heated flat and pouring bottled water down the loo!

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As many of you are already aware, we are publishing a free supplement to the Rendezvous alongside the main magazine. Consisting of the Going Out and Marketplace sections from the magazine, the supplement continues to be distributed in bars, restaurants, tourist offices etc.
Marketplace advertisers automatically appear in the supplement.

Display advertisers who wish to appear in the supplement should contact Anthea (English) on 06 17 02 24 89 or Raph (French) 06 99 67 30 30.

If none of us has any money, we can’t employ or buy services from each other

Editor's January blog

This should be a cheery column about all those jolly resolutions we make and break at this time of year. But I think we’re all a bit jaded, this January, for such nonsense?

Most of us are vacillating between stiff upper lip, we’ll get through it, heroism and explosions of blinding panic.

The speed of devastation has been breathtaking. One minute we were tittering over the names of US sub-prime mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - who sounded like a pimp and his hooker. It was all happening an ocean and a channel away. Then suddenly, even here in Normandy, we’re heading for the promo shelves, switching off the heating and living on vegetable soup.

There may be a clutch of lucky readers out there with plenty of money, safely stashed in euros, and good luck to you.

But few of us are immune. A huge service industry here in Normandy depends on a fresh supply of British incomers and the financial stability of the already-resident and second home-owners. Others earn a sterling income or pension which has gone into free-fall, reducing their spending power.

If none of us has any money we can’t employ or buy services from each other, can we?
And spare a thought for the British estate agents - their French bosses can’t offload them fast enough.

Then there are all the French businesses, the food shops, restaurants, supermarkets, garages, DIY stores, garden centres who have benefited from the incomer spending power. They are the next dominoes to fall.

The tentacles of Mac and Mae are long indeed. A recession only reminds us that clever people choose Teflon careers like dentistry, debt-collection and undertaking.

The usual recession advice is stuff like: give up that (second) foreign holiday, don’t replace the car this year, put off up-sizing your house, don’t buy designer clothes etc.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not acquainted with an awful lot of expats who take multiple foreign holidays, drive spanking new cars, lust after a bigger house or even remember what a designer garment feels like.

As the two families on pages 4-5 demonstrate, most of us have already downsized our lifestyle since moving to Normandy and don’t have have much slack left in the family budget.

So, while we may have managed to plaster the traditional smile across our faces for Christmas Day, it’s hard to keep it in place as we contemplate 2009.

But let’s try. Some of us do have mortgages, but probably a good 70% of British incomers do not, so won’t be facing home repossessions. Even if the value of your sterling pension has plummeted - it is still an income. Many of us have already withdrawn from full-on, must-have, consumer culture and learned to live with less. Our gardens are big enough to have a go at veg-growing (see the potager guide on the gardening pages). Trips to the UK are cheap and it’s a good time to move back if that’s what you want.

OK, we’re clutching at straws here and it’s tough to be cheerful when you’re waking up sweating at 3 am. But we (Brits) are supposed to be good at this kind of Blitz-mentality thing and it won’t go on forever. (How long, exactly, my daughter keeps asking? When are you going to stop giving me pocket money in IOUs?)

People will go bust. While some dance a jig when a competitor goes under, others feel a frisson of fear: there but for the grace of God...

So, whilst fighting for our own survival, we should also be kind in 2009. When it comes, recovery will be swift and sweet. Let’s hope that it’s not too far away. In the meantime: as Happy as possible New Year to All.

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄

2008 ended with sad news in our household: the children’s wonderful Russian great-grandmother died, just short of 100 years old. Baba Valia’s life spanned modern history: born into Imperial Russia, she lived through the Bolshevik revolution. In Siberia, in labour with my husband’s mother, she trudged through frozen wastes to reach a maternity hospital. Having moved to Moscow, she survived Stalin’s purges and during WW2 watched her children run along the rooftops catching Nazi incendiary bombs and burying them in buckets of sand. When I first met her, the country she had lived almost her entire life in, the Soviet Union, was collapsing and her grandson married (me) a foreigner; her grandchildren are scattered across the globe. Throughout this incredible journey she remained calm, strong, kind - and always cheerful.

How do you actually use up a salary of £18 million?

December 2008 blog

There is a poster which reads: ”I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” How true. Being short of money is soul-destroying, marriage-wrecking. Repeating “no, we can’t afford it” to bright eyed children is very dreary.

Who doesn’t want enough money to change the car, redecorate the house, take weekend breaks, spoil children - occasionally?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to work hard, be good at what you do and earn lots of money. I've nothing against people getting rich - I only wish I were among their number.

But there’s rich and there’s stupid money. Let’s take the example of a UK celebrity recently in the news with his contract worth eighteen million over three years.

One million, OK. Two million - most of us could get through that with a bit of imagination. (Never wasted hours planning what you’d do if you won the lottery and realised that 1 million is not quite enough?)

But £18 million? How do you actually use up that much money? Does any sane person want a gold-plated yacht? Need homes for all the family in the Middle East? What kind of altered state are you living in if you earn several million a year and still feel hard-done by if you don’t get a few more million as a Christmas Bonus?

There's a level of wealth where you stop envying the person and start to feel a bit sick.

When the elite restaurant Maxim’s opened a branch in Moscow soon after the fall of communism, I was sent to review it. In warm boots and thick winter coat I picked my way over penurious, bewildered Muscovites (this was long before the super rich Russian oligarchs appeared on the scene) who were, literally, hawking family treasures on the pavement in order to feed their families bread and potatoes. I’m not sure if the sumptuous curtains inside the restaurant were to hide our food from the destitute or hide the destitute from us while we ate; either way, I couldn’t swallow.

So, while I’d like to be, say, filthy rich, I don’t think I’d be any good at being obscenely rich. Even could I afford it, I’d never be able to spend 260, 000$ on a bag. (Chanel’s alligator and diamond tote, in case you’re wondering). I don’t think most of us would.

Which is why it’s not surprising that, while we may be worrying about savings and mortgage payments as the credit crunch starts to bite, most of us are relieved that the crazy greed-credit-debt-credit-debt carousel has crashed to a halt. We won’t have to listen to people talking about how much their house has risen in value, for a start.

More, importantly, we can take a fresh look at what makes us enjoy life? Huge overdraft? No. Bills we can’t pay? No. Hiding from the Postman? No.

Would we rather a big car or good friends? Kids who have everything or kids who are happy?
Loving husband or new pair of shoes? (OK, that last’s a tough one.)

For a while there, we were persuaded that the road to eternal happiness lay in buying lots of stuff we didn’t need and couldn’t afford. The credit was never real money, so we had this hallucination that the debts wouldn’t be counted in real money either.

(If Jesus got upset by the Romans turning his Father’s house into a temple of money-lenders, you can’t help wondering what he would make of todays banks, not to mention ”futures” markets and hedge funds?)

Except that deep down we knew that there must be a glitch in the argument. All that time we were in denial we were also a bit scared which is why it feels good, albeit dull, to find that we’re back in the real world now. Greed and acquisition, fun for a while (and motivating) are the opposite of contentment.

Christmas is a good time to make the re-adjustment. Don’t feel pressured into going for one last bank-account-emptying spree. Ditch the glitz and try and squeeze a drop of spirituality out of this most family-centred of festivities. Make it a challenge to see how much warmth and laughter you can create with as little cash as possible. This issue is devoted to helping you do this.
And thank your lucky stars no-one’s giving you the Chanel tote this Christmas! It would just make you look naff.

Happy real Christmas!

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The last of our eight unplanned puppies is about to head off for her new home. They have cost a fortune in time and puppy meat. We’ve spent hours clearing s*** and washing floors It’ll be a relief to see the back of them. And sad.

They’ve given us two priceless insights into our lives. First, if your days are too busy to stop and have a tug of war with a puppy or take it into your arms for a time-wasting, heart-warming cuddle then you need to re-evaluate your priorities. Second - when did any of us dreary adult humans last greet a new day with the sheer, tail-wagging delight with which they pour out of their pen on a cold, frosty morning?

The December Rendezvous is out

The December issue of the Rendezvous is out and being distributed. Please pick up your free copy at one of our regular distribution points - or subscribe to enter prize-draws and receive the magazine ahead of everybody else.

My husband sneaks about replacing light bulbs with low energy tubes

November 2008
Now that we have entered the dark months when children catch the morning bus by starlight and come home after nightfall, I love nothing more than drawing the curtains, turning back the covers and turning on the desk and bedside lights to make their rooms cosy and welcoming to celebrate their return.

To me, there is nothing more depressing than entering a dark room or returning to a cold, unlit house after an evening out.

I grew up among adults moulded by the post-war austerity years - in freezing houses where ice formed on the inside of windows and face creams froze in the bathroom. “Turn out the lights” was a constant refrain.

I vowed then that when I grew up and had my own home, lights would burn all over the house and my family would never shiver around a sole source of meagre heating, pulling on another jumper.

And I would be wasteful! Chuck left overs in the bin rather than think about the starving millions and throw out perfectly usable clothes; replace rather than mend, buy pre-washed salads and eat strawberries in winter. (This, of course, was the Dallas era)

Now here I am, head of my own household, drifting about turning lights on and the heating up, having deep hot baths instead of showers and jumping in the car because: if God meant us to walk, why did He invent the wheel?

And instead of nagging parents, suddenly there’s a generation of eco-warriors snapping at our heels, checking food miles and tutting because you didn’t put your used Kleenex in the recycling box.

Yes, I am blessed with children intent on saving the planet. I plug my mobile in to charge only to discover - when I need to make a call - that some laudably conscientious child had unplugged the charger. Slump into a chair and reach for the remote only to find that the television has been switched off at source.

Meanwhile my husband sneaks about replacing light bulbs with those awful low energy tubes which take half an hour to warm up and give less light than a dead glowworm.

I don’t care how many times people assure me that they are now much better than the early prototypes and you can barely tell the difference. You can. They’re as cheery as a naked light bulb in an interrogation chamber.

Cheap flights, year round fruit and veg., handy aerosols, 4x4s were all invented to make life more fun but then up pops a scientist warning us that these are the Devil’s toys.

Luckily for the planet, however, we’re now facing a capitalist meltdown that has billionaires panicking, the ghost of Karl Marx tittering over Highgate cemetery and the rest of us counting out the centimes.

One way or another, life is determined to keep us wringing out our used tea bags. Actually, the New Frugality may not be 100% good news for the planet. Replacing the old banger with a green model or sticking solar panels and windmills all over the roof are luxury investments that may now have to be struck off priority spending lists.

But, certainly, we will all be looking for ways to cut down on waste and spending.

Who dares turn on their oil central heating this winter? Who is not now factoring in petrol costs to the children’s activities and heading to Lidl and Aldi for the unglamorous basics like loo roll, and floor cleaner?

Over the coming months, the Rendezvous will be greeting the challenge of the New Frugality and looking at ways to trim the household budget - without, of course, sinking entirely into gloom and despair.

Now, I’d better go and turn on a low-energy tube before the children get home.

Many thanks to all those who completed our readers’ questionnaire at Faire Play and congratulations to Gail Redhead who won lunch for two at the ever popular Le Robbery in Vire (now under new management - bookings 02 31 67 28 43).

Your answers tell us how popular the Noticeboard and, especially, Marketplace sections are; that many readers are living on their own and that you want more recipes, history and advice as well as articles on animals and horses, walks, boating and cheap living.

We are always pleased to get reader feedback and do our best to cater to all requests. Look out for our columns on bargain-hunting and being a small-holder in our even better Rendezvous in the New Year.

Also in the New Year, we will be phasing in a small charge for the Rendezvous. Our costs are rising, just as they are for the businesses who wish to advertise with us, and thanks to whom the magazine has been free for the past two and a half years. Introducing a charge will allow us to cut our advertising rates whilst continuing to improve the magazine, and to increase our print run to satisfy rising demand for the Rendezvous.

This will mean some adjustment to our distribution points but as it will also allow us to be present in local newsagents, this will make collecting your monthly copy more convenient for many readers. See our December issue for a list of where to find your magazine from January 2009.