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.

Unlike a broken heart money problems can be overcome

October Blog

By moving to France we have, to some extent, distanced ourselves from excessive consumerism and crazy credit as well as from the panic engulfing the US and UK as financial institutions topple like dominos.

This doesn’t make us immune, however, to financial insecurity. Food and fuel prices have rocketed here too and those of us with oil heating are dreading turning it on for winter. The euro value of sterling pensions or savings has been slashed, jobs are hard to come by and those trying to run their own business in France often live on a financial knife edge.

When debts start mounting while income dwindles, sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel appears just too far away and the future demands more energy than we believe we can muster.

Few of us can have failed to be shocked by the events at Osbaston House at the start of this school year.

Millionaire Christopher Foster shot dead his horses, dogs and even the chickens. He murdered his much-loved daughter, his wife and then, having barricaded the property, set it alight before returning to his wife’s side to shoot himself.

Time was running out; bailiffs were due the following day as Foster’s £2 million worth of debts were about to catch up with him.

So Foster displayed all the cowardice of the man who cannot face failure. And he showed love - albeit deranged and misguided - for his family (and pets) , by taking them with him rather than leave them to face the consequences without him. (Although his mother is still alive, and grieving.) While the Black Dog is with us, ending it all holds a fleeting attraction. If you love your family too much to leave it mother- (or father-) less, taking loved ones with you has a perverse logic.

But Foster was wrong. When a person kills themself over an irreparable (so they believe) broken heart or following a terrible tragedy or because they are terminally ill and in pain, the death is tragic, of course, especially for those left behind, but at least it is not banal.

But when a man (or woman, although women are less likely to kill themselves over money troubles) commits suicide over his debts (or a teenager over poor exam results) there is none of the poetry of a broken heart or tragic life; it is just plain pointless.

Unlike a broken heart or terminal illness, money problems (and bad results) can be overcome; they are not worth the ultimate sacrifice.

So what? you may be thinking. Millionaire tops himself because he can’t maintain his “must have” lifestyle. His daughter may have had to give up her horses and enter the local comp.
But are not all of us aboard the same consumer merry-go-round, just on a smaller scale?

We are likely to see much more money-related despair in coming months as house repossessions and job losses kick in; the ability to cope with “failure” will serve as an increasingly valuable life skill.

Like most of those who kill themselves over money problems, Foster had kept his debts secret from his friends and family.

According to UK debt counselling agencies - and they only see people whose debts are already pretty bad - one third of their files are marked “partner unaware”. It is bizarre that couples who may happily discuss how to raise their children or celebrate Christmas do not, or cannot, talk about their spending.

OK, we’ve all hidden a bag of new shoes from a partner and then pretended we’ve had them for ages. But seriously, it is secret money problems - like secret drinking, secret pornography, secret gambling - which destroy relationships, marriages, families - and lives.

Had he come clean, Foster would probably, have discovered that he had a practical wife who would have told him “we can get through this. Here’s what we do.” And a daughter who may have cried when her ponies had to be sold, but who would have grown up into a strong young woman able to tell the story of “When my Dad lost everything… and we survived.”

What matters is that you have health and you have loved ones - if you have these two you are already pretty damn well off. Foster’s tragedy was not his debts but that he had travelled too far along the path of despair, alone, to see sense.

Drink of hemlock, if you must, when your heart or body are broken. Not over a pile of IOUs.

Regular blog readers will remember how we took in, out of the kindness of our hearts, an English Setter who had been abandoned when his owner returned to the UK leaving the dog chained to the empty property.

And how does he repay us? Step forward eight adorable little pups, just born to the resident Golden Retriever.

They will be looking for loving homes soon. But, before you take on a(nother) dog, be sure you really want it - for life. Animal rescue workers report an increasing number of dogs being abandoned - literally left wandering empty houses or the streets in some cases - by Brits moving back to the UK. Before you offer to rehouse one of these dogs, or offer a home to a cute little puppy, read our new animal care and behaviour expert Jon Moir’s advice on page 18 of this issue.

Don’t test your brain age with half a bottle of wine inside

Two solid months in the company of my darling teenagers and I have learnt new ways to waste my life. (It was my son, regular readers will remember, who got me hooked on the Game Cube). This summer’s technology briefing began when my daughter asked “have you heard of David Bowie?” Heard of him? David Bowie?
Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were my youth. Prettiest Star was “our ( first boyfriend) song”. Rebel Rebel, Jean Genie... Space Oddity. Fashion... Changes.

“Ok, calm down, mum. Show us.” Which is how I was introduced to the addictive, time wasting sport of summoning up clips on You Tube. We exhausted the Bowie concerts. Waded through the entire repertoire of Talking Heads - children now rolling their eyes and yawning.

Then I found the Stones in Berlin (Urban Jungle tour - still have the t-shirt)
“Look - maybe you’ll spot me in the audience! As the offspring fled in horror, I whiled away the rest of the week watching my youth flash by in a series of video clips.

To distract me (and get their hands back on the computer) they made me test my brain age on the Nintendo DS. (a software originally designed to help oldies exercise their grey matter but now a big hit with the Gameboy generation.) Triumph! Despite the machine insisting it could not understand my perfectly good BBC English, and despite being too slow on the buttons, I came out years below my real age. (This is good. ) You are meant to re-test yourself daily so you get better and your brain age goes down until it reaches the “optimum” 20 years old.

Here’s a tip for adults: on no account allow your children to test your brain age late in the evening and with half a bottle of wine inside you. It soars to 80+ and provides them with endless mirth. (It’s already bad enough that you have to put your reading glasses on to see the screen.)

You Tube and DS brain tests are self-inflicted distractions, however. The endless pings of emails, junk mails, burblings of the Skype phone, flashing lights to indicate texts, beeps to let you know you have voicemail , the pop-ups on websites are a daily assault of distractions which make it virtually impossible to concentrate on work - or leisure.

Soon after arriving in Fleet Street I was handed one of the very first “portable” phones - about the size of a small bag of shopping. After the thrill of calling everyone I knew just to tell them I was ringing from the car! I immediately recognised the newfangled mobile as a Bad Thing. No more going blissfully AWOL on a story - the editor could track you down anywhere, any time.

Now everyone thinks they can track anyone down, any time and nobody can wait five minutes for a reply. Have you noticed how many people call your home number, leave a message saying they are now going to try your mobile. They leave a message on the mobile telling you they have just left a message on your landline. Then they send a text alerting you to the messages already left, try Skyping and then immediately send an email saying they are increasingly concerned that they can’t get hold of you and are you OK? Can you get back to them urgently, please.

That’s at least half a dozen communications and they’ll start the whole round of calls all over again in half an hour’s time.

It takes an enormous effort of will to ignore all this and concentrate on writing an article or reading a book or talking to your family. Indeed, alarmist research from America says we are now so overwhelmed by distractions that we may soon lose altogether the ability for deep concentration.

If you can’t ignore the rings and beeps the only other option is to hide, out of earshot, at the bottom of the orchard or swim out to sea.

But you’ll pay for it. If just a handful of people have been trying to get hold of you in the meantime, that’ll be 120 messages, minimum, to wade through when you get back - and before you can double check your brain age, run a You Tube clip and wind down with a quick blast on the Game Cube.

No wonder the only time I get to read a book is when the rest of the world is asleep.

August Editor's blog

"it is nobody’s business
who I am or
what I am doing"

In the newspaper world, August is known as the silly season. The general shutdown means there is so little news around that editors end up running bits of nonsense - singing dogs, alien landings etc - to fill their pages.

No need to go scouting for nonsense this August, however, with these real stories making the UK headlines: local councils spending tax payers money on sending officers out “disguised” as dog walkers and with hidden cameras to catch real walkers failing to clear up their dogs’ mess. Council teams tailing families for weeks to check they really live in the school catchment area they claim.

Just think of the employment opportunities if we continue down this route! What with all the cctv footage to be monitored as well, that’s half the country with a job for life spying on the other half. From nation of shopkeepers to nation of snoopers.

But of course these aren’t just silly season stories, they leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Think of Zimbabwe where neighbours are encouraged to monitor each other’s voting habits. Think of the Soviet Union where the most feted role model for schoolchildren was the little boy who shopped his parents and got them executed for anti-soviet sentiments.

The rise in official snooping comes as we learn that the government is considering allowing the police unquestioned access to telephone information (at present, their requests for such information can be challenged) and talk about putting cameras in the back of every airline seat to check if passengers are behaving suspiciously.

Then there’s the forty two day detention issue, of course, which prompted Conservative MP David Davis to resign his seat and stand for re-election.

Just as a country at war has a great excuse for clamping down on dissent at home, there’s nothing like a good terrorist threat - and what better than putative Islamic bombers - as a tool to curtail individual freedoms.

David Davis, opposing the introduction of 42 day detention, was reelected although I suspect that was because he is Tory in a very Tory area rather than because too may people give a toss about Muslims being thrown into jail.

The ensuing debate, however, prompted one joyous moment for Britain when the former head of the Security Service MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller told the Lords that she opposed 42 day detention on the grounds that there is no such thing as complete security and that lengthy detention without trial flies in the face of hard won British civil liberties.

It is heartening indeed that the woman once charged with domestic surveillance and who had the power to order phone taps and letter opening and teams of followers, holds individual freedom dear.

And she is quite right. You cannot have 100% security any more than you can guarantee the safety of your children. Unless, of course, you lock them in their bedrooms for life and never let them walk into town or climb a tree - in which case what kind of sick children would they be? Similarly, how sick is a society where everybody is spied on? Orwell tried to tell us.

Of course, even the freest democracies need some degree of internal surveillance. And, of course, as a mother, I sympathise with parents terrified of the increasing prevalence of knife crime who want cctv cameras on every street corner. But this is a symptom of a sick society not a solution.

Excessive monitoring is a tool of state control. Forcing citizens to carry identity papers is the state’s way of asserting ownership of the individual. Overwhelming citizens with red tape and bureaucracy is another way of making the same point.

In these respects France, despite her reputation for being quick to the barricades, is far less free than Britain.

To ensure that not one child slips unfairly into a better school nor one potential criminal ever remains at liberty you would have to monitor all of the people all of the time. It means challenging the innocent to identify and explain themselves.

The argument used, not only by the organs of state intent on attacking civil liberties, but, too often, by those whose liberties are under attack, is: if you’ve nothing to hide and are doing nothing wrong, why would you mind carrying an ID card or being watched?

But if I have nothing to hide and am doing nothing wrong, it is nobody’s business who I am or what I am doing.

July Editor's blog

"Losing our identities:
the Nobody Scenario"

There is a computer game which, so the blurb goes, has been specially designed to tax the older brain and keep it perky. I don’t need this software - I get more than enough mental stimulation trying to make head and tail of my daughter’s text messages. Take this one, from last month’s school trip to Italy: Ostia zin.

She had already explained to me that’s it all phonetic. So - Ostia is...thin? Is the ancient Roman port spectacularly narrow? Maybe she meant Ostia, seen - as in: done that, got the t-shirt ? But still my mind kept straying back to that picture of a very narrow set of ancient ruins.

“Amazin” she sighed when she got back.

God save these poor teenagers - their parents are so dim.

But far from, as BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys would have it, “doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago” texting, according to a new report, is good for children. It improves literacy.

Frequent texting develops their reading and writing because of the imaginative abbreviations needed, according to the latest academic research. These help vocabulary and phonological awareness.

Hmmm. I can hear it now: but mum, you know texting is good for me…

As we gear up for that annual screen fest which is the summer holidays (especially, God forbid, if the weather is anything like last year) parents throughout the developed world are plotting strategies to lure their offspring away from the virtual world and into the real one.

Bang on cue, the maverick British scientist Susan Greenfield has come to some really scary conclusions. A specialist in brain degeneration and the loss of identity associated with Alzheimer’s, Greenfield says that today’s teens are heading not just for an identity crisis but are in danger of losing their identity altogether. She calls it the Nobody Scenario.

And she goes further: the actual make-up of the brain changing in response to the hours spent in the unreal world.

When you, say, rescue the princess from the tower during a computer game you don’t know - as you would if you were reading the story - anything about the princess, her personality, why she is in the tower, why it is your job to rescue her? There is no narrative and we human beings need narrative both to make sense of who we are and to understand the world around us.
Add spoon-fed menu options which avoid the need for free ranging enquiry, tick box multiple choice options, the death of imagination and creativity, a text language which avoids the need for the verbs and the conditional structures essential to complex thought process and you create a generation of screen addicts unable to link facts together and understand how they are related to each other.

To create our unique identities we need unique adventures, conversations and interactions with the real world around us. But individuality is being obliterated in favour of a passive state, reacting to a flood of incoming sensations - a “yuck” and “wow” mentality where the ability to make connections is entirely lost.

A generation which won’t be able to build the mental framework necessary to link actions to consequences - a moral compass in other words.

The Nobody Scenario is particularly scary because nobodies want to become somebodies and those without a sense of personal identity are more likely to opt for a collective identity: within a gang, for example, or political or religious extremist group. Fundamentalism is, after all, the suppression of uniqueness.

Greenfield’s hypothesis gets worse. The constant “hits” of wham bam computer games promote the addictive over-release of the brain’s natural feel good chemical, dopamine. The brain is a supremely malleable organ and excessive dopamine hits could, she believes, be leading to an underfunctioning of the prefrontal cortex - i.e. an inability to make connections typified by a total absorption in the here and now and an inability to consider past and future actions. It could lead, in other words, to a generation literally unable to understand the meaning of their actions.

She is talking about children who spend between six to nine hours a day in front of one screen or other - apparently not uncommon. Of course none of our children fall into this category. Do they?

Go on: count the hours.

One of my concerns about particularly, hand held computer games, has always been the effect on the eyesight of scowling at tiny screens for hours. But I’ve just unpacked a box of my childhood books, saved for my own children’s long summer holidays, and had to go in search of a magnifying glass. The writing is miniscule - far smaller than your average text message . Ditto all those old Penguins, price 1/- , inherited from my mother. No wonder we didn’t have any holes in the ozone layer in those days - one tree must have been enough for an entire print run. It’s a wonder that those of us who spent eight summer weeks with our nose in a book, not to mention all those hours with a torch under the bedclothes, have any eyesight left.

June blog

"That friend with the
bigger car and salon tan
is so last year"

We’ve covered the planet in maize so that we can pump the new biofuels into our SUV’s without increasing the hole in the ozone layer. Brilliant!

Now we discover that all those crops that are no longer being grown in order to make way for planet solutions means that there’s a famine in the third world. Oops. Shouldn’t somebody have thought of that?

Suddenly anyone with a back window sticker proclaiming “this car runs on biofuels” is guilty of the death of millions by starvation and liable to get beaten up like models wearing fur. A bowl of rice is about to become a luxury item because harvests are low. But this doesn’t matter because, economists have just realised, the people who used to survive on rice - most of Asia - are now rich enough to eat meat. However, as it takes eight times as much grain to put a Big Mac on your plate as a bowl of, well, grain, there’s another reason why switching from edible crops to biofuels was a bit of a no-brainer.

Carbon emissions labelling of foods has just hit UK supermarkets meaning you now have the moral choice to choose between fair trade products which keep third world farmers alive OR saving the planet.

Help! It’s all about as clear as US policy for post-Saddam Iraq. Sometimes it’s downright suspicious too. Look at carbon offsets. You want to fly around all day in a big fat jumbo? All you have to do is bung a few quid to a carbon offset operative, or whatever they call themselves, they plant a tree in Africa and hey, presto: guilt free trip!

Forgive a note of cynicism but are some people - probably those carbon operatives - making a wad of money out of this like black-marketeers in a time of sanctions? It sounds too much like a brilliant marketing wheeze like feng shui or bottled water (which we now know is really, really evil as it takes ten litres of water and a factory load of emissions to produce a few glugs on a hot day ).

I mean, give me the cash and I’ll rearrange your furniture, plonk a twig in the ground and let you fill your bottle from my garden well any time.

Nevertheless, some good has come out of it all and that’s the great news that it’s now cool to be a penny-pincher. Conspicuous consumption , overloaded credit cards and waste are out and you no longer need be embarrassed about buying eco (as in eco-nomy not eco-logically sound) bulk packs or turning the heating down. You can serve spag bol and cheap plonk to guests, not worry if the stair carpet is worn and send the kids to school in patched trousers.

We are now in the PCC (post credit crunch) era and meanness is the new lifestyle choice.
Frankly, this is a relief to most. Your hair doesn’t have to be permanently glossed, the garden immaculate and it is positively good to venture out in last year’s summer dress.

Better still, that friend with the bigger car and salon tan who used to make you feel a bit of a slob is now sooo last year.

A recent report says that children who grow up with less are more contented. (Although when I tried this theory on my teenagers I was met by alarming discontent: hang the washing outside instead of bunging it in the drier?? Mum, are you serious? I guess the contentment comes later on).

But figures reveal that a tiddly west European country like Great Britain throws out £10 billion worth of food every year. This would be obscene even if we were on the brink of a worldwide glut rather than a famine.

OK, no-one but the eco-hardliners wants to go back to darning tights, reusing tea bags or reading in bed by candle light. We don’t want to trek to Spain on a donkey for two weeks sunshine or forage in the woods for supper.

But I defy any reader of this magazine to not go shopping for a week and still find enough to eat at the back of the ‘fridge, freezer or kitchen cupboard.

Or try seeing how many items on your “must have” list could correctly be reclassified as “luxuries”.

Since this June edition of the magazine has, inevitably in Normandy, a remembrance theme, one last thought: the idea that recycling is some sort of new idea must leave the veterans rolling in the aisles.

But their recycling wasn’t about bundling rubbish into different coloured bin bags, driving (carbon emissions) to a dump and having the waste taken off (more emissions) for melt down (yet more emissions.) It was about reusing things. Think Blue Peter.

Anyone who, like me, grew up with parents influenced by the war years (or, like my husband, grew up in the consumer desert of the Soviet Union), knows perfectly well that yoghurt pots and broken furniture have their second uses. Cutting out waste is in fact oddly calming.

If nothing else, it’s a cool way to get your finances in order before we all get credit-crunched, starve to death or are fried by excess sunshine.

Send us your best money-saving, waste-reducing ideas to editor@therendzvous.info

1968 remembered: barricades forever

May 2008

Paris, May 1968 and French youth was famously manning the barricades. It was a protest which began in the Universities, lead to running battles in the streets, a general strike and the ultimate collapse of the de Gaulle government.

With protest in the air, further demonstrations broke out across Europe while in America they were protesting the Vietnam war. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia saw a fleeting glimmer of freedom before being crushed by Soviet tanks. In China, Mao was overseeing the worst excesses of the cultural revolution (while Western Maoists ignorantly espoused his doctrine). Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were also assassinated in 1968. Some year.
But back to those Paris barricades. The protests were, as protests generally are, anti-establishment: down with the bosses - i.e. anyone in a suit - who are capitalist pigs all, and the police, the tools of oppression, fascist pigs the lot of them.

(Plus ça change. Today’s protests may be against GM crops, oil wars or the destruction of the planet but the baddies are still the capitalist and “fascist” pigs.)

Of course we know that all this anti-establishment, anti- bourgeois rage is eventually tempered by marriages, mortgages and cleaning ladies.

"I hope that my children
will man their own barricades one day"

Perhaps that’s why we look back with a certain nostalgia on the long-haired, unwashed anger of the moment, the tatty banners with their great slogans.

Although students and CS gas are back on the streets of Paris as I write, it has been a long time since Western Europe was truly gripped by revolutionary fervour. Indeed it can be hard work, in the relatively comfortable, relatively free West to feel truly oppressed.

The great British playwright Tom Stoppard recently recalled how he tried to throw himself into the 60’s protests but having just witnessed tanks rolling into his homeland, Czechoslovakia, found it hard to empathise with the “oppression” in London. In the 1980’s I shared a flat in London with a left-wing South African refugee who, having fled a police force which shot demonstrators dead, found it hard to shout ‘fascist pigs’ at London Bobbies.

But the spirit of revolution has thrived elsewhere. As a foreign correspondent, I was lucky enough to watch crowds dismantling the Berlin Wall by hand and later I met my husband on the barricades surrounding the Russian parliament building, just feet from where Yeltsin was famously clambering on top of a tank in defiance of the right-wing coup attempt. To be part of these crowds was to witness what it means to be alive.

OK, it’s naïve to believe that practical economics and politics don’t play a greater role in the collapse of untenable regimes than a handful of brilliant slogans: Communism couldn’t sustain itself.

And, let’s face it, Nelson Mandela probably didn’t walk free just because we danced along to the Specials’ “Free-ee-ee... Nelson Man-DE-la”.

But let’s not give way entirely to cynicism either. Protest is essential. It is only our refusal to accept the way things are that keeps society alive and moving forward. Questioning the status quo and seeking to overturn it is what makes us intelligent beings.

Stop doing this and we might as well line-up to become delta-minuses in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Which is why my heart still gladdens at the sight of a bunch of angry students clutching (still badly made) placards, bringing traffic to a halt and getting in the way of those of us with deadlines to meet and dinner to get on the table.

At least they are tasting the spirit of revolt and if it’s against the size of their grants today it might be repression in Tibet tomorrow.

So although, like most parents, I bring up my children to respect the teachers and do as they say, I also sincerely hope that they will grow up to question and reject, to stand up and be counted and, if necessary, (peacefully) man their own barricades one day.

Of course the next generation of youth may be too fat to go out onto the streets and have to confine itself to virtual protests online.

But let’s hope the croonings of boy bands being pumped directly into their brains via their iPods doesn’t render them too comatose to care.

As graffiti on the 1968 Paris barricades proclaimed: “We don’t want a world where the certainty that we won’t die from hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom”.

Long live the revolution!

***********

You may have seen the picture of the English setter in last month’s Noticeboard, “abandoned by owner and looking for a good home”. He was chained up outside the owner’s property which was up for sale when we went to photograph him so, being soppy English animal lovers, we took him back with us to await the flood of calls offering him a good home. And the calls came in - but too late.

He is so funny and clever and loveable that, even though the last thing we need is more animals, we couldn’t part with him. He’d been on his chain for three weeks when we collected him. Awful the way the French treat their dogs, isn’t it? Except - his owner was English.

Virtual Passions - April blog 2008

I am one of those mean parents who considers that a television, computer and Game Boy is quite enough screens for one child and am thus deaf to pleas for Gamecubes, Nintendo Wiis, PlayStations, X boxes or whatever else is on the market.

Of course there are excellent and informative television programmes, great films on DVD and brilliant computer games like the Civilisation series or Age of Empires which are not just absorbing and creative but educational, imaginative and thought-provoking as well.

And we all need a dose of junk TV from time to time - not least children who have just walked in from a ten-hour school day.

Recently, however, my son’s best friend lent him a Gamecube installed with the most mindless games whose sole purpose is to run around empty warehouses or bits of no man’s land blasting opponents to a bloody pulp using an arsenal ranging from snipers to bazookas and hand grenades.

“I too had become
a zombie,
jabbing
incessantly at buttons”

The two of them not only played for hours on end but morphed into hyperactive zombies - jabbing incessantly at buttons whilst so transfixed by their quest that they were unaware of anything going on in the room around them and deaf to repeated attempts to distract them.

Then the friend fell ill and couldn’t come round any more. But we still had the Game cube. My son tried to interest his sister in playing but she said she “couldn’t see the point” of a game that consisted only of shooting people without any strategies or creative content. (Boy, was I proud of her!).

He approached his father, who tried to interest him in a bike ride or some target practice with his new bow and arrow instead.

Adolescents spend an increasing amount of time in the virtual world and thus, inevitably, significantly less time in the real world while we parents try to explain that “taking a break from the TV” does not mean switching to the computer, it means throwing a ball for the dogs or baking a cake or having a face to face conversation with a live human being.

In desperation he turned to me and I took pity on him: the cube was only on loan for a few more days and his horrible parents wouldn’t buy him one of his own. I offered to be taught and to play with him.

I am not a techno-Luddite but nevertheless I was useless. With a set of buttons in each hand controlling different movements it was a bit like an IT version of the old trick where you have to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.

My choice of weapons was pathetic. Generally I opted for the bazookas and machine guns to give me the best chance of hitting something when, my son pointed out, a revolver or shotgun would have been more appropriate (how is it boys know these things?). Every time I threw a hand grenade I forgot to run away but just stood and watched, thus blowing myself up rather than my opponent (who had run away).

My son was patient. He invested time in “training” me (to turn me into me a more interesting opponent, I suppose). He encouraged me, commenting periodically on my improvement and he congratulated me on a good shot.

It was fun spending time with him doing something he wanted to do and I was impressed with the range of skills and co-ordination he had mastered to be able to play so well as well as by his ability to instruct me.

And there was a moving moment when he said proudly that he didn’t think “any of the other boys in my class have a mother who plays Medal of Honour with them”.

Gradually I got better. Not just that, I got hooked. Absolutely bowled over addicted. My daughter might ask for help with her homework, my husband try to establish if the animals had been fed and I didn’t hear a word. This is such a fast moving game you don’t have time to break concentration for a second to answer irrelevant domestic queries. I too had become a zombie, jabbing incessantly at buttons. Worse still, when I wasn’t playing, my fingers were itching to play.

It was a secret vice I shared with my son. I would be busy proofing pages of the Rendezvous and he would sidle into the room and suggest a quick game.

“Only twenty minutes - max”. He nodded. Two hours later we were still playing.
If you are tearing your hair out watching your kids fritter away their lives playing mindless electronic games, believe me, they can’t help it. It’s frightening.

Eventually, the friend reclaimed his Cube and of course I was as disappointed as my son.
“Now you know what fun it is I don’t suppose you’d think of buying one for us?” he asked hopefully. But he knew the answer already.

Absolutely no way.

Mother's Day - editor's blog for March 2008

Whether you still celebrate UK Mother’s Day or now mark the French date - depending on where your mothers and children are - March daffodils and the reawakening of spring still evoke Mothering Sunday for many - be it looking forward to a hand drawn card and tea in bed or a dash to Interflora.

This annual recognition is pretty fleeting - but everyone takes mothers for granted, so long as they have one.

If only the reverse were true! If we could take our children for granted, how much more bearable motherhood might be.

"the only time a mother can be really, truly happy is when her children are at home, in bed, asleep"

Instead, as soon as that first bundle is placed in our arms we turn animal like in our passion to protect. Understanding that you will never again be the most important person in your own life is a shock. The enduring state is one of exquisite agony.

When mothers say “kids - who’d have ’em?” or tell childless women they are lucky, I long to silence them quickly: that’s such a lie! And, call it a latent protestant background or plain superstition, but: what if somebody’s listening?

Yet while our instincts cry out to lock our children in a room and keep them safe for ever, the true story is of a journey separation - and one which it is our job to encourage.

Each success is a stab to the heart. The first time they smile at a child minder. Leaving them at pre-school while they beg you to stay and you pretend to be hard hearted and turn your back. When they start secondary school, you burst into tears because you have no babies left and any minute now - that’s what six years will feel like - they’ll be leaving home for good.

Each morning, I scowl at the bus driver in case he’s had a heavy night and in any case because he whisks my children away to a life in which I have no place.

In the evenings I am kinder because he has returned them safely, prompting a little leap of joy and relief.

For it is this, this fear of the ultimate separation - every time they go out on their bikes or on a coach trip - which means that the only time a mother can be really, truly happy is when her children are at home, in bed, asleep.

Then, whatever their age, we are allowed to brush their forehead lightly and know that, for the next few hours at least, our babies are safe.

Editor's blog February 2008

Love...
You may get a Valentine’s Day card this month or at least a text message: luv u :). Which your phone will store for about a week. Or maybe you’ll find a loving email in your inbox - to treasure until your next computer crash.

But do you have any love letters? Any hand-written words of endearment? Correspondence from friends and family?

OK, this is the modern world and a transitory one. We are urged not to print out emails and digital photos to save the planet.

But we are missing out on sensory pleasures: the thrill of seeing the familiar handwriting of a loved one on an envelope, the tactile pleasure of pulling out the letter and smoothing the pages, carrying it to a quiet spot to read.

A friend and I still determinedly correspond by post. We no longer manage the hand-written bit but send real letters for the sheer near-obsolete - pleasure of opening something that is neither bill nor junk mail.

Photographs, too, are now digitally stored on disk or in the ether rather than in boxes in the attic. We are moving into an age when we will leave nothing physical behind, no clues to who we were. Yet, it is only when parents die that children wonder who they were.

Clearing the family home after my parents died I spent hours sifting through old photographs, remembering some, turning others over to see what was written on the back. Often they were unmarked and I have no idea who the people were - but even that mystery is appealing. There were letters and diaries, even old lists - my mother was a hoarder. But it was physical evidence of a life lived and, sitting on the floor surrounded by it, I suspect more comforting than staring at the same details on a screen.

Our delete-in-a-click existence will make the biographers’ task almost impossible. And some of our greatest literature or most fascinating glimpses into the past come from posthumously published letters: Tolstoy’s daily outpourings to his wife and her’s to him or, published last year, the Mitford sisters’ letters. We learn much from the passions of the past - future generations may find little evidence of ours.

...& Politics don’t necessarily make happy bedfellows.

While many a great leader has been sustained by the steady love of an excellent spouse, going doolally whilst actually being a world leader frequently leads to trouble.

Traditionally, it has been the British who are served the fulsome details of politicians’ private lives over breakfast but, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine PM Brown, one month divorced, cavorting with the likes of, say, Nancy Dell’Olio.

“We don’t know whether to laugh, cry or just scream” remarks a French colleague as toute la France is hypnotised by the Sarko-Bruno shenanigans. The man who devoted his entire life to becoming president is now in thrall to a woman who reputedly sends herself to sleep by counting the number of her famous lovers including, of course, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.

Hands up who thinks a middle-aged man who has just started going out with a super model is going to be able to sit at his desk and concentrate deeply on the minutiae of the next G8 summit, say, or third world carbon footprints?

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.

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.