French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  Of course it won’t. We both know that warm weather rarely lasts in Ireland, and that ‘hot’ is defined as anything over 17 degrees. But ‘hot’ delights the Irish in a way it never delights the French. It sends them scampering off to the beach whooping with joy, waving their bottles of sun lotion like trophies, revelling in the sheer, simple pleasure of summer. They love it. Even during famously sweltering heatwaves, such as that of 1985, they have never been known to say one bad word about it.

  Whereas the French: ah, non. It is miserable, it is rotten, it is unbearable … whatever the weather. They will be making an official complaint to the government about it, to demand that something be done, that compensation be paid out and action taken to ensure that it never happens again.

  And who knows, maybe it never will. Maybe the sun will never again cook Normandy to a crisp. From my window right now, that’s certainly how it looks.

  See? There is a god.

  23.

  A Matter of Opinion

  It is a crystal-clear spring day. Late April, and France is foaming with blossom, engulfed in exuberance. White and lacy, the hawthorn and spyrea embrace like lovers, all but waltzing up the aisle, attended by dancing yellow daffodils, blushing pink tulips and shy, tiny lily of the valley. Overhead, the first swallows swoop and dip, and my sentry blackbird has taken up his station on top of the fir tree, ready to sing, later, the evening aria. You could forgive France almost anything this fine morning, and as I wander up the drive, riffling through the post, I even contemplate for one insane moment forgiving the moles. (If you’ve ever seen the movie Caddy Shack, that’s northern France – bring on Bill Murray with the gelignite.)

  Amongst the missives in the mail is a newspaper cutting. Sent by an Irish friend who has not relinquished the battle for my soul, it is a follow-up to a survey indicating that the Irish are amongst the happiest of Europeans. This new survey, however, finds Dubliners ‘far less satisfied with life than rural dwellers’. Conducted by a brace of university researchers, it cites ‘proximity to the sea’ as one of the things that make people happiest; it discovers that single people are happier than those who are separated, divorced, or in possession of more than three children, and it says that once people attain an income of around sixty thousand euro, the importance of further earnings ‘decreases in terms of well-being’.

  The things that make people unhappy are predictable: bad infrastructure, unreliable transport, urban overcrowding, crime, frustration at work, lonely old age. The survey is one of those regular little agents provocateurs that editors fire off to get people chatting in the pub, but one line hovers in my mind as I head out to buy fish at the harbour, where the first tourists are strolling around in the sun: ‘The environment is a much more significant factor in explaining our happiness than was previously thought – just as important as your job or income.’ So concludes Dr Peter Clinch of UCD.

  It’s hard to disagree. Living in the country, within reach of the sea, is doing me good for sure. Despite having less money than before, and virtually none of what Dr Clinch calls ‘employment status’, I doubt now if I could ever go back to urban life. Moving to France has meant giving up a lot of material benefits, and it’s not all rosy – indeed, there are days when I could cheerfully garrotte the entire French nation with its own red tape – but the quality of life is definitely better, and quality does matter. In fact, it’s vital. It’s worth giving up urban perks for, and you gradually learn to live with downsides such as the moles, the spectacular storms, the two-hour drive to the airport, the thundering sugar-beet trucks in winter and the maddening lack of competent tradesmen.

  But that’s just my view. For now. Because I’m coming up to that make-or-break moment when the novelty starts to wear off, and people wonder whether, after all, they really intend to stay abroad for the rest of their lives. After a few years, the adrenalin rush recedes, you start feeling less like a tourist and more like a resident – one from whom France expects a contribution in exchange for all this lovely lifestyle. Some people start seeing their half-full glass as suddenly half-empty. They give up on learning the language, on making friends, on coping with flooded basements and power cuts, and start thinking, increasingly, about … maybe … making their way home … some day?

  Well, today I’m not going anywhere. I’m practically drunk, this morning, on the fragrance of all these flowers, the intoxicatingly fresh air, the balmy sunshine. I’d sooner have my nose sliced off with a chainsaw than go back to the urban jungle, with its scratchy irritations, its noise and dirt, its aggression and competition. Rural France is where I’m meant to be. But is everyone? Intrigued by the survey, I decide to conduct a little one of my own. By now, I know quite a number of other foreigners living locally. What do they think? Has moving to Normandy really made them happier?

  A week later, I’m considering sending my findings to Le Figaro. Everyone has jumped at the chance to participate in the casual questionnaire, and their comments disclose some aspects of France, both good and bad, that nobody ever mentions unprovoked.

  First, of course, there are the obvious things. Everybody loves French food, full stop. Everybody loves the window displays, the architecture, the languid landscape, the sense of style and flair. Everybody hates French paperwork, French angst, the eternal strikes, and that infuriating Gallic shrug. Everybody adores the markets, the music, the summer fireworks and festivals, the uncrowded roads and the sense of space.

  More than anything, it emerges that everybody loves the freedom of not having to trudge off to a tedious job every morning, not having to battle public transport or a megalomaniac boss. Many of the foreigners I’ve questioned do actually work, but they endorse one of Dr Clinch’s findings: ‘the self-employed are happiest’. Even though France throws every possible spanner at the self-employed, they still say it’s better than what they did before. One man from Belfast describes himself as ‘a child of Ceaucescu’ – by which he means that his previous career, working for a ‘demented’ boss in ‘horrendous’ conditions, has left him ‘scarred for life’. If he hadn’t moved to France, he says, he would have had a nervous breakdown at the very least, maybe even ‘gone screaming round the bend’. Now he runs a B&B, teaches a bit of English in winter, and says that no amount of money would ever lure him back to Belfast, where, apart from his boss, he was ‘so sick of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, ranting on day in and day out, dictating the quality of my entire life … I never want to see or hear of either one of them ever, ever again’.

  Somebody else – who should possibly have been a painter – says that the most attractive thing about France is ‘the church spires’.

  Eh?

  ‘Yes, spires. Especially when they’re lit up at night, glowing like beacons, all over France. And the plane trees, those lovely dappled corridors of greenery that go on and on for miles … I just love the churches and the plane trees. They are the essence of France.’

  Well, Normandy doesn’t actually have plane trees – you have to go further south for those – but it has no shortage of church spires, and suddenly I’m looking at ours and thinking, yes, there is something timeless about it, something comforting. Although Catholicism is waning in France, and the little rural churches are poorly attended these days, it would be a terrible shame to lose them. An inestimable loss, when you think about it – and, overnight, we all seem to be thinking about it. The decline in vocations means that it’s now common for six or seven parishes to share just one priest, but the church is still the focal point of every village, the place where people are married or baptised or buried, and I wonder about the remark of a friend who reckons that ‘any day now, they’ll all be pulled down to make way for mosques’.

  Will they? And if so, will the mosques exercise the same emotional pull as the old churches? Will their spires glow on winter nights, lighting the way home? Will their crypts be damp and haunting? Will their walls reverberate to the enthusiastic – albeit off-key – singing of their faithful? Will there be plaque
s commemorating those who fell in the defence of France, and of freedom? Will there be handshakes on Sunday mornings or Saturday evenings, and a quick nip of something reviving in the Café des Sports after baby Benoit has been baptised?

  Who knows. But the French landscape is changing for sure, and not always for the better: one of my quiz participants quotes ‘urbanisation’ as the thing she likes least about living here. ‘The paving of everything,’ as she puts it. ‘The fusspot tidying up of nature. And the fact that everywhere else is urbanising too doesn’t make it any better. In fact, it makes it worse – this blind rush to follow what other countries are doing. If France doesn’t watch itself, it’ll soon be completely concreted over. Tarmacked, synthetic, not a blade of grass left.’

  Well, this potential disaster seems relatively remote, given the currently vast agricultural plains of central France, the dying Auvergnat villages where even the cat is twiddling its thumbs. But as if to underscore her viewpoint, a farmer appears on television just a few days later, complaining that he has ‘no land’. His region, Brittany, is, he says, ‘falling victim to the bulldozer’. This is something of a double entendre, since Jacques Chirac’s nickname is le bulldozer. Jacques was, and still is, famously sympathetic to farmers (especially in his native Corrèze), but this man wants land for his sheep and, bizarrely, none is available. My friend nods solemnly and says: ‘There you are, what did I tell you?’

  A chap from Kent says that ‘the best thing about France is the public transport. Huge autoroutes, the TGV, always on time, not to mention Métro tickets 60 percent cheaper in Paris than in London. A fifty-kilometre bus ride for two euro. In Britain, that’d cost twenty quid. Marvellous, bloody marvellous.’

  Well, yes. Even if autoroutes are expensive, they are excellent, and trains are extremely punctual (when the SNCF isn’t on strike). My only quibble – being Irish, a child of Ryanair – is about aviation. If a tiny country like Ireland can have flights between Cork, Dublin, Galway, Knock, Kerry, Donegal and Waterford, why can’t France have direct links between, say, Marseille and Le Havre? Lille and Bordeaux? Why does everything have to filter between Paris or Lyon? Why are there no hop-on, hop-off shuttles across l’hexagone?

  ‘Because,’ explains my pilot pal Michel, ‘there is no demand.’

  Rubbish! Nonsense! Infuriatingly, the French take the view that there’s no point in supplying something for which there appears to be no demand, whereas we Irish believe that demand is something you create. Demonstrably can create. The day Air France or Ryanair puts on a link between, say, Biarritz and Strasbourg, it’ll fill up, you’ll see. Ironically, the entire French countryside is scattered with small aerodromes, left over from World War Two and just begging for renovation – assuming, that is, that terrorism doesn’t stamp out aviation altogether, because, as Michel says: ‘Terrorists already dictate the street furniture, transparent litter bins and so forth, the new non-smiling passport photo, the amount of toothpaste we can bring on a plane … maybe some day they’ll ground us entirely?’

  Other ex-pat views are quirky. Somebody says the best thing about France is ‘a stunning painting I once saw by an artist called Jean Grégoire. A village landscape, cubist … unforgettable.’ Someone else quotes ‘the luminous window displays, the gift-wrapping, the perfect presentation, especially in the pâtisseries and chocolateries. The way they knot a scarf or dress a table like nobody else. I just adore French visuals’.

  Somebody trumpets the joys of iced shellfish platters, someone else loves ‘the free entertainment’ (fireworks, church concerts, heritage days, and so on), and there’s even a vote for the café philo, where people congregate for a convivial, albeit organised, chat about the state of the nation, or the state of humanity, in France’s version of a pub. And one Londoner, who had very mixed feelings about moving here, admits to having been completely seduced by ‘family life. Those big picnics you see in summer, with babies, toddlers, parents, grandparents, everyone … they all seem so close. There’s no generation gap. You sense this wonderful warmth.’

  But the devil has advocates too. One woman denounces ‘those dreadful Turkish loos’ (the shock of which all but hospitalised my visiting mother), another wishes that France would ‘neuter its army of stray cats’, and there’s a definite thumbs-down for ‘the screaming motorbikes that drive everyone mad, like mosquitoes. Why are silencers not mandatory?’ (Because too many cops, I’d guess, were once that testosterone-fuelled teenager, doing wheelies at the lights.)

  The ‘diversity of the regions’ gets a big vote, as do the ‘the clearly defined seasons’, and the icons are much loved: the Eiffel Tower, the Millau viaduct, the Arche de la Défense, even Paris’s Pompidou Centre. (I loathe it, but am squashed by those who find it ‘inspiring’.) And of course the affordable wine is a big plus, as are the low crime rate, the ‘serious’ educational system, and the ‘intelligent cinema, which would be classified arthouse elsewhere but is mainstream here’. They all love doctors who still make house calls, the ‘delightful’ beaches, the mediathèques and espaces publics where you can use computers, libraries, research resources and so on, for little or no charge. Some Irish ex-pats lament ‘the lack of social spontaneity’, but their English counterparts salute ‘the refreshing reserve’ because ‘Friends easily made are easily lost. If a friendship’s worth having, it’s worth working for. Plus, French neighbours aren’t a bit nosy.’ (This is very true, you could be dead for a month before they’d notice.)

  The downsides to life in this putative paradise encompass ‘choking taxes and stifled enterprise’, the thirty-five-hour week ‘which encourages laziness, dependence and navel-gazing’, the ‘waste of public funds on fussy nonsense’ (this voter means traffic-calming devices but includes the Programme Anti-Morosité – yes, there is such a thing), and the burgeoning insurance industry, which, unsurprisingly, is gaining a grip on the neurotic, worst-case-scenario French mind.

  ‘I hate insurance companies,’ growls our man from Kent, ‘especially when they ring me in the middle of my dinner wanting to know whether I’m worried about slipping on a bar of soap or falling off a ladder. They should be worrying about whether I’m going to turn up in their offices toting a Kalashnikov.’

  What else annoys, in fabulous France? ‘The bloody moles, of course’ – this battle has reached epic proportions – and ‘not being able to vote. My great-grandmother was a suffragette, and now France has robbed me of the vote she fought for, even though I’ve been a French taxpayer for seventeen years.’ (Some foreigners can in fact vote if they fight hard enough for long enough, but getting on the electoral register involves taking out dual citizenship and can be a laborious, soul-destroying process.)

  French formality, while considered exaggerated by some, is overall listed as a plus: ‘Much better than American rudeness, or the tacky insolence that’s creeping across Britain. The French kiss much more than they swear, which is lovely.’ A less enchanted contributor points out that the French spit a lot too, and the men urinate in public, ‘which is curiously crass amidst so much courtesy’. But my guinea pigs are really rummaging in the bottom of the barrel to find much else to criticise. Even the low-key nightlife gets a vote: ‘No drunken thugs, no puking in the streets.’ One woman wishes that the shops would stay open throughout lunchtime, but nobody else seems to want this, ‘now that we’re into the rhythm of life here’.

  Nonetheless, there must be some things that people miss about ‘home’?

  ‘Hmm … chips? Proper fat, greasy chips? Curry? Darts? Pub quizzes? And our friends, of course … though honestly, we see them as much as we ever did. There’s nothing we miss enough to lure us back.’

  So we’re all going to stay in France, then, assuming we don’t kidnap Mona Lisa or do anything else that might get us kicked out?

  Yes. Oh yes. Everybody says they’re definitely staying, ‘circumstances permitting’. Indeed, in some cases wild horses wouldn’t drag them ‘home’, wherever it formerly was. One couple have even persu
aded their adult children to join them in the Camargue, and, over the years I’ve been here, I’ve seen only a handful of disillusioned francophiles wash their hands of France – almost all because they hadn’t researched their area or their house before moving, hadn’t learned a word of French or were fizzing with an impatient inability to accept that the French lifestyle is, um, French.

  And is France proving good for our health?

  ‘Yes,’ says the chap who hates the insurance industry, ‘especially my mental health. I never knew what a difference it would make to eat real home-cooked food, to sit out in the garden on summer evenings or play boules … I’ve even learned to let the phone take messages, whereas in my previous life I was a slave to it. I’m a different person here in the Sologne. I even gather my own walnuts and can tell a truffle from a toadstool.’

  What if someone offered you a job back in Blighty at, say, a hundred grand a year?

  ‘I’d tell them to go find a Frenchman for it!’

  Finally, there’s the chap just back from a weekend in his native London. ‘Hideous,’ he says, ‘like a failed America. I only wish I’d moved to France sooner. Years ago.’

  Why? What’s the best thing about it?

  ‘The best thing about France is that it’s France.’

  24.

  Material Girl

  ‘Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.’

  That was one sceptic’s wry comment when I first mooted moving to France. Another was more optimistic.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Lazing in the sun, surviving on peaches and baguettes … how romantic!’

  Clearly he’d never tried surviving on peaches and baguettes. But that’s what downsizing is all about. Trading a hectic lifestyle for simplicity. You have to make sure that simplicity, in all its shapes and forms, is going to suit you, because once you jump off your local property ladder there’s no going back. You won’t be able to buy so much as a garden shed. A garden rake.