French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  Should you? Is it really wise to trade your pension, health care and peace of mind for the charms of Lille on a wet Monday? You will have to hate your current life very much, or love France to the point of insanity, to risk it. Some people thrive on risk, but not all.

  After the first euphoric year of living in France (gilded by that gorgeous summer when I became a beach bum), I was hit by a terrible attack of reality. Autumn was drawing in, and what on earth was I going to do next? Although the sale of my Irish house meant that I had no immediate financial problems, I could see one looming, and it became very, very worrying. Suddenly, I was sleeping like a baby only in the sense of waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

  But, I reminded myself, you knew that this would happen. You decided that France was worth it. You were going to exchange a busy cosmopolitan life for a quiet rustic one, and you were going to get back your physical and mental health come hell or high water. So far, that’s working. So what’s the problem?

  The problem is the human condition. As soon as we get one thing, we’re worrying about not having the other. Now I had my freedom, I was worrying about not having my security.

  That was several years ago. Today, I still have no security whatsoever. None of the buffers that used to go with a steady job. If I get run over by a bus, or struck by lightning … well, tough. I can’t afford the comfort zone of expensive insurance. The only difference between then and now is that I’ve trained myself to stop worrying about it. As far as is humanly possible, I live in the moment.

  You can actually do this. You can train yourself not to worry, the same way you can train a dog not to bite. After I’d done a bit of worrying, I began to realise that (a) it wasn’t going to change anything, and (b) it was counter-productive. It was tainting the new life I’d fought so hard for. If it went on, I’d end up worse off than before, which would be pointless and ludicrous. Besides, if bad things could happen, then logically good things could happen too. I might get Alzheimer’s, or I might get a contract to write some more books. Might be bitten by a rabid dog or might buy a winning lottery ticket. One night I watched the sun going down and muttered: ‘Yeah, okay, but it’ll come up again too.’

  And it did. Unless you are exceptionally unlucky, there is a fairly even rhythm to life: ups and downs, good and bad, wet and dry. It can’t be high summer all the time, nor would one want it to be. As my redundancy money and house money from Ireland began to dwindle, I recognised a learning curve: okay, no Dior handbags (thank God I never craved any!) and okay, things are getting a bit tight, but on the other hand, this is Europe. We’re not talking about the street misery of Calcutta. I also grasped one of the main reasons why we worry: we do it because nature abhors a vacuum. We worry when we haven’t anything better to do.

  Unless you’re coming to France to get married, take up a new job or oversee some corporate project, chances are you will have a lot of time on your hands. Once the house is sorted and all the logistics are in place … what then? If you have nothing else to occupy your attention, you’ll start fretting. Start drinking all that delicious French wine, maybe, at eleven in the morning. Start fighting with whoever is handy. Start building up a head of steam about the hundred and one things that might go wrong and surely will, any day now. Anxiety will become your predominant mode.

  But you can ward it off simply by doing something else. Anything else at all. Watching a movie, weeding the garden, painting a wall (not necessarily your own), reading a novel, whatever: the trick is simply to move your mind elsewhere. My astute estate agent, Pierre Yves, once told me that he rated ‘boredom’ very high on the list of the things that drive foreigners out of France. And yet, there’s no shortage of things to do. Any number of sports, cultural and social facilities, endless charities in need of volunteers. The Restos de Coeur, for instance, will be delighted if you park yourself at a supermarket entrance cajoling shoppers into filling up a trolley-full of groceries for people needier than yourself, while you in turn will be reminded that there’s real poverty out there. Poverty that makes your petty fussing look pathetic, actually.

  I have yet to sign up for the Restos de Coeur. But I did agree to teach two English classes a week for a local association, even though the pay was peanuts. The point was that it furnished me with a social insurance number and got me out and about, meeting some very nice new people. It engaged my mind – not once during those classes did I ever worry about anything (too busy) – and it provided an insight into local life. By letting my students chat and gossip all they liked – on condition they did it in English – I learned a great deal about what was happening in the area. Really I should have been paying them, rather than the other way round.

  Teaching was fun, and I gave it up with reluctance only when something else, even more unexpected, happened. Out of the blue, on one of those rare days that bless and validate a risky lifestyle, a commission arrived from London to write two novels. A contract, a cheque, and a promise of more. This didn’t mean any kind of long-term security, but it did take care of today and several tomorrows. Not only was this a relief to me, it was also good news for the friends who so kindly seemed determined to do a lot of my worrying for me. (You will find you have two kinds of friends: those who worry about you, and those who envy you, regardless of what sacrifices your move may have involved.)

  So, I needn’t have worried after all. What a good thing I didn’t – or not for long, anyway. It would have poisoned lovely France, and some of the happiest days of my life might have been squandered for nothing. Besides, as the saying goes, ‘your health is your wealth’, and nothing erodes good health quicker than worry. Anyway, no foreigner will ever be as good at worrying as the French themselves, who have practised for centuries and pride themselves on their mastery of l’inquiétude.

  Amongst new friends here in Normandy, one is English and in her early seventies, the other French and in his early forties. The English woman moved to France at age sixty-eight, is divorced and has, she candidly says, ‘very little’ to live on. The French friend is married to a successful vet and enjoys a much higher standard of living.

  But is his quality of life higher? My impoverished English pal doesn’t consider herself poor at all. ‘I just make do and mend,’ she says cheerfully, ‘and enjoy living in this lovely place. You don’t really need much money to enjoy a beach or a sunset or a piece of music, do you?’

  The other, wealthier, friend shudders on hearing this. ‘I couldn’t bear having to “make do and mend” when I’m old. I want plenty of money to cushion my old age. I want to go on nice holidays and eat in civilised restaurants and drive a comfy car.’

  Fair enough. So why is he the one who is occasionally prone to anxiety attacks and sleepless nights? After all, he’s the one with the security. He has a lot more material goodies … and, therefore, a lot more to lose?

  There’s no particular reason why he should lose any of the things he likes having, or doing. But the mere possibility of losing them is a worry to him.

  The other, older, friend doesn’t worry at all. She doesn’t care whether she ever eats in a posh restaurant, and, the last time she went off on a nice holiday, it was ruined when her handbag was stolen. She’s not in any great hurry to go on another one. ‘After all, living here is like being on permanent holiday, isn’t it?’

  Yes, it is. And the quickest way to ruin any holiday is to start mentally packing your bags a week before you need to leave.

  Shock, horror!

  Something appalling has happened. The sales are on and, after everything I just said, I’ve been mysteriously stricken by an attack of must-have. I’ve blitzed the shops. Inexpensive shops, admittedly, Kiabi and Gémo and Les Halles. In one wicked, wanton afternoon I bought a pair of shoes, a pair of boots, two shirts, new jeans, gloves and a ludicrous bright green scarf.

  I needed none of these items. But I wanted them, your honour. I was seized by sheer longing, complete lust. I couldn’t help myself. It happens about once every
six months. There I am, being all good on a sensible budget, living on twenty euro a day (I mean, is that saintly, or what?), and next thing – wham! I have to have, absolutely must have, a pink taffeta scarf at all costs. Life simply could not go on without that scarf. Or those shoes. Or that dress. Even though there’s very little call for them in my neck of the woods, some cosmic force drove me to buy them.

  Yes, I know I already have a dress. And shoes. And scarves. That’s not the point, your honour. You’re not listening. You’re a man, you don’t understand about clothes or shoes at all, do you? No. But you’d understand quick enough if it were a hi-fi, or wi-fi, or iPod or somesuch gizmo, wouldn’t you? Flat-screen, high-definition telly? Oh yeah. Well, there we are then. Boy toys for you, a crossover lace top (pale cream on coffee) for me. Irresistible.

  Yes, all right. I was on probation, and I did promise to behave, and now here I am sinning again. But it happens. I can’t just shed the consumer habits of a lifetime! I used to have money, you know, I used to buy anything I—

  Huh? Very different days now, you say? I’m only allowed one accessory, and that’s a tight belt? Do you think one would really suit me? I have tried on a few, but seem to keep losing them. Don’t know where they get to. Probably a stack of them under the bed somewhere.

  Yes, all right then. I’m pleading guilty as charged. I’ve been out spending money I’d no business to spend. Sometimes I forget that living in France means resisting everything that is deliciously French. Forget that all these lovely things are only for the natives, for normal people with proper jobs or rich spouses. I just get this rush of blood to the head and start spending as if there were no tomorrow.

  Oh well, maybe there won’t be any tomorrow. Maybe I’ll only get to pirouette round in that new dress once, tonight in front of the mirror, before there’s a tsunami or something that’ll wash me away on a wave of divine retribution. But see if I care.

  Promise never to do it again? Sorry, your honour, no can do. I’ve got the shopping gene the same way I’ve got green eyes and freckles. I can live on fresh air for ages but sooner or later a day comes when, for no apparent reason, I lose the run of myself entirely. As Mae West said: ‘When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.’

  If only one could have money and France. Now there would be bliss. But for some reason it seems destined never to be. For foreigners, France and funds are mutually exclusive. Take your pick. Meanwhile, if a material girl runs out of money, well, she can always eat her words.

  25.

  Dancing the Can’t-Can’t

  True story. An Englishman moves to France. He buys a plot of land and, after a while, decides to exploit its small man-made lake by setting up a fishing-holiday business. He will make a living and the area will profit from new tourism.

  Ah non, says the mairie. Not possible, m’sieu.

  Why not?

  Because the original deeds of the property contain no mention of the lake, which was added later by the person who sold it to you. Therefore, we cannot issue fishing permits for a lake which does not exist.

  But it does exist. Look, there it is. That sheet of water just over there, the one with ducks bobbing on it. Water. Fish. Lake. See?

  Ah, non. It may exist in practice, m’sieu, but it does not exist in theory. On paper, there is no lake. Therefore, there will be no permits. No fishing. No tourism. Désolé.

  Nothing, absolutely nothing, could induce the mairie to acknowledge the existence of the lake, to simply add it onto the paperwork and issue the permits necessary to make a viable business of it. After lengthy wrangling, the Englishman was last seen standing outside the mairie, not once but every morning, wrapped from head to foot in red tape. Thus will his life continue, he asserts, until the mairie unties the tape.

  This is what you are up against in France. No matter how ludicrous the tales you have heard about French bureaucracy, they are probably true. Running your domestic affairs – never mind a business – will consume days, months, years of your life. Your health, your marriage, your solvency and your sanity will all be at risk. For a civilised Western nation, France sometimes bears the most uncanny resemblance to pre-glasnost Russia. To the most backward of banana republics. To a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

  One day, I run into a restaurateur new to the area. I ask him how it’s going. ‘Eh bien,’ he sighs. ‘Summer was a nightmare. The tourists all wanted chips and burgers. But now we’re back into winter … well …’ Conspiratorially, he leans forward. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  I think so. Hope so. What is it?

  Slowly, he smiles, stroking his nose in the manner of the master genius. ‘I am going,’ he whispers, ‘to start serving … ssh … sshellfish. Under your hat. Don’t tell anyone.’

  Fingers to lips. A week later, the sshellfish are on view to all the world on their bed of ice in his front window, but sshh, it’s a secret. No, I still haven’t cracked it.

  When I visit the bank to pick up my new chequebook, I discover that they have printed the wrong address on it. How bizarre. Why?

  ‘Who knows, madame? C’est comme ça.’

  C’est comme ça is the most often-used phrase in France, even more than ‘My colleague isn’t here’ or ‘Be with you in a minute’ or ‘Sorry, we’re just closing’. If you come from any country in which a shrug is not a solution, you will find France immensely frustrating – as do the French themselves, often driven to despair by their own maddening inefficiency.

  It isn’t just the big things that break people’s spirits. It’s the little ones too. The snow, for instance.

  Every time it snows in my area, the electricity goes off. The official explanation for this is that the overhead cables can’t take the weight of the snow (despite the proximity of a huge nuclear station supplying power to communities all over Europe). During one of these power cuts – which has, ironically, defrosted the freezer – I meet a woman visiting from Canada.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ she says. ‘When I left Canada, the temperature was minus twenty and the snow was a metre deep. Yet we had full power. As always. The snow never causes power cuts – after all, it’s in cold weather that you most need power.’

  A point that appears to have completely bypassed the EDF. Unless maybe its chief executive has a cousin in the candle business?

  Equally, when the weather heats up and there’s a thunderstorm, my computer is frequently struck by lightning. I’m now on my third, and have learned to unplug it every time I go out (both power and phone lines), after having seen what lightning does to a motherboard: toasts it like a slice of Hovis, is what. It kills televisions too, and pumps, and all sorts of gadgets … yes, you can claim on your insurance, but only if you’re prepared to do battle into infinity – and even then the one kind of damage you’re claiming for will turn out to be the one type you are not, hélas, insured for. French banks, insurance companies and tradesmen are all up to international standard on at least one level: their greedy cynicsm. Eh oui, c’est comme ça.

  In some countries, consumer relations are an industry in themselves. Companies anxious to keep their customers will do whatever it takes to placate them when problems arise. In France, it’s war. David versus Goliath. Big business versus the pesky consumer.

  I have two mobile phones, one Irish, one French, both run on top-up credit. In Ireland, the credit lasts until it’s all used up. Even though months elapse between my visits to Ireland, all I have to do is switch the phone back on, and the credit is reactivated by a brisk American voice. (‘Yew hev uhleven yewro an twenny cenz …’)

  In France, mobile credit lasts for a fixed duration, depending on the price of the mobicarte. If it’s not used up within this time-span, it expires, forcing you to buy a new mobicarte. On average, I calculate that Orange, the operator, plucks two hundred and fifty euro from my pocket every year in unspent credit, on top of what I spend on calls. Two hundred and fifty euro in exchange for nothing whatsoever, legally extracted by force. C’est comme
ça.

  French efficiency is indeed unparallelled. Nobody can screw up as comprehensively, as magisterially or as insouciantly as the French can. Why is this? From where did they get their inability to run the proverbial booze-up in a brewery? If they can construct excellent breweries, why can’t they run them? This is, after all, the country that built the magnificent Viaduc de Millau, A380 Airbus, Concorde, Arc de Triomphe … but now, the triomphe seems chiefly to consist in defeating the consumer.

  Personally, I blame the parents. While other European, American and Australian teenagers get weekend and summer jobs, thereby earning the money for iPods while learning responsibility, French teenagers very rarely stack shelves, mow lawns or man supermarket checkouts on weekends, much less during the lengthy school holidays. While Irish youngsters busily stockpile funds for their next booze blitz on Gran Canaria or their next pair of designer jeans, their French counterparts anxiously copy out Voltaire in copperplate.

  Not all, of course. Nor all the time. Now and then, they will prune a rose bush, if maman asks nicely. They do look up from their navels at mealtimes. But somehow the concept of energy, of dynamism, of earning their keep beyond a certain age, seems to elude them. There is a film called Tanguy about a student who, at the age of twenty-eight, still lives at home with maman and papa, who pamper him like a prize poodle. On the whole, French families are small, and French children are much indulged. So long as they put in the study hours – all that Corneille to read, all that Rousseau! – they are rarely expected to further exhaust themselves. As a result, the workplace, when it finally arrives, often comes as a shock to their delicate sensibilities.

  Naturally, they do everything in their power to cushion the blow. They invest vast energy in devising labour-saving devices such as the thirty-five-hour week and the pont, or bridge, which can turn bank holidays into four-or even five-day events. (If a bank holiday falls on a Friday or Monday, they will endeavour to get nearly a week out of it, and the month of May is pretty well a thirty-one-day holiday.) Until he graduates (reluctantly, after an agreeably lengthy career as a student, with a car and apartment bankrolled by papa), a middle-class Frenchman has little need of drive, initiative or pocket money. Over and over, you hear French mothers lamenting their lazy, ‘good-for-nothing’ sons, even while cooking their meals, doing their laundry, completing their paperwork and all but blowing their noses for them. (As in most countries, the girls are less spoiled and more enterprising – at least until the creaking ‘system’ beats it out of them, with its punitive attitude towards endeavour.)