Getting stuck in.

One of our main concerns before we moved was to ensure that we joined in with the local community and integrated with the French speaking part of it.  We needn't have worried, the French speaking community have almost insisted on welcoming us and getting us integrate with village affairs.

Competitive Wife has already been roped into a variety of local events and meetings, in two weeks she has sat on the committee for opening a new community library, helped make the local goats cheese tarts called "Torteaux" and baked them in the community oven and at time of writing is at her French class in the local town followed by lunch with the French class at a Creperie called "Le Marmite" (I think it's a big cooking pot roughly the same shape as the jars of savoury spread, must be a connection there).  Last week she also went (with a friend who visited from the UK) to a soiree Tartines, which we came to realise can only be described as a toast topping festival!   I’m working on her to write an account of "soiree Tartines" for my blog but true to her name she won't let me have it unless it's better written than my entries! (Not altogether difficult one would have thought).

For my own part I'm getting into French society through the medium of DIY and vegetables.  We have started receiving vegetables from a variety of sources, in exchange for anything from furniture to cup cakes.  Green garlic are particularly plentiful at the moment, we've received about 30 of them so far and are running out of things to put them in.  Along with those, in the last week, we have had 4 lettuces and a bag full of what Local service calls spinach but which looks alarmingly like doc leaves, nice in an omelette though.  On the DIY front I'm pushing the limits of what I can do on a daily basis, I've replaced windows with cut glass and putty, wired the barn with lights and set up/aligned a satellite dish all for the first time ever.  The window and TV work fine so 2 out of 3 isn't too bad.  I'm afraid I'll have to call 40 cat man to help with the electrics but he will then need to have a drink with me afterwards and he does smell of cat wee and doesn't say anything while he's having his drink leaving me floundering around to make conversation in basic French!

Well, onwards and upwards and let there be light next time I write.

Cultural handgrenade.

There were plenty of warnings from locals, expats, internet forums etc. Always make sure you employ local craftsmen to work on the house if you want to be accepted by the French speaking community, they told us.  This turned out to be true but not for reasons you might expect.

Late last year I spent a few weeks at the house (yes, totally ignoring warnings but a 3 month waiting list for an outrageously expensive artisan wasn't an option) with a friend/builder who was to help me build a bathroom at the house.  Building rather than fitting is the correct term here as we had to knock through to the barn and construct the walls, floor, ceiling etc.

All well and good, although knocking doorways through 3 foot thick stone walls was never going to be straightforward and so it proved.  The walls are held together with a combination of mud, gravity and light footsteps and comprise of two outer layers of meaty boulders filled with vast quantities of little stones, chaff and walnut shells. An interesting take on cavity wall insulation I presume.

During the course of these few weeks my builder managed to upset or offend pretty much every contact or friend we made since we bought the house. I have now heard 5 or 6 different plans of how the local residents plan to dispose of him from burial under patios to magic tricks gone horribly wrong. It seems no fate is bad enough and frankly, given that half of what he did is falling apart, I'm considering joining the queue!

Ultimately some good has come from the whole thing because the community seem to be pulling together in their mutual dislike of our Rhinestone Builder and no blame has been attached to us.

Hard to pick the moral out of that one but the cliché is easy, all's well that ends well.

Electric eccentric!

The standard for electrical installation in France is have armoured conduit threaded with individual wires for positive, neutral and occasionally earth. This is all good and well until one of two problems occurs.

Firstly where several connections have been made you can have upwards of 10 individual wires running through a single conduit. This makes making changes to the system very difficult because (even when correctly coloured) 4 blue wires will look exactly the same at either end.

Secondly it seems to encourage the amateur, have a go, electrician to, well... have a go! This time you can guarantee that no wire remains the same colour on its way into or out of a junction box. Wiring up a light with yellow and green wire for the positive gives you a distinctly uneasy feeling and becomes a journey into the unknown.

Bricomarché!! (Rules not Service!)

Perhaps it is through some national sense of unease at the rise of supermarkets and gradual decline of local shops that the French shopping experience in large national chains (Such as Bricomarché) is so utterly obtuse.

The amount of form filling, ticket holding, needless waiting, shoulder shrugging, rules and bureaucracy is staggering. It's not as if any of it is aimed at providing superb service or efficiencies that are passed onto the consumer (far from it, I could do my DIY shopping at Harrods for less). It seems to me to be uniquely aimed at ensuring, the shopper fully understands the immense privilege he should feel by spending his money at Bricomarché!

Last autumn, I had the misfortune of attempting to return four, four meter lengths of copper pipe and some valves to our local store, which I visit regularly and have spent a considerable amount of time and money in. Some of the process I was aware of, by studying how the locals did it, so I knew that as you walk into the shop, you need to catch the attention of the lady behind the counter who will give you a ticket. It turns out that the ticket says "4 x copper pipe" (Or words to that effect) on it. This served the purpose of allowing me through the automatic barrier to the customer returns department, without being accused of stealing copper pipes. The customer services department is the other end of the same counter where I handed my ticket over to the same lady, who then took the time to read the ticket she had, not ten seconds previously, written and actually checked to make sure there were, as she had just written, 4 copper pipes about my person.

So far so good, I was maintaining a sense of humour at being thrown into farce but then made my first mistake, I produced the 2 valves from my pocket. Oh dear god, if my hand had contained a live grenade, the look on her face could not have been more appalled. My French (lessons underway) is not what it should be but through observation of a particularly animated conversation between her and her colleague I got the impression I had committed a grave, possibly capital, offense. My broken pleas that she had seen me walk into the shop and was watching me the whole time were met with "but where is your ticket?", when I suggested that she write me a ticket now, she called the manager!

Further arm waving conversations between all three of them, intermingled with furtive glances in my direction (Still holding my four, four meter pipes aloft, like some contemporary jouster ready to charge, and the incriminating valves in a slightly more sheepish fashion) seemed to produce a bit of progress. I was not, it seems, to accused of theft (again!) and they would be happy to deal with my returns provided I had my receipt.

Ah!

My second mistake was to lose my receipt, more arms were waved (or possibly the same ones but more vigorously), further conversations were had and once again the manager was called over.

French or no I got the very clear message that they could not help me. Sense of humour gone by now, I thought to myself "I don't need Bricomarché as much as they need me, I going to go for a Franglaise rant". This I did and I rather surprised myself at how well I could make a point in angry French! Had my rant been song it would have had the title "Rules not Service". You get the idea.

As I prepared to storm out, not easy with my 4 meter pipes clattering into everything within a two meter radius, I was called back and told everything would be fine, full refund, no (more) questions asked just as long as I took the refund as a credit onto my loyalty card. So it seems the rules can be bent as a very last resort!

I'm sure this approach is not going to be the basis of my future transactions in France but hanging onto my paperwork will certainly have to be. That's all folks.