M is also for Mairie

I can’t claim to be documenting the idiosyncrasies of life in France without mentioning the Mairie.

Familiar to anyone who has studied French at school, the Mairie is the grand building in the centre of any town or village, flying the tricolore and sporting a bust of Marianne with the words liberté, égalité, fraternité.

We were told at school at the Mairie is the town hall. But actually isn't really. It is the hub of the community.

France is divided into départements, of which there are 92 on the mainland. These break down into pays which are a collection of communes. And it is to the commune that the Mairie belongs.

                                   

When we arrived, we reported to the Mairie as we had been advised to do, and found ourselves greeted like long lost friends and ushered into the office of Madame le Maire herself. We chatted a bit, answering her questions about our livelihoods, our past, our intentions. It was like an interview with the headmistress.

It was several months later when we realised how central the Mairie is to the life of the commune. One of our dogs had gone missing, off on an adventure in the woods behind our house. We searched, put up notices and went to the vet’s to see if anyone had reported finding her. Finally, when all hope was nearly lost, we went to the Mairie with a photo for the weekly bulletin and were met with joyous exclamations. She had been found, probably no more than an hour after she slipped her lead, by one of the Mairie’s handymen and had been accompanying him all week.

In case of any query, concern or anxiety, the Mairie is where you turn. So much more than a font of information, the Mairie is where you will register your births, deaths and marriages; it’s where your boundary dispute will be discussed; your application for photovoltaic panels be turned down on grounds of not fitting in with the local architecture. It is where you will turn when you want to arrange a knees up in a local salle, or to accommodate your association’s weekly meetings. It is the hub of gossip and the breeding ground for entente cordiale with your fellow members of the commune.

Where the British town hall is aloof and formal, the Mairie is welcoming and friendly, enshrining at least one of the three tenets of the French constitution - fraternité.

M is for Marché

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.

Still central to the French way of life is the weekly market. Where we are, there is a market just about every day of the week in one of the local villages, throughout the year. Sometimes small (the veg lady, the butcher, a fish van and maybe the local goats' cheese maker) in the main, the markets here are pretty impressive, with a wide selection of both food and other useful items.

Near us, Matignon market offers the very old lady who sells all sorts of hats in all sorts of weather. There are numerous clothes sellers, spanning the spectrum from utilitarian ladies' crimplene frocks to frothy 'designer' numbers you could only ever find in France.

There are the men flogging gadgets to improve the quality of your life - things for cleaning floors, opening jars, frying food. There is usually at least one stall selling mattresses and any number of chic displays of household linens.

Bags feature largely, whether the Algerian men with their selection of leather goods brought over from Africa or the haughty ladies with their knocked off Cath Kidston and French lookalikes.

                                  

Its the highlight of the week, wandering past the long stalls of vegetables, exclaiming with delight as something new appears in season. Right now, the asparagus is making a comeback and I saw some early strawberries last week. There are cheeses, olives, locally gathered honey; cold meats, whole tables taken up with baskets of different flavours of saucisson; vans selling freshly cooked paella or whole spit roast chickens; producers from surrounding farms offloading their cauliflowers as large as full moons; a dodgy bloke who sells live rabbits and hens for the pot and for rearing; the gentleman selling a huge array of sweets exclaiming in English "Ze rrrrabbit ees free" as he offers a balloon to my son.

The market is the place to meet people, pass the time of day. With your bags laden with fruit and veg, a baguette tucked under your arm, there is always time to duck into one of the coffee shops for a quick cafe (see C is for Café). It is a pleasurable way to do the shopping and one which keeps you in touch with the seasons and the origins of the food on your table.

L is for boite aux Lettres

The humble letterbox might seem a lightweight subject for a blog. But stay with me.

Growing up in the UK, I am accustomed to my mail being thrust at me through a flap in the front door. The 'letter box' at home is a rectangular slot usually with a hinged flap to keep the draught out.

For the first few years we owned our house in France, we assumed that any mail not sent to our UK address would be pushed under the door. Then a friend pointed out that we are required by law to have a little mailbox attached to our garden wall.

Postage in France in prohibitive. The cost of sending anything further than the next town has me calling my bank for authorisation. We have an attic full of books, some quite valuable, which the husband had thought to flog on ABE but we rapidly abandoned the idea when the first postage bill came to more than the revenue of the books we had sold.

After a year of living here, I still can't get used to consciously taking the key and opening the door to find if any mail has been delivered. I find myself wondering why a certain letter or parcel hasn't arrived yet and then realise I need to walk to the front gate to check the box.

I once had a call from a man I didn't recognise. I struggled to understand his rapid French (never easy on the phone) and after much repetition of the words colis and what I believed to be 'boitolette' I was still none the wiser. Then he uttered the magic one: Amazon. I dived to the little box and discovered a parcel which had clearly been lying there for a few days. How, I wondered, did it get in there?


This word 'boitolette' struck me as jolly appropriate. The suffix ette or lette often occurs in French and implies a diminutive, which is precisely what the post box is. A little box, neatly perched on the garden wall with a cute little door opened by a cute little key. I also liked the 'o' in the middle, reminding me of English conjunctions of words like jack-o-lantern and 6 o'clock.


It took me months to realise how foolish I had been. In the market one day, a visiting friend asked where the boite aux lettres was and the light poured in.

On the flipside, there is a great system in France of points relais. If you want something in a hurry, you can either pay through the nose for a courier or you can opt to have it delivered to one of very many shops who offer the relais service. It arrives in double quick time and is absolutely free.

K is for kissing

As we all know, the French kiss one another in greeting every time they meet.

It doesn't matter who you are - an acquaintance, a friend, a long lost lover - you are entitled to at least two, sometimes three or even four, light brushes of cheek against cheek.

The French do it with such ease and finesse. In the supermarket, the market, outside school, you see women and men greeting one another with a smile and des bises. It is effortless and charming.

I, on the other hand, am gauche. Much more at ease with a formal handshake, I view the approach of an imminent bisous with some trepidation. In Colombo, a truly cosmopolitan society of expats, people from all nationalities would embrace one another with a kiss on each cheek, which was fine until I found myself kissing other Brits. For me, anything more than a slight hand wave and a "how are you?" with a fellow Anglo-Saxon just feels wrong.

It is not simply the act of kissing that I find tricky. There is the hiatus after two when one hesitates a fraction of a second in case there should be more. In parts of France, two kisses are not enough, you must give three, four, even five are not unheard of. A Belgian friend always caught me out with his unexpected four which inevitably meant bumping noses. Not an elegant greeting.

I was in the market (see M is for Marche) with my son last week where we ran into his rugby teacher. Toby greeted him with a handshake (he is a lad after all) and I was just swapping my bag of veg from my right hand to my left in anticipation of a handshake when I realised he was aiming a bristly cheek at me. I am so English. I don't even know his name.

I am always caught out by small children I have never met who come to the house with Mum or sister or whoever. They step forward and stand on tiptoes, leaning towards me, and I look blankly back for a second or two before realising I am supposed to receive a kiss.

We must seem so rude and standoffish. I am not averse to kissing on meeting, I just forget. I find myself remembering, midway through a conversation and wondering if I should make amends now with a peck on the cheek. The thought that I have committed a faux pas distracts me from the conversation so I then compound the sin with that of not paying attention. And so it goes on.

They do say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and I am afraid, in the matter of the French greeting, I am a very old dog who is taking a long time to learn!

J is for Jardin

Can you tell anything about a nation from its gardens?

The French like it clipped and orderly. I reckon it's significant that the word for weeding is the same as for cleaning, nettoyage.

Lawns are small and neat. Gravel abounds. In our area, although we are not that far south, there are plenty of palms, yuccas and even the odd banana tree. These, like the camellia bushes and arid little fir trees are plonked on their own in the middle of the grass or the chipped stones. And growing hortensias (hydrangea) would appear to be a local sport.

Fencing is utilitarian. Stiff green grillage like a prison compound, or worse, concrete slabs, are most commonly used for boundaries. Occasionally, you will come across an old house where the original stone walls are still allowed to billow with gentle plants. But in the main, a garden is delineated with a starchy wire fence or wall.

I am no great gardener. But I come from a long line of gardening experts and have grown up with an inherent love of the English country garden.

When we first bought our house here, I imagined a garden I had read about in books. Inspired by the paintings of Helen Allingham (1848 - 1926) and the writings of Gertrude Jekyll (1843 - 1932), I planned drifts of colourful cottage plants, a pond and a small orchard where my hens could scratch and gossip.

But I can't find lupins, delphiniums or hollyhocks in our local garden centre, though I am spoilt for choice in chrysanths and dahlias. I have taken on board the passing comments from friends and neighbours about the untidiness of disorganised flowerbeds.

Instead, I am learning a bit of the French approach to the garden. Our delightful neighbours arrive late on a Friday from their permanent home in Avranches and while Madame sweeps the house and prepares the dinner, Monsieur is out mowing and weeding so that before we have finished breakfast on the Saturday morning their little garden is spick and span.

I am making peace with the gravel that fills two thirds of our plot and have dug neat little circles for the magnolia and the olive tree. I have even planted two varieties of hydrangea. We have hacked back unruly shrubs and plan to get a man in to restore order to the leylandii. We have joined in the cavalcade of cars, trailers and vans to the déchetterie to disgorge our cuttings, clippings and weeds.

I still yearn for a dreamy English cottage garden, but have come to recognise the value in shipshape gardening. It allows more time for sipping coffee in the shade and listening to the birdsong.

I is for Impôts

No one likes paying taxes. Like vaccinations and going to the dentist, it is necessary and ultimately for your own good.

Tax in France is hilarious. 

The actual income tax, the bit that has most other nations on the hop, is not unreasonable. There are generous tax breaks, income is assessed on a household basis and the number of dependants you have is also put into the mix, meaning that for many, the tax burden is not too onerous.

Where French taxation takes off on a flight a fantasy is the arena of cotisations, roughly equivalent to Social Security Contributions. They are draconian. In some cases, your cotisations can be as much as 50% of your gross earnings or more.
What is so fascinating about the cotisations system is that they vary wildly from metier to metier. In the UK, National Insurance contributions are the same across the board. Everyone pays the same percentage of their income. It's fair.

In France, the level of cotisations you must pay depends on the exact nature of the work you do. And precision is everything. A friend teaches private English classes and classed himself as an animateur (sounds like someone in the circus but I think means someone who runs ad hoc workshops). The powers that be chose to think otherwise, even though they were not the ones doing his job, and really had no true understanding of it, and re-classed him as a professeur. The increase in cotisations was staggering. It's all in the name.

A few years ago, if you started a small business here, you were required to pay roughly €3,000 in cotisations up front for three whole years before your actual liability was assessed. This system is still available for those who choose it but now the Auto Entrepreneur has been introduced. It is a great system for small enterprise that allows you to pay as you earn (novel!).

But there are rumblings. Unions and Government Ministers have railed against this system and there was a point a year or so ago when we thought the whole thing would be axed. It is still not guaranteed to continue.

The reason for the acrimony is that unscrupulous gaffers, mainly in the building trades, have leapt on the opportunity to slash their employee tax burden by making their workers redundant and re-employing them as independent contractors. Thus, two chaps doing exactly the same job, could be paying radically different amounts of cotisations and anyone can see that that isn't fair.

On the upside, the benefits the State offers in return for our massive cotisations are great. The health service is second to none and although not completely free is very nearly so. There are a sheaf of benefits available to parents, including a generous handout at the beginning of the school year to cover the costs of stationery and joining up for after school activities. Societies are given perks like free use of public buildings and advertising (see S is for Societies). Every Commune provides activities and support for its elderly, young families and anyone else in between.

You pays your money and takes your choice. Though how much you pay very much depends on finding the right pigeon hole.

H is for Horaires d'Ouverture

Opening hours in France take a little getting used to.

In the UK these days, there are twenty four hour supermarkets, corner shops that are open all hours, a whole culture of being able to buy what you want whenever the mood takes you, whatever the hour or day.

This is a relatively recent status quo. I remember as a child, Sundays that were sacrosanct and early closing on Wednesdays. The drive home from Mass on Sundays was past empty streets and shuttered shops.

So life in France makes me quite nostalgic. Most small shops will shut on Wednesday afternoons. The Post Office too. Banks and offices are closed at lunchtime, and on Mondays, to make up for the exertion of opening on a Saturday morning. Only the supermarkets, big and bold and employing plenty of staff, venture to stay open all day.

Small shops adjust their opening hours for their own benefit. Our local bakery for instance is actually closed on Mondays and every lunchtime, in spite of the fact those may well be exactly the times people might be thinking to buy bread and croissants.

Public offices have miniscule opening hours, usually something like 10am - 12pm and 2pm - 4pm. And just for good measure, they will often have one day in the week when they are not open to the public and at least one afternoon. But which one is the 64 million dollar question, and can mean several trips before finding the place open.

Before we came here, we were warned about the frustrations. A friend who was a DIYer complained that almost every time he ran out of something crucial (paint, polyfilla, a certain type of screw) he would look at his watch and realise it was ten minutes to lunchtime so no hope of replenishing materials for another two and a half hours.

Personally, I find it quaint. I am untroubled that I must plan to do my shopping on a Saturday or that I shall have to set off early to be able to pounce on the local office of CPAM before their doors slam shut for lunch.

It leads to a calmer pace of life. We accept that we cannot do what we want whenever we want. Instead, sometimes we are forced to do nothing, sit in the garden and listen to the birds, walk the dogs around the bay, find a gentler occupation to fill the hours. And you know, those urgent errands become less pressing when you realise the country is currently shut.