T is for Tutoyer

Tu or Vous? That is the perennial question when chatting to people in France.

We all know from school that vous is polite and tu is familiar, but in reality it is just not as clearcut as that.

Children are easy. I work on the rule of thumb that anyone young enough to be still at school merits a tutoyer, although it gets a little misty around the age of 18. There is a young man who comes for classes in English who is in his final year at school and preparing for the Bac. He is huge. A rugby player and all round jolly tall chap, he towers over me which makes the use of tu seem a little inappropriate.

People one deals with in public life - at the shops, the doctors, the bank, the long list of government agencies you have to deal with if you run a small business - are also easy. Its vous all the way with no deviation.

The tricky bit is how to address those people you chat to regularly. Friends seem to drop into tu quite quickly but there are so many others, acquaintances, neighbours, where it is all as clear as mud.

We have known our delightful neighbours for seven years. We have shared aperitifs and afternoon tea. We have discussed each other's gardens and even gone through the process of re-routing a shared right of way. Yet we still use vous. They are retired and are older than us, and I was always taught that one should wait for the older person to initiate the tutoyer. Occasionally I have slipped up in conversation and used tu and felt my blushes rising. But no comment has been made, and we still vousvoyer.

A friend was here at the weekend and he was telling us that he has been working in his current job for two years and is still vousvoying with his boss. So the complication does not just arise for foreigners in France. The French struggle with it too. He says that sometimes, they will have a conversation and tu will be used, but the very next day, his boss will be vousvoying again. And as a subordinate and the younger person he does not feel able to broach the subject.

We Brits are possibly luckier. We can mess it up and use the familiar form inappropriately and it will simply be put down to the ignorance of l'etranger. Pity the poor Frenchman and his daily struggle with avoiding a faux pas.

S is for Sociétés

The Société or Association has a very special place in the fabric of French society. It takes a bit of getting used to, but after a year, we are finally beginning to understand.

Every commune has a clutch of Associations. We have a choice of Tarot, local history, watercolour painting and several others aimed at children and young people. On the surface, the Association is a club. It is a group of like minded people getting together to practise an activity or share a passion.

But a Société enjoys rights and privileges in the commune that other organisations do not. Free room hire is one. Copious free promotion in the local newsletter is another.

And this is why the Association is fascinating to an outsider. It is as though our entertainment is enshrined in the Constitution. We have the right to have our free time occupied in companionable activity and thus it must be facilitated by the State.

There is a statute and a legal structure. An Association must have a board, a responsable and an accountant. There is an AGM and a requirement for bureaucratic reporting. All this so that we can enjoy our stamp collecting or marble rolling with amitié.

Try running classes or offering workshops as an individual and you will soon see the benefit of jumping through the red tape to set up as an Association.

R is for Randonnée

To randonner is very popular in France. You can do it on foot, on your bicycle, in a car, on horseback even. It is the gentle art of wandering the countryside.

Around here, we are awash with footpaths and bridleways. Every day, we are spoilt for choice - coast paths, woodland walks, or hacking across country.

The other day, I took the dogs for a constitutional along the river near our house, aiming for the Chateau More-Vowels-than-Consonants in the distance. We slip-slided along the muddy banks where the high tide had recently deposited its ballast of flotsam, jetsam and tiny crabs. A rather imposing sheep eyed us from a promontory on the other side of the water, setting the dogs on edge and putting the wind up me a bit. I was jolly glad a steep muddy water course separated us.

Into the woods, we found primroses, violets, bluebells and campion smiling in the dappled sunlight. Huge flag irises were preparing for their display along the edge of a murky ditch. And most precious of all, little clusters of orchids had appeared, dotted across the path in places where the horses had blindly trampled.

In my youth, a wild orchid was a rarity indeed. Individual specimens found in a field were protected and visited by the curious. Now it seems, they have made a rip roaring comeback and are thronging the verges and woodland banks as if they had never been gone.

Just opposite the end of our drive is the start of the main coastal path for Cap Frehel. Starting off along the old railway track, the path mounts quickly to give spectacular views of our lovely bay in all its humours. Further along, round the corner and past Fort la Latte, the coastline unravels with precipitous cliffs and breathtaking bays.

Randonner is such a lovely pastime.

Q is for Quincaillerie

                Such a lovely word! Can-kiy-yer-y.

I remember seeing it here and there on shop fronts as a girl on visits to France, but could never quite work out what it was.

In fact, the Quincaillerie is part hardware store and part Aladdin's cave. Stepladders, fishing nets and log baskets spill out across the pavement; zinc buckets and brooms of all sizes hang from butcher's hooks beneath the striped awning; and in the dimness of the interior, you can make out a medley of interesting and useful items you never knew you needed.

The one nearest to us is the Maison Ohier, run by the two Misses Ohier (breaking with tradition for shop naming, as discussed in N is for Noms!). Neither my husband nor I are particularly into DIY or Bricolage, but we do love poking around in this shop.

Aside from the hardware selections you would expect - wood cut to size, widgets and wotsits for screwing, fixing and hanging, light bulbs, paint, and all things needed for DIY - they have a fascinating collection of things for the home.

Fabulously expensive cookware and gadgets for the kitchen are ranged alongside chic wheelie shopping bags and multicoloured household bins.

Our favourite section is the collection of handmade brushes from a German company. Beautifully crafted in wood and natural fibres, they are designed for just about every conceivable use. You can buy a brush to clean your mushrooms, a curved one for removing crumbs from the table, a beard and moustache brush. Whatever you can imagine may need a brush, the Mesdames Ohier will have one to sell you.

P is for Petanque

Another short one today.


I love the French tradition of Petanque. Virtually every town and village has its own boulodrome, a flat, dusty area set aside for the gentle game.

Sometimes called boules, after the balls that are used, it is a team game of enormous popularity. There are apparently 375,000 people registered with Fédération Française de Pétanque et Jeu Provençal, and that's just the people who take it really seriously.

                                 

Retired gentlemen on a weekday afternoon, groups of young adults on a Friday evening, families at the weekend, the boulodrome gets good use.

You chuck a little wooden ball (the cochonnet or 'piglet') as far as you can and then see who can get their boule the closest.

We play it on the beach with the children, using garish heavy plastic balls. The curve of the sand and incidental shells and footprints make for an interesting outcome.

I thoroughly recommend Petanque. Fun for all the family and can be played virtually anywhere, though a hot, sandy ground under pollarded lime trees is the most authentic endroit. Especially with the smoke from a Gauloise or two wafting through the air.

O is for ventes d'Occasion

What to do with all our unwanted stuff? That's the crucial question.

Its that spring cleaning time of year when so much accumulated detritus comes to light. In the UK, we bag it all up in black bin liners and take it to the charity shops or, if it is unsaleable, to the tip. (Apart from the Christmas when I made the mistake of storing our four year old son's presents in a bin liner - came home from work to find the husband had taken them to the tip.)

Here in France, the charity shop doesn't exist. So what shall we do with the jeans that no longer fit, the shoes bought in an extravagant moment that are never going to see the light of day, the purple vase we were given a few Christmases ago?

There is the déchetterie, the repository of all waste. Huge skips line up to receive your rubbish but woe betide you if you put the wrong substance in the wrong bin. There is a man in uniform, who looks not unlike a Camp Commandant in corny war films, who watches over we dumpers with an eagle eye.

It amazes me what people will throw away. Serviceable furniture, pots and pans that have plenty of life left in them, decent curtains and household linens. I once saw a man about to chuck a selection of large terracotta flowerpots. I caught him just in time and they are now gracing my garden (see J is for Jardin) with tulips and geraniums.

I wasn't so lucky with the double mattress. As we are currently desperately in need of one, the pristine mattress that arrived in the back of a little fiat caught my eye immediately, but the tip was busy that day and by the time I had edged my car into the only available space I was too late. The Camp Commandant was cheerfully helping the little old man heave his exceptionally good quality mattress into the mouth of a skip. I still wake in extreme discomfort in the middle of the night, springs digging into my back, and think of that mattress, languishing somewhere in a waste disposal unit or down at the bottom of a very deep hole.

The other option is to sell your unwanted stuff at a Vide Grenier. Much like a jumble sale or car boot, the vide grenier is taken very seriously. Legally, you are entitled to participate in two in a year; any more and you are obliged to pay tax on your earnings.

I did one last year at my son's school. A fabulously sunny day, there were plenty of stalls there offering a whole variety of tat. In amongst the fellow parents and local householders, there was a coterie of professional brocanteurs, those perennial bad lads who flog antiques and 'collectibles'. On the stroke of midday, they set out a table and got out the vin rouge. They continued drinking throughout the afternoon, culminating in a game of 'who can throw the valuable paperweight the furthest'.

But by far my favourite repository for unwanted items is Leboncoin, the online classified ad service. You can literally sell anything on it from a donkey to a child's bicycle. It works on a regional basis, so you can narrow your search down to find that elusive mattress in a town near you.

I will now log on and do just that!

N is for Noms

A short blog today (well there were two yesterday to make up for it). The naming of shops.

Go into any town or village and you will find a selection of shops exactly as depicted in your school text book. The signs above their premises read: Boulangerie, Patisserie, Boucherie, Charcuterie, Poissonnerie, Quincaillerie, Tabac.

                                       

Aside from the occasional strapline bearing the owner’s name, French shopkeepers do not deem it necessary to give their establishments cute names.

                                            

Only the hairdressers venture into drollery. There’s a Miln’hair near us and a Baln’hair in a nearby town - though I don’t get the joke with that one.

                                            

Other than that, businesses do exactly what is said on the sides of their vans. Electricité, plomberie, maconnerie, jardinage, couverture, zingerie. Maybe it has something to do with the pigeonholing tax system. (See I is for Impôts)

And I love the way their surnames are given in CAPITALS, like Luke PICARD, or FESSARD Michelle. No fuss, no frills, we all know exactly who does what and how to spell their name.

As a postscript, I have just found this set of business names from the UK. I think it demonstrates the difference between us very well when it comes to the naming of shops!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/glorious-shop-puns-youd-only-find-in-britain