Ruminations from yer one

We take Dulwich Books with us wherever we go

As may be clear, the principal author of Nantilly Notes is Peter - what follows is exculsively authored by Sheila.

Five weeks, seems such a long time at the beginning and such a short time at the end. When we thought we’d try for a five week holiday many months back it was a little tester for the long term. As for the test the great news is that we are still speaking to one another if nobody else, at the end of the five weeks which is good

Highlights of the holiday are strange and varied and one began even before we left. I devour, in great detail, articles and information in a monthly magazine we get called French Living. Four days before le departure I spotted a news story announcing that Sanofi were now offering their “telepeage” automatic toll charger to UK residents. Yippee I thought we could get that, attach it to the car and zip through the toll gates on our journey down through France.

The challenge of negotiating the toll booths when you drive on the right is not so bad when there are two of you because the person on the left will keep you close to the payment machine, though not too close of course. (Shouts of “left, left” or “woo right, right” can be heard from British cars at most toll booths.) If you are unlucky enough to be driving alone, well no one will be shouting at you and you’ll just have to pull up, hop out of the car, put in your payment and get back in the car. You try to do this elegantly and with a smile however when there is a Frenchie queueing behind you that’s not so easy. After many trips to France you learn that non, non, non the French don’t queue or for that matter have a huge amount of patience on the road.

Therefore when I spotted the Sanofi story you can imagine my excitement and fired up my PC and ordered one for us. They offer a 48 hour service and before we knew it one had arrived and all by myself I registered us and installed it onto the car windscreen. The excitement of the first toll booth was palpable in the car as we approached the gate, we had the credit card ready to pay the €8 toll, just in case the remote did not connect, don’t want the French getting impatient behind us. We were like two little children when the barrier rose and we sailed through, how simple our pleasures are these days. So that was it, €8 paid just like that. It was therefore a slight surprise to me 14 days later to receive an email from Sanofi together with our first invoice which was for €53! Oops I thought I better check into this further before I mentioned it to yer man. Now I would have to bring up the subject because for reasons that are really too boring to mention, that’s if you are not bored already the charge was going to be taken from his bank account.

When I had a spare 15 minutes I logged onto my Sanofi account and read the small print. Now I don’t have a feel for whether the lack of ability to read small print is solely a female talent or just me, but it’s not the first time I’ve come unstuck by not reading the small print. In fact in the case of Sanofi it is not really small print, it is in fact in very large letters on their website outlining the set up charge, the monthly fee when the remote is used and the security fee for the remote which as you’ll have guessed all add up to €53.

As I say, reading small details or detail in general is not my forte, I have lots so I am not worried about not being good at that and I have a man who is. This means that if we are venturing into the unknown I drive and yer man navigates as I cannot read a map. Of course I can read a map however I have found that statements like “ah that was the turning back there” is not good for any marriage. One of our trips was to visit the WWII bunker that is situated right in the heart of La Rochelle harbour or at least that’s what we thought we were heading for when we saw the news stories about Le Bunker museum now open to the public.

The bunker at La Rochelle was used to house German and Italian submarines during the second world war and as you’d expect is a building you can spot from a number of locations around the port. After our coffee one morning we thought we’d pop in and take a look and though we broadly knew where it was we were unsure of the actual road. So yer man is directing and I am driving as we head up and down the roads around the post. La Rochelle might be a large port but there are not that many roads and for the life of us we could not find the right road. After an hour and apart from suffering from the usual female need of “eh I wouldn’t mind going to the toilet soon” we took a right turn at a set of traffic lights for me to momentarily forget that we were in France and smoothly moved into the left hand lane. It’s hard to say who was more shocked, yer man who immediately came face to face with a French man, or the French man who saw the whites in our eyes. “Drive on the right shouts yer man” as I swerve the car over to the right and proceed on our way. We gave up looking for the  bunker and headed for a café for coffee and a toilet.

We drove a little less for a few days, with our new found hobby of cycling and the development of the centre commercial in Marsilly, we found we don’t need to drive as much. On an early visit to the supermarket we were asked if we have a loyalty card, now I don’t want you to think that we understood her exactly, however there are only a few lines of conversation one can have at a supermarket checkout and we gleaned one key word and I said non. It always surprises us how the French can use so many words to say so little and ten minutes later and a long line behind us at the checkout we left with a form to complete and a new loyalty card. We felt we’d been accepted into the Marsilly community and on every visit we proudly take out our card and get our points - an activity we ignore in Britain! We did learn that you need to show it at the beginning of your transactions rather than the end and you might ask how did we find this out.

So that’s €15.44 said the checkout girl, or rather we saw the display on the till and handed over our money and then oops we forgot our loyalty card so handed that to her. Ah she said or words to that effect and then proceeded to inform us of what she was about to do. Before this there was 3 people in the queue, there are always people queueing at the checkout in the supermarket. She heads to the next till, gets under the counter and disappears from view for what seemed like minutes. The shortest time always feel very long when you are holding up a queue due to your request and we stood and look along the line which was now building quicker than if they’d been giving away Euros.  

After what does seem like hours she pops up from underneath the counter, engages us again in conversation and hands us back our loyalty card with our points on it. I say points, sometimes we only get 1 point and we have no idea how it works. What we do know is that after five weeks it is going to come to an abrupt halt and expect Le Clerc to be writing to us to find out why we’ve stopped shopping.

I go less and less on the trips to the supermarket because yer man has become the M&S shopper in disguise. He has taken to “coppering up” at the checkout which is of course an endeavour to run down our two bags of Euros 1/2/5 cents coins. However there is a reason why we have two full bags of Euros coppers because a bit like the rest of Europe we’ve never fully got comfortable with what the bronze ones are. A week in yer man announces that he challenge for the holiday is to work through these two bags and the best way to do that is at the checkout so I have discovered that if I thought 3 people behind us is a lot that’s nothing compared to the numbers that are left behind after we have handed over 44cents in copper.

There is a belief in the Anglo world that French children are the darlings everyone would like their children to be and in fact Pamela Druckerman has made a writing career out of it by having bestselling books in the UK called “French Children Don’t Talk Back” and “Why French Children Don’t Throw Food”. Clearly her research is based on French children in another part of France or else it looks like La Rochelle has been allocated a higher percentage of children that do talk back to their parents. You might be encouraged to hear me say this and think oh our French has improved so much that they can now understand conversations between French families; oh no, there is a universal expression on both a parent and child’s face when the conversation is not going the way that either would want.  A sentence that has a number of ‘non’ in it followed shortly afterwards by tears will lead anyone to the view that French parents face the same challenges as any parents and are as equally competent / inept as the rest.

In the end there are a huge amount of similarities and an amazing amount of differences for a country that is so close physically to the UK. However it will be good to go back to a land where I can have a conversation with someone other than yer man nice and all as that is.

I wonder when we will sees them again?