Posted on by loveleyjoy

BANANA BREAD

Just to illustrate what I was saying in my previous blog, that I can give you the recipe for the things I bake, but the result will not be the same.

Today, I used another of my favourite recipe books, ‘The Loaves and Fishes Cookbook’. It is written by Anna Pump, originally from Germany, who ran a restaurant on Long Island, USA.

When she moved to the USA, she found that everyone had a favourite recipe for Banana Bread, a cake that she had never heard of. Soon she developed her own list of ingredients and method.

2 eggs – yes I used that number, but I make sure ours are organic and free range.

1/2 cup safflower oil – don’t have any of that so used coconut oil and some organic rape seed oil.

1 cup of sugar – there is no white sugar in our house after reading, ‘Pure, White and Deadly’ the 1972 book by John Yudkin. I used golden granulated cane sugar and a spoonful of molasses. Sugar from sugar beet can be made to appear brown, by coating the crystals with molasses. Recently a limited range of ‘Sucre Roux’ appeared in our local German discount supermarket. I had not much brown cane sugar left and no trips to the UK planned. I was getting desperate. When I opened this sugar (produced in Belgium) it stank! It looks like golden sand that any beach would be proud of, but it smells disgusting. I looked on the internet and found that this was normal! I asked a Belgian pilgrim who was staying with us if it was OK . He tried to reassure me it was. I have tasted it, and I will never use it in any dish. The smell is like earth plus a chemical spill. Growing sugar beet sprayed with many chemicals and then trying to make the white product golden seems to have failed terribly.

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. I got out a bottle of vanilla pods infused in vodka but decided that would add too much liquid so didn’t put in any vanilla.

3 ripe bananas – yes, I had those. That was the purpose of making the cake – to use up 3 of the 5 ripe bananas we had.

1 1/4 cups of unbleached white flour. I made a mixture of toasted soya flour, some freshly ground whole almonds (with skins) and coconut that I also blitzed in the coffee grinder.

1 teaspoon of baking powder. After having a student stay with us for a month who was gluten intolerant, I started making my own mix of baking powder. I had read that some manufacturers use wheat flour to bulk out baking powder which should have only 2 ingredients -twice as much Cream of Tartar as Bicarbonate of Soda.

1/2 cup of walnuts, coarsely chopped. As I had already put in some ground almonds, and didn’t have any walnuts I added about 6 chopped delicious, plump Medjool, Israeli, dates. Our local Aldi had them in its special offer section and I bought about 6 packets as I knew they would not be there for long.

Cook for 60 minutes at 350°F or 180°C or until a toothpick comes out clean. Who has toothpicks in their kitchen? Inserting a toothpick into a cake in the middle of a hot oven seems to invite telltale burns on the forearms that novice cooks all seem to bear. Use a fork or blade of a pointed knife for health and safety sake!

The result? An unctuous, moist, flavoursome slice that kept calling to me during each entry to my kitchen, ‘just another spoonful’. The moist result made me wonder if I had put in 11/4 cups of flour. Finding 3 different ingredients and grinding 2 of them, plus my other substitutions means that an 8 step recipe became a 12 step recipe where an item could be missed or miscalculated. Oh, well, my husband and I have both had portions and enjoyed it.

Oh, and I almost forgot that I added a sprinkling of turmeric (curcuma in French) because it’s supposed to help heal ………… whatever I read it helped heal and as it was yellow, it wouldn’t be out of place in a Banana Tea Bread.

Posted on by loveleyjoy

VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE

I have been downsizing my collection of recipe books. I had over 100. Some have gone to a school here in Reims that has a catering department. One I kept, was the Cranks recipe book. A ‘crank’ is a crazy person, or as the Oxford English Dictionary says, ‘a person who has strange ideas or unusual ideas and beliefs’. There used to be a Cranks restaurant in Norwich, which I had visited several times. Vegetarian meals were served there, way before vegetarians were considered normal. Flours used were usually wholemeal and ingredients were unusual like lentils, soya and buckwheat.

Years later, I had symptoms of gluten intolerance and cut out all wheat products. Looking back it was an easier journey than it could have been thanks to recipe books like ‘Cranks’ that introduced alternatives to the plain white, non-organic flour on which, the UK Flour Millers estimates, a third of our food products are based.

I had heard about buckwheat from the Cranks book but it was in Brittany that we were astonished by fields of a bright red cereal. We stopped to investigate and identified it as buckwheat that is ground to make sarrasin flour in France and turned into delicious savoury pancakes or galettes. Interestingly, buckwheat is a relative of rhubarb – so they say!

Another cereal that we drool over is maize-meal or polenta. We make the most delicious chips from polenta stirred into an organic chicken stock. It needs lots of stirring and gets thicker and thicker, before the final ingredient of grated parmesan cheese is added. The gloop is spread out in a large tray to cool and dry, then cut into chips to be fried. We had an Italian pilgrim stay with us who said our polenta was the best he had ever tasted – praise indeed!

Oats! Where would we be without porridge, muesli and granola. Cranks had a recipe for granola that was baked in the oven until crisp. I have often made it. Samuel Johnson in his dictionary defined oats as, “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”. We wouldn’t be without flapjacks, and cheesy savoury ones are also made in our house – great for eating on motorway journeys.

I’ve just seen that millet was another grain used in several recipes. It is the grain that is fed to budgerigars – a sprig is often hung in their cage. After trying it once, I don’t think I will return to those recipes- it was bland and tasteless.

I often bake cakes and biscuits for Afternoon Tea when we have pilgrims arriving to stay overnight while walking to Rome or Spain. When people taste my baking they often ask for the recipe. I have to tell them that I can give them the recipe, but what they make will not taste like the item that have just eaten. My box of flours rarely has white plain flour in it. At the moment it has toasted soya, rice flour, potato flour and sarrasin.

If the recipe says sugar, I might add raw cane, muscovado or date syrup with a bit of molasses for a depth of flavour. And of course all brown sugars have chromium in them – the mineral that is necessary for the digestion of sugar – but that is another story.

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I’M BACK!

After quite a while away from my WordPress blog I am back again. My absence was because my laptop was getting old and able to do less and less. We debated whether to get a new French one with all its quirks and such an annoying arrangement of keys on the keyboard or to wait and get an English one.

However, I am quite used to the strange location of punctuation and symbols after nearly 20 years of use, a logical English QUERTY keyboard would drive me crazy again. Things that are illogical on a French keyboard:- the full stop is uppercase whereas an exclamation mark is up under the numbers and is lowercase. When I first started writing on a French keyboard my letters home were full of accidental semi-colons as that is in the lowercase position of a full stop key.

What have I learnt while away? Every so often we have a ‘Café Croissant’ service at our french church. Tables are set out, each seating 8 people. A large coffee percolator serves coffee for the next 2 hours and for the children there is hot chocolate. Platters in the middle of the tables are piled high with mini croissants, pain au chocolates, and pain au raisins. As I have bushes that produce pounds of raspberries, I thought I would be generous and supply a jar of freshly made raspberry jam for each table. I was perplexed when I noted that none of the jars were opened. I went to the children’s table and opened their jar, took the croissant off quite feisty lad, split his croissant and filled it with jam. ‘What are you doing, Joy?’ he cried. ‘Letting you taste my lovely jam.’ I replied.

That was the day that I learnt that French people don’t put butter or jam on a croissant. The other jars remained unopened, but at the end of the event when testimonies had been shared of God’s goodness, several people wanted to take a jar home. I prevaricated; that was not the point of taking along the freshly made conserve. But, I learnt something new after almost 20 years in France – if you want to look authentic don’t put jam on your croissant.

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CEMETERIES

Do you like visiting cemeteries ? In the UK we lived very close to one and it was a popular route to take into town, with plenty of mature trees, squirrels, birds and  a large wild flower patch, yellow with dandelions in the spring.

Maybe that’s why we had no problem with buying a house that overlooked a graveyard here in France. The advantages are many. No-one will be able to develop the land and build a block of flats that blocks out our light. It is locked at night and surrounded by a high wall so thieves would find it very difficult to break into our house from behind. It is also very calm. No noisy neighbours for us!

We have a little joke that we like to tell people when they visit. The family across the road have the very un-French surname of More. So we tell visitors that we are ‘entre les morts’. We have the dead – ‘les morts’ on one side and ‘Les Mores’ on the other, so we are between the dead!

We have been very surprised to find that the average French attitude is very different. People will refuse point blank to rent or buy a home next to the dead.  The reticence to have tombs near to dwellings can be seen in the placement of cemeteries. In the UK the local church usually has a large patch of sacred ground round it, but this is rarely the case in France. Cemeteries are often far from the village and out of sight behind a high brick wall.

When I was researching the history of my grandfather’s brother who was killed in France in 1917 on the Somme, I set out to find the local cemetery in the village of Courcelette. My Great-uncle was killed at the age of 24 during a German advance. His body was found and his papers were sent to the British by the ‘enemy’. The family were told that he was buried in German Cemetery No 1. But now that graveyard has been lost.

I wanted  to see if there were any isolated German or British soldier’s graves in the local village among those of civilians. I searched maps. I searched the village website, but there was nothing, no mention of one. I knew this could not be the case – there was one in every village.

In the end I went onto Google Earth and virtually ‘walked’  along every road out of the hamlet. Along country lane, was an unusually high, neatly trimmed, hedge. I said to my husband, ‘That is where we must look.’ We visited the area and hey presto, I had found what had  not been marked on any map – the well-hidden burial ground.

If you are in France during October the cemetery is one of the places to be. At the end of the month are two weeks of half-term holidays for school children, culminating in 1st November Toussaint national holiday. Traditionally, flowers are placed on the graves for All Saints’ Day. 

I must add that the right to have a grave space is often only 30 years. If the grave is left untended and neglected the local council will repossess it and re-use it! Terrible news for family history addicts. Thus, during October far more visitors than usual come to see where their loved ones are interred.

The grave must be weeded and cleaned. People arrive with buckets and cleaning materials to give the marble headstones a good scrub. Nearly everyone comes armed with a large pot of chrysanthemums. Modern intensive plant breeding means that these ‘golden flowers’ , for that is the meaning in Greek, can now be bought in all shades of yellow, red, pink, white and purply-bronze.

The view from our window becomes more and more florid as the days pass. Families come with little children in pushchairs, couples arrive, older people with mobility problems do their duty to their sadly missed defuncts.

There was an advert on British TV quite a long time ago for an Italian product. In it a young man left a bunch of chrysanthemums on the doorstep of a girl he was hoping to impress. Grandma came home, saw the flowers and burst into tears. The viewers were supposed to know that chrysanths are associated with death in most of southern Europe. Don’t ever take a bunch as a present to anyone. They will be very taken aback.

We often take a walk around at the close of the day to appreciate  our own Chelsea flower show. Sometimes there are poignant flower arrangements. The Victorians were known for using ‘the language of flowers’ to transmit secret messages. Three vases of identical Chrysanthemums with a few red roses among them, surely spoke of ‘love’ separated by ‘death’?

Sadly, these hothouse-grown plants don’t last very long once the November weather takes hold. Sometimes strong winds wreak havoc, and pots are overturned and can be seen rolling around on their sides. Cold rain soon kills these tender plants.

The council gardeners come with a pick-up truck and any dead or dying ones are quickly removed. The big green bins are overflowing with discarded floral arrangements. However, rich pickings can sometimes be had by removing the nicest pots before the bin men arrive. Gardeners can never have enough recipients!

I feel a bit like the unofficial guardian. When, one evening at dusk a man staggered along the path, I was concerned. I was even more worried when neither I nor my husband, from the vantage point of our dining room table, had noticed him leave as night began to fall.

I had always wondered what would happen if someone fell among the tombs, unable to get up. I decided to go and check. I entered, but saw nothing, I continued, still nothing. Then right at the far end, I saw a body lying over a ground level memorial. I hurried towards him fearing the worst but was relieved to hear sobs and breathing. I encouraged him to get up and to come with me.

Fortunately, some younger family members soon arrived and took charge. I explained that I had seen him enter and indicated my house. Later on in the week someone knocked at my door. It was the man who had been in deep distress. He thanked me and sadly explained that the tomb was his wife’s who had committed suicide.

Cut price tombs! Every October time there are adverts in the papers for reductions in the price of memorials. I wonder what happens if you buy one. Does it get delivered and you store it in your garage until needed?

I heard of someone who wanted a marble table for his garden, but needed the help of half a  dozen friends to lift it into place. I wonder if the reductions in October are attractive, we could make use of the slab as a luxurious outdoor eating surface in the mean time!

George Tinsley Loveley – ‘He fought at Gallipoli and died on the Somme.’ Available on Amazon by Joy Brodier

Posted on by loveleyjoy

LAVOIRS

A great many French villages still have outdoor communal washing places – a ‘lavoir’. It won’t be long before you spot one on your travels. However, trying to describe what one looks like is very difficult as there are possibly as many designs as there are villages.

The name comes from the Latin ‘lavare ’which means to wash with a liquid. So the first pre-requisite must be water. Some ‘lavoirs’ are situated by the side of a stream, some are built next to a spring and some are built in the middle of a village joined to a fountain.

Many are very picturesque. Today they are often beautified with hanging baskets, troughs of flowers and one near Reims now contains aquatic plants and goldfish!

What fascinates me is that there are so many of them throughout France, yet none in the UK. The mayor of Birmingham was concerned that in 1914 there were still 40,000 homes without an indoor water supply out of a population of more than 630,000 indicating that the majority of the houses in that crowded industrial city had piped water. Yet in our village the ‘lavoir’ was built in 1892 meaning that at the beginning of the twentieth century it was normal for households to have no tap and for women to be washing clothes outside in river water. One of my lady students reminded me that many rural homes would have had a well and could heat water on their stove. She also added that up until the 1940’s rural people were not renowned for washing themselves very often. One bathful of heated water would suffice for all the family on a Saturday night!

The sudden appearance of many new ‘lavoirs’ in the last half of the 19th century was due to a law passed in 1851 which offered each mayor a subsidy of 30% of the cost of construction. Some mayors and councils built ‘lavoirs’ under a newly constructed town hall. While the good women laboured below, the men climbed grandiose curved stairways to meet in the council chamber above. Remember that votes for women didn’t arrive in France until 1944.

We spotted one lavoir that was a small brick building. If it had not been for the letters L A V O I R on the exterior we would have mistaken it for a garage. But in reality, this enclosed space was far more congenial for the women that used it than our one down by the river protected from the elements by just a projecting roof.

Pity the poor women of Ecueil where a fountain fed a large rectangular stone bath right in the middle of the village square.  Not a scrap of protection from sun, wind or rain was provided for those housewives. Another lavoir in our region is just an open-air ground level rim of concrete where ladies had to be on their knees to access the water, but perhaps it was a dual purpose one as often large reservoirs ‘les égayoirs’ were used to wash horses and their carts as well.

Our lavoir in Cormontreuil was said to be quite ingenious. Partially sunken barrels were tied together along the front of the washing place and each user had to climb into a barrel. Water flowing by at waist height meant that it was not necessary to bend over. I wonder if the man who thought of this idea ever tried it out? Perhaps he did, while wearing trousers, but I wonder how the voluminous skirts of the local ladies managed to fit into a barrel and how they managed to not splash any of the water on their below river-level clothes! Perhaps that is why it was the only one of its design in France!

A friend of ours arrived  in France as a young bride in 1953. While on holiday in Normandy she was intrigued to watch a woman arrive at the riverbank opposite, throw her linen on to the water, retrieve it, wring it and repeat the actions several times. All she had as a washing place was a flat piece of slate, so I suppose a lavoir would have been counted as a luxury.

The last documented use of a lavoir was in 1995. Someone asked a lady why she was using this outside washing facility. She explained that she was washing  a piece of tapestry and as she was not on mains water, she found the lavoir useful. As someone who tries to wash pillows and duvets on a regular basis, I can see that a large basin of water would be very helpful.

Also, it would be quite romantic to grow soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) flowers in the garden in order to boil up the plant to obtain a lather and to use my garden lavender as a freshening rinse before hanging my washing over my lavender bush to dry. French washerwomen were called ‘lavandiéres’ because of the close association of doing the laundry and the aromatic plant.

However beautiful your local ‘lavoir’ is now, think of the women carting wet laundry there that had been soaked overnight in washing powder made from cinders, washing the laundry with beef fat soap made with rendered fat and caustic soda, beating it with wooden paddles, hauling it over those roof rafters to drip dry. Their hands would be very rough and sore.

Give thanks that you have a washing machine and mains water and have no need to use your village lavoir however beautiful it looks today!

Joy’s Recipe

 50g dried lavender heads,

1 cup of white vinegar (supposed to brighten laundry)

1 cup water

Gently boil the lavender in the vinegar and water for 5 minutes and leave to infuse.

Strain.

Use 1/3 cup of the lavender water as the fabric softener in the washing machine.

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ANOTHER GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE?

Our previous experience of Champagne was of a drink that is usually served at weddings and that it is the long, thin sweet in a packet of Maynard’s wine gums! Having come to live in the heart of the Champagne region in Reims, how has our view of Champagne changed?

We live in a suburb of the city and can see the neon lights of the commercial centre from our window, yet we are only 3 minutes drive away from our closest vineyards. In fact if I step our into the street, I can see vineyards in the distance. In the other direction our journey into town takes us past some of the most famous Champagne houses in the world, Pommery, Moet et Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Mumm . Sometimes you can even smell the yeasty, sweet, alcoholic  aroma in the air.

Daily life is not often affected by being  so close to the vineyards, only in September when the migrant workers descend on the region to begin the harvest and spare plots of land around the city become temporary caravan sites. All the grapes are picked by hand, so as to keep the precious juice inside the skins until the moment of pressing. The normally empty hillsides and valleys of green vines become speckled with the multi-colours of the shirts and tops of the pickers and the white vans and lorries that are there to take the crop to the presses. At that time it defies belief that every row will be cleared in just 3 weeks. Anyone and everyone goes to help with the harvest, the money is good and tax free, so students, mothers, and professionals can all be found working alongside each other.

Working as  English teachers has brought both my husband and me into contact with several of the Champagne houses. I regularly have a lesson in the Veuve Clicquot headquarters  in the town centre. The lesson takes place in one of the beautifully decorated reception rooms  where honoured guests and rich clients are usually welcomed. From a huge oil painting the widow Clicquot herself keeps an eye on me. Another of my pupils is the packaging manager, so we have interesting conversations about new box designs, the mushroom shaped corks and the distinctive yellow labels.

Living in the Champagne region affects our children too.  Here the collecting of capsules, the little metal lid on top of the cork, is more common than stamp collecting. Shops sell indented trays in mock velour in which to display capsule collections. Champagne houses will bring out  special editions printed with motifs such as “French Presidents” or the “Rugby World Cup”.  Common capsules may change hands at 10 for 1 euro, but lesser known brands may be on sale for 10 euros each at the local brocante! My daughter’s collection reads like an edition of Hachette’s Guide to Champagne, Bollinger, Jacquart, Lanson, Krug, Pommery, Ruinart and Roederer. Then there are the names that only the few who are Champagne buffs would know from some of the 15,000  small producers, Diebolt Vallois, Beaumont des Crayeres, Rene Prevot and Larnaudie Hirault, G.Lagache et Fils, Veuve Forny et Fils, which makes me  wonder if there is an ”et fille” among the producers?  Our daughter will soon need a sixth capsule tray, we are collecting so many.

Do we ever drink Champagne? The answer is, “Very frequently” . It is quite hard to avoid doing so! If we are invited by friends and neighbours for aperitifs, it is not sherry that is offered but Champagne that is served, of course, in a flute and not the wide shallow glass I remember from the Babycham commercials.

Everyone has their favourite small producer and will travel out to visit him to keep their  cellar  stocked up. I went out on a visit to the vineyards with a student and we were told that we could not buy Champagne from one small producer unless we were on his existing customer list. His policy was to reserve his Champagne only for his regular clients! Fortunately my student was a buyer and we were able to purchase a bottle, after the obligatory sampling.

There cannot be many jobs outside of the Champagne industry that require the drinking of Champagne.  But that honour exists from time to time for my boss. He has a student who is a Champagne blender and who wants to learn the English vocabulary of his profession. So it was that on two consecutive afternoons just as I was leaving the office I was hailed  by my boss and invited to join in the tasting session and help with the vocabulary. The next day was our last working day before Christmas and all our teachers were treated to an end of term office party at which Champagne was of course the drink on offer.

At the end of our first six months in Reims we returned to the UK for Christmas. I felt a degree of one-upmanship  when I was able to slip into conversations, “ Last week I drank Champagne three  days in a row!”

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AMBLEVINS

IT IS everyone’s dream to retire to France, buy a little house in the country with enough land to grow fruit and vegetables. But what if you find your little ‘pied à terre’ is infested with the worst kind of pests imaginable?

It has happened to me. It was my niece that first said, “You’ve got vine-weevils”. She pointed out the leaves on a fuchsia that should have had smooth edges but had little indents eaten evenly along the sides.

Before you can defeat your enemy you have to know your enemy and what its tactics are. Some research on the Internet revealed that ‘otiorhynchus sulcatus’ are nocturnal creatures that live in leaf mould and lay eggs around the stems of the plant, which hatch into white grubs with orangey heads in the spring. The grubs feed off the roots, weakening the plant, and emerge a year later as adult vine-weevils.

I had just planted raspberry canes and discovered that vine-weevils are particularly partial to asters, cyclamens, geraniums, honeysuckle, roses, primroses…….   (the list continued) and raspberries. The French name is generally ‘Charançon’ but another is “poinconneur des lilas” which translated is ‘hole-puncher of lilacs’- not very good news at all!

More research on the Internet was required!  I learned that it’s very difficult to see or catch an adult weevil as when they are disturbed they fall to the ground and scurry away. OK, dirty tactics need cunning responses. I placed flowerpot bases all around the stems of the plants. When I got up in the night to go to the toilet (I’m that sort of age!) I would also wage war!

When I woke up, I boiled the kettle, carried it out to the garden, gently filled up the flowerpot bases and then gave the raspberry bushes a shake. Hey presto, several of my enemies jumped off and fell into my dishes of very hot water and scalded themselves to death!! The moment was one of pure, triumphant bliss, regardless of the fact that my neighbours might see me and wonder what I was doing in the garden with a kettle, in my dressing gown at 3 o’clock in the morning! The English are very strange!

The enemy had indeed been the, yet unseen, vine-weevil – black apple pip sized body, elongated head ending in long feelers and 3 pairs of legs. Triumph eventually dimmed to despair when I realized that my only method of defeating the marauders was to continue to get up in the early hours of the morning! But God is good and inspiration comes to those who pray! Suppose the vine weevils didn’t just jump off plants when disturbed, but they are lazy by nature and fall off instead of climbing down?

My theory was proved right by the presence of several drowned vine-weevils in the dishes of water I had left under the plants. With the aid of lengths of guttering strategically placed I managed to drown quite a few. One day I found that one humble 3 foot length of guttering had caught 11 vine weevils overnight! This may not sound much but they can lay between 500-1600 eggs a piece.

My joy turned to further despair when I noticed that my neighbour’s huge privet hedge that ran down one side of my garden was infested with vine-weevils and also the lilac that belonged to the other neighbour! With horror I realized that although I could possibly win the war in my own garden, I couldn’t defeat the enemies of the entire neighbourhood.

I found a charming little story on the Internet that showed that even in the 1587 French villagers were having the same problems as me. The residents of Saint-Julien-de-Maurienne were having their vines ravaged by a horde of ‘amblevins’ as they are called in the Savoyard dialect. The local judge ordered a court case against them. But to represent the weevils fairly an advocate was appointed on their behalf. The local people offered the vine-weevils a patch of pasture away from the vineyards where they could munch away to their hearts content. Their lawyer argued that the area was infertile and didn’t at all suit his clients. We don’t know the end of the story, but perhaps the villagers were trying out the new legal process of allowing a Devil’s advocate, a new system that was established in the same year as the story took place.

When the Norman’s invaded England the first thing they did was to build motte and bailey castles. The bailey or palisade was probably to keep the English out, but I am sure that the water ditch was there to protect their small parcels of land from the possibility of invading vine-weevils. Even if my theory is not true, the next house I look for will have a moat!

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WORLD WATER DAY

As a family that has never owned a tumble drier, I like to think that we have added hundreds of gallons of water back into the environment due to the evaporation from our weekly washing.

My best tips for saving water are as follows:-

If you are fortunate to have a bath with shower attached you can save enormous amounts. Keep the plug in the bath and use the ‘dirty’ water to flush the toilet. The lifting of full buckets is excellent for exercising arm muscles too.

Always have a washing-up bowl in the sink. Begin by swilling out dishes with a little of the soapy water and tipping it down the drain. The water in the bowl stays clean and does not need frequent changing.

We have a bathtub which I tell visitors is my ‘lavoir’. Until as late as the 1950’s some rural French housewives still needed to take their laundry to a communal washhouse – un lavoir. My bath is used for washing pillows, duvets and winter woolies which drip dry in the garden in the summer sun. Plants do not seem to mind a little soap judging from the size of my blackcurrants and blackberries last year. Looking at experiments online, plants were affected negatively, but they were in pots. I don’t use recycled water on pot plants.

A rain-water recuperation system collects water through the winter and provides many litres for use during summer droughts.

Invest in a steamer. Several different vegetables can be cooked at the same time over one pan of boiling water. Steaming is much better at preserving the vitamins. Whereas, boiled vegetables lose their goodness into the water that is then thrown away!

Boiling a kettle full of cold water is more economical, as a water saving method, than running a tap until the water is hot.

French people drink bottled water in preference to tap water. Even children will refuse a glass of tap water. Yet those bottles once opened, are often discarded if not used immediately. Old lead ‘ plomb’ water pipes used to be common, but their use was forbidden in 1995. Lead plumbing (from the word ‘plomb’) had to be replaced by 2013. French people could save the underground water supplies by investing in a glass jug and drinking tap water at meal times.

Our household consumption of water is usually so low that when we had a student staying with us for a few months, we received a letter from the water company asking us to check to see if we had developed a leak somewhere in our pipes!

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IT DOESN’T ADD UP!

Every week we get supermarket flyers in our mailbox. One shop regularly offered a 4 euro reduction voucher if 40 euros was spent in their store. We made it into a regular weekly activity.

My husband is excellent at mental arithmetic so it was his job to total up the purchases until we got just slightly over the target amount. It would not have been profitable to spend 50 euros as the 10 % would only have been 8 1/2 % off. (I told you he was good at mental arithmetic!)

The problem was that our calculations and the shop’s calculations were rarely the same. We would arrive at the tills to find that we were either 20c short and had to quickly run, so as not to annoy those in the queue behind us, and find a packet of peanuts to bring us up to and over the thresh-hold or we were over and buying more than we needed;

We soon learnt to take a pencil and a paper on which to list the items and their prices so we could see where we had gone wrong. However, when we checked the till receipt against our list we could see that each week several items were marked at one price on the shelf and another price at the tills.

In France, as in the UK, the law is clear. A shop must sell any product at the price shown on the shelf label, if that is less than the price at the till. We would regularly point out these discrepancies to the staff especially if we were being overcharged.

Eventually, I had a collection of till receipts that I had annotated with the errors . I scanned several and wrote to the shop’s headquarters.

In the post I received a letter of apology and a voucher for 5 or 10 euros – I can’t remember which.

When I next did some shopping and presented the ‘bon d’achat’ the lady on the till looked at it with astonishment. She asked where I had got it from. I replied that it had come from her shop’s headquarters. ‘ I’ve worked here for 10 years, but I’ve never seen one of these before’.

It was then that I realised that French customers rarely bother to complain.

The manager got more and more irritated with us pointing out the errors. One day He angrily took my paper out of my hand, disappeared for several minutes and reappeared having changed all the wrong labels, saying ‘There, they are all correct now!’

That shop closed down soon after – the whole chain disappeared from France. I would think that competition with Aldi and Lidl had become impossible. The manager now works for one of our favourite stores which is also a German owned chain. I was a bit nervous of contact but always said ‘hello’. He greeted me with a friendly reply one day when I complimented him for watering the plants on sale – something that rarely happens in any shop. He now greets me with a nod of acknowledgement. I expect he has realised that the management of his former chain did not make life easy for their staff. Working for a German chain is probably a lot less stressful. We can say hand on heart that we have never found any discrepancies between the shelf prices and the till prices in any of the several chains that have taken over France, and the world, with their legendary teutonic efficiency.

Posted on by loveleyjoy

BANK ACCOUNT – CLOSED OR NOT

It seems that closing a French bank account is not an easy thing to do. I thought that my experience was just a case of bad customer service, but apparently I am not alone.

When my daughter left France to work in the UK, she naturally closed her French bank account. However, statements kept arriving to inform us that there were several centimes still being held for her.

The branch was 300 metres from our house so it was easy to visit or to call in when passing. Only one assistant was ever on duty as it was small and local.

I broached the question of the few centimes – could they be transferred to our account ? No, that would need an authorising letter from my daughter. She duly wrote a note and I took it in a week of so later.

The next month another statement arrived which still showed the centimes in her account. Another visit took place. ‘We need a RIB with your bank details’. A RIB is a ‘relevé d’identité bancaire‘.These are thoughtfully printed in the back of your check book and can be given to anyone who needs your bank details.

‘But we bank here – you have our details on your computer! I’m sure it is possible for you to transfer this remaining amount from one account to another!’

The next month another statement arrived still showing the few centimes. Banking is not free in France. It was fortunate that there was only a small amount left as fees would have continued to have been taken during this time.

Another visit. ‘The account is still open , please could you close it’. ‘I am not authorised to do so, you need to make an appointment to see the manager’.

At this point I was fuming at the ridiculousness of all these excuses and the time being taken on something so trivial. Outside the bank my father was waiting for me. I mimed my frustration like a child would do, stamping my feet and clenching my fists with arms raised, much to the astonishment of the customer who was just entering!

That afternoon I took the phone and called the agency. ‘Please could I speak to the manager and make an appointment to see her’. The manager was a nice person, who we had always found to be very pleasant and helpful. She answered the phone.’There is no need to worry, Madame, I have your file open in front of me now. I will transfer the money straight away, and your daughter’s account will be closed.’ ‘Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!’ If I had had her in front of me, I think I would have kissed her!

I have related the incident to my adult students. To my surprise, I found that it is far from unusual. Banks hate to lose clients, so they make it difficult for customers to close accounts. Even worse, I learnt that young trainees are encouraged to lie to the public. A parent told me about her daughter’s experience of joining a bank and of the other students cheering when these attitudes were being encouraged. Another told me of her friend’s discomfort as a bank employée at having to meet weekly targets that necessitated encouraging customers to buy policies and products that had no advantages for them. This employee eventually left her excellent well-paid job on moral grounds.

To close a French bank account a formal letter must be written and sent recorded delivery ‘lettre recommandée avec avis de reception‘.Examples can be found on line which must be copied to include several legal details and be handwritten! We obviously failed to do this when we thought we had closed our account with that branch as it remained open. Fortunately, we had also failed to change one source of credit going into it so the continuing monthly bank charges didn’t make it ‘à découvert ‘. But it was a surprise to find that several months after thinking the account was closed – it was open and money was being taken for monthly charges.

P.S  Doesn't  'à découvert' sounds like a wonderful adventure and nothing like the horror of being overdrawn?