French Windows

Doctors expect to see a lot more of you in France than in the UK. Being modest and protecting your dignity is difficult. Just to take off everything and to lie on the consulting room table without a hospital gown or shred of covering is embarrassing. Also, there are no nursing assistants to chaperone you.

Where does Dijon mustard come from? If you go to Dijon, there are picturesque villages and lots of vines producing plenty of Burgundy wines. The region is also famous for crème de cassis, which comes from blackcurrant bushes. Where are the tell-tale yellow fields of mustard? You will have to have good eyesight because 90% of the mustard seeds come from Canada! So why is Dijon famous for mustard? In 1856 someone from Dijon substituted the vinegar in a mustard recipe for grape juice from not-quite ripe grapes, so really it should be called ‘mustard made to the Dijon recipe’. As a native of East Anglia, I recommend Coleman’s mustard, which is grown by farmers in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Coleman’s English mustard is what it says on the jar! At least the countryside around Reims is an agricultural region and there are efforts being made to grow local mustard to ensure that Reims Mustard is not also a misnomer.

 Il faut. This phrase is often used in France. It means ‘you must’. I think that in the UK we are less legalistic and give advice with ‘you should’, ‘you can’, ‘you could’. Even when we want to state something quite strongly, we still use ‘you ought to’ which gives people a choice as to whether to follow the wise council. I think I could write another book on the bizarre occasions that the phrase ‘Il faut’ has been used. For example, our toilet flush button was sticking. We called in a plumber to fix it. He said that the cable was sticking and needed oiling. ‘Il faut huiler le cable chaque année’ – ‘You must oil the cable each year.’ As we had never oiled a toilet flush cable in our entire lives, this heaped a lot of negligence onto our shoulders!  Another example; we decided to have a ‘free’ heat exchanger fitted after receiving many phone calls about how efficient they were. After its installation, we found we were using more electricity than before and that it turned out to be far more expensive than we could afford. It fact we had been conned. I told people about our experience, but the reaction was, ‘You must never agree to anything via telephone sales’. There was no sympathy for our situation. The fault was entirely ours!

When in 1914 Britain’s Lloyd George asked France’s famous General Castelnau if France could expel the German forces his reply was, ‘Il le faut’ – we must do it! Churchill used, ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ in 1940. It would be interesting to do a compare and contrast essay on the nuances of the respective expressions.

 Most British Museums are free. Payment is required in French ones except on the last Sunday of the month. On Tuesdays they are often closed. Museums generally feel the need to educate the visitor without entertaining them. Almost every exhibit has a page of information to read. Skipping the texts brings forth feelings of guilt, but if you read every word, you will have read the equivalent of War and Peace by the time your visit ends.

 Foraging in the woods for mushrooms could be a pleasant weekend outing. Many French people like to do so. However, how do you know if the ones you have picked are bona fide and not a poisonous lookalike? Easy, take your basket to the local chemist. Pharmacists have all been trained to recognise edible mushrooms from toxic ones. You don’t get service like that in Boots the Chemist. Interestingly the variety ‘trompette de la mort’ is edible. My friend Juliette tells this joke. ‘All mushrooms are edible, but some, only once.’

One would think that motorways would have been one of the first items to be scrutinised by EU committees. They link the European community from north to south and east to west in continuous lengths. Yet auto-route safety measures use different symbols and different words in different countries. On British motorways, we are exhorted to keep two ‘chevrons’ (a word we have taken from the French language) away from other cars. On French motorways, the lengths painted alongside the carriageway are ‘traits’. ‘Un trait = danger, deux traits = sécurité. One must pay to use French motorways. Prices can vary enormously from 10c per kilometre to over 50 cents. There are 15 separate companies that manage the French network. In the UK, we have only the M6 where there is a fee, but now payment is required at some bridges and tunnels. Auto-routes are clean and well maintained because the managing companies have huge sums of money at their disposal. It is horrible to see the amount of roadside litter in the UK especially in the winter before the weeds on the verges grow tall enough to hide it.

 We have stayed with nuns in Paris and in another convent closer to us. Many religious houses offer accommodation at a reasonable rate to tourists. There is no obligation to participate in the life of the monastery, in fact we helped ourselves to breakfast and saw no one except for the nun who showed us our room. Pilgrims can stay in various religious houses on the Via Francigena between Canterbury and Rome. In the UK people may stay in a few monasteries in order to take a retreat but you eat with the monks and are expected to be staying there for religious reasons.

Every so often a big marquee gets erected in the car park of a supermarket or big furniture shop advertised as, Vente sous Chapiteau. Tills are installed and the shop promotes products such as beds or fruit at wholesale prices which are sold from this marquee over the course of a week.  Am I right in saying that this never happens in the UK?

 All of the 36,681 communes of France have a paid mayor earning at least 646€ a month.  French communes can be extremely small. Castelmoron-d’Albret in Aquitaine is the smallest with just 3.54 hectares (8.75 acres). It has less than 100 inhabitants. Yet, it has a paid mayor, a mayor’s secretary and a town hall which is open every Wednesday afternoon for 4 hours between 14h – 18h. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a deputy mayor too and a town council. The smallest local council in the UK is in West Somerset which has 34,222 people to look after. The average number of inhabitants per commune in France is less than 2,000.

 Just before getting married, French young people go into town and do crazy things just like British young people. I was a bit shocked to see a future groom wearing a hangman’s noose round his neck ‘la corde au cou’ and another time there was a coffin as part of their props. The fun activities are celebrating ‘l’enterrement de vie de célibataire’ – the burial of the life of the single person. T- shirts may carry the motto ‘Game Over’ and the young man might dress as a prisoner wearing a ball and chain round his ankle. I think it is a sad concept to be thinking of marriage as being the end of all fun times rather than the promise of a wonderful new life together.