Always cheque which is the shortest queue

I ventured down to the enormous Auchan hypermarket today. It’s not often we enter this mammoth supermarket, as it’s so big that you almost need your walking boots and a map. In the past, I have seen staff on roller-blades, but perhaps this practice has been discontinued as I haven’t seen them for a while.

Shopping here requires a meticulous list cross-referenced against the floor plan, because if you forget anything, it’s a long trek back to the other end of the store. I just ‘popped in’ today for a handful of items that would be difficult to find elsewhere, or at least all under one roof. I was under the misconception that I could ‘pop in’ and ‘pop out’ in no time, just like I do at our local Asda back in Yorkshire.

But of course, I’d forgotten that of about a million tills, Auchan only chooses to open a tiny handful. Fair enough, I suppose, since it was a Thursday afternoon, not really peak shopping time. But despite this, I approached with dismay to find all the queues were at least 3 or 4 deep. I considered the quick self-service tills, but rejected them a) because I usually try to avoid them unless I’m really pushed, as I feel I should support a person’s employment as a cashier, and b) because I had one or two non-food items that would probably set the red light flashing and woop-wooping to alert the assistant lurking nearby. Having once been frogmarched into the security office at Auchan by two burly and over-enthusiastic security guards as a set of pillowcases bought in another store entirely had set off their alarms, I didn’t fancy taking the risk.

So I did what any other reasonably intelligent person would do, and joined the shortest queue. I congratulated myself on my choice, as there were only two people in front of me, a well-dressed lady with well-coiffed hair and a smart coat, and an elderly gentleman just buying one or two bits, including a giant jar of Nutella and a packet of breath-freshening mints (clearly trying to hide his Nutella addiction).

But wait… what’s the hold up? Why is this taking so long? The other queues are already advancing at a steady rate, so what’s the problem at ours? Another three or four people had joined the queue behind me, and I could sense that they were starting to hop from one foot to the other, huff and puff, and strain their necks to see what the problem was.

The delay was caused by the smart lady paying for her week’s groceries by cheque. By cheque! When did you last see anyone paying for their shopping by cheque? But the practice is still widespread here in France. In addition, the lady had waited until the entire conveyor belt of shopping had gone through, meticulously and painstakingly packed it all, then waited until the cashier announced the amount before beginning to rummage through her voluminous handbag, as if caught by surprise that she was actually expected to pay. Then she had to find her pen. Then she filled in the cheque. Then she had to fill in the stub, to keep her accounts up to date. We huffed and puffed. The elderly gentleman in front looked rather frail, and I wondered whether I ought to spoon-feed him some of his own Nutella as an emergency sugar rush. But finally, as the queue grew to mammoth proportions, she folded up her cheque book, returned it to its correct pocket in her handbag, slid the pen into its slot, collected her shopping and left. Hurrah!

But then… the elderly gentleman had forgotten his shopping bag, so a whole new time-consuming palaver ensued…

The moral of this story is: go for the longest queue, it’s probably the quickest.

Barthelasse and Bill

Today we decided to play truant and head into Avignon for some lunch. We parked on the other side of the river and ate at the restaurant on the riverbank, with fabulous views across to the Palais des Papes and the famous Pont St Bénézet (usually known as the Pont d’Avignon). As we ate our lunch and watched the huge river cruise boats gliding by, we marvelled at the fact that we could drive to this lovely spot and park for free right in front of the restaurant. In the UK, parking seems to be viewed as a pesky bad habit that should be discouraged, with motorists facing extortionate parking charges or a forest of ‘no parking’ signs.

View from our table… hope this gentleman didn’t mind being snapped!

With full tummies, we got back in the car and drove a short distance up to the far end of the Ile de la Barthelasse. This is the largest river island in Europe, and is a green and leafy haven of calm just a stone’s throw from Avignon. Our 4-mile circular walk took us right round the far tip of the island, as far as the hydro-electric power station at Sauveterre:Just a few minutes into our walk, we came across a gentleman who asked us if we had seen his dog. He was apparently a hunting dog, prone to running off in the opposite direction with obedience not at the top of his list of skills. We hadn’t seen him, but said we would look out for him. Sure enough, a short while later, a flash of black and white appeared momentarily in our peripheral vision like some kind of canine missile, and instantly vanished round the next corner. As we stood and watched, he reappeared at his 100mph pace, scooted across the ditch and onto the embankment, where he suddenly applied some extremely efficient brakes and stopped dead in his tracks, head cocked to one side and one paw in the air. Then… he set off again like a bullet out of a gun, but this time he was in hot pursuit of a hare which must have been disturbed from its lazy doze in the afternoon sun. Both hare and dog disappeared out of sight within seconds, despite us pointlessly calling and whistling to the dog. Apparently, when it comes down to responding to daft foreigners or chasing a bunny along a riverbank, there can only be one winner.

We retraced our steps in the hope of finding his owner, who happened to be just appearing round the corner. He laughed when we told him what we’d seen. Apparently Bill the dog loves nothing better than chasing anything furry that moves, but despite his lightning speed he never manages to catch anything. We walked with the gentleman for a while, as Bill continued to bolster his reputation as the Usain Bolt of the canine world, racing madly from side to side and vanishing far into the distance. We reckon Bill the dog must have run the equivalent of a marathon today, but he still had the energy to raise a smile for my photo (can’t believe he stood still for long enough).

 

Bill

 

 

Market sales are through the roof

As promised, our builders arrived at 9.15am on the dot yesterday, greeted us with smiles and handshakes, put up some scaffolding and began merrily reducing our roof to a pile of rubble in the back of their truck. Progress has been good over the past two days, as they worked methodically to strip off the old tiles on one side up to the ridge, with the other half to be done afterwards. Heavy tiles were cheerfully and noisily chucked off the roof into the truck below, with telephone cables swinging wildly as some of them missed their mark (I’m still on line, so presumably no harm done). Steady streams of plaster and unidentified masonry were sprinkled artistically down the staircase all day, as the two old glass tiles at the top of the house that pour light down the stairs were removed, ready to be replaced by a Velux window. The existing Velux window in the spare bedroom has been removed altogether, and now provides a bright blue outlook that is caused by the vast tarpaulin spread over the roof, rather than the Provençal sky.

Excellent progress indeed, as half the roof is now stripped right down to the original old plaster, which will be chipped off before the new insulation is laid. But this progress has now ground to a halt, because it’s market day tomorrow. When the builders had the meeting with the two gentlemen from the Mairie on Friday, they were told in no uncertain terms that work could not take place on Wednesdays because of the market. Our little market begins at about 7am, and is all packed up and gone by 12.30pm. It takes up the main square, which is temporarily closed for the morning, but all other access routes are accessible as normal. To reach our house, it is not necessary to pass through the main square. But hey! Who are we to argue… we are grateful the new roof is getting done at all, and anyway, we could do with access to the terrace outside to dry the washing. Every cloud!

Give way to the right, left, in, out, shake it all about

Negotiating roundabouts on the continent is in the anti-clockwise direction, as we all know. This means that we give priority to vehicles approaching from the left. But in small villages or in the countryside, the old ‘priorité à droite‘ rule still applies. At the entrances to our small town, there is a sign stating that this rule indeed applies. This means that you can be happily driving along the main road, and somebody can quite legally come whizzing out of a side road without stopping. It can make for some quite hair-raising experiences. 

We have been passengers in our French friends’ car, and heard them ranting about this silly rule when screeching to a halt as a car comes flying out without any warning whatsoever. We have also been passengers with the same friends who have ranted about people failing to let them out when they attempt to come straight out onto a main road. It’s all good fun, and utterly bonkers.

Today, the ultimate in give way madness happened. A few hundred yards from our house is a roundabout that’s diamond shaped. It’s a designer diamondabout with an attractive cobbled feature. Spherical lamp posts are located at each corner, making the intersection very attractive, as junctions go. But what it wins in aesthetics, it loses on functionality. Nobody seems to know whether it’s priority to the left, as in a normal roundabout; priority to the right, as applies in our town; or none of the above, as it’s not actually a roundabout. As we approached it, so did three other vehicles from the other directions. We all arrived at exactly the same time. We all stopped. We all looked at one another. We all looked to the cars on our right. They showed no signs of moving. We all looked to the cars on our left, and still we were all a hundred percent stationary. We wondered whether we would get to the shops before they closed at 7pm. We wondered whether we ought to get out and direct the traffic. We wondered whether we should just go straight across the middle to put an end to this law-abiding stand-off.

In the end, people began to huff and puff, and all four cars began to edge forward. But progress was really only made when one of them decided enough was enough, put his foot down and boldly entered the diamondabout. After this, we could all follow suit, and everyone finally got to continue their journey. Until the next junction…

 

Terrific trees

Shafts of bright sunshine illuminated the bedroom floor when we woke up this morning, and opening the blinds revealed a startlingly violet-blue sky, as if the weather were apologising for its bad behaviour yesterday. The perfect day, then, for an 11km walk.

As we drove to our starting point at the pretty hilltop village of Méthamis, we drove through a breathtaking avenue of twisted trees, all set to spring into bloom and form a bright green leafy canopy in summer. As we stopped for me to take a pic, we decided that today was to be a tree-themed day. So here are ten beauties we captured during our walk:

1. Wiggly bare tree

 

 

2. Wiggly bare tree along with his other friends, forming this fabulous avenue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.Thrifty tree (why bother with a whole one?)

 

4. Parasol tree

 

 

5. Sunny glade trees

 

 

6. Bunny tree

 

7. Ex-tree 😦

 

8. Stuck-in-the-wrong-season tree

 

9. Chaotic tree

 

10. Blossom trees

 

 

 

 

Washed out globe trotters

Our friend is a member of a group that organises the annual Avignon Festival des Globe Trotters. This festival brings together people who prefer not to choose bog-standard locations for their holidays, but instead are to be found in Uzbekistan, Tibet, Myanmar or Bolivia. They trek for days with donkeys, sleep in yurts, see breathtaking scenery and meet inspiring people. The festival aims to describe their adventures and experiences and inspire others to take their own exciting voyages to far-flung places. I admire such people, not least our friend Martine, whose apartment is filled with quirky hats, bowls, fabrics and other exotic paraphernalia, as well as fabulously colourful photographs of smiling wizened faces and awe-inspiring landscapes from lands I have barely heard of. I admire them in particular as I am too much a fan of home comforts to contemplate such voyages. My camping days were over when I left the Girl Guides at the age of 15.

This is the third or fourth time we’ve visited this festival. Aside from the stalls where you can find out more about travellers’ adventures and buy books they have written, there are films and talks going on in various locations around Avignon. There is also an appetising outdoor tea room, where you can enjoy a sweet Moroccan delight washed down with exotic floral or herb teas. 

In previous years, we’ve sat and chatted with our friend in the sunshine while the exotic flavours tickled our tastebuds and conjured up heady fragrances of distant lands. But this year, Mother Nature decided differently, choosing today to lower the temperature to a chilly 12C and dumping relentless heavy rain on visitors and volunteers alike. Rather than browsing from stall to stall and raising faces to the sunshine while sipping tea, the handful of visitors that had braved the rain were huddled inside the only indoor area, and the home-made cakes and sweets lay largely untouched. 

What a shame. But the festival is still on tomorrow, and normalement the weather should be better. What a pity they can’t bring that exotic sunshine back from their travels with them!

 

That little word that makes all the difference

No, I’m not talking about ‘please’ or ‘thank you’; I’m talking about ‘normalement‘. I remember Peter Mayle’s thoughts on this enormously important word in his book ‘A Year in Provence‘ which I read years ago. And he was certainly not wrong.

Here in France, or perhaps just in Provence, someone can make you what sounds like a promise or a concrete agreement, but if the word ‘normalement‘ is slipped into the phrase, this is a disclaimer that effectively invalidates the rest of the sentence. If someone says, for example, ‘Normalement, it won’t cost you more than €100′ you can expect to be raiding your bank account imminently, or ‘Normalement, we’ll call round early afternoon’, means you should settle down for a long wait until around tea-time. The effect is exacerbated if accompanied by a hand held horizontally and waggling from side to side. Prepare to rob a bank, or write off the rest of the day altogether.

So when we were told that ‘Normalement, everything should now be ok to start your new roof on Monday’, we were not entirely convinced. But this afternoon, our builder arrived outside the house accompanied by two men from the Mairie. When I went outside to meet them, I was met with smiles, Bonjour Madame, and those magic words ‘C’est bon!’ There was no normalement, no hand-waggling, but nodding heads and handshakes all round that set the deal in stone. An agreement has been reached regarding the road closure, all the neighbours are fully au courant, and it’s all systems go. To celebrate, we took ourselves off to Avignon for tea and cake at our favourite salon de thé. 

Normalement, I shall be reporting on progress on Monday…

Vision technician à la française

Stopping at traffic lights at a major junction today, we were approached by a young woman wielding a squeegee and a bottle of soapy water. This is a fairly common sight at French junctions. Often working in groups of three or four, these people are often the equivalent of Big Issue sellers in the UK, selling the Sans Abri magazine. In order to boost their income, they offer to clean windscreens for drivers as they wait at the traffic lights.

The young woman was thin, dressed in a long flowing skirt with flat sandals and a scarf tied round her head. She was dark skinned with expressive brown eyes. As our windscreen was sporting about a million dead insects transported all the way from Yorkshire, we were happy for it to be washed. As we signalled to the woman, she skipped across the lanes and drew two hearts on the windscreen in soapsuds with the edge of her squeegee, before thoroughly soaping and scrubbing off the fly mortuary (some more stubborn than others).

Views on homelessness or poverty can vary wildly from person to person, I know that. But personally I feel that what these people are doing is surely better than sitting begging in shop doorways. Whether they will ever get above the poverty line and back into ‘real’ society is another question altogether.

The lights changed, and our windscreen was now sparklingly clean and surprisingly transparent, its squashed and sticky passengers now making their way into the gutter in a soapy stream. Our vision technician took our €1, skipped back to the pavement and waved. She flashed us a smile, revealing mostly gums… and a couple of gold teeth.

Market day

Wednesday is market day, so off I went this morning with my straw basket (that makes me feel like a true Française). The sky was blue and the sun was shining, but unfortunately the stalls were being battered by a strong Mistral wind. Stallholders were holding on to their canopies for dear life, while the olive seller had given up altogether and was selling his olives out of the side of his van, because, as he explained, he couldn’t get accurate readings on his scales.

 

The square was particularly busy today, as there was a group of people rallying troops to fight against the rising cost of water to our homes. The lady who grabbed me to deliver her spiel was actually someone I knew, although she didn’t recognise me at first as we had only met a couple of times previously through friends of friends. Once we (re)introduced ourselves, though, the cost of water was forgotten as cheeks were kissed and greetings were cheerily delivered. Other friends and acquaintances popped up and the whole shopping experience turned into quite a social event. A friend beamed at me and introduced us as “her favourite English people”. When I asked her if she knew many, she replied “Just you and your hubby!” 

 

Hubby was intrigued by the man displaying a row of wooden chairs with cane seats, demonstrating his abilities to repair and restore them to their former glory, whatever their sorry state. He was wearing a navy blue zip-up parka with a Bolton Wanderers badge stitched on the chest. Never one to pass up on a football-related puzzler, hubby enquired as to whether he was a fan. The man looked rather bewildered, and replied “Oh, I don’t even know what it is, it’s English rugby I think?” He went on to explain that someone gave him it. Did he mean the coat itself, or did someone give him the badge which was then dutifully sewn on even though he had no idea what it was??

Our purchases included a fennel bulb, cherry tomatoes and some salmon, which now look like this.

Bon appétit!

Frogs

No, of course I wouldn’t be so rude as to refer to my current compatriots in this way. I am, of course, referring to frogs of the amphibian kind!

This afternoon, we went for a walk around the Lac de Monteux.

This man-made lake was only opened last year, and provides a lovely corner of nature just a couple of miles from Carpentras. As well as a shingle beach, children’s play area, outdoor gym and bar, it boasts a decked walkway that meanders through the bullrushes. It’s the perfect size for a stroll rather than a hike, taking under 20 minutes to circumnavigate.

In the summer, the beach bristles with multi-coloured parasols and beach towels, as people slip on their cozzies and take a dip just a few minutes from home rather than driving for over an hour to the Mediterranean. Today, its banks were busy with runners, cyclists and young mums with pushchairs enjoying the spring sunshine.

But the most striking thing today was not the bullrushes, the pretty reflections in the water or the greenery that is now starting to fill out and give this man-made feature a more lush and natural appearance, but the sound of our amphibian friends who were either having choir practice or were fancying a bit of, ahem, froggy hanky-panky. Their voices were raised in a ribbiting cacophony, not very tuneful but fairly harmonious nonetheless. We were delighted to spot their little faces peeping out of the water, but unfortunately most of them dived back to safety under the surface as we approached.