Gallery: November

Click the thumbnails for explanation of each picture below. (Clicking the picture again shows it slightly larger.)

   

  

   

 

Le médecin

From Becky – I’m still amazed at how different two neighbouring, technologically advanced countries can be. Every stage of going to the doctor was new, starting with the need to go along at all; our baby swimming classes require a ‘certificat médical’ for each child, stating that there are no contra-indications to aquatic activity. Then there’s the decision about which one to go to – in England it would be the local GP, but in France you have to decide between a general doctor and a paediatrician. Most parents of young children apparently favour paediatricians, but we’d already booked the appointment with the general doctor before I discovered this.

Next, we had to find the surgery. In my experience, British health centres are well signposted and have large, spacious waiting rooms with automatic sliding doors and guard-dog-like receptionists. Where there aren’t any sliding doors, there’s a prominently displayed survey from a PCT pushing the case for a public-private investment company to improve their facilities. Here, we spent five minutes wandering up and down the road to locate a plaque in a dimly-lit lobby between two shops, on which our doctor’s name was at the bottom of a long list of solicitors and notaries; then two minutes to find the relevant buzzer; three minutes to work out that we weren’t going to get a reply from the buzzer and flag down a resident to let us into the block; three minutes stopping on each floor to see whether there was a doctor’s surgery there; two minutes to manouevre the pushchair through the narrow door and park it in everybody’s way in the tiny waiting area. Lastly, two minutes looking for a receptionist, before asking a waiting patient and being told that there wasn’t one. On closer inspection, there were notices around the waiting area instructing patients to make follow-up appointments by phone.

After a short wait, Dr Kirtenstetter came and collected us himself, and the five of us trooped into his surgery, where we spent most of the next hour. I’ve taken our children to the doctor in England many times over the last 2½ years, and I think the longest I’ve ever spent in a surgery is ten minutes.

This doctor was very helpful and attentive, and all three children – to their delight – were measured, weighed, placed on the couch, inspected (teeth, ears, eyes), listened to (chests, backs) and certified. No – sorry – certificated. All their measurements were marked meticulously onto the charts in their British little red medical books, and their vaccinations were checked. The doctor seemed alarmed at all the missing check-points on their charts, and at the news that health professionals in England don’t really measure children any more.

Luca was last, and the doctor assumed that we’d brought him at least partly because of his cough. He’s been coughing for three days. Nothing worse than the usual winter snuffles, I thought, but by the end of the inspection I felt like a negligent mother for treating it so flippantly. It isn’t bronchiolitis (I checked), but I left with a prescription for steroids and antibiotics. There would have been paracetamol suppositories and some kind of vapours too, but I pursuaded the doctor that our paracetamol ‘en syrop’ would do, and fibbed that we’d already got vapours. For all this, we paid €74 (about £50) plus €8 at the pharmacy. I understand that we can get 70-80% reimbursed if we take all four invoices to the Social Security offices on the Saint Joseph industrial estate on the edge of town; I’ll keep you posted.

It’s tempting to mock this culture of over-medication, but I believe the French have the longest life-expectancy in the world. Surely it can’t all be down to red wine?

Dégustation

Adrian has been hassling us to have the local wines sussed out by the time they arrive in a few weeks’ time. So, purely in the interest of research, I got the kids up from the nap that they weren’t having and told them what we were about to do.

‘Dug-uh-shon’, they repeated back, nodding sagely.

We noticed the other day that there is a wine cooperative five minutes’ drive away, so we hopped in the car and drove up the hill to Pierrevert, a ‘village perché’ overlooking the valley. The views from Pierrevert are spectacular: orange and green vineyards stretching out in their autumnal glory, and fresh snow on the Alpine peaks many miles to the north. We could also see our very own Mont D’Or, which, when caught in the early evening sun, lives every bit up to its name. On the Today programme, this morning, the UK weather was reported to be rainy everywhere, but we have spent another day under bright blue skies

The lady in the coop coo-cooed the kids, and gave Cara and Theo plastic Father Christmasses to play with while we degusted. Of the three rosés and four reds we tried, we came away with a case of each colour, and we’ve noted down a couple of others we’d like to buy when we return.

The only thing is, at just over 2 quid a bottle, will there be any left for Adrian and Kate when they arrive?

Chain restaurants and picnics

From Becky – Who’d have thought that a visit to Hyper-U followed by a walk with the kids would make for a perfectly idyllic day? The shopping was achieved calmly and efficiently, with no screaming fits, no old ladies bowled over by sprinting toddlers, plenty of gourmandises purchased and two urgent trips to the distant toilets successfully navigated. Then we succumbed to the French equivalent of the IKEA restaurant by having coffee in Flunch, next to the supermarket.

It was wonderful! Nice loos with a changing table, great espresso, a jug of hot chocolate with two little cups for Cara and Theo, croissants and a double-decker soft play area with no-one else around, all for less than 5 Euros. AND the kids got free balloons on sticks on the way out. My principles about supporting little family businesses are out of the window – I’m going to have to go to Flunch at least once a week. Then, on a whim, we drove another half mile, across the river Durance, parked the car and followed a track up the side of a hill. Within half an hour (toddler pace) we came out of the woods into glorious sunshine, with a view over Autumn-orange trees to the East, the Luberon mountains to the West and Manosque, backed by round wooded hills, to the North. We sat for ages with a baguette, cheese and bananas, checking out grasshoppers, hover flies and, finally, a dung beetle. Jasper asked the kids, “Do you know what dung beetles eat?” Theo gave his all-purpose answer: “I don’t know”. “They eat poo”. “Oh. That’s NASTY”.

Frustrations (cont.)

From Becky – Jasper has fired my imagination, with all that talk of frustrations. Mine divide into two categories: French bureaucracy and nerves about getting to know people. Right now, it’s bureaucracy that’s driving me mad, having spent my ‘morning off’ (Jasper took the kids to pick olives) trying to make progress with some admin.

How can it possibly be so difficult, nearly two decades after Britain joined the EU, to arrange basics like driving a car in France and setting up a French bank account? Opening a bank account has involved, to date: three meetings with the very pleasant Monsieur Negre at the Credit Agricole (he needs Jasper and me to be present at the same time, so all five of us cram into his little office, Theo crawling under his desk, me pacing up and down to keep Luca quiet in the sling, Cara nearly toppling the twizzly chair over… you get the picture); four conversations with the charming Justin at the Co-operative Bank, trying to persuade him to send the ‘lettre de recommendation’ that the Credit Agricole thinks should be a standard document; and £18 in charges for the letter and a bank transfer. For the record, most of this could be avoided if we had in our possession the following original documents: a gas or electric bill at our French address in our own names; our three most recent bank statements; our passports; and a gas or electric bill for 55 Sunningwell Road. We have considered using our English bank account instead, but it rankles to pay 2% commission every time we withdraw money, and anyway, I can’t let them beat me!

And then the car insurance. We could keep our existing British insurance if we were here for 90 days or less. Or we could take out RAC insurance in Britain if we were prepared to return home with the car once in the middle of the six months. If we were staying for more than six months, we would be obliged to register the car in France. Of course, we could do that anyway, but I’ve discovered from a consultation at the mairie, a phonecall to the departmental authorities and an evening on the internet that this would involve mountains of paperwork and somewhere in the region of £200, depending on the make of car, size of engine and other as yet undiscovered factors. We can’t get French insurance without French immatriculation, so my preferred option is currently to keep our existing insurance for another 60 days, paying the £32 per month extra for being covered while abroad, then to switch to RAC, giving Sunningwell Road as our address and saying that we’re on holiday in France for another 90 days. But the research continues.

Integrating into the community here is a much more nebulous worry. Is there any chance of us getting some work here? It would make it feel so much more real, somehow, and we’ll be very tight for money indeed if we don’t earn anything. And yet, unemployment in France now exceeds 10%, and the papers and town simply aren’t filled with job vacancies as they would be at home – so what can the chances be for Jasper, who will struggle to communicate well enough to take orders in a bar for a little while yet. Will language be too much of a barrier to allow us to get to know people, beyond exchanging a few pleasantries about the kids at the climbing frame? And will we ever work out what you can do with children here? The swimming pool doesn’t seem to have any written information about opening times or classes, and I didn’t really understand the answer when I asked at the reception about swimming classes for babies, so we’re obeying instructions and going there at 9.00 tomorrow morning to take part in something, or subscribe for something, or maybe just find out about something – I’m not sure which. That is, as long as we manage to source some classique swimming trunks for Jasper before then, since they won’t let him in with his swimming shorts.

Mostly I think it’s all bound to take time, and we should just enjoy the countryside, weather, house, food and sights for the moment, and see what happens. The little family centre is lovely and welcoming, with an almost unbelievable lack of bureaucracy – you just tell the staff the children’s names, take your shoes off and play. We’re developing a very convivial relationship with Monsieur Negre at the bank, not to mention the butcher and the boulanger. The children love running along the beautiful, pedestrianised streets on the way back from the market. And we’ve got to work out how to prepare the sea urchins we’ve just bought for supper

Frustrations

We’ve been in Manosque for two weeks today and I’m almost feeling settled in. I haven’t quite got my geography right; I spent hours wandering the wrong way down a road out of town trying to find a shop to sell me a present for Becky’s birthday. If I hadn’t turned round after about a mile I might still be out there somewhere. Anyhow, during that time I realised something fundamental about this place. You can buy what we think of as luxuries easily, but day to day stuff isn’t as easy to find. For example, there’s loads of prime quality extra virgin olive oil, sold by the local producers, but there’s no pasturised full fat milk. I wasted half an hour looking through all the various papier maché additives you can get while failing to find some small pots of poster paint for the kids. We’ve yet to find anywhere to buy hummous, plain unlined notepads to scribble in, plain cream to cook with, or indeed anything at all on a Monday.

But these are minor frustrations, and I reckon it’s best to build it all in to our lifestyle. We’ve been using crème fraiche instead of cream and ripe soft cheeses seem to go down well with the kids instead of hummous. The three day weekend they seem to have here takes some getting used to, but what a great institution it is! We’ve been making good use of it. We went to a small town just outside Marseilles on Sunday, where we dipped our feet in the Med (not too cold to swim, by the way) and ate ice cream on a café terrace. Yesterday we visited the Grand Canyon du Verdon, which was stunning. The best view was from a platform called Point Sublime, and with it being half way up a mile high gorge, sublime it certainly was. Hopefully such spectacular views drew attention away from the fact that I couldn’t find Becky a proper birthday present in time

The Olives up the Hill

 

We did two things today, which isn’t bad when you’re outnumbered by your offspring. Becky had a recipe in mind for tonight, so we went to the market for some sardines and accidentally bought 2 kilos of clementines too. We find it impossible to visit the market without buying all sorts of expensive, unnecessary, gorgeous food. Today we came back with two different kinds of olives, some confit de tomates, bleu de pays, brie and pimentoes. Before our daily sieste we took the kids up to the top of the Mont D’Or in the car. It is a hillock that overlooks Manosque and has lovely views both of the town, and of the Plateau de Valensole through which we drive to the hypermarket. (The kids love the travellator that takes you from the shop floor to the top of the car park, and this gave us something to point out to them in amongst the wonderful view from the top of the hill.)

Much more exciting for the kids, though, was an opportunity to pick olives. The whole hill is covered in an olive grove that appears to be open for anyone to plunder. Before we came here I don’t think I’d ever eaten a raw olive. I certainly won’t be doing it again; they are bitter and nasty. Apparently, they need to be steeped in really really really salty water for three months before you can eat them. Luckily, I have it in my ken to make water salty, and time is on our side for once

Manosque

The old Manosque, inside the walls, is quaint in the way towns can be only when they predate town planning. Buildings are thrown together, without regard for traffic, the space between them making irregular shapes with not a right angle to be found. Cars, where allowed, have to move slowly in order to negotiate the sharp turns and uneven road surfaces. And then, around every other bend in the road there is a new square to sit and sip café noir, or a new fountain, or statue, or monument. Some roads are blind alleys while others are busier thoroughfares. They have names that tell stories: ‘Rue de la Fraternité’, ‘Rue du Mont D’Or’ and ‘Rue Sans Nom’. Walking from one side to the other would take all of three minutes, but there are a couple of shopping streets to slow down the ambling tourist. As mentioned earlier, these seem to be dominated by lingerie and boulangeries, but also pharmacies, fashionable clothes shops and wonderful-looking chocolatiers. Three days per week there’s a street market with exotic squashes, chanterelles, local mussels and honey.

So we’ve got all this on our doorstep, but step outside the walled centre and we’re in amongst the trappings of any other French provincial town: Monoprix, Credit Agricole, L’Office de Tourisme, La Piscine, coiffure shops and bricolages. Oh, and more lingerie outlets.

First impressions

From Becky - We’ve been here 2½ days. We immediately loved the town and the house, and knew that we would be spending a lot of time just exploring and getting to know them both. If you’ve been to an old town centre in the south of France, you can probably picture the outside of the house: tall, thin and cool, with blue shutters at the windows. There’s a tiny parking space outside the even-tinier garage, so our estate-with-topbox dominates the aspect a bit. It’s quite a tardis inside, as the centre of the house is made up of a wonderful, potentially lethal, uneven stone spiral staircase and a light well. The rooms behind these are large, facing the hills. The lounge is full of Eva’s beautiful pictures and Egyptian furniture and rugs, and the sun streams in – apparently 300 days per year are sunny here, which has certainly been borne out by our experience so far.

We are spending most of our time in the lovely kitchen, where we feel more comfortable about letting the kids run amoc. It opens onto a pretty terrace, where Cara and Theo love watching the cats fight and sweeping up the horse chestnut leaves. When we go upstairs, we tend to go en masse, with the kids holding our hands, and then stay above the stair gate. I’m not sure whether we’ll get more relaxed about this as they get used to it – I have a horrible vision of one of them falling down the 40 stone stairs.

None of the children are as unsettled as I expected. The worst moment was the morning we left Alton. Cara and Theo usually love their morning visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s room, but that morning Cara came running out crying. I kept asking what the matter was, and eventually she said “Grandma and Grandpa scary. She got claws and prickles on her back”. This must surely have had more to do with the suitcases lined up in the hall and me being a bit stressed than with my mum looking like a Gruffalo. Now we’re here, they both seem to accept that we’re staying for a while, though they can’t possibly understand how long five months is. They loved setting up their big bedroom, with a cupboard each for their toys and clothes (they shared one at home). If you ask where Sam-the-dog is, they answer “at Grandma and Grandpa’s”, with a ’silly Mummy’ inflection in their voices. I think they’re slightly confused about Eva, who they haven’t met, but whose things they have to be very careful with. I wouldn’t let them into the bathroom cupboards last night: “Those are Eva’s things”. A bit later, Theo held up the plastic lid from my pot of cream. “Is this Eva’s thing or my thing?”

We’re all enjoying exploring Manosque. At the market, Jasper and I loved buying beautiful vegetables, and the sights and sounds, while the kids loved the chocolat chaud in the cafe. In the boulangerie, we enjoy chatting to the boulanger, while they love carrying the bread and saying ‘bonjour’ and ‘au revoir’ and getting beaming smiles and bisous in return. We gaze around the streets at the gorgeous architecture, fountains and decorations… and they go to sleep in the pushchair. And Luca does his thing: sleep, eat, play, try to roll over, cry, sleep, eat.

 

Nous sommes arrivons!

Well here we are. Manosque seems to be a bustling little town, full of character and hairdressers’ and lingerie shops. The walled centre bit (where our house is) is very small indeed, but this morning was swarming with people visiting the boulangeries and the farmers’ market.

This is ideal and I think we’re going to have fun here. There’s a guitar shop about a minute away; fantastic croissants; oodles of bars and restaurants; views; smells; sounds and people. With any luck, my French will improve enough by Christmas that I can get the title right.