Christmas & all that

Thoughts from abroad

I never thought it would happen, but the UK becomes increasingly "foreign" Perhaps it's a comparison with the pace of life here in Provence, but the volume of traffic in Britain is amazing as is the aggressive driving often experienced!

We did a "grand tour" for the last two weeks of October - kids first, then holiday in the far north of Scotland, as Jo's brother has a croft in Durness, then Edinburgh for the wedding of David & Hazel's younger daughter, Lizzie, to Brian. Jo had made chutney for table presents and 10 kilos was duly potted & labelled!

Lovely weather in Scotland; had lunch outside on 23rd October in 20°C sunshine and made the trip to Cape Wrath lighthouse.

Wedding went very well and we left for home the next day via a ferry from Newcastle to Ijmuiden, near Amsterdam.

We did the whole journey in a car lent to us by the local Citroën dealer, as the car we had on order would not arrive on time. We picked it up with 500 kilometers on the clock and returned it reading 5,500 k!

We made another visit from 8th to 15th December. Strange how journeys turn out; we set off early on Saturday with snow on the ground and worried about the rest of France. In fact the snow had fallen across France, but the motorway roads were fine, no traffic so we had a lovely run right to within 17 k of Calais.

We went so that I could go to an ICL reunion, but the high spots were helping Guy & Sa buy & transport stuff for their new house, and having dinner with friends Liz & John in Putney.

Carols again

W got back in time to have a last rehearsal before our performances. We did a new carol this year, called "St. Nicolas' lament." It originates in Lorraine and reflects the huge, dark forests and the myths and fables that they seem to generate.

The plot paints a somewhat different figure to our chubby, cheerful Father Nicholas and in short:

Three children are gleaning in the fields and realising they are lost ask the butcher if they could stay with him. Absolutely says the butcher, we have a place for you; as soon as they enter he kills them, chops them into small pieces and puts them in brine in a big barrel.

Seven years later the great St. Nicolas asks the butcher if he could stay the night. The butcher agrees and st. Nicolas is invited to supper. He declines the ham as it was bad and declined the roast as it was not done, but asks for seven year old salted meat; At this point the butcher realises the game is up and scarpers  St Nicolas makes the sign of three fingers and the children awake.

Shades of Sweeney Todd!!

Both concerts seemed to go well

Politics

I guess it has always been the case that politics and government are often different things. It is fascinating to see the Liberal Democrats struggling to balance their political beliefs and the demands of government.

I see the same here in France. M. Hollande's political programme included steps to tax the rich more. He has introduced increased taxes leading to a flight of the rich to other countries, mostly Belgium and Switzerland, such that the revenue from the rich will go down.

So what does M. Hollande do? Stick to his guns (good politics, bad government) or revoke the new laws (good government, bad politically)?

If there is one thing that stirs me up it is the performance of the British Civil Service. Not at the level where we are likely to met them, but the higher echelons. 

Two recent examples  The fiasco of letting the contract for running the West Coast line is amazing. Of course I don't know all the details, but the contract seems to be deeply flawed. One, it was let to the highest bidder, but that bid was only the highest because it estimated (guessed,)  bigger passenger growth. Secondly, the payments by the winners were largely back-ended. After 5 years the winning company would owe billions of pounds, and only suffer a penalty of £190 million if they walked away from the contract.

The board of a public company may well argue that its primary duty to shareholders could well give it no option but to abandon the contract!

Second example is the disgusting case of a MP using parliamentary privilege to publicly accuse a firm of immorality by avoiding tax payment (I think it was Starbucks. She neglected to mention the thousands of people employed by them, collecting their taxes and paying social security contributions.)

Tax avoidance is not even illegal, let alone immoral. It behoves the Civil Service to get their act together, use the brightest people they have to write the financial rules in such a way that companies cannot avoid corporation tax. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? Not if the proper effort is mobilised.

And herein lies the rub! For me, the biggest problem in getting things done properly is the outdated class structure in the Civil Service. The brightest people go into "policy making" and don't see fit to get involved with the "nitty-gritty" of managing contract letting or writing financial rule books. Only when the brightest get involved will we begin to compete with all the bright people who work for the big companies & consultancies.

Rising Cost of Living

Logs

The logs arrived this morning at 08.20! Fortunately I'd been to get the paper and croissants and put both our cars next door and asked our tenants the night before to park their car neatly.

The delivery was to be in two lorries as the large lorry was en panne. Having seen the large lorry some two years ago I'm not surprised; it looked as though it could have delivered logs for Napoleon! (the third at least!)

As I said earlier, we buy our wood by the metric ton, as opposed to the stere, which is a measurement of volume. It's more economical buying by the tonne, but you have to have absolute confidence in your supplier to supply wood that is ready for burning. If not and you get newly cut wood, you will pay a lot of money for the water content and it won't burn!

The way they calculate the invoice is interesting. The empty lorry is weighed on a weigh bridge and then again when stacked with logs; the difference is the weight of logs you have bought.
The purchase price is quoted in cost per kilo! why such a small unit I don't know,as I'm sure they wouldn't supply small amounts. Their smallest lorry holds about 2.5 tonne, which may be the minimum. 
Eventually the invoice shows a delivery of, say,  4,500 kilos of wood at 0.145€ the kilo, a total of 
652.5€.

One of the pleasures of France, or this part of France anyway, is the large number of family-run concerns; shops, restaurants, cafes and many other small enterprises.
Our supplier of logs, "Les Fils de F Barbanson" (the name says it all) is one such firm, always lovely to deal with. I was thinking of the family run context when the lorry came down our drive and backed around to empty all the logs. As usual, the logs were all stacked neatly in the back. I suspect that in a non family run firm, the cost of labour to stack logs in the lorry would have resulted in the logs being loaded mechanically in to a large lorry any which way. When it's a member of the family, it makes sense to get as many logs in as possible per delivery!

Anyway, we set out to stack the first delivery of 2.3 tonne, kindly helped by our neighbour, Jean-Louis. By 9.45 we'd just about stacked the lot when the second delivery arrived, neatly stacked in the lorry. With a break to pay the bill and drink a coffee, we started again and had the lot stacked by 11 a m!

The exercise to be repeated on 13th August. Hope the weather is as kind then as it was today, sunny but cool and if we finish the job before midday, we are working in shadow.

We always get enormous pleasure out of stacking our logs. We've had some exercise, they look good stacked and there is an atavistic pleasure in knowing that you have sufficient to keep the winter chills at bay.

Cost of living

Our friend Ian Hugo who lives in the village commented in one of his blogs that in some outlooks on life there would seem to be a deep cultural difference between the French & English.

That many French people, often in the family firms mentioned above, regard looking after their customers and giving them value for money as more important than making large (& larger) profits.

I was reminded of this when ordering our logs and subsequently confirming the delivrery date. I asked the girl in the office, probably the wife of one of the Barbanson fils, to confirm that the price had gone up from 0.140€ to 0.145€ pr kilo. She was immediately very apologetic and explained that the VAT had just gone up (true, from 5.5% to 7%) I reassured her that I was not complaining, just wanted to confirm!

I was certainly not complaining. This is the 7th year we have bought our logs from Barbanson.
In 2006 they were 0.160€ per kilo, the same in 2007 and went down to 0.140€ in 2008( some kind of loyalty bonus!) where the price stayed until this year!

Passports Privatisation & Nationalisation

No Jay!


Our daughter Jay, husband Paul and their children Timmy & Amélie should be arriving here on Monday morning after an overnight drive - except they are not coming at all.


Problem is a lack of passport for Jay, as she changed her surname to Mackay after getting married last December. I know, plenty of time to order a new one, but she finally sent off the application 3 weeks ago. This should have been within the guidelines for return delivery of a new one, but on this occasion, was not. Jay may have to abandon the school of thought that "If it wasn't for the last minute nothing would ever get done!"


Their non-arrival has a knock-on effect on us (minor compared with the loss of not seeing them) We have ordered 10 tonnes of logs to be delivered, 5 tonnes on the 7th August & 5 tonnes on the 13th, anticipating plenty of help to stack them, but now Jo & I will have to do the lot. Jay was also bringing out some shoes I'd ordered in the UK, 6 litres of "Tomorite" for feeding the plants and the télépéage control that guy used going back to the UK in June.
Ah well, perhaps they'll come over at Christmas?




Privatisation.


Like many political/economic:social ideas, the dogma seems to overcome rational discussion; you have to be either for or against, when experience would suggest good & bad in most things. So in Britain, there is a case to be made that the privatisation of telecommunications has worked very well to the benefit of the users, broadcasting rolls along happily as a blend of private & state owned companies, whilst there must be severe doubts about privatising the railways in Britain, where we now have some 37 TOC's (train operating companies), a separate entity for controlling track and bigger government subsidies than ever! (One has to compare this with France's splendid, state owned & run, railway system)


These thoughts developed over conversations here in France and were strengthened when helping Jo to get a new passport. It seems to me that the issuing of a document such as a passport is rightly the job of Her Majesty's civil service, but it has, for some time now, been contracted out to a private firm.


If you phone the Consular Office in the British Embassy in Paris, or I guess anywhere else now, then you hear a recorded message that tells you that all enquiries must go to the private firm, telephone number kindly supplied!


So, you phone the firm processing passport applications and what do you get? A message stating that all calls will be charged at 72 pence a minute, so please provide  the details of a credit card before going any further! People who don't have credit cards, as far as I know it's not compulsory in British law to have one,are disfranchised & permanently cut off from talking to the passport issuing firm


When my daughter tried to find out where her passport was after 3 weeks, a friendly civil servant agreed to help, but had to admit defeat as "The lines are always busy and you can't get through to the passport issuing firm!"




Nationalisation.


For some years now I have re-discovered my love of history and now have the time to indulge myself in reading for long periods.


It was in one of my favourite historian's books that a novel (to me) idea was proposed. That state ownership of industry trade and commerce was likely to succeed or fail dependent on the political system that it was operating within. 


State ownership & control is less likely to work within a democracy, as the efficient and sensible running of an enterprise runs the risk of its operations being subsumed or otherwise distorted to meet short-term political priorities.


Harold Wilson, when prime minister, started out by running the railways as a social service & then made a huge change to run them as a profit-making operation. The head of British Rail, Richard Marsh, an ex minister of transport in a Wilson Cabinet, stated that you couldn't hope to run a large industry like this!


On the other hand, with a totalitarian state, where there is no need to consider the electorate as a necessity to continuing in office, the undertaking can be run in he best way to meet the individuals' and state requirements.


Whether this actually happens, is of course, variable! 

Scope Change

Scope

My readers, all five, may have noticed a change in the title and attached information. Although we remain fascinated by the bird life, it can be repetitive, so our blog will be extended to cover aspects of our life here.

Service

There are many jokes circulating here regarding the slowness of life in Provence. along the lines of the Spaniard who asks a Provençale the equivalent provençale word for "manana" to which he replies that he cannot think of a word with the same degree of urgency!
However in the important aspects of daily life they are often very responsive. Last Friday afternoon our washing machine decided not to fill with water, so the local hardware shop in Vaison was called who confirmed we would be called on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week by the repair man, to confirm the directions to our house.
In fact, he called this afternoon, Saturday and duly arrived, established that the control board was defunct, that he would have to order a new one but would lend us his own test board while we awaited arrival of the new one; service indeed, and very prompt.

Life expectation

No, not ours, but mechanical items. The French, in this part of the world anyway, are much less of a "Throw away" society than the UK. I was reminded of this when talking
 to the repair man as in the washing machine event above.
As he was changing the control board, I enquired whether it would be a good idea to change the water pump while he had the machine open, as "The washing machine was 5 years old!"
I got a condescending look and the comment, as might be delivered to an idiotic infant, that "Five years is not old!"
I had a similar experience with our local garage in the village. I mentioned to the owner that I was thinking of saving money by reducing the insurance to fire & theft only, as it was not worth insuring fully comprehensive. Our C5 is 9 years old with evidence on the bodywork to an active life amongst French drivers. I had mentally valued it at £500 if lucky.
"Don't do that" said our garage man, it's worth at least €4,000!"
I suspect when I come to trade it in it might be less!"