Paris is not France: travelling perspectives

Think of France and the French for a moment. What images, thoughts and ideas fill your mind? For me it used to be Brigitte Bardot, chic, fashion, cheeses, onions, snails, frogs, crepes, champagne, Burgundy, Beaujolais, Bordeaux. Yes: sex food and wine. And that accent. Is there anything sexier than a beautiful woman speaking French whilst eating snails?

Margaret and I have probably seen more of France than most people, including the French. We take our time travelling through the country four times a year on average. We usually make three or four overnight stops and on our last trip down to Spain we spent nearly two weeks in Brittany. And we do try to take a somewhat different route each time, rarely parking our motor caravan in the same town or village.

We have grown to love the country, though not through sex, food, and wine, rather through its rivers, its architecture – the churches and chateaux – and the varied country scenery. In fact we find the food generally expensive and poor and the wine poor if not expensive. I make no comment on sex except to say that we find the villages and towns that we grace with our overnight presence rather dull (with some exceptions of course: see this blog). So dull that we look forward to a night out in Dover (we have a local there called Blakes) or our first night in Spain.

Usually we begin to search for somewhere to park up for the night as the light fades. And generally, though not always, we end up in run down places with many vacant shops and restaurants. Worse still the eateries that are open close early. On our most recent trip we stopped at Prades in the Pyrenees.  We left with memories of difficult parking and narrow streets; of almost becoming accidental extras in a film about Pablo Casals - a famous Spanish cellist who lived in the town; of the many dreadlocked dog owners; and of at least three restaurants, all open, all deserted. We were excited to find that one of the restaurants offered traditional French cuisine, but calmed down when we saw that Elvis Burger was on the menu. We ate alone in a pizzeria.

The second stop was at a place called Riom just to the north of Clermont Ferrand in mid France. We parked near the railway station which was somewhat noisy and walked into the historic town, which was mostly dead and had very few eateries. We ended up in a hotel restaurant which offered a reasonable menu and there we consumed well-done (as requested), tough, steak accompanied by exceptionally well-done chips. Unusually, in our experience, there were other people eating there, all sitting alone.

The third stop was at Senlis, not far north of Paris. This was completely different. There were many shops and restaurants, all open. There were dogs but their owners were not dreadlocked and their animals well-groomed. Golly, there was even a charity shop in Senlis, plus a complex and commanding cathedral, together with charming streets boasting warm, busy bars. We ate in a Michelin Starred restaurant and were asked if we had a reservation!! The food, surprisingly, was not too expensive, but it was not too good.

The point of this blog is this: France is a fraud. Just as London is not England, Paris (and its surroundings) is not France. Yet our images of these two countries are often formed by the capitals. And, given our own experience, it is no surprise that the voting pattern varies so much between the big cities and the remote countryside, just as it does across the north/south divide in England.

Over the years we believe that the contrast in France has increased. In the early days we did find traditional restaurants with good food, chequered table clothes and waiters who knew themselves to be our superiors. Now we are more likely to find pizza and kebab take-aways. Still, we are thankful that the rivers, the chateaux, the churches and that delicious accent all survive.

Leonard Cohen and the death of our Spanish village.

Leaonard Cohen’s death was announced via Facebook on the 11^th of November 2016 so we played his Greatest Hits CD a number of times, saddened, yet comforted by the fact that there are many more Cohen songs out there that we have still to hear: songs like ‘Goodbye Marianne’ and ‘Everybody Knows’ will gradually imprint themselves on our receptive brains as he touches our imperfect bodies with his mind.

Darkness had fallen in our Spanish village of La Fresneda as we listened to the songs we loved and, as  Allelujah, the last track on the album, played we heard monastic chanting in the background. Margaret threw open the window despite the chilly evening and the sad and moving strains of the monks blended with the rising crescendo of Cohen’s most famous song.

“I want to see if we know who’s died,” she said leaning out into night.

This, of course, was nothing to do with Leonard – the whole world knew that his free spirit had slipped away. No, this was to be a local announcement from the town hall of our village. La Fresneda, like almost all Spanish villages, is laced with loudspeakers all linked to a microphone at the village’s control centre: the system is called the pregon and the chanting monks preface news of a death dolefully delivered announcement as their voices fade away. But Margaret, I noted without surprise, did not recognise the name of the dead person.  Interestingly, this is the fourth death since we arrived six weeks ago. So what’s going on? It’s quite simple, the villagers are dying of old age. I can only guess at the average age here, but sufficient to say that it must be in excess of fifty and the replacement rate, given Spain’s low fertility and continuing drift to the cities, is well below that needed to sustain the population.

Our Street

La Fresneda has a street called Calle Fantasma, Ghost Street, and it is gradually becoming a village of ghosts. This morning I completed a little survey of our own street, Santa Agueda. It has thirty-one houses in total arraigned in two terraces on each side of the road. The houses are tall and thin and the street is short and narrow. Of those thirty-five, five are wrecks supported mainly by their neighbours. One of the wrecks is occupied by a fierce dog. Two of the houses I know to be rented, though the one next to us, we are glad to say, is currently empty. One house is currently being renovated, just four are permanently occupied, and the remaining nineteen are occasionally occupied, mostly at fiesta times only and mostly by people from Barcelona who have inherited their houses from family. We currently live in our house for nearly half the year and are therefore more permanent that most.

In a way this is a sorry tale. My neighbours and friends in the street above us are in a sorrier state. They tell me that only two of the houses in their street are occupied  - the other by Vicente, the current proprietor of the old bar in the main square. But everything is relative. Relative to England this is an incredible tale. Relative to rural Spain our village is quite lively. There are children and there is a school. There are two bars, two restaurants, two grocery shops, two butchers, a bread shop and many visitors – it is a beautiful place.

Is La Fresneda dying? In a way it certainly is. Looking back on our years here we realise that most, though by no means all, of the people we know are from the older generation. Many of them were touched either directly or indirectly by the civil war in Spain. They remember well the heavy hand of Franco and the sudden transition to a liberal democratic state. We like them. They talk to us, they are interested in us and we in them. They are country folk, they give us gifts of tomatoes and more. The younger generation are more metropolitan. With a few exceptions they do not see their future as olive growers or olive growers’ wives. They have been exposed to a wider world and want to be part of it.

It is often said that a Spaniard’s thoughts and action are ruled by family and then village. Affairs of state are secondary and relatively unimportant. For many that is changing, for many it has already changed. The old boys in the bar had neither the opportunity, nor the inclination to go to university and to the big city: the village was there world, and their ambitions lay in growing olives, almonds and vegetables for the table. Similarly the girls aspired to marry a good provider rather than following a career. When we first came to the village just sixteen years ago there were a few mules and horses  working  the fields, and men carrying firewood on their backs. Now there are machines that shake the olives from the trees and one of the villagers owns a JCB, a tractor, a number of motorbikes and, I think, a modern vibrating road roller!

So, once again, is our village dying? Well we all are bit by bit, aren’t we? To actually die a village must lose all of its inhabitants, and in Spain that does happen. However, it is not likely to occur in  La Fresneda. Instead of dying, it is changing. More tourist come to absorb the beauty and history of the place, the number of events are on the increase; not just fiestas but fairs on various themes like the antiques fair which gets bigger each year. The number of bars has doubled (now two) and with that the amount of outside seating in the main plaza is much greater. There is now a very successful camp site nearby, a swish hotel and cheaper inn.

So, like Leonard Cohen’s music, La Fresneda will go on and on. But the village will never again be the place we were so delighted to discover just sixteen years ago.