My money-off voucher

When we came to live here, I had to register myself as a job-seeker with the French equivalent of the Job-centre. I had been registered as such with the Dutch authorities, who refused to see that someone of about 60 did not stand much chances in finding a job in his trade as qualified engineer for a salary far above the minimum wage. However, rules are rules in the Netherlands and if I did not apply for a job at least 4 times a month I would loose my unemployment benefit. The lady who dealt with me in Mâcon made it very clear to me that she perfectly understood that a foreigner of 60 years old, speaking pidgin French in a country where the retirement age at the time was still 60 was not high on the wanted list of the few employers around here offering the specialised work I did in the past.

She struck a deal with me, and registered me as “looking for work, with dispensation to actively apply for a job”. There was no money involved; I simply had to wait till my pensions from the Netherlands started rolling in.
What I received however was a piece of paper we referred to as my “money-off voucher”. This piece of paper enabled me to enter museums free of charge or at a reduced price, gave me a nice reduction on the price of the cinema in Cluny, etc. In a word, this piece of paper was worth its weight in platinum.
Recently my voucher expired, because indeed money was coming in from the Netherlands. Of course one has to inform the French authorities (Assedic, now Pôle-emploi) of this sad event, which I dutifully did. But it certainly hurts, having to pay full fare for Cluny abbey and getting a mediocre reduction for pensioners in stead of the royal reduction for “Chercheurs d’emploi”.

The voucher can easily be Photoshopped to give it another year, but I have not lived 65 years in relative honesty to became a hardened criminal at 65...

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Does anyone read your blog?

It is a question I have asked myself many a time. And every so often I meet someone who knows things which can only be known by those who have read my blog.
Yesterday a Frenchman stopped at our gate, who explained that he had found an old blog of mine about tuileries in Burgundy (from 2009) via the internet. Of course we asked him to come in, offered him a chair and away he fired.
He happened to be a member of the " Association des amis du vieux Berzé ", a village about 25 km from here. The association occupies it self with restoring and maintaining some old gypsum furnaces over there. Whilst cleaning up they had found some old bricks with the stamp of "our" factory engraved in them. After having found the bricks they searched the internet for a Tuilerie of Noël Marembaud in Chazelles, Cormatin, and that is how they found my little history. He had worked in England for a while, hence he could read my blog without much trouble.
He had found the story interesting enough to pop by and have a snoop around. We offered him the grand tour, which he happily accepted. During the tour we found out that he had read the blog thoroughly; the blog said clearly that we never had been able to find proof that our tuilerie had actually produced roof tiles. And that was very true when I wrote it. However, two weeks ago we received two roof tiles, with inscription, from the mayor of Cormatin, who in turn had received a number of tiles from the former country constable. The latter had found the tiles somewhere while cleaning out a shed in Cormatin, and gave them to the mayor.

Our new friend made the remark that it was rather strange that they had never produced tiles in our factory, and we could put that straight there and then! After the tour he said goodbye and invited us over to the gypsum furnaces of Berzé-la-Ville to return the favour. And we certainly will!

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A French wedding

In France, as in the Netherlands, only a civil wedding is considered to be an official wedding; reason why a church wedding, if there is one, always takes place after the civil ceremony. However, the amount of people gathered around a church for a wedding is considerably bigger in France then in the Netherlands.
A week ago we found a wedding invitation in our letterbox for the church wedding of the daughter of some friends in Chazelle. Because we liked the people and because we would not mind to witness a French church wedding, we happily accepted the invitation.
Towards three o’clock we drove off to Cormatin church (the service was supposed to start at 15h30) and found with difficulty a parking space. That is not unusual on a Saturday, but the amount of women with rather exuberant dresses tumbling out of vehicles made us think they came for the wedding. That was even more evident when we tried to find a place in the church. Cormatin church was filled to the brim with friends and relatives of the couple or their parents.

Chazelle church can handle approx. 120 church goers; Cormatin church, which is much bigger, easily holds over 200, and the church was soon chocker block full. The service was relatively simple, bride and groom and their respective parents radiated happiness, in a word, this was the day of their life.
After the ceremony we went off to Morlay for a vin d’honneur, where another acquaintance of ours sometimes hosts parties and weddings. Fortunately we knew the way; hence we managed to arrive early by making a little detour, this way arriving just before the whole column of cars turned up.
Everything was organised very well. The kir flowed amply, there were all sort of snacks to accompany the drinks, all in all it was, apart from the stunning view over the Grosne valley not dissimilar to a Dutch wedding reception.

We would have loved to stay a bit longer, but on a Saturday we have to be home as well, if only to receive gîte guests who had said they would arrive late…..




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Lost in translation

In the Netherlands there is an expression for doing something in a slapdash way, “doing something the French way”. That is the title of the simultaneous Dutch blog about the same subject, but using that here seems a bit out of place, hence the alternative title. Why the Dutch associate the French with working sloppy must go back a long time, probably to 1795 when the Dutch revolted against the Oranges and installed a Dutch version of the French Republic and after that were annexed by Napoleon to become the Kingdom Holland under his brother, Louis Napoleon.
Expats here tend to comment a lot on the French way of working, mainly because it is different from the way English or Dutch are doing it. It is debatable whether different is necessarily worse, but that seems to be the general opinion among most expats. That is why I would like to break a lance for “a company we have had excellent experience with”. If they work “the French way”, give me “the French way” anytime!
We had a rather big project on our hands, building a modern filter to treat our waste water in the back garden.

On the designated day a crew arrived, varying in size per day between 2 and 5 men, with diggers, a tractor, trucks, materials and tools. At the end of each day, but also during breaks, they meticulously cleaned their tools (shovels, spades, etc.). When they had to install a membrane white as snow in a filter, they took their dirty boots off before stepping on the filter cloth. Maybe a bit over the top, because after that the filter was covered with gravel, but at least the pores did not get clogged up with clay from dirty boots.

When the whole project neared completion, some small pieces of wood, beautifully cut to suit, were used to cover some joints in the beams. After a few months these bits of wood should be invisible because of the reed plants that are planted in the filter, but it certainly shows how neat and tidy these people work. Before the men left, the whole orchard had been turned into a World war I battlefield by tractor and digger movements.
At the end of the day, before the men left the premises, they levelled everything as good as possible with a digger, rakes and shovels, sowed in grass, and although the next day it was very well visible that works had taken place here, they had certainly done everything they could to bring the orchard back to its original state. And finally they finished a day earlier than planned to our full satisfaction and had turned up whenever they promised to do so.
For those who are interested in gardening work on a big scale, or in installing a modern water treatment system, “this is the link to their website”.

I would not be able to name a Dutch contractor who could have done a better job doing it the Dutch way...

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The circus is in town!

Some time ago we noticed three red trucks driving between Cluny and Cormatin. Nothing spectacular, but for the fact that one truck was pulling three trailers. How this sort of concoction can safely reverse more then 6 feet is beyond me. Anyway, when we overtook them, we noticed that it was a circus obviously heading for some village in the neighbourhood. I must confess that I am not really a circus fiend. The only live performance I ever saw was in Singapore, by a small Malaysian (Indian) family circus. The father, mother and children acted as jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, etc., but the whole performance was of a charming simplicity, possibly helped by the natural grace of these Indian people.

The only other experience I have with circuses are the five minutes I could keep my eyes open whenever there was a circus on TV.
Accidentally we stumbled on some posters, where Circus Azurias was announced to perform in Massilly, Saint-Gengoux and with two shows in Cormatin. Since we had in those days a lot of work going on around the house, we decided to treat ourselves to a night on the town. The circus was located by the Plan d’Eau, hence we parked our car somewhere near and walked past the tent and the livestock roaming around the tent and bought tickets for € 7.00 each. Children paid € 5.00. The livestock consisted of a horse, a pony, some chickens, a cat, a dog, a llama and a cow with enormous horns, possibly of Ugandan extraction. We went inside and turned out to be the only grownups not accompanying children.

The show went on for 45 minutes with a 5 minute break in which sweets were sold. The balance : 10 adults, 19 children, gross income of the evening € 445. The attractions: two kids who did handstands, a horse walking in a circle ending with its front legs on a table, a llama idem, a pony idem, a poodle idem, 3 ferrets doing slaloms on a shelf with vertical sticks nailed to it, a cat idem, and finally the inevitable clown’s act. This circus was also run by a family, most likely parents, children and grandchildren, just like the Malaysian circus. Unfortunately the French people missed the elegance of the Asians, and I think this is a very kind way of putting it.
What I am wondering about is this: how can a family of at least 7 persons survive on an income of this scale; it would not surprise me if the maintenance of the trucks costs more than the revenue of one evening.

Anyway, since these sort of attractions are normally held in winter, we now know what we can do on a long, cold boring winter evening; see an even more boring circus!



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Open house Office de Tourisme St-Gengoux

For those who are spending their holidays in this area but who are not familiar with the region, the Office de Tourisme of Saint-Gengoux organises this summer every Sunday from the 8th of July up to the 26th of August an open house between 11h00 and 12h00 in the Office the Tourisme. When the weather is fine, and why would it not be, it happens outside, in front of the Office de Tourisme. The local shopkeepers and merchants are providing local culinary specialities (pastry, various meat products) and drinks (locally produced wine and fruit juice) and the staff of the Office de Tourisme is there to answer your questions and to give information and brochures about what is going on in the area (most if not all mornings English speakers are present). When you are in the neighbourhood, do not hesitate to nip in!

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Oyez, Oyez, Oyez!

Not so long ago we discovered that Cluny still has a town crier. The first indication of this we saw nailed on a tree at the market: the paper said that in order to have your message cried out you had to post it before a certain time in a letterbox in the high street. The crier would be crying out loud your message later in front of Café Le Bistro in the high street. And although we always pass by Le Bistro on our way to the market, we have never seen the crier in the blood. Until one Saturday morning, when we went to the market a bit earlier than usual. Around eleven that morning we noticed a colourfully dressed woman, armed with a drum, drumsticks and a big mouth, standing on a crate and shouting her head off. What exactly she had to say was not entirely clear, but will be found out one day. For the time being we assume that you can ask her to tell everybody what you think of your neighbours, at a small price no doubt, but without repercussions...

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Rome wasn’t built in a day

Well everybody knows that. But how many people know that the small chapel of Charcuble was built within 24 hours?
When the French capitulated to the Germans in 1940, the conscription was abandoned at the same time. To keep the boys of about 20 years old away from possible resistance work and to learn them some discipline, the Vichy regime founded in July 1940 the Chantiers de la jeunesse française (CJF). The CJF organized, heavily leaning on and influenced by the example of the scouting movement, an alternative conscription. In these 6 months the lads were taught discipline and community spirit whilst executing works for the public interest, like helping with the harvest, foresting and helping with building projects, etc. Not long after the foundation of the CJF, jews were banned from joining. After the Germans had ousted the Vichy regime, the CJF was used for providing forced labour in Germany. Like many things related to collaboration and resistance in France, CJF is often a bit of an obscure subject.

On the side of Cormatin church we had found a small plaque of the Vauban CJF 4. After some research we found out that CJF France was divided in a big number of groups, of which Vauban 4 was just one. The mayor of Cormatin knew a bit more. The CJF group Vauban 4, based in Cormatin, had done work in the surrounding woods, and in the wood near our house there were still remains to be seen of barracks built by and for the CJF.
Very recently we noticed an article in our indispensible source of information, Le Journal de Saône et Loire. It was about a ceremony to commemorate the fact that 70 years ago, on May 1st 1941, the Group Vauban 4 had built a small chapel near Charcuble within 24 hours. We always like to check out these sort of things, hence we got in the car and drove off to Bissy-lès-Mâcon, the commune of which Charcuble is a hamlet. The bell tower looks a bit like a pre-romanesque construction, but the rest of the small chapel, including the wall paintings behind the altar gives the real age of the chapel away.

The chapel is still considered to be a consasacred place, and is maintained with the help of the commune of Bissy-lès-Mâcon.
Although Rome is not really comparable to Charcuble, but…. This chapel was indeed built in one day!

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Economics

This season there will be no theatre festival “Les Rendez-Vous de Cormatin” here. The rumour had been spreading for a while now, but recently all volunteers doing the work in Cormatin (building stages, selling programs, etc.) were called to a meeting and briefed about the situation.
The theatre company Studio Asnières from around Paris, the organiser of the event, has been unable to cough up the social payments for their employees, and is now in a state described by those in the know as technical bankruptcy.
However, this is not the first time this happens; a few years back the festival was also cancelled for one year, hence the Cormatin side of the festival knows how to handle this. Adverts in the program had already been sold to advertisers, and those will be refunded. The benefactors (and to be allowed to help as a volunteer one has to become a benefactor!) whom all have paid up around € 30, will be treated to a show as a consolation prize. To that effect most likely a big name will be asked to perform in Cormatin for all benefactors. A couple of years back this was the well known French actor Kad Merad, very famous since he played a role in the French film and blockbuster “Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis”, who also performs as a stand-up comedian.
One would think that in a situation like this no more money would be spent than strictly necessary.

Still, the volunteers were asked, after they had been told the facts about the “bankruptcy”, to turn up once more in the near future to help addressing letters, in which the situation around the festival is explained.
We are talking of about 3000 (three thousand!) letters, sent to people who at any one time in the past had purchased a theatre ticket and of whom the address is known to the organisation.
Would it not be more logical to save a cool € 1500 (and I am only taking into account the cost of stamps!), and keep them for a year when the festival will go ahead?

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Again : Jazz in Trivy

In our second year here, in 2006, we heard that accordeon player Richard Galliano was going to give a concert in Cormatin's church during the festival Guitares en Cormatinois. However, I had never heard of the guy (ignorant, moi?) and besides, why would we go to listen to an accordion player during what was supposed to be a guitar festival?
A couple of years back my son gave me a CD ("Viaggio") for my birthday, where the guitarist Biréli Lagrène was accompanying this same Richard Galliano.
After having listened to this CD a few times I realised how stupid I had been not going to that concert out of sheer ignorance. Since that day I have been keeping an eye out for the various announcements of concerts in the area. One never knows who might pop up in this part of the woods. Had we not been very lucky to see Biréli Lagrène in Trivy through an announcement in the newspaper? Unfortunately through circumstances beyond our control we had just missed a concert by Rhoda Scott who performed in a nearby village. But again, if one keeps an eye out, one is boud to find something of ones liking every so often.
A few weeks ago I spotted that Galliano was scheduled in the series "Jazz in Trivy".

A few years ago we had to drive to Mâcon to pick up tickets for the Tirvy concerts at a pharmacy, but in the mean time we found out that one can order tickets at the Cluny tourist information as well. Four tickets for Galliano were quickly bought, and on the evening of the concert we drove off to Trivy with two friends, about half an hour driving.
We were a bit on the early side we thought, but the church was already almost full. The advantage of that was, that we managed to conquer some ordinary extra chairs in the aisle. Of course it is nicer to have a front seat, but having said that, sitting for two hours in a church bench is not my idea of a comfortable way of watching a concert. The concert was extraordinarily good. Galliano has developed a style in which the influences of tango, valse musette and jazz are nicely interwoven. The only other jazz accordion player of international fame I know of is the Dutchman Mat Mathews (1924-2009).

Galliano played not only the accordion; he also used the accordina, a cross between the accordion and the harmonica. his trio further consisted of Jean Marie Ecay on guitar and Jean Philippe Viret on bass (played with Stéphane Grapelly).
But why write an article about an excellent concert in a tiny little village not far from here? Do I really think that people will travel this far just to enjoy a good cocert?
Yes, I do! In one of my previous blogs I had mentioned Rhoda Scott, who had given a concert not far from here. Someone in the Netherlands was looking for concerts by Rhoda Scott, found a festival in Vienne and my blog, and put one and one together. She booked a week in one of our gîtes and visited the festival in Vienne using La Tuilerie as base of operation.

So much I have learned from blogging: you never know who reads it, and every reader is a potential client...






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The pictures of the concert were taken from the Journal de Saône et Loire.

Birds of a feather?

Regularly, throughout the season, we notice campers as well as gîte guests going for a walk, armed with a pair of binoculars. Others are staying on the premises, pointing their binoculars at trees and listen very attentively to the surrounding sounds. No doubt these people are bird watchers, who keep an eye and an ear out for everything that warbles and flies or flutters.
I am a total nitwit when it comes to nature, and I have asked some of these people what exactly they were looking for, and what they found. Bird names like red-backed shrike, a tiny little bird, several types of woodpeckers that hammer our trees, red kites and a variety of song birds were mentioned. I think I myself might have spotted a golden oriole, I certainly have been woken up by nightingales, and I had a number of brief encounters with hoopoes.

However, I am more excited about encounters with in my eyes more exotic species. In winter, and only then, I have seen a white heron around here. It stands in various fields around here, flies off very elegantly, and I assume it is every time the same bird I have seen around here. Last winter I drove through Chazelle, and there it stood, on a weir in the Grosne, close to the lavoir. Fortunately I had my camera ready, hence I could have a good picture of him before he flew off. An internet search revealed that it might have been a great egret, but having said that, an expert could come up wit a better determination.
Last summer a pair of storks took residence in Cormatin. We spotted them for the first time in a field near Cormatin, pecking the ground in search of, I believe, worms or frogs. They build a nest on a chimney of the Cormatin château. I know that storks are not exactly rare; in the Alsace, but also in Southern France and in Spain almost every bell tower is crowned with a stork’s nest. But the whole population of Cormatin, all 503 of them, find the storks a fascinating phenomenon.

My last spotting was a rather strange one. Towards one September evening I was looking out over the fields from our sitting room, when I noticed a swarm of birds landing on the telephone cable running to our house. I saw them with the sun aslant behind them, hence I could not see them very clearly; still they did not seem ordinary birds. When I looked at them through a pair of binoculars, I noticed they were beautifully coloured birds. I managed to catch one with my camera just before the swarm took off again. With the help of a small bird book for laymen and some internet research, I suspected these had been European bee-eaters. Checking this with a birdwatcher confirmed this suspicion. The swarm was migrating, and obviously landed in Chazelle for a short break.

And then I thought how to close off this blog? The answer came the same day. We drove through Saint-Gengoux on our way to the local cave to get some wine, when we saw, sitting on a gate post in the middle of the day, a tawny owl. They normally live in the woods, and although Saint-Gengoux is not exactly a metropolis, it is also not that rural that tawny owls would nest in the town itself. The owl looked a bit sleepy, and I suspect it somehow got lost and mistook the gate post for a tree.
The moral of this story: to see interesting birds, it pays off to keep your eyes open in stead of investing in expensive equipment!

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A tale of 11 stères

This time of year the Dutch are very ambivalent about the weather; on the one hand trains come to a grinding halt because of the low temperatures, on the other hand most people are hoping for the “Tour of 11 Cities”, a 200 km skating race along canals and across lakes in the Northern part of the country. The ice has to be of considerable quality and thickness to hold the hundreds of skaters.
For us in Burgundy the cold is much more associated with keeping the house warm, hence the title of this blog. We prefer to wait until the ground is properly frozen before we order our yearly 11 stères (approx. 11 cubic metres) of firewood. The wood is delivered in three loads, which we stack under a half-covered area of the toilet block for the campsite. The wood can dry there, and is ready for consumption by next November. We normally manage to stack one load before the next one arrives, but not this time. There was such a horribly cold gale blowing, making the temperature feel like -20 degrees in staed of the -7 it really was. We had to go inside to warm ears, fingers and feet after having stacked only a few wheel barrows.

Our blogs and our website are very often found by people who are using Google to find out “what is a stère”, “how to stack wood under a roof”, “match sticks from one cubic metre of wood”, “stacking a stère of wood”, etc. Most of these wood-obsessed people are strangely enough from Belgium, but also an occasional Brit, American or Canadian has been affected by this aberration. Whether they have ever found in my blogs what they were looking for is questionable, hence this little helping hand concerning the stacking of wood.
Whenever you drive around here, one cannot miss the neatly stacked, freestanding rectangular “walls” of firewood along roads, by houses or even in the forest. Whoever has tried to stack logs of wood should know the problem. One starts with a neat row of logs, followed by a second row which is one log shorter than the previous one, etc., until the required height has been reached. The result is a “wall” which is not rectangular, but has the shape of a trapezoid (see photo no. 1). Not only has the stacking to be done neatly, the various layers also have to form horizontal planes. If they are not horizontal enough inevitably collapse follows at some stage. Our first stacks were built this way. The only advantage we had was that our “wall” was stacked against a brick wall, hence the danger of collapsing was not so big, provided the wood was more or less leaning towards the brick wall. The disadvantage is obvious; a lot of space is lost in the triangles on the side of the stack. In order to see how it should be done, we looked at how the French were stacking. And that was fundamentally different!

They start building a tower at the beginning of the stack. Two or three logs of equal size form the first layer; the next layer is the same, but the logs are perpendicular to the first logs, etc., etc. When the tower has reached the required height the whole process is repeated at the end of the stack. Choosing the right logs is a bit tricky, but once one gets the knack of it it results in two free standing, stable towers. Then the space between the towers is filled as usual. The towers assure that no logs are rolling away, and when the planes are more or less horizontal, a stable rectangular “wall” is the proud result of all the work (see photos no. 2 and 3).

We have just done this, and the same amount of wood, last year stacked in 3 trapezoidal walls, has now been “reduced” to 2 more or less rectangular walls!

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Loto / Bingo

Last Saturday was the big day in Cormatin; your humble narrator and a hall full of Cormatinois and Cormatinoises were playing bingo till death did us part, in loco parentis for our generous friends who could not play personally.
Alas, all to no avail.
Of all the 91 cards we managed to flog off note even one was good for a prize. We did try to bribe the Bingo Master, apparently also without success
But do not despair; next year there will be another Loto, and hence another chance to win a TV, a Home cinema or a ham!

Des chiffres et des lettres

We are now finally part of the real world; we have an address and a house number. This must be a relief for the Dutch tourists who call us with the question whether there is no betterbetter address available than “La Tuilerie de Chazelle - Cormatin”, because not having a street name, let alone not hsving a house number is for a Dutchman more or less a blasphemy. So for those who cannot cope, as of yesterday we live at 10, Rue de Chazeux.
Irrespective of this Great Leap Forward, instigated by our Great Helmsman, we will stick to our “old” address. The reason is quite simple: most people in Chazelle and Cormatin know exactly where La Tuilerie is; whether they can imagine where 10, rue de Chazeux lies is questionable.
The rue de Chazeux starts at the D881, and runs through Chazelle until it ends on the boundary of Cormatin between the hamlets Chazelle and Chazeux, in the middle of a forest. The agricultural path we live on, well outside Chazelle has been designated as a cul de sac of rue de Chazeux by the officials involved in naming roads and giving numbers.

The distance between no. 8 and 10 is approx. 1 km (slightly over half a mile).
Had these officials taken their job a bit more seriously, and better, had they sought our valuable advise, we possibly would have ended up with a slightly more poetic or romantic road name.
We knew that street names were about to be dished out, hence we had given this matter some thought, as one does.
What about “Boulevard Noël Marembeaud”? That would have been a nice tribute to the man who started the tuilerie or tile factory here in the second half of the 19th century.
A French play on words always goes down quite well with the local warlords, hence the link between “Avenue des Champs Elysées” and “Avenue de chez Sue et Cées” would be quickly established.
The house number 10 has strong associations with Downing street, certainly when one thinks of the British owner and of the recent film “The Iron Lady”.

We would have been quite happy with something simple like “Les Tuileries” or even with “Rue de la Tuilerie”, but no, the authorities knew better...
To summarize this complaint: the mairie has chosen the line of least resistance, and again we are the victims of this lax attitude.
But of course this is not the end of this nasty affair: I have already send a letter in high dudgeon to the mairie, including the relevant photos. And knowing our mayor, this will no doubt be part of the agenda in the next council meeting!

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The latest on Loto Cormatin, extra, extra, read all about it!

Hello everybody; I am only posting this to announce that we have managed to flog off all our 78 bingo cards for the Loto.
The remaining cards are with the other members of the Amicale and with the local shopkeepers.
We will certainly inform any possible prize winners after January 28th!
Thanks again on behalf of the children and pensioners of Cormatin.

Again : a call for help

Just like last year we received a number of bingo (or loto) cards from the Amicale de Cormatin, which we were asked to sell. The proceeds of these cards are used to finance the yearly dinner for the aged of Cormatin (April) and for Christmas presents for all kids in Cormatin between 0 and 10 years old.
At the beginning of 2011 I placed a call for help in my blog, begging my readers to donate something to this fund raising event. I got quite a few positive reactions, and we managed to sell our 40 cards quickly to some expats and friends around here, to some guests who stayed previously on the campsite or in the gites and to friends and family abroad (the second prize fell on one of our cards!)
Because over time we have gathered some more friends and acquaintances among the French population of Cormatin, we made the rounds in Cormatin and environs, and we managed to sell all our 40 cards in no time. No call for help on my blog or on Facebook required, or so it seemed...

Until Sue spoke to some less pro-active Amicale members; they had been “unable to sell any cards at all”, and on top of that they possessed a box with more than 60 unsold cards! She will be on the road this afternoon, to try to persuade the shopkeepers in Cormatin to flog off some more cards. At the same time I will try to interest some of my readers in again buying some cards off us through my blog and through Facebook. Who says that social networks are useless?
I ask those who are willing to invest some of their hard earned money for this good cause, to send an e-mail to this address cees@latuileriechazelle.com, specifying the number of cards requested à € 2 (or £ 1.70) a card.
The potential benefactor will receive our bank details; continentals my (Dutch) BIC and IBAN numbers, islanders who want to pay in sterling will receive Sue’s account number and sort code.
On Saturday 28 January half the population of Cormatin will play bingo on your behalf for 3 prizes well worth the money:
1. a Techwood 32 “ flatscreen TV-set (PAL & SECAM)
2. a Life’s Good home cinema
3. a ham

None of these goods will go off shortly!
I hope this call for help will have the same effect as last year; all contributors receive a well meant “thank you very much” in advance.

People’s democracy

No day goes by in France without big numbers of Frenchmen being “en colère” about something somewhere. Either the farmers, or the fishermen, or the railroad workers, or the judges are infuriated about something, and most of the time this results in big demonstrations in Paris or near a Préfecture in the neighbourhood. Abandoning a required right or reforming traditional institutions is always a good reason to take to the streets for the average Frenchman. Being an old left winger, I always get a kick when I see streets full of people, waving red flags, marching towards their goal. One of the most recent protests here were aimed against transforming one of the main East-West roads of France, the N79 (RCEA, Route Centre Europe Atlantique) from Route Nationale into a toll road. Understandable that this does not go down well with people who are using the N79 day in day out to travel from home to work and vice versa. Another recent protest was aimed against privatising La Poste. And even though the government had already promised that La Poste would not be privatised directly, the French left wing had organised a nation wide “referendum”, to see what the population thought of privatisation. Throughout the country there were voting boxes strategically placed near post offices, and the CGT (the biggest French union) announced the next day, that an overwhelming majority of the 2 million “voters” had said “No” to privatisation.
My first encounter with demonstrating “the French way” was in 2005. There was going to be a European Union protest against the Bolkestein directive (Wikipedia) in Brussels. Since I was a member of one of the bigger Dutch unions, FNV Bondgenoten, I joined the crowd.
In the bus on the way to Brussels all Unionists received a parcel, containing a dull bread roll with ham, an even duller one with cheese, an apple and a carton of orange juice. Once in Brussels we were guided to the place from where the demonstration was supposed to start. The FNV was to start in between Unionists from Poland (Solidarność) and France (CGT). And it only dawned on me then, that for the French a demonstration is a bit more like an outing on a nice summer’s day than for the grim Polish and the serious Dutch. While we were desperately trying to rinse our bread rolls down, our neighbours of the CGT opened their picnic baskets. A tablecloth was draped over a bench on the side of the road, and out came the French loafs, with all sorts of sausages and cheeses, and last but not least, bottles of wine and glasses. When you see this, would you not like to take part in a demonstration against no matter what, every day?

The website of La Tuilerie de Chazelle

A bit boring, this time!

Yesterday it was 11 November, the day when in many countries the armistice of 1918 which ended the First World War is celebrated and remembered. Strangely enough (at least in my eyes) is the wreath laying of 11 November the one that is attended by the biggest crowd, far bigger than the one on July the 14th. Unfortunately the man who normally unwillingly turns these events into something more amusing than just a wreath laying, Monsieur P., was unable to attend. The wreath laying takes since 2009 on instigation of Monsieur P. place at both monuments, the one for those fallen during the wars in Cormatin, and the one for the deportees at Bois Dernier. Everything worked smoothly this time. The traditional flag-bearer, Monsieur N., took Monsieur P.’s place to operate the CD-player, and the flag was this time carried by Monsieur G. No ramshackle old cassette-deck, no hick-up in the Marseillaise, no frantic searching for the off-button, no, actually everything went too smoothly...
The attendance however was so unexpectedly big, that the mayor had to move the venue for the vin d’honneur from the small Café de la Poste (which was supposed to host the drinks) to the bigger Les Blés d’Or.

That these sort of last-minute logistic changes often cannot be implemented without any problems was proven by the fact that there were insufficient tables, chairs and even standing room available for the crowd. But the rest of the ceremony went like clockwork, after the mayor had uttered a few times the word “Bordel” (“What a mess!”) to the owner end the first drinks and snacks had been passed around. Let us hope that next time Monsieur P. will be present again; with him there has so far never been a dull moment!

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Sans Virus!

Some time ago, when we went to the Intermarché in Cluny for our shopping, we found part of the parking area closed off for works. Recently the works were completed, and it appeared that they had built two covered parking places, both with an intercom facility. We had no idea what these parking places were for; our best guess was a facility to return a rented van (the Intermarché rents out vans) outside opening hours of the supermarket.
Today a big sign revealed that we had been completely wrong. The parking places were part of a new service Intermarché is offering: “Le DRIVEINtermarché”. The client orders his shopping via internet, and indicates when he comes to pick up his shopping. He passes by at the agreed hour, parks his car at the intercom and announces his arrival. Somebody from Intermarché then comes to the parking area and delivers the shopping.
When I read this and thought about it for a second, I realised that this concept had disaster written all over it. Inhabitants from the villages around here ordering their shopping through internet?

First of all they would miss out on an endless conversation at the till whilst unloading their shopping trolley, followed by digging in a bottomless handbag looking for the chequebook, after which a pen has to be found as well. Then the cheque has to be signed and handed over, after which the said piece of paper disappears in and reappears a number of times from a magic black box which happens to verify the cheque. This whole procedure which so far has lasted at least 10 minutes is concluded by the stowing away of the shopping followed by an in-depth conversation about the neighbour’s cat. No Burgundian would miss out on something like this, would he?
Secondly, and that does not go just for the locals here but for big parts of France, computer illiteracy and fear of computer viruses are rather high in France compared to the UK or the Netherlands.
To illustrate this: a number of our French friends, amongst whom also business people, only open emails if they come from someone they know. All notorious carriers of computer viruses, such as films, jokes, web links, etc. are opened without any hesitation as long as they know the sender. However, one potter who works around here received a request for some home made pottery from my daughter, who had been there once and had bought some stuff there and then. The request was binned without being opened, for the simple reason that she did not know the name of the sender!
Another illustration: in our favourite quiz show every so often one of the prizes is a PC. This is always announced as “ordinateur avec écran plat, SANS VIRUS!”. One even finds these adverts on the internet.

I really wonder if it is at all possible to buy a brand new computer from a French retailer which contains a virus.
Anyway, to cut a long story short: I do not give this service a long life; I am pretty sure that soon the two parking spaces are going to be used for the rental vans…

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