Food and More Reflections

Madam and I (and little Pip) have lived in France for 5 years now - do we like it? Well, up to a "Point Lord Copper". There is a lot to like about France and the French, but there are disappointments. Take the food for instance, I am greedy - I like my food. Before we left England "kind friends" liked to point out how fat I would get on "all that lovely French food"; that has not proved to be the case; French food has been a great disappointment. The French seem to have turned aside from their famed culinary skills and prefer to stuff their systems with Pizzas, Burgers and other such fast food rubbish. The old family Resto seems to have pretty much disappeared. French cooks seem happy to serve fast food as fast as the French public is happy to shovel the rubbish down its' collective gut. Very sad, but at least it has removed any tendency I might have to overeat. My great sadness is "The Beef". When I first arrived in France, I used to look at the beautiful 'beef on the hoof' feeding in the pastures and salivate; it was not to be. French butchery is a complete disgrace. Meat is not hung, indeed, I understand that it is an offence under French law to sell meat that is more than 3 days old. This is all the fault of the British, of course. They get blamed for inventing 'Mad Cow Disease' (as though the nastiness was completely unknown in France). This means that any steak offered for sale will be marked (V.B.F) - Viandes Bovine Francais - steak that is only suitable for re-soling a boot. I have given up trying to chomp French beef - very sad.

We first went to the Vienne (West Central - Poitiers), it was not a part we knew, but it seemed worth a punt because Madame and I are monstrous keen on hunting. I had tried French hunting back in the 1980s and greatly enjoyed it. According to the official map of the Society of Venerie, the Vienne had the largest number of packs of hounds per square kilometre of anywhere in France. A man told me that it was possible to hunt 7 days a week in the Vienne. This may have been true - what is also true is that in five years - I did not have one day that I remember with pleasure. French hunting had greatly changed for the worse in the previous decade. The great hunts that I could remember were no longer possible. Hunting had become 'parked'. For example, our local hunt that pursued both Stag and Boar, lived in a forest of 30,000 acres. After the Hitler war the noble owner was thought to have been too sympathetic in his approach to the German occupiers, so his house was burned down and he moved away. He put in a 9ft stock proof fence around the forest and leased the sporting rights. I used to hunt there a bit, but churning round the same bit of forest, day after day, can quickly lose its' charm. The local farmers told me that there used to be great hunts out of the forest, but as with the tender 'beef', those days were gone.
These days I fear the 'Parking Craze' has increased. I can see the reason for the landowners; parks can be stocked. Busy main roads avoided and insurance costs reduced. Gone are the days when a hunt would be accompanied by its' own van of Gendarmes who held up lesser traffic when hounds had to cross a main road. The modern sort of hunting may be practical, but it lacks excitement and zest. There was plenty of hunting in the Vienne, but it had no sparkle.

Now we have moved to Normandy and we are hoping for a fresh start. What about the French? We have met many pleasant and helpful French. The big problem is that the French are deeply engrained with petty bureaucracy. Take a problem - I was christened Robert, William Frederick Poole. All my life I have been known as William, or one of the variations. The French do not go in for multi prenames - they have hyphens - Jean-Paul; Sophie-Anne etc. so to the French bureaucracy I am, Poole-Robert. If you try to change it they will object. For instance: I needed to change my mobile phone. My wife took the old one to the Orange shop in the town. "But", said the woman, "You must bring Msr Poole's passport". So she did. "But", said the woman, "you must have the written permission to use it". To cut a long story short, it took Mrs P six visits to Orange - I could not be William, my name was officially Robert and so on.
You may think that petty officialdom is an annoying joke, but the results can be tragic. Do you remember Srebrenicia in 1995? The inhabitants of the town had a UN protection force of Dutch troops. The Dutch asked their French Commander for an air-strike to stop the Serbs shelling the town. "No", said the French General - "the Dutch have filled in the wrong form". Because of this bit of petty lunacy - 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered.
A fine example of Bumble-dum.