O. Oaks
Symbol of England. But in France I live surrounded by dense oak woods, with tall ancient trees. We have a large oak wood on our property called “Le bois de Vinaigre.” This year I am planting fifty oak saplings. And the next year. And the next.
P. Paris
I love living in London. Perhaps the only other city I could move to would be Paris. Yet Paris, beside London, seems so small. In an hour or less you can walk from Montparnasse to Montmartre, but an hour’s walk in London hardly gets you anywhere.
I spent a week in Paris in 1969 when I was seventeen, sleeping on the floor of a house on the Ile St Louis, planning the great adventure of the hitch-hike to the Mediterranean coast. Even then my callow eyes were struck by the city’s classy beauty. Now I go to Paris several times a year and, banal observation though it is, its claim to be the most beautiful great city of the world is effortlessly re-established.
Q. Quiet
Nowhere is as quiet as our house in France. In bed at night with the shutters closed the loudest sound you hear is the blood rushing in your ears. In the total darkness of the bedroom it is almost as if you are taking part in a sensory-deprivation experiment. The consequence of this silence in the night is that you become abnormally sensitive to noise in the day. The sound of birds — the cuckoo’s call echoing through the woods — the angry sound of distant chainsaws, the creak of old beams, the battering of a stink-bug against a light shade, rain spitting on window panes, the hum of bees in the lavender, the wind in the big oaks. These are the sounds of la France profonde.
R. Republicanism
A few days ago, I flew from Edinburgh to London on the same plane as Prince William, the future king of Great Britain. The plane was absolutely full but this twenty-two-year-old young man sat beside his detective and around them was a protective ring of nine empty seats. Who paid for all these empty seats, I wondered? The British tax-payer? Why did he have to have nine seats, three full rows, empty? Why were we being kept at such a distance? I suspect the official answer would have been security but I bet the real reason is privacy. They just don’t want anybody getting too close to a royal. In that case I would reply: then don’t travel on commercial airlines, don’t pretend you’re a “normal” passenger catching a normal plane like anyone else — why not fly in one of your royal aeroplanes, the ones that we pay for anyway.
It was not Prince William’s fault — he’s a nice enough lad, by all accounts — but the symbol of this young university student with his expensive and needless cordon sanitaire made me think. It reminded me of the undying hierarchical structure of British life: it was a sour indication of our unhealthy obsession with royalty and aristocracy and titles of all kinds.
I know that the fact I’ve been living on and off in France for the past ten years has made this tendency in me — this anti-royal, anti-aristo, anti-class feeling — more pronounced. It’s not because France has no class-system — every society has a class-system of some kind, every society contains snobbery — but the saving grace is that because France is a republic the notion that every citizen is as good as the next seems hardwired into the social life you lead. I feel that in my dealings with the French men and women that I meet — whether a captain of industry or a plumber, a femme de ménage or a novelist, a mayor or a schoolteacher, a vigneron or a député—there is an implicit and strong egalitarianism that functions in that encounter. We are all “monsieur” or “madame”; no one need defer or kow-tow; no one need assume superiority or inferiority. I find it enormously refreshing to relate and communicate with other people in France because I know that when I cross the Channel back to England I go back to the Land of Rank and Artificial Status. And, moreover, I go back to a country where so many judgements and aspirations, so many ideas of success and failure are determined by your perceived social classification. Furthermore, and even worse, this social ranking has nothing to do with ability or talent or achievement. It’s all a result of an accident of birth or an expression of patronage.
I think that this is an iniquitous and degenerate situation and it breeds other noxious side effects: snobbery, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, class-hatred, social shame and so on. Almost everything I dislike about British society can be traced back to this type of aristocratic ranking and its outmoded values.
S. South
Where I live in France is, I feel, where northern Europe ends and the south — the “South”—begins. Some people place that demarcating line further north at the Loire valley, but for me it is signified by the Dordogne river. The transition is marked: five miles north of the Dordogne feels and looks completely different from five miles south. Périgueux, the capital of the Périgord, possesses a quite different ambience from its regional rival, Bergerac, forty kilometres south, and straddling the river. A friend of mine, a Bergeracois who lives in Périgueux and works in Bergerac, tells me that the weather is different too and that those forty kilometres mean that Bergerac is usually a noticeable few degrees warmer. It’s hard to determine what’s different about north of the Dordogne — maybe it is something fundamentally atmospheric, a less luminous quality of the light, a preponderance of dark pine woods — but once you cross the river you notice some distinct change has taken place — the landscape is gentler, the skies seem higher, the air is sweeter. There are other more easily verifiable, more obvious signs of the south too: not just the clustered vineyards but also, in summer, the fields of sunflowers and maize and the pale mottled salmon-pink tiles on the low farm buildings and the great pitched roofs of their barns. And yet here we are not in the citrus belt, no oranges or lemons will survive the winter frosts and neither will you see any olive groves; but as you venture south to the Lot valley, down past Agen towards Toulouse, the landscape is imbued with a hint of the approaching Mediterranean, another few hundred kilometres away, but present somehow in the mineral, pure quality of the sunlight, in the flaking crépis of the rural churches, the shuttered fastness of the villages at noon.
T. Tomatoes
In our vegetable garden in France we grow, routinely, between fifteen and twenty varieties of tomatoes. In July and August I eat a flavour-rich tomato salad at least once a day — salads composed of tomatoes coloured black, purple, yellow, green and orange as well as the more normal red. I find it almost impossible to eat a tomato in England as a consequence. So if there is one fruit I particularly associate with my life in France it is the tomato.
U. Underground
I travel on the London Underground and (less frequently) on the Paris Métro: both are subterranean modes of transport but there all comparisons effectively end. Amongst the many things the British really, truly envy France are — in pride of place — the Lycée system and the Métro, and the TGVs.
V. Vin
When I occasionally begin to worry about how much wine I drink each day I console myself — or excuse myself — with the thought that I drink wine like a French person. It seems to me almost sinful to sit down to eat food without a glass of wine. And how does one signal the end of the working day without opening a bottle?
When we bought our house in France there was an old vineyard attached. Our farmer — who is also a major vigneron in his own right — suggested we tear out the old vines and replant them. Now we have our own small vineyard that produces 7,000 bottles a year: a fruity, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon, appellation Côtes de Bergerac contrôlée. Our first vintage was 1996; 2003 sits in its vats awaiting transfer to its oak barrels. I don’t claim to be any kind of a wine expert but living beside a vineyard has given me a new understanding of this amazing drink, of how the place, the weather and the cultivation — and the luck — shape the end product. Completely impossible, now, to live without it.