Marché de Noël

Yes, the season is upon us and like all the other Mum's I will be in the market place come Monday. We may even have some snow according to the Meteo, just to add that festive touch. All the school children have been working hard creating gold painted angels from pasta, hand-made Christmas cards and dough baked tree decorations.

My son has been going around singing Petit Papa Noël for the last 3 weeks ,(see below for lyrics), and the man himself is due to put in an appearance on the last day of school. Apparently, one quick witted little chap last year noticed that Petit Papa Noël sported the same shoes as the headmaster! That was explained away as both gentlemen having extremely good taste.

Well all that remains is for me to wish everyone, everywhere a Very Merry Christmas or as we say round here Joyeux Noël.

Petit Papa Noël

C'est la belle nuit de Noël
La neige étend son manteau blanc
Et les yeux levés vers le ciel
À genoux, les petits enfants
Avant de fermer les paupières
Font une dernière prière.

Translation

It's a beautiful Christmas night
Snow spreads its white coat
And eyes lift toward the sky
On their knees, small children
Before closing their eyes
Say a last prayer.


Petit papa Noël
Quand tu descendras du ciel
Avec des jouets par milliers
N'oublie pas mon petit soulier.
Mais avant de partir
Il faudra bien te couvrir
Dehors tu vas avoir si froid
C'est un peu à cause de moi.

Translation

Little Santa Claus
When you come down from the sky
With thousands of toys
Don't forget my little stocking.
But before you leave
You should dress well
Outside you will be so cold
And it's kind of my fault.


Le marchand de sable est passé
Les enfants vont faire dodo
Et tu vas pouvoir commencer
Avec ta hotte sur le dos
Au son des cloches des églises
Ta distribution de surprises.

Translation

The sandman has passed
The children are going to sleep
And you will be able to begin,
With your sack on your back,
To the sound of church bells,
Your distribution of surprises.

Refrain

Il me tarde que le jour se lève
Pour voir si tu m'as apporté
Tous les beaux joujoux que je vois en rêve
Et que je t'ai commandés.

Translation

I can't wait for sunrise
To see if you brought me
All the lovely toys that I see in my dreams
And that I ordered from you.


Refrain

Et quand tu seras sur ton beau nuage
Viens d'abord sur notre maison
Je n'ai pas été tous les jours très sage
Mais j'en demande pardon.

Refrain

Translation

And when you are on your beautiful cloud
Come first to our house
I wasn't always very good
But I ask for your forgiveness.


Refrain

La Rentrée - (with junk mail)

Back in May I put the finishing touches to my school dossier,(yes another one!), to ensure that my son was enrolled for maternelle.

In our village La Rentrée actually takes place during the last week of August as the children here do not go to school on Saturday mornings.

So far, all has gone well - although why shouldn't it when according to my son all he does is play velo! I am sure there must be slightly more to his day than that.

Whilst I expect the normal school notices of after school activities what I can't believe is the amount of publicity that goes into all the pigeon holes. All sorts of leaflets about childrens reading books, language courses, back packs, bedding. I get enough junk mail in my normal boîtes aux lettres at home.

I am thinking of putting a huge notice up, alongside the rather cute painting of a lapin that marks out Théo's place, saying Pas de Pub - NO JUNK MAIL.

La Rentrée

La fin de l'été

Ok here come the excuses : people staying, fête after fête after fête, devising 1000 ways to entertain a 3 yr old during the school hols etc etc. But finally, I have some "me" time to devote to my blog.

I once read that at one American school the teachers returning for the 1st day after the Summer hols were met by Mums holding a banner saying "welcome back - we have missed you!". I know how they feel ....

Not only am I looking forward to the new school term I am also looking forward to only seeing the number plate 30 around the town, getting a seat in my local cafe, my favourites breads, quiches and patisseries not having sold out by 9.45am, no queues in our local supermarket, managing to walk around the local farmers market once more. Oh the list is endless. I am turning into a moaning minnie!

The season of "mists and mellow fruitfulness" will soon be here and I for one cannot wait. New wines to be sampled, chasse au sanglier, scouring the woods for cepes and other members of the fungi family.

Celebrations for la fin de l'été start tomorrow with a blackberry picking session followed by the making of a very big blackberry and apple crumble. Miam, miam.

Out of the mouths of babes!!!

My adorable 3 year old son Théo jumped into our bed this morning and started giving me a cuddle. What a nice way to start the day I thought as he started stroking my hair and face.

"Mummy, what's that?" he asked as one of his chubby little fingers came to rest upon my cheek. Before I could answer he said, "I know - it's a crack". That woke me from my revery. I would love to say I cracked up (ha ha), but I didn't.

Well out of the mouths of babes.....

Election Fever

Quel différence between the election apathy in the UK and election fever over here in France. Whatever your politics, you can only be impressed and swept along by all the fervour. There are 236 people in our village eligible to vote and during the first round 216 of them had ticked a box.

This election is an extremely important one for the French - the country is at a crossroads. Which road will they choose to go down?

Below is an extremely interesting article titled "Unlike us, the French do it all wrong but still get life so right " published in The Times on April 22, 2007 by Simon Jenkins.
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Both France and Britain are about to change their leaders. The French will do so by ballot, the British by bistro.

The French are staging a raucous two-ring circus to elect their new president, involving a first vote today and another in two weeks’ time. The British have already been told who is to lead them. It was ordained 13 years ago by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the Granita restaurant in Islington, north London. Blair would be prime minister first provided he ensured Brown would follow him.

In never moving Brown from the security of the Treasury and packing the cabinet with wimps and half-wits, Blair has been as good as his word, despite regarding Brown as unworthy of the office. The voters can get stuffed. While France practises the politics of Wilkes, Paine and Mill, Britain borrows from Louis XIV.

Modern elections are festivals of indecent exposure. They display politicians in all their nakedness and in doing so reveal much about the countries they purport to lead. The French election has been no exception. It has not been a pleasant spectacle for Brussels oligarchs or Americans who like to lump all Europeans together as homogeneous. It has peeled away the skin and shown France worried, vulnerable, proud, vital, stylish and unlike anywhere else — in other words, French.

Two years ago the French (and the Dutch) did Europe a signal service by voting against a new European constitution. They thereby relieved Britain of the necessity of doing the same. We forget how those referendums shattered Labour’s establishment. Peter Hain, now running for Labour’s deputy leadership, deceitfully called the new constitution merely “a tidying up operation”. Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock and Jack Straw sat around after the French vote like Roman cardinals contemplating Luther’s Reformation, glumly demanding a “period of sober reflection”. José Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, declared a “risk of contagion” across Europe if the referendums continued. The French and Dutch should vote again and do so “until they get it right”. Only in Brussels is democracy considered a disease.

The French vote was, of course, peculiar. The vote against the new constitution was not (as it would have been in Britain) because it was too centralist and corporatist. The French “no” lobby’s case was that Europe was becoming too liberal, too open-market and thus threatening France’s cartelised public sector and restrictive labour laws. Worse, an expanded Europe would put French jobs at the mercy of east Europeans. France, co-founder of the new Europe, now rejected its pan-Europeanism. It was a reactionary vote but it worked. Indeed it may be called in aid again if the Anglo-German plan to revive the constitution as “just a treaty” goes ahead. Blair, eager for some European credentials before he retires, will argue that a treaty would need no referendums and can be slipped through before Brown takes over. Of course Europe needs a new constitution/ treaty, but not this one and not without a vote.

A similar chauvinism has been reflected in the election campaign. The contest between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolãne Royal has only superficially displayed the new politics, where personality and vision are all and policy programmes unimportant. The right-wing Sarkozy’s desire to “get France back to work” is closest to Britain’s Thatcherite consensus, but Thatcherism is not something he would dare advocate. The left-wing Royal is corporatist, conservative and protectionist. She is pledged to maintain the 35-hour week, state benefits and guarantee employment and housing tenure, despite their contribution to a devastating 22% youth unemployment rate.

Both these candidates, along with the centrist François Bayrou, share a nationalism which, to outsiders, seems old-fashioned and Gaullist. Nervous about immigration, passionate for the public sector and defensive of the state, they could not be farther from the reform programmes being sought in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.

None of them would suggest opening French agriculture to world competition. None would hint at multiculturalism in a country whose southern shores are besieged by Muslim and north African migrants. None would attack the scale of the public sector, which still owns or controls all public utilities and has half of all adults dependent on it. One of Sarkozy’s final rallies was in a boiler-making plant where he pledged to protect French manufacturing against foreign competition.

This conservatism evokes the derision of Britons eager to repay the smugness that France hurled at us during the horrors of the 1970s. They point to the 30,000 French who pour into Britain looking for work each year, drawn by a more open and dynamic economy. It takes two days to set up a company in Britain, three months in France. From the Huguenots and the Orléanists to the Communards and the resistance, Britain has long been accustomed to accepting refugees from France’s political and military disasters. Today critics cite French businessmen building factories in Kent. They see Paris declining into a sort of Venice on dry land, industries awash in subsidies and stuck in the doldrums, French culture perpetually “en crise”.

Yet such derision rarely turns over the coin. It does not mention that more Britons now migrate to France than vice-versa (42,000 in 2005). They are drawn by the quality of life that attracts 7.3m British holidaymakers a year and 50,000 British second-home owners. There are few French pleasure seekers pouring the other way. France takes seriously the protection of its urban and rural environment. It values civic life: witness the cleanliness, security and confidence of municipalities there compared with Britain’s. Public services work. France’s trains run far and fast. Towns and cities, parks and museums are beautiful — as are even motorway service stations. The public realm in France has taste and bravura. In Britain it is grotty, largely because it is under the aegis of Whitehall and Westminster.

Europeans used to fight to get into Britain’s NHS hospitals. Not any more. Today the flight from these demoralised, MRSA-ridden places to France’s immaculate hospitals is becoming a flood. When last year Jacques Chirac warned that to pursue British policies risked having to accept Britain’s quality of life, his audience laughed. The risk was unthinkable.

A recent study of Anglo-French relations, That Sweet Enemy by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, delighted in the implacable polarity of these two cultures. It stretches back and forward through centuries of conflict to such piquant contrasts as the British official complaining that something “might work in theory but not in practice” while a French counterpart complains that “it might work in practice but not in theory”. Did not Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister inform the baffled Jim Hacker that Britain’s nuclear missiles were targeted not on Moscow but on Paris? Have not the Royal Navy’s bases always faced the French coast and not Germany or the Atlantic?

This is all good clean fun. Where it becomes less attractive is when British comment on other countries takes as its basic premise that they would be better off if only they were run like Britain (or America). The depiction of Chirac as an absurd Bourbon prince may have had a grain of truth in it, but Chirac ran France as the French desired, as did François Mitterrand and other presidents before him. Hence his constant capitulation to pressure from the unions and farm lobbies, irrespective of France’s hypocritical claim to be “a good European”.

Protectionism is, in every sense of the word, part of the French character. It is the privilege of a sovereign state, as it is the right of its citizens to choose and pay for it.

A casualty of globalisation has been a growing intolerance of political diversity, diversity not just of national personality but also of ideology, political priority and system of government. I may not share France’s view of the world and may believe it wrong to deny the Thatcherite reformation, as in varying degrees do all today’s candidates. But as Voltaire, the greatest of Frenchmen, insisted, the right that most needs defending is the right to be wrong.

On this day of the French election, long live difference.

simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk