French Letter: Can a new front door really cost as much as my childhood home?
Monday: Wet and windy. Autumn in Brittany can be wonderful, with bright, sunny days and trees turning, if not New England red, then pleasing shades of rust. The landscape still looks alive. But the season as it wears on loses all inhibitions, dumping rain in intense bursts, leaving roads slick and lanes awash with mud.
Normally, by mid-November, we would have switched the central heating on. But this year we have held off, mindful of the energy crisis and government advice to reduce our consumption of precious electricity. I have to say, though, I am tempted. My wife, Louisa, is leaving me – temporarily, I hope – at the end of the month to visit family and friends in New York. On the day she takes the train to Paris, thence to Charles de Gaulle, the heating is going on. If I must be home alone, I should at least be snug and warm.
Tuesday: to Rennes, 175 kilometres to the east, following a dental episode that involved my new implant installed four weeks previously falling out as we sat watching an old episode of Boston Legal. I nearly swallowed it, which could have been nasty, but managed to cough it up just in time. En route in our increasingly eccentric, nine-year-old Renault Mégane, whose GPS now thinks we live in the sea just off Cherbourg, we pull into a garage on the N12 to check the tires. Or at least we try to. The entrance to the station is totally blocked by a line of cars and lorries that stretches all the way back onto the main carriageway.
Odd, we think, but never mind. The next pit stop, fifty kilometres or so further on, is similarly chock-a-block, but we manage to negotiate our way to the pressure gauge, only to find that it is of a new, computerised kind that I am at a loss to understand. I attach the nozzle and nothing happens. If anything, I can hear air being sucked out of the tire. The instructions, in pictures, make no sense to me. Perhaps there is an app for it. If so, I don’t have it.
In Rennes, the dentist offers no apology for my recent mishap – which sorely marred my enjoyment of Boston Legal – but quickly sets about fitting a new implant, for which, he says, there will be no charge. I am disturbed, I have to say, when he twice drops a small metal tool with a pointy end in my mouth, which I am forced to retrieve each time while gagging before it disappears down my throat. But, being from Northern Ireland and therefore peculiarly British, I guard my sang froid, and make no complaint. “If I don’t see you again before your next appointment in January,” the good doctor says as I pull on my jacket, “ have a good Christmas and Bonne Année.”
It was as well that Louisa had filled the car with diesel the day before we set off, because, on the way home, still searching for my air-apparent, we find that one garage has completely run out of fuel and the next – small and usually reliable – is as congested as Piccadilly Circus at five o’clock on a Friday evening.
Wednesday: According to the local paper, the petrol shortage was the result of fear and paranoia. The strike at French oil refineries has yet to be resolved and everyone on the move is topping up wherever possible. Happily, whatever has gone wrong has not so far affected our local supply, so that we are able to fill up smugly from the pumps next to Intermarché. While waiting my turn, I notice that the adjacent car wash is back in action after being shut off during the long summer drought. I must tell my friend David, whose car hasn’t been washed since late June. It’s leased, he tells me, so not really his problem.
Thursday: I email Thierry at Logiprotec, the company that supplied and fitted our groundfloor windows a few years back to confirm that we wish to purchase a new front door. The existing door, which probably dates from the 1950s, is now paper-thin, as if suffering from bulimia, but its replacement, made of solid oak, with two glass panels, will set us back two-thousand-six-hundred-and-ninety euros, including VAT and labour, which is only slightly less than my father paid for the house I grew up in in Belfast in the 1950s.
At the pub, where we now sit in a semi-circle round the fire, a friend known to be careful with money gives me a run-down on prices at the pumps and at the shops, which he says are going crazy. He is not surprised by the cost of our new door. The good news, he informs me, is that our UK state pensions are set to rise by 10 per cent when the inflation rate in France is only 7 per cent. So, on one front at least, we might actually be quids-in.
Friday: The sun is shining. I have to draw the curtains so that I can see my computer screen. Louisa is busy in the kitchen treating the walls for mould, using tissues saturated with bleach and vinegar. I realise, with a sigh, that we are going to have to have external insulation fitted to the side of the house most exposed to the elements. Someone told me recently that the Government will, if pressed, pay a goodly proportion of the cost of this, but I’m exhausted just thinking about the palaver of it all.
On the radio, there is talk of a crisis facing French winegrowers. Rising temperatures in the more southerly regions, including Bordeaux and Burgundy, are starting to shrivel the traditionally used grapes, forcing growers to look at new varieties, which may or may not be as good. Even the Champagne Country, northeast of Paris, could be affected. But despair ye not. Years of plenty may lie ahead for English wine, which is coming into its own as a result not just of improving skills, but of climate change. And the French are moving in, offering top-euro for the best vineyards. Who knows? Twenty years from now, the race to bring the first Beaujolais nouveau to London may just start in Kent.