Let France be unconfined

In rural France, déconfinement is well underway and life is returning to what passes for normal in a post-traumatic society.

Yesterday, outside one of the newly re-opened bars in our part of Brittany, groups of newly arrived customers greeted each other with bear-hugs and kisses on the cheek. Inside, the barman handed out masks which are required by law when standing or moving about, but not when sitting at one’s table. Unopened, these were politely placed on the tables next to the drinks.

In the town square, the Café de la Place, run by a Breton couple who worked in the hospitality business in Paris for 20 years, now boasts an elaborate pergola that projects over the pavement and into the adjacent car park. We are not allowed to drink at the bar, but everything else is more or less as it was, including three oysters and a glass of white wine for six euros-fifty.

The local doctors – six of them in one of two surgeries covering the town and its immediate surrounds – are once more doing a roaring trade. During the lockdown, the medics were there, dressed in white coats and masks, but most of the French stayed away, afraid they might catch the lurgi. I went to see my man, Dr Tison, who has been looking after me for the last 20 years. I was suffering from a surprise attack of vertigo and was given a full thirty-minute examination followed by an appointment with a locally-based cardiologist – “just to be sure”.

The specialist, who saw me two days later, fitted me with a heart monitor. The next day, he reported, rather gruffly I thought, that there was nothing the matter with me but that if I wanted to make old bones I needed to have my heart checked every 12 months, not every 12 years!

During the lockdown, my wife was able to keep an appointment with her dentist, who turned out to be a locum because the woman she normally sees – a rather striking young Romanian woman – was on maternity leave. She also dropped in to see her optician, who, in accordance with a pre-Covid undertaking, arranged to provide her with a spare pair of glasses within ten days at a cost of one euro. Specsavers eat your heart out.

Given the current anxiety over non-coronavirus treatments in the UK, you will be interested to learn about a friend of who suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, a condition that required him to spend two days a week in hospital in Rennes. He had been given just three months to live but was told last month, out of the blue, that a suitable liver had been round and that a transplant operation had been scheduled for the following day – this at the height of the Covid scare. The resulting surgery was a success and my friend is now visited twice each week in his home to receive post-operative care.

If that is the new normal, I can live with it. More to the point, so can my friend.

In the retail sector, Casino, one of our two local supermarkets, which had closed down in the spring, miraculously re-opened two weeks ago with an emphasis on organic produce. So, for a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants, we have two supermarkets, three bars, two doctors’ surgeries, two dentists, a florist’s (naturally), a butcher’s, a garden centre and two boulangeries – though, alas, as of last year, no newsagent.

Inevitably, the situation in Paris is somewhat different. I spoke to a friend of mine this morning who manages a branch of Picard, the French equivalent of Iceland, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the swanky suburb where Nicolas Sarkozy once served as mayor. He told me that his customers rarely bothered with masks and were just as arrogant and demanding as ever. “As far as Parisians are concerned,” he said, “rules are for other people, not them.”

The capital’s bars and cafés re-opened for business more than a week ago, but the regulations are such that the newly-cobbled-together street terrasses, spilling onto the streets, remain less than half-full. The Metro, it seems, is a nightmare: intending passengers have to wait, typically, for 15-20 minutes before it is their turn to board a train, and the service stops at ten-thirty instead of the usual 1.30 in the morning. Yesterday, at Chatalet, the system’s biggest interchange, normally so thronged with people as to be unbearable, there were no more than a dozen people at seven o’clock in the evening.

One thing that is particularly noticeable, my friend told me, is the lack of tourists. “Everyone on the streets is speaking French. It is very strange.”

Politically, there has been little fallout thus far from the President’s third address to the nation during the current crisis, delivered from the Élysée on Sunday night. Macron was less doomladen this time round. His message, aside from the latest announcements on lifting the lockdown, was that the economy would somehow survive what was happening and that Europe was the key that would open the door to renewed prosperity.

My friend was not impressed.

But the surest indicator so far that life, however grindingly, is returning to normal in France was the appearance on the streets yesterday of thousands of healthworkers, including doctors and nurses, demanding that Macron keep his promise to increase pay and improve conditions in hospitals and other health facilities across the country.

“Fini les applaudissements, place aux rassemblements!” – “Enough applause, time for action” – was the slogan. Perhaps France and England are not so different after all.