Tag: Poitiers Places

Cobblers to maple syrup!

Monday

I can’t remember when I last got a pair of shoes soled or heeled. The development of synthetic materials means that shoe repair is probably not a growth industry. That said, Poitiers has a sprinkling of cordonneries that seem to be doing a reasonable trade. Good luck to them. In his book Uncommon Pursuits, historian Eric Hobsbawm devotes a chapter to shoemakers and menders and, having read it, I have a new-found respect for them

Throughout history, they have had a reputation for being political radicals. George Fox, one of the founders of the Quaker movement, was a shoemaker. Their role as working-class spokesmen and organisers in nineteenth-century England is well documented in studies of the anti-enclosure ‘Swing’ Riots of 1830 and of the Chartist movement. In France in 1789, twenty-eight shoemakers were involved in the Storming of the Bastille, and they were the most prominent group amongst those arrested for opposing the coup d’état of 1851. According to historian Jacques Rougerie, the workers involved in the Paris Commune of 1871 who suffered the highest proportion of deportations were, ‘of course, as always, the shoemakers’.

Monsieur L Guichard, Rue Carnot

There are various theories as to how these craftsmen got their reputation for radicalism, too many to go into in any detail here. The work was, at least to some extent, selected by men not capable of being involved in more conventionally valued physical activities. Small, weak, or physically handicapped boys were habitually put to this trade, and this may have provided an incentive to acquire other kinds of prestige. Shoemakers working together in workshops were among those crafts (which also included tailors and cigar-makers) that developed the institution of the ‘reader’: one of the men taking turns to read newspapers or books out aloud. The shoemaker’s work thus permitted thinking and discussion while working. The journeyman shoe-repairer travelling from village to village would be exposed to the culture and politics of a wider world, and the lightness of his toolkit made it easier than in some other trades to carry books with him. He was self-employed and needed by all. He did not rely on wealthy patrons or clients, so he could express his opinions without the risk of losing his job or his customers. There is much more in Mr Hobsbawm’s book, which is well worth seeking out.

Monsieur P. Mallet, Rue de La Tranchée

Tuesday

One of the joys of living in France is, of course, the food; the wonderful fresh produce available in the markets, the wine, the wide range of restaurants. There are, however, some odd little quirks in the French food world. I still can’t get my head round the fact that you can buy tinned Brussels sprouts here. Tripe is regarded as a luxury, and as for the ingredients (and smell) of andouillette sausages … According to Wikipedia, an andouillette has ‘a strong, distinctive odour related to its intestinal origins and components’, which is a diplomatic way of saying they smell of … er … faeces. ‘Although sometimes repellent to the uninitiated, this aspect of andouillette is prized by its devotees.’ They are welcome to them.

It’s artisanal, innit?

Here in Poitiers, the latest gastronomic quirk is the opening of Chien Chaud, an ‘artisanal hot doguerie’ on Rue Carnot. They offer a wide variety of hot dogs, including the Classic New York (onions, mustard, and ketchup), El Gringo (peppers, guacamole, and jalapenos), and Don Corleone (sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, and parmesan crisps). They come in at about €7 each, and you can have nachos or coleslaw with them. Purely in the interests of research, Madame and I have tried them (a Don Corleone for me and a Classic for her). The verdict: very tasty, but maybe not quite enough for a meal.

Do you want relish with that?

Wednesday

A strange dream last night. I’m in a pub in Wandsworth with Sir Anthony Hopkins and Steve McQueen. I’d been doing some sort of clerical job for Sir Anthony and he’d suggested a drink when we’d finished. Over pints of bitter, he is telling a funny story about how he once managed to lose his ticket while travelling on the Isle of Wight ferry. As is the way with dreams, we suddenly move on. It’s now late evening, and we are walking in Fulham, looking for another pub. Sir Anthony abruptly decides that he wants to go home. This turns out be a flat nearby that he’s renting from my aunt. He says goodbye and leaves me and Steve McQueen standing in Fulham Palace Road. At this point I wake up.

Later this morning, I remembered reading an article in yesterday’s Times about Sir Anthony Hopkins (he’s just celebrated his 83rd birthday), which probably accounts for his presence in the dream. However, I haven’t a clue as to what Steve McQueen was doing there. He didn’t say a single word throughout the whole thing. Mind you, he always struck me as a bit of a miserable sod.

Thursday

Do you want syrup with that?

Another strange new food outlet has opened: a Canadian shop in the Cordeliers shopping mall. It sells sirop d’érable (maple syrup), which is fair enough; the maple leaf is, after all, Canada’s national symbol. It also sells a variety of confectionery, along with Canadian rum, brandy, and whisky, nearly all which are steeped in, or infused with, sodding maple syrup. It reminds me of the Two Ronnies sketch about the restaurant that only sells rook. They even sell tins of baked beans in the stuff. (Again, for research purposes, I have bought one of these.) Our neighbour Natalie tells us that the Canadian shop is a boutique éphémère (sounds so much classier than ‘pop-up shop’, doesn’t it?)

Friday

Prime Minister Jean Castex announced the new Covid-related measures at a press conference last night. The ban on people travelling from the UK will remain in place until further notice to minimise spreading the variant britannique. Bars, restaurants, and cafés will remain closed until at least mid-February. Eight additional departments (mainly located in the east of the country) have had their curfew brought forward to 18:00. For the rest of us, the existing 20:00 curfew will be maintained, and reviewed on January 20. According to the Prime Minister, ‘the health situation has become more fragile in the past few weeks … I cannot rule out that we will have to take additional national measures in the coming days if needed.’

Meanwhile in the UK, the predicted end-point is slowly but steadily being moved on. On Monday, in his press conference confirming the lockdown, Boris Johnson spoke of February. By Wednesday, this had become April. I’m now more or less resigned to it being June or July before we will be able to visit the UK.

***

Things I’ve learnt this week:

The national anthem of Bangladesh includes the lines: ‘The fragrance from your mango groves / Makes me wild with joy.’

Kummerspeck (‘grief bacon’) is German for the weight put on from eating too much when feeling sorry for yourself.

The French for a walkie-talkie is un talkie-walkie.

Bye Bye Boulangerie

Sadly, La Pâtisserie Blossac in Rue de la Tranchée closed last Sunday. The proprietors, Serge and Isabelle Richefort, are finally retiring, thirty-seven years after Isabelle, an accountant by training, joined up with her brother to start the business. A group of customers gathered together for a small celebration at the shop on the Friday before the closure.

This is the third boulangerie we’ve seen closed since we moved here in April 2018, and it follows a pattern that is being seen throughout France. One reason for this is the general decline in bread consumption. According to the National Association of French Millers (ANMF), people in France are shunning baguettes in favour of healthier options. French people are now, on average, eating 120 grammes of bread per day, compared to 150 g in 2003 and a hefty 325 g in 1950.

But there is another aspect to this story. Serge and Isabelle belong to an endangered species. The term boulangerie is reserved for bakeries where the bread is prepared and baked on site; frozen or pre-baked products are not allowed. There are still around 32,000 traditional boulangeries in France, but the number is decreasing at a rate of about 1,200 a year. Young people are no longer drawn to the lengthy hours of the traditional bakers who live above the shop. Shopping malls have taken root on the periphery of rural areas, drawing in people who are content to buy at supermarkets or chains, such as Paul, La Panetière, and La Mie Câline – companies that get their products from mills which supply ‘mixes’ (mixtures of flour, improvers, and various ingredients) which simply require reheating. There are even baguette vending machines. All well and good, but for many people, particularly in more isolated areas, the loss of a boulangerie is also the loss of a community hub, a place to meet and chat while waiting in line for the daily baguette or the weekend eclairs. The decline in numbers is reminiscent of that of village pubs in England.

Quelle horreur !!

For all the decline in bread consumption, the French still take their baguettes very seriously, They consume a staggering 10 billion of them every year, which averages out at about 150 per head of population. In 1993, in an attempt to combat the creeping industrialisation of the bread-making process, the government, under prime minster Édouard Balladur, passed a law saying that the only ingredient allowed in a “baguette tradition” are wheat flour, water, salt, and yeast or sourdough. It must be baked on the premises and nothing must have been frozen in its preparation. If you can buy “une tradition” you know you are in a genuine boulangerie.

At, the same time as the Balladur act, in another attempt to garner support for traditional boulangeries, the city of Paris created an annual Best Baguette Prize. One of the privileges give to the winner is the right to supply the Elysée Palace with baguettes. Paris is still well provided for, in terms of boulangeries, so the prize is highly sought after. When I lived there, in Place D’Italie, there was a lot of local excitement when the nearby La Fournée d’Augustine in Rue Raymond Losserand, won the competition.  The owners were obviously delighted, the regular customers slightly less so, as the queues that used to form outside got even longer as people came from all over Paris to try the baguettes.

 La Fournée d’Augustine 

In doing what I laughingly call research for this little piece, I am slowly beginning to appreciate that, for all that they moan about it, the French secretly love bureaucracy. They keep statistics about everything. So I suppose it’s natural enough, in a country where bread shortages helped trigger a revolution, they keep such an extensive amount of data about bakeries.  Half the country lives less than 1.4 miles of a bakery, “as the crow flies”, according to one government report. In cities, 73 per cent of the population lives within less than a half-mile.

How long do the French take to reach their bakery? According to a national bakery association, the average boulangerie run, including all modes of transport, takes just over 7 minutes. To be more precise, it’s five minutes in a city or just over 9 minutes in the countryside… I could go on but I’m boring myself now.

 I had a strange experience when we came to Poitiers. M. Cousson our estate agent had recommended L’Atelier du levain ( literally “the sourdough workshop”)in nearby Rue Augouard as a particularly good boulangerie, and indeed it was. When we first moved in, I would reguarly buy our bread there, being as polite and smiley as possible in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate myself with the rather severe-looking female proprietor. My efforts seemed to be largely wasted. Every day, she would took my money with a curt, unsmiling “merci”,

Then, one Saturday, as I put out my hand for my change as usual, she suddenly delivered a heartfelt little speech. How she now regret not learning English at school. Her wonderful teacher, M. Durande. What an opportunity! Wasted! Wasted! How stupid she had been!  

Somewhat alarmed, I mumbled something about it being never too late and got out as quickly as I could. From then on we were on good terms. She always greeted me with a smile and restricted herself to the occasional sigh and “Oh, how I wish I could speak English ”. Something instinctively told me that not to reveal that I was an English teacher. One morning, about a month later, the shop was unexpectedly closed.  There was a note of apology in the window saying this was due to family illness and that they would re-open on the following Saturday. On the Saturday there was another note of apology and a promise that they would “définitivement” open the following Tuesday. They didn’t. The shop remained closed and I never saw here again. 

Victor Hugo would get a 1000 page novel out of that.   

***

Three interesting things I’ve learnt this week:

In 1871, lawyer Clement Vallandigham accidentally shot himself while demonstrating how a ‘murder victim’ may have accidentally shot himself. His client was found not guilty.

Most sex between giraffes is homosexual: in one study, same-sex male mounting accounted for 94 per cent of all sexual behaviour observed.

The total cost of rescuing a stranded Matt Damon in all of his films (including Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, and The Martian) is an estimated $900 billion.

Going, Going, Gone

Monday

Out for a walk after lunch, in my permitted exercise hour. Poitiers is always quiet on a Monday, with most of the shops shut. This can be very pleasant – a gentle transition between the weekend and the working week. On a gloomy day, when I am a mile from home and it begins to rain, it is less appealing. Turning a corner near Place Leclerc, I pass a bunch of seven squaddies, wearing balaclavas and carrying submachine guns. They all look very young. The nearest couple make eye contact with me, and I wonder what they are thinking. They may be the same ones I saw patrolling alongside the police outside the Cathedral yesterday morning. A sight we will no doubt have to get used to for a while.

The soldiers’ presence is co-ordinated through Vigipirate, the national security alert system which was set up by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1978. It sounds vaguely swashbuckling, but is actually an acronym of Vigilance et protection des installations contre les risques d’attentats terroristes à l’explosif (‘vigilance and protection of installations against the risk of terrorist bombing attacks’). The system defines levels of threat represented by five colours: white, yellow, orange, red, and scarlet. The levels call for specific security measures, including increased police or police/military mixed patrols in subways, train stations, and other vulnerable locations. We are currently at scarlet (a definite threat of major terrorist attacks). In 2015, after the Bataclan attack in Paris, Opération Sentinelle was initiated. It is ongoing, deploying 10,000 soldiers and 4,700 police and gendarmes to protect ‘sensitive areas’. Right now, that probably includes every city centre in France.

Wednesday

It’s an ill wind. Having learnt from the first lockdown, many local shops have been quick to offer a click-and-collect service now that they are closed, including, thankfully, bookshops (why the **** are vape shops regarded as ‘essential’ but bookshops are not?) We are doing our best to support them all wherever possible.

An unexpected bonus is that the move online means that many things we would not otherwise have visited are now unexpectedly available. The most exotic of these that I have found so far is the Drouot Auction House in Paris – effectively the French Sotheby’s. They have been forced to close their doors during the lockdown but are continuing their auctions online. It took me just two minutes to register an account. Madame was quite alarmed when she realised that I had to give them my credit card details, and she has made me promise never to visit the site after lunch.

For me it’s a slightly more civilised version of fantasy league football. At the start of the month I allot myself a notional €500,000. I look through the items in the online catalogues, decide my maximum bid for anything that takes my fancy, and then we’re off to the races. Obviously, I don’t actually bid, but you’d be surprised at how tense it can get. If my maximum bid for any lot is higher than the hammer price, I claim it as mine. So far this month I’ve managed to pick up a bronze representation of an eleventh-century Ethiopian king for €120k (it reminded me of an old history teacher of mine), a nice Raoul Dufy oil painting of Deauville harbour (€210k), and a case of 2005 Mouton Rothschild at a very reasonable €11k. Sadly, I just missed out on a complete set of Ian Fleming first editions, which went for €22k, just over my limit. My only regret is paying €4,500 for a Cartier ‘tank’ watch. It’s very nice, but I could have got it for €3k. Goes to show you can’t always trust the estimates. Lesson learnt.

It still means I’m over €100k in credit this month. There’s a sale of erotic art next Tuesday, but the idea of Madame discovering me reading the catalogue does not appeal. I’ll probably settle for the Second Empire snuffboxes on Wednesday.

Friday

Another thing that hasn’t been affected by lockdown is construction work, and there’s quite a lot of it going on in the city centre right now. Two projects are council-funded. One is a new frontage for the central library, the Médiathèque François Mitterrand, where a landscaped garden is being built, and the other involves knocking down a rather forbidding wall in front of the old Banque de France building in Boulevard Solférino and putting a hanging garden in its place. Both will brighten up the city centre considerably, and they are another sign that the council doesn’t seem to be strapped for cash.

Growing up in London in the 1950s, I can remember a lot of building work going on to cover up old bomb sites from the Second World War. There would always be a few men hanging around watching the building work going on, and as a boy, hurrying by to play football or whatever, I used to think this an odd and boring thing to do. Not any longer; it is completely addictive. I try to arrange my daily walks so that I can see the progress at one or other of these sites. Sometimes nothing seems to happen for several days, and then suddenly, because of a minor alteration, some shrubs planted or some brickwork done, the whole layout seems transformed.

I am becoming a familiar sight to some of the workers, and I suspect they may think I am the Clerk of Works from the town hall. For a joke, I’ve toyed with the idea of turning up with a clipboard and stopwatch, but there’s a fair chance I’d have a brick hurled at my head.

Boulevard Solférino 2019

Last Week

Early next year

Saturday

It was sad to read the obituaries of both John Sessions and Geoffrey Palmer this week. John Sessions’ Life of Napoleon was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and Geoffrey Palmer’s line (in Reggie Perrin), ‘Bit of a cock-up on the catering front’, is now hardwired into my brain.

There’s a little piece about obituaries in The Times today. A reader asks why medical conditions are sometimes given as cause of death, whereas in other cases people are reported simply to have ‘died’. The paper’s obituaries editor says that they include the cause of death if it is known, but not if there is a continuing inquest or the family didn’t want to say.

Not all newspaper obituaries go into the cause of death. The Daily Telegraph briefly tried it as an experiment, but one of the first subjects under the new regime was a New Orleans jazz musician who had apparently died of an exploding penis implant. This was regarded as a little too much information for Telegraph readers.