What follows is a selection of articles - the equivalent of a 'tasting menu'.
They are in no particular order or chronology - so, if you don't like starting with the dessert, skip to the next course…
Bonne Dégustation!
* and please note: they are all copyright - mine, the publisher's, or both
They are in no particular order or chronology - so, if you don't like starting with the dessert, skip to the next course…
Bonne Dégustation!
* and please note: they are all copyright - mine, the publisher's, or both
For starters, here are three articles about living in France - both as a second-home owner and as a permanent resident. We - my wife and I - have experienced both and the articles follow our thirty-year relationship with the country : from the UK to France... to Australia... back to France... and, in early 2020, back to Australia where we are now again resident.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
20/21 SEPTEMBER 1997
Photo: MD
In 1990, Michael Delahaye wrote in Weekend FT of the pleasures and pitfalls of owning property in a French village. Now, as he is packing up to go, he offers food for thought for prospective second-home owners
We're leaving France. Even as I look at the words, I am amazed. Ten years ago, when we bought this house, I would never have thought it possible. Indeed, anyone seeing me now, tapping away at my laptop on our terrace, sitting on the ramparts of a medieval village above the River Lot, would say we must be mad. We speak the language, we're bien intégrés, the flexibility of our jobs allows us to spend months of the year here - and not so long ago we even saw ourselves one day retiring here. Yet now the house is sold and the moving van is booked. I am not soliciting sympathy. This is not an appeal to send 'however much, however little' to the Second Home Owners' Distress Fund. I am just curious at the way things have turned out - and so suddenly.
Part of it, I suppose, is restlessness: a realisation that even paradise can become recreationally challenging. What starts out as your 'holiday home' becomes, well, just another 'home'. Life carries on as normal but in a different place. In our case, it took a perceptive house guest to point out that for the past decade we had not had a holiday - that is, a week or fortnight where you wallow around, see new sights, read new books and are generally waited on by others.
What clinched our decision, though, was the French legal system. We thought we had covered everything - until, belatedly, we came to make a French will and encountered La Loi de Succession. It was then we discovered that, because I had never formally adopted my step-daughter, she would have to pay 60% of the house's market value in taxes if she were to inherit it directly from me. There are some elaborate ways round it but none applicable to our circumstances. Perhaps we should not have been surprised. I have before me our latest electricity bill. It's for FFr 1,600. But 44% of that - FFr 700 - is made up of the standing charge, VAT and local taxes. Looking more closely, I see VAT has even been levied on the local taxes.
But yes, I hear what you say: if one chooses to live in someone else's country, one should be prepared to pay the price. And we probably would - if the village itself had not started to change. When we arrived, it had a pleasantly neglected air - the world forgetting and by the world forgot. But those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first put on the tourist map. Three years ago the village was elevated to the ranks of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. Since then it has been so gentrified - embourgeoisé - that you can no longer turn a corner without tripping over a geranium. For a time we even had a full-scale working guillotine outside our front gate, as 'a historical aid for foreigners'.
But there is a more fundamental reason for our departure, and harder to define. It has to do with living long-term among people of a different culture. Since half my family comes from the Channel island of Jersey, I hardly qualify as a Little Englander. In fact, my grandmother spoke a local patois that the English could not distinguish from French (nor the French from gibberish).
No, I like the French. I like the essential civility of the people, the way they greet each other, the hand-shaking and double-kissing, the way they are not afraid to touch. I like the way their children learn from the moment they walk to 'present' themselves, not to remain glued to the telly when adult visitors enter the room. I like the French attitude to alcohol - as something to be drunk, not to make you drunk. And I like the way our town hall can turn even the biannual distribution of the household rubbish bags into an occasion that would not disgrace the Elysée Palace.
But here's the strange thing. While in any French street or square you will find this politesse at every turn, as soon as you climb into a car, it evaporates. No wonder that, in spite of having the same size population as the UK, they kill twice as many of their fellow countrymen on their roads. The exception, incidentally, is cycling. I can vouch that French drivers have an almost reverential respect for anything on two wheels.
Which brings me to the wider point. For its combination of climate, countryside, culture and cuisine, France has no equal. But it is not perfect.
Yet try, as a foreigner, suggesting to a Frenchman that perhaps not every restaurant in France is of the first order, that indeed it is surprisingly easy to eat badly here - and you will be reminded that the English have no taste. The argument is not so much that, being English, you cannot judge the matter but that, not being French, you will always lack the necessary discernment.
Take wine as an example. I am no expert but I am prepared to believe that the best French wines are the best wines in the world. But what of the rest? If I go into an off-licence in Oxford, I have a choice of wine from four continents and at least a score of different countries. But take a trip along the shelves here and 95% of what is on offer is likely to be French and the remaining 5% will be relegated to a vinicultural freak show, often on a single shelf. Even the man in charge of the extensive wine department in our local supermarket, Leclerc, had the honesty to admit that, although he had a couple of Australian out the back, he had never tried the stuff. Ultimately, such ultra-conservatism - the belief that the French way of doing things is the only way - leads to a narrowing of experience in all aspects of life, a cultural sclerosis.
Do I overstate my case? Perhaps. Finding fault with a loved one has always been a way to ease the pain of parting. Besides, just when you think you've got the French nailed, they have an annoying way of surprising you. When English designers take over Paris fashion houses, when you start finding le chutney in provincial épiceries and when the President himself admits to a penchant for Mexican beer, something must be changing. Whatever the infuriating archetype, it is the individual we will remember best when we leave - our ever-considerate neighbours who forbid their children to career around the garden 'because the English eat late', our mayor whose door has always been open to us, and our postman who, when asked what sort of day he thinks it's going to be, can be relied on to reply: 'How should I know? I'm a postman, not a meteorologist!'.
Even so, I fear it would have been some time before we would have persuaded our local restaurateur that the cheese that goes into a genuine mozzarella and tomato salad is the sort sliced from a ball, not industrial-grade granules used to retread pizzas. Better perhaps to leave it to an Italian to enlighten him. It was after all Henri II's queen, Catherine de' Medici, who first taught the French how to cook. But don't tell them that.
POSTSCRIPT: This article came back to bite me fifteen years later when in the summer of 2013 we bought again in France - a very modest pied-à-terre in the Dordogne - before moving permanently in early 2016. By way of eating humble pie, I wrote a second article - this time for THE CONNEXION, France's most widely circulated English-language newspaper. See next...
20/21 SEPTEMBER 1997
Photo: MD
In 1990, Michael Delahaye wrote in Weekend FT of the pleasures and pitfalls of owning property in a French village. Now, as he is packing up to go, he offers food for thought for prospective second-home owners
We're leaving France. Even as I look at the words, I am amazed. Ten years ago, when we bought this house, I would never have thought it possible. Indeed, anyone seeing me now, tapping away at my laptop on our terrace, sitting on the ramparts of a medieval village above the River Lot, would say we must be mad. We speak the language, we're bien intégrés, the flexibility of our jobs allows us to spend months of the year here - and not so long ago we even saw ourselves one day retiring here. Yet now the house is sold and the moving van is booked. I am not soliciting sympathy. This is not an appeal to send 'however much, however little' to the Second Home Owners' Distress Fund. I am just curious at the way things have turned out - and so suddenly.
Part of it, I suppose, is restlessness: a realisation that even paradise can become recreationally challenging. What starts out as your 'holiday home' becomes, well, just another 'home'. Life carries on as normal but in a different place. In our case, it took a perceptive house guest to point out that for the past decade we had not had a holiday - that is, a week or fortnight where you wallow around, see new sights, read new books and are generally waited on by others.
What clinched our decision, though, was the French legal system. We thought we had covered everything - until, belatedly, we came to make a French will and encountered La Loi de Succession. It was then we discovered that, because I had never formally adopted my step-daughter, she would have to pay 60% of the house's market value in taxes if she were to inherit it directly from me. There are some elaborate ways round it but none applicable to our circumstances. Perhaps we should not have been surprised. I have before me our latest electricity bill. It's for FFr 1,600. But 44% of that - FFr 700 - is made up of the standing charge, VAT and local taxes. Looking more closely, I see VAT has even been levied on the local taxes.
But yes, I hear what you say: if one chooses to live in someone else's country, one should be prepared to pay the price. And we probably would - if the village itself had not started to change. When we arrived, it had a pleasantly neglected air - the world forgetting and by the world forgot. But those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first put on the tourist map. Three years ago the village was elevated to the ranks of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. Since then it has been so gentrified - embourgeoisé - that you can no longer turn a corner without tripping over a geranium. For a time we even had a full-scale working guillotine outside our front gate, as 'a historical aid for foreigners'.
But there is a more fundamental reason for our departure, and harder to define. It has to do with living long-term among people of a different culture. Since half my family comes from the Channel island of Jersey, I hardly qualify as a Little Englander. In fact, my grandmother spoke a local patois that the English could not distinguish from French (nor the French from gibberish).
No, I like the French. I like the essential civility of the people, the way they greet each other, the hand-shaking and double-kissing, the way they are not afraid to touch. I like the way their children learn from the moment they walk to 'present' themselves, not to remain glued to the telly when adult visitors enter the room. I like the French attitude to alcohol - as something to be drunk, not to make you drunk. And I like the way our town hall can turn even the biannual distribution of the household rubbish bags into an occasion that would not disgrace the Elysée Palace.
But here's the strange thing. While in any French street or square you will find this politesse at every turn, as soon as you climb into a car, it evaporates. No wonder that, in spite of having the same size population as the UK, they kill twice as many of their fellow countrymen on their roads. The exception, incidentally, is cycling. I can vouch that French drivers have an almost reverential respect for anything on two wheels.
Which brings me to the wider point. For its combination of climate, countryside, culture and cuisine, France has no equal. But it is not perfect.
Yet try, as a foreigner, suggesting to a Frenchman that perhaps not every restaurant in France is of the first order, that indeed it is surprisingly easy to eat badly here - and you will be reminded that the English have no taste. The argument is not so much that, being English, you cannot judge the matter but that, not being French, you will always lack the necessary discernment.
Take wine as an example. I am no expert but I am prepared to believe that the best French wines are the best wines in the world. But what of the rest? If I go into an off-licence in Oxford, I have a choice of wine from four continents and at least a score of different countries. But take a trip along the shelves here and 95% of what is on offer is likely to be French and the remaining 5% will be relegated to a vinicultural freak show, often on a single shelf. Even the man in charge of the extensive wine department in our local supermarket, Leclerc, had the honesty to admit that, although he had a couple of Australian out the back, he had never tried the stuff. Ultimately, such ultra-conservatism - the belief that the French way of doing things is the only way - leads to a narrowing of experience in all aspects of life, a cultural sclerosis.
Do I overstate my case? Perhaps. Finding fault with a loved one has always been a way to ease the pain of parting. Besides, just when you think you've got the French nailed, they have an annoying way of surprising you. When English designers take over Paris fashion houses, when you start finding le chutney in provincial épiceries and when the President himself admits to a penchant for Mexican beer, something must be changing. Whatever the infuriating archetype, it is the individual we will remember best when we leave - our ever-considerate neighbours who forbid their children to career around the garden 'because the English eat late', our mayor whose door has always been open to us, and our postman who, when asked what sort of day he thinks it's going to be, can be relied on to reply: 'How should I know? I'm a postman, not a meteorologist!'.
Even so, I fear it would have been some time before we would have persuaded our local restaurateur that the cheese that goes into a genuine mozzarella and tomato salad is the sort sliced from a ball, not industrial-grade granules used to retread pizzas. Better perhaps to leave it to an Italian to enlighten him. It was after all Henri II's queen, Catherine de' Medici, who first taught the French how to cook. But don't tell them that.
POSTSCRIPT: This article came back to bite me fifteen years later when in the summer of 2013 we bought again in France - a very modest pied-à-terre in the Dordogne - before moving permanently in early 2016. By way of eating humble pie, I wrote a second article - this time for THE CONNEXION, France's most widely circulated English-language newspaper. See next...
THE CONNEXION
NOVEMBER, 2015.
In 1997 Michael and Anni Delahaye sold their house in Aquitaine, disillusioned with France and the French, and emigrated to Australia. Eighteen years later, they are back… in France. Did they change or did the country?
Our story begins in Oxford during the particularly wet English summer of 1987. The date is August 4th. We have planned a barbecue and chosen the day deliberately. Surely it won’t dare to rain on the Queen Mother’s birthday? It doesn’t. It pours.
NOVEMBER, 2015.
In 1997 Michael and Anni Delahaye sold their house in Aquitaine, disillusioned with France and the French, and emigrated to Australia. Eighteen years later, they are back… in France. Did they change or did the country?
Our story begins in Oxford during the particularly wet English summer of 1987. The date is August 4th. We have planned a barbecue and chosen the day deliberately. Surely it won’t dare to rain on the Queen Mother’s birthday? It doesn’t. It pours.
That was the turning point. Within a few months, we’d bought a holiday home in France, far enough south to be assured of reasonable – and predictable – summer weather. And so for a decade we drove three times a year to and fro between Oxford and a stunning hilltop village in the Lot-et-Garonne. Our house was perched on the very edge of the village, its terrace comprising twenty metres of the medieval ramparts. In the evenings we would sit out with a glass of wine and listen to the nightingales and frogs below. As one guest put it, ‘If heaven isn’t as good as this, I’m not going’. Our teenage daughter spent her formative summers there and, in the last couple of years, my wife Anni set up a business making chutney for local restaurants and épiceries.
Then, bit by bit, the gilt started flaking off the gingerbread. The village changed. Fatally, it was elevated to the ranks of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The art galleries and regional produce shops moved in; the locals moved out. One morning we woke to find we had become extras in a medieval theme park.
We fell out not just with the place but with the people. Not so much the individuals as with the national conviction that the French way of doing everything was the best way, indeed the only way – whether cooking, wine, cinema, literature… you name it. The phrase that came to mind was ‘cultural sclerosis’. The last straw was the conversion into a restaurant of the barn opposite our house. The frogs and nightingales had to compete with music and revelry.
Just before we left in the autumn of 1997 I wrote a full-page article for the Financial Times, listing – exhaustively - our reasons for selling up. You could smell the burning boats.
In 2009 we sold our house in Oxford and left Europe altogether – for Australia, where Anni had grown up and still had family. Having a job that requires me only to be close to an airport, I was ready to experience a new life ‘down-under’. There was just one inconvenient fact… By this time, our daughter had married and had two children – our grandchildren. And they were all in Bath, Somerset. Ten thousand miles away.
So began an inter-continental migration for three months of the year back to the UK. While there, we would take in the rest of Europe - usually Italy but France too, even if only driving through. Time and again, like lovelorn adolescents, we found ourselves drawn to our old haunts. As we crossed into the Lot-et-Garonne, inane grins would creep across our faces. The shimmering poplars, the quaint pigeonniers, even the clichéd sunflowers… Emotionally if not physically, we were back.
We even revisited our old village – to discover that the subsequent owners of our house had stuck a monstrous carbuncle of a garage on the front and replaced the aged flagstones on the terrace with bathroom-grade commercial tiles. It hurt.
Coincidentally, a relative-in-law had meanwhile built a house in the area and generously made it available to us at a family rate. While staying there, we started glancing in estate agents windows… and even, very occasionally, we would view a property. Purely out of curiosity, you understand. By now there was also a financial consideration. After three years of living like executive gypsies in rented apartments and houses, we were shocked to realise that our European sojourns were costing us about £1000 a month – in addition to the unavoidable expenses back in Australia. There had to be a better way. A modest pied-à-terre perhaps?
Understandably, our daughter wanted us close to her and the family, in or around Bath. Our son-in-law tried to interest us in Jane Austen’s former basement but the appeal of reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in authentic period gloom was limited and brief. The other possibility was somewhere outside the UK but within reasonable flying time of nearby Bristol Airport… somewhere close to, say, Bergerac Airport.
In May 2012 we found ourselves in Monpazier, that most perfect of bastides in the Dordogne, just over the border from the Lot-et-Garonne. We called in on Annette, an estate agent we knew.
‘I’ve something that might interest you…’, she said. Ominous words.
The building of which the house formed the middle section had once been a hotel – some say a brothel – before being converted into separate units. The exterior was uninviting; anonymity had evidently been a requirement of the building’s alleged former function. The interior, though, was a revelation… The developer had punched out walls, changed levels and made the twisting 250-year old central staircase an open-plan feature of both the ground- and first- floors. But the biggest surprise, tucked away at the back, was a walled courtyard – a sought-after rarity in the heart of a medieval village.
Cursing our good fortune, we made an offer… then another… until finally the deal was done. It cost half Miss Austen’s dark, damp basement.
So who has changed – us or the French?
Both I suspect. We’ve come to appreciate what we had… lost… and missed. But the French too seem to have mellowed. Whether it’s the high unemployment, the divisive immigration debate or the sight of their young people seeking success across the Channel… the sharp edges have been rubbed off the old Gallic certainties of the Mitterrand and Chirac years. There seems to be more self-questioning. Even self-doubt.
With the occasional heart-warming exception… One morning, sipping coffee in our arcaded square in Monpazier, I listen in disbelief as another resident, an ex-Parisian, remarks that France is the only country in the world which she can imagine devoting a television programme to books and reading.
It’s good to be back.
Then, bit by bit, the gilt started flaking off the gingerbread. The village changed. Fatally, it was elevated to the ranks of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The art galleries and regional produce shops moved in; the locals moved out. One morning we woke to find we had become extras in a medieval theme park.
We fell out not just with the place but with the people. Not so much the individuals as with the national conviction that the French way of doing everything was the best way, indeed the only way – whether cooking, wine, cinema, literature… you name it. The phrase that came to mind was ‘cultural sclerosis’. The last straw was the conversion into a restaurant of the barn opposite our house. The frogs and nightingales had to compete with music and revelry.
Just before we left in the autumn of 1997 I wrote a full-page article for the Financial Times, listing – exhaustively - our reasons for selling up. You could smell the burning boats.
In 2009 we sold our house in Oxford and left Europe altogether – for Australia, where Anni had grown up and still had family. Having a job that requires me only to be close to an airport, I was ready to experience a new life ‘down-under’. There was just one inconvenient fact… By this time, our daughter had married and had two children – our grandchildren. And they were all in Bath, Somerset. Ten thousand miles away.
So began an inter-continental migration for three months of the year back to the UK. While there, we would take in the rest of Europe - usually Italy but France too, even if only driving through. Time and again, like lovelorn adolescents, we found ourselves drawn to our old haunts. As we crossed into the Lot-et-Garonne, inane grins would creep across our faces. The shimmering poplars, the quaint pigeonniers, even the clichéd sunflowers… Emotionally if not physically, we were back.
We even revisited our old village – to discover that the subsequent owners of our house had stuck a monstrous carbuncle of a garage on the front and replaced the aged flagstones on the terrace with bathroom-grade commercial tiles. It hurt.
Coincidentally, a relative-in-law had meanwhile built a house in the area and generously made it available to us at a family rate. While staying there, we started glancing in estate agents windows… and even, very occasionally, we would view a property. Purely out of curiosity, you understand. By now there was also a financial consideration. After three years of living like executive gypsies in rented apartments and houses, we were shocked to realise that our European sojourns were costing us about £1000 a month – in addition to the unavoidable expenses back in Australia. There had to be a better way. A modest pied-à-terre perhaps?
Understandably, our daughter wanted us close to her and the family, in or around Bath. Our son-in-law tried to interest us in Jane Austen’s former basement but the appeal of reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in authentic period gloom was limited and brief. The other possibility was somewhere outside the UK but within reasonable flying time of nearby Bristol Airport… somewhere close to, say, Bergerac Airport.
In May 2012 we found ourselves in Monpazier, that most perfect of bastides in the Dordogne, just over the border from the Lot-et-Garonne. We called in on Annette, an estate agent we knew.
‘I’ve something that might interest you…’, she said. Ominous words.
The building of which the house formed the middle section had once been a hotel – some say a brothel – before being converted into separate units. The exterior was uninviting; anonymity had evidently been a requirement of the building’s alleged former function. The interior, though, was a revelation… The developer had punched out walls, changed levels and made the twisting 250-year old central staircase an open-plan feature of both the ground- and first- floors. But the biggest surprise, tucked away at the back, was a walled courtyard – a sought-after rarity in the heart of a medieval village.
Cursing our good fortune, we made an offer… then another… until finally the deal was done. It cost half Miss Austen’s dark, damp basement.
So who has changed – us or the French?
Both I suspect. We’ve come to appreciate what we had… lost… and missed. But the French too seem to have mellowed. Whether it’s the high unemployment, the divisive immigration debate or the sight of their young people seeking success across the Channel… the sharp edges have been rubbed off the old Gallic certainties of the Mitterrand and Chirac years. There seems to be more self-questioning. Even self-doubt.
With the occasional heart-warming exception… One morning, sipping coffee in our arcaded square in Monpazier, I listen in disbelief as another resident, an ex-Parisian, remarks that France is the only country in the world which she can imagine devoting a television programme to books and reading.
It’s good to be back.
As the next article, the third, makes clear, we would soon commit ourselves even further. Sadly, though, it didn't last. Read on...
THE CONNEXION
MARCH, 2020
Michael Delahaye and his wife Anni have moved to France not once but twice - first from the UK, then from Australia. Now they are back in Australia. He explains whey they've left again...
It was last summer, a Sunday in late August. As I looked through the open windows, beyond the rose-fringed terrace, to the valley marking the frontline of the Hundred Years War, the truth hit me: ‘We are going to have to leave.’ Just seven words, but they were the culmination of an association with France that went back more than three decades.
MARCH, 2020
Michael Delahaye and his wife Anni have moved to France not once but twice - first from the UK, then from Australia. Now they are back in Australia. He explains whey they've left again...
It was last summer, a Sunday in late August. As I looked through the open windows, beyond the rose-fringed terrace, to the valley marking the frontline of the Hundred Years War, the truth hit me: ‘We are going to have to leave.’ Just seven words, but they were the culmination of an association with France that went back more than three decades.
In 1988 we bought our first holiday home in a tiny hill-top village in the Lot-et-Garonne. La vie française was everything we had hoped for but within a decade we had – no other way to put it – fallen out of love with France and the French. We sold up and, after a few years back in the UK, emigrated to Australia, my wife’s homeland. France, the old seductress, has a way of drawing one back. During a European trip in 2013 revisiting old haunts, we bought a small pied-à-terre in the Dordogne. Within three years, we had left Australia and formally taken up French residency, signing up to the health system, the tax regime… and moving into a bigger house which we imagined would be our permanent home for years to come. After all, we had been here before and learned the lessons.
But the rules of being a permanent resident are not the same as those for a second-home owner…
Our new base was that most perfect of medieval bastides, Monpazier. Founded in 1284 by English King Edward 1st, its current population is about 530 - with a high proportion of expats: Dutch, German, American, Antipodean and, this being ‘Dordogneshire’, British.
One of our first acts was to present ourselves to the Mayor. Wishing to be an active citizen and having a reasonable command of French, I volunteered my services as a translator. A few days later, an expat local sidled up to me and, in the hushed tones of one compelled to give painful advice, told me it had been noticed that I had ‘joined the Mayor’s camp’. This was followed by another expat complaining that I seemed to be ‘into everything’ – a way of saying that I hadn’t served the social apprenticeship required of a newcomer.
Lesson 1: Joining a small community is like going to a new school: in making some friends, you will forfeit others.
Though irritating, it was a minor rite of passage. Discovering that there was no up-to-date English guidebook of the village, despite its estimated 250,000 visitors a year, I put together a virtual one on-line and was soon asked to conduct the occasional tour for Anglophone visitors. My wife, meanwhile, joined the judging panel of the annual ‘maisons fleuries’ competition. Within a year, we couldn’t walk through the village without half a dozen double-kisses along the way. So far as the locals were concerned, we were bien intégrés.
But integration requires communication…
Lesson 2: As a permanent resident, you have to deal with officials, doctors, accountants, car mechanics, etc. – in their language and sometimes over the phone. Don’t expect to get by with the ‘shopping French’ of a visitor.
One of the biggest helps, we found, was to eschew the satellite dish and watch only terrestrial French TV channels, most of which are helpfully sub-titled, in French. It may sound a bit ‘swotty’ but, with a notepad to hand, there is no better way to build up new and refresh old vocabulary. And don’t believe those who rubbish French television. Particularly recommended is the excellent 20h00 evening news on France 2.
“But what about all that ghastly bureaucracy?’’, visiting friends would ask. There is no denying it can be tedious but…
Lesson 3: The French are masters of the creative interpretation of their own rules.
One example among many… Leaving a Bergerac hypermarket one rainy day, I dropped a 40 Euros bottle of whisky, bought as a gift, in the car park. Resisting the temptation to lick the asphalt, I went back inside to check whether the company had insurance cover for such eventualities. The deputy manager was sympathetic but no, their policy didn’t extend beyond the building. Five minutes later, as I queued up with a replacement, another 40 euros grudgingly in hand, the manager herself appeared. ‘Just take it,’ she whispered, ‘We’ll sort it out…’
By now you’re probably guessing that the only reason for our leaving has to be Brexit.
Not so. Psychologically, it came as a blow to realise we no longer ‘belonged’ in France but we could have accepted the administrative complexities and the possible extra cost of health care.
Ultimately, our decision came down to the realisation that to Liberté and Égalité might soon be added Austérité. Our financial base was still in Australia but French taxation is global. This meant income from our Australian Super Fund pensions, which in Australia is tax-free to encourage self-sufficiency in later life, was now taxed. Fair enough, you may say; the level of taxation goes with the territory you choose to live in.
But the rules of being a permanent resident are not the same as those for a second-home owner…
Our new base was that most perfect of medieval bastides, Monpazier. Founded in 1284 by English King Edward 1st, its current population is about 530 - with a high proportion of expats: Dutch, German, American, Antipodean and, this being ‘Dordogneshire’, British.
One of our first acts was to present ourselves to the Mayor. Wishing to be an active citizen and having a reasonable command of French, I volunteered my services as a translator. A few days later, an expat local sidled up to me and, in the hushed tones of one compelled to give painful advice, told me it had been noticed that I had ‘joined the Mayor’s camp’. This was followed by another expat complaining that I seemed to be ‘into everything’ – a way of saying that I hadn’t served the social apprenticeship required of a newcomer.
Lesson 1: Joining a small community is like going to a new school: in making some friends, you will forfeit others.
Though irritating, it was a minor rite of passage. Discovering that there was no up-to-date English guidebook of the village, despite its estimated 250,000 visitors a year, I put together a virtual one on-line and was soon asked to conduct the occasional tour for Anglophone visitors. My wife, meanwhile, joined the judging panel of the annual ‘maisons fleuries’ competition. Within a year, we couldn’t walk through the village without half a dozen double-kisses along the way. So far as the locals were concerned, we were bien intégrés.
But integration requires communication…
Lesson 2: As a permanent resident, you have to deal with officials, doctors, accountants, car mechanics, etc. – in their language and sometimes over the phone. Don’t expect to get by with the ‘shopping French’ of a visitor.
One of the biggest helps, we found, was to eschew the satellite dish and watch only terrestrial French TV channels, most of which are helpfully sub-titled, in French. It may sound a bit ‘swotty’ but, with a notepad to hand, there is no better way to build up new and refresh old vocabulary. And don’t believe those who rubbish French television. Particularly recommended is the excellent 20h00 evening news on France 2.
“But what about all that ghastly bureaucracy?’’, visiting friends would ask. There is no denying it can be tedious but…
Lesson 3: The French are masters of the creative interpretation of their own rules.
One example among many… Leaving a Bergerac hypermarket one rainy day, I dropped a 40 Euros bottle of whisky, bought as a gift, in the car park. Resisting the temptation to lick the asphalt, I went back inside to check whether the company had insurance cover for such eventualities. The deputy manager was sympathetic but no, their policy didn’t extend beyond the building. Five minutes later, as I queued up with a replacement, another 40 euros grudgingly in hand, the manager herself appeared. ‘Just take it,’ she whispered, ‘We’ll sort it out…’
By now you’re probably guessing that the only reason for our leaving has to be Brexit.
Not so. Psychologically, it came as a blow to realise we no longer ‘belonged’ in France but we could have accepted the administrative complexities and the possible extra cost of health care.
Ultimately, our decision came down to the realisation that to Liberté and Égalité might soon be added Austérité. Our financial base was still in Australia but French taxation is global. This meant income from our Australian Super Fund pensions, which in Australia is tax-free to encourage self-sufficiency in later life, was now taxed. Fair enough, you may say; the level of taxation goes with the territory you choose to live in.
But the additional problem for us was that for decades I have worked as a freelance, my income fluctuating wildly from year to year, even month to month. Last year our always-helpful French accountant warned that my ‘activity’ was such that I could be re-classified as a ‘self-employed professional’ – and, with it, more paperwork and still more tax. As to how this ‘activity’ was calculated – the number of weeks worked, the amount of euros earned? - that would be for a local tax officer to decide, year on year. A fiscal sword would always be hanging over us… on the finest of threads.
Lesson 4: Interpretation of the rules doesn’t always work to one’s advantage.
The clincher, though, was France’s inheritance law, the Droits de Succession. Many of us took comfort when in 2015 France implemented the EU regulation allowing foreign residents to choose their own national inheritance law when deciding who would get what of their estate. What some of us chose to overlook was that the tax element of French inheritance law, death duties, remained unchanged.
To quote the website of the international tax advisers, Blevins Franks: “Succession tax can therefore be quite crippling, potentially reducing the inheritance you hoped to leave to someone by over half… For couples with children from previous relationships this can be a real problem”.
That was us. Our daughter – my step-daughter – would be the beneficiary of our estate. If she inherited from me as the surviving parent, she would face 60% inheritance tax. Australia, by contrast, has no inheritance tax.
So, like much else, our decision came down to death and taxes. But, channelling my inner Edith Piaf, no regrets. The last four years have been incredibly enriching – a chance to live in another culture and, metaphorically, another skin; in a film-set medieval village that oozes history from every stone.
We may have paid for the privilege but, looked at another way, it has been an experience money couldn’t buy.
Lesson 4: Interpretation of the rules doesn’t always work to one’s advantage.
The clincher, though, was France’s inheritance law, the Droits de Succession. Many of us took comfort when in 2015 France implemented the EU regulation allowing foreign residents to choose their own national inheritance law when deciding who would get what of their estate. What some of us chose to overlook was that the tax element of French inheritance law, death duties, remained unchanged.
To quote the website of the international tax advisers, Blevins Franks: “Succession tax can therefore be quite crippling, potentially reducing the inheritance you hoped to leave to someone by over half… For couples with children from previous relationships this can be a real problem”.
That was us. Our daughter – my step-daughter – would be the beneficiary of our estate. If she inherited from me as the surviving parent, she would face 60% inheritance tax. Australia, by contrast, has no inheritance tax.
So, like much else, our decision came down to death and taxes. But, channelling my inner Edith Piaf, no regrets. The last four years have been incredibly enriching – a chance to live in another culture and, metaphorically, another skin; in a film-set medieval village that oozes history from every stone.
We may have paid for the privilege but, looked at another way, it has been an experience money couldn’t buy.
THE CONNEXION
JANUARY, 2016
BUT WHAT DO THEY REALLY THINK OF US?
When asked about their feelings towards foreigners, the French typically respond with clichés - so Michael Delahaye has been digging deeper to learn the truth...
JANUARY, 2016
BUT WHAT DO THEY REALLY THINK OF US?
When asked about their feelings towards foreigners, the French typically respond with clichés - so Michael Delahaye has been digging deeper to learn the truth...
Nations do it; individuals do it – we all construct self-serving narratives. Brits living in France are no exception.
Our narrative goes like this: We are British, they are French; but a few centuries back this was as much our land as theirs. Swathes of the country – notably the south-west and a hunk of the north coast – belonged to the English crown (yes, at this point ‘British’ has morphed into ‘English’).
So we belong. You might almost say we have ‘a right of return’. Which is why we are particularly cheered when we come across a Frenchman named Edouard –after an English king called Edward.
Rather more nuanced is how our French hosts regard us. We are after all cuckoos – or, if owners of holiday homes, swallows who most of the year leave our nests empty or occupied by a succession of strangers. Before we bought our first French house, in the Lot-et-Garonne back in the mid-1980s, we checked out the likely reaction of our potential neighbours. The first exclaimed, ‘Alors, vous êtes revenus dans votre coin!’ (loosely translated, ‘You’ve come home’), a reference to Aquitaine having been English-owned for three hundred years.
Pumped up, we introduced ourselves to other locals. Their reaction was probably more honest: ‘Eh bien, better you for a couple of months of the year than Parisians every weekend…’ (We thought of naming our house, ‘Faute de Mieux’ ). Regardless, we continued our stately progress to the end of the village and were delighted to find there an ancient stone gate proudly announcing itself as La Porte des Anglais. ‘Et voilà’, we thought – home indeed! A curious local, observing our proprietorial grins, explained that it had been so named because ‘That was where we fought you lot off back in the thirteen hundreds’.
OK, so we are gate-crashers – but at least we bring something to the party: cash.
I put this to an anglophile neighbour. ‘Ah,’ he said, raising a finger, ‘More than that! Not only will you give me mad money for my mother’s tumbledown ruin but you will do it up exquisitely, in the best possible taste…’ A second finger appeared. ‘And you will employ local labour – so you are supporting our economy…’ A third finger. ‘The result is that it is you British who are helping to preserve our architectural heritage. Je vous remercie, Monsieur!’
Well, jusqu’à un certain point. We don’t always use local labour. Sometimes we bring over George from south London with his mate who will happily combine a couple of weeks’ holiday sur le cont-ee-nong with a bit of cash-in-hand work. All for a fraction of what it would cost using the local Didier.
The French accept this – free movement of labour is a fundamental tenet of the EU – but don’t expect them to like it. Just as they still loyally buy Renaults, Peugeots and Citroëns, there’s a strong national feeling that you should support your local artisans. It’s why the DIY revolution was late to take off in France and one reason that a tart bought from a pâtisserie is generally more acceptable at the end of a meal than something home-made, however delicious.
That said, we do make an effort to integrate. Yes, there are the unreconstructed ex-pats who seem to take a pride in not learning the language but, with a younger influx, that is changing. Most Brits in my experience try to speak French and, although they may still play cricket (the English at least), they also join the village choir, tennis club or rambling group and even get involved in local politics.
Yet when it comes to one-on-one social interaction, we can be slow-learners. We’re not good at ‘presenting’ ourselves - possibly because, unlike the French, we’re not taught it as children. Any shopkeeper will tell you about the Brits who walk into their shops, heads down, pick over a few items and then leave without so much as un petit Bonjour.
The way we regulate our family relations is equally puzzling to our hosts. I once had to explain to an incredulous official that the British did not have, didn’t even understand the concept of, a ‘livret de famille’, (the official family booklet recording marriages and offspring), doubtless confirming his suspicion that we were a nation of fornicators and bastards. You’re likely to get the same reaction if, as a married couple, you try to open a bank account but with the wife wanting to use her maiden or professional name for cards and cheques.
We are, as one French friend put it, like a species of non-native wildlife - undeniably invasive but always worthy of study. And, though generally benign, occasionally provocative…
During the summer the London-based open-air theatre company Antic Disposition toured Perigord and Quercy with Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’. Although it had been tactfully re-imagined as a joint production by Anglo-French troops in a WW1 field hospital, it remains a ‘confronting’ play – the more so this being the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.
So it was an electrifying moment when Henry was raised high by his band of brothers and his words, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead!’, ricocheted around Monpazier’s Place des Cornières. I’m sure I wasn’t the only member of the predominantly British audience wondering whether a band of French producteurs and éleveurs might appear and dump a heap of steaming ordure on the stage.
But no. By the end of the play, with the reconciliatory marriage of Henry to the French king’s daughter, the feeling can best be described as warm and fuzzy. At one point Shakespeare has a character describe France as ‘this best garden of the world’ and this surely is what ultimately binds us: that our hosts appreciate how much we appreciate their incomparably beautiful country.
So much so, we want them to share it with us.
Our narrative goes like this: We are British, they are French; but a few centuries back this was as much our land as theirs. Swathes of the country – notably the south-west and a hunk of the north coast – belonged to the English crown (yes, at this point ‘British’ has morphed into ‘English’).
So we belong. You might almost say we have ‘a right of return’. Which is why we are particularly cheered when we come across a Frenchman named Edouard –after an English king called Edward.
Rather more nuanced is how our French hosts regard us. We are after all cuckoos – or, if owners of holiday homes, swallows who most of the year leave our nests empty or occupied by a succession of strangers. Before we bought our first French house, in the Lot-et-Garonne back in the mid-1980s, we checked out the likely reaction of our potential neighbours. The first exclaimed, ‘Alors, vous êtes revenus dans votre coin!’ (loosely translated, ‘You’ve come home’), a reference to Aquitaine having been English-owned for three hundred years.
Pumped up, we introduced ourselves to other locals. Their reaction was probably more honest: ‘Eh bien, better you for a couple of months of the year than Parisians every weekend…’ (We thought of naming our house, ‘Faute de Mieux’ ). Regardless, we continued our stately progress to the end of the village and were delighted to find there an ancient stone gate proudly announcing itself as La Porte des Anglais. ‘Et voilà’, we thought – home indeed! A curious local, observing our proprietorial grins, explained that it had been so named because ‘That was where we fought you lot off back in the thirteen hundreds’.
OK, so we are gate-crashers – but at least we bring something to the party: cash.
I put this to an anglophile neighbour. ‘Ah,’ he said, raising a finger, ‘More than that! Not only will you give me mad money for my mother’s tumbledown ruin but you will do it up exquisitely, in the best possible taste…’ A second finger appeared. ‘And you will employ local labour – so you are supporting our economy…’ A third finger. ‘The result is that it is you British who are helping to preserve our architectural heritage. Je vous remercie, Monsieur!’
Well, jusqu’à un certain point. We don’t always use local labour. Sometimes we bring over George from south London with his mate who will happily combine a couple of weeks’ holiday sur le cont-ee-nong with a bit of cash-in-hand work. All for a fraction of what it would cost using the local Didier.
The French accept this – free movement of labour is a fundamental tenet of the EU – but don’t expect them to like it. Just as they still loyally buy Renaults, Peugeots and Citroëns, there’s a strong national feeling that you should support your local artisans. It’s why the DIY revolution was late to take off in France and one reason that a tart bought from a pâtisserie is generally more acceptable at the end of a meal than something home-made, however delicious.
That said, we do make an effort to integrate. Yes, there are the unreconstructed ex-pats who seem to take a pride in not learning the language but, with a younger influx, that is changing. Most Brits in my experience try to speak French and, although they may still play cricket (the English at least), they also join the village choir, tennis club or rambling group and even get involved in local politics.
Yet when it comes to one-on-one social interaction, we can be slow-learners. We’re not good at ‘presenting’ ourselves - possibly because, unlike the French, we’re not taught it as children. Any shopkeeper will tell you about the Brits who walk into their shops, heads down, pick over a few items and then leave without so much as un petit Bonjour.
The way we regulate our family relations is equally puzzling to our hosts. I once had to explain to an incredulous official that the British did not have, didn’t even understand the concept of, a ‘livret de famille’, (the official family booklet recording marriages and offspring), doubtless confirming his suspicion that we were a nation of fornicators and bastards. You’re likely to get the same reaction if, as a married couple, you try to open a bank account but with the wife wanting to use her maiden or professional name for cards and cheques.
We are, as one French friend put it, like a species of non-native wildlife - undeniably invasive but always worthy of study. And, though generally benign, occasionally provocative…
During the summer the London-based open-air theatre company Antic Disposition toured Perigord and Quercy with Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’. Although it had been tactfully re-imagined as a joint production by Anglo-French troops in a WW1 field hospital, it remains a ‘confronting’ play – the more so this being the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.
So it was an electrifying moment when Henry was raised high by his band of brothers and his words, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead!’, ricocheted around Monpazier’s Place des Cornières. I’m sure I wasn’t the only member of the predominantly British audience wondering whether a band of French producteurs and éleveurs might appear and dump a heap of steaming ordure on the stage.
But no. By the end of the play, with the reconciliatory marriage of Henry to the French king’s daughter, the feeling can best be described as warm and fuzzy. At one point Shakespeare has a character describe France as ‘this best garden of the world’ and this surely is what ultimately binds us: that our hosts appreciate how much we appreciate their incomparably beautiful country.
So much so, we want them to share it with us.
THE INDEPENDENT, 5 SEPTEMBER 1999
Photo: Karen Robinson
Pilchards for dinner, en suite cells with sex-defying single iron beds, lights out at 9.30 - and no whispering. Born-again atheist Michael Delahaye mortifies the flesh at the monastery of La Verna in Tuscany
Some years ago a magazine ran a competition for the most unlikely newspaper headline. The winner, as I recall, was "POPE ELOPES". It was with a similar sense of the incongruous that, just after Christmas, I asked my wife to book us a double room in a Franciscan monastery.
The Sanctuary of La Verna is between Florence and Urbino. Its claim to fame is that for a decade, between 1214 and 1224, St Francis was a regular visitor. But what makes this the second most important Franciscan site in the world, after Assisi, is that it was here the saint received the stigmata - the holes in his hands and feet in imitation of Christ's crucifixion. Nearly 800 years later, La Verna is still a 'working' monastery, with two dozen resident monks and a couple of nuns. And, in the age-old tradition of offering hospitality to weary pilgrims, it takes in paying guests.
For anyone who has ever wondered why holy places are so often high places, La Verna provides the answer - closer to Heaven and about as hard to reach. More than 4,000 feet above sea level, the monastery is built on - and into - an extraordinary outcrop of rock. During the winter months it's literally lost in the clouds. As you approach through a forest dripping with moisture, up a series of increasingly tight switch-backs, it's hard not to feel like the unsuspecting Jonathan Harker in one of those early Dracula movies.
The night we arrived, Sister Priscilla was on reception, swathed in black anorak and white scarf. She referred to the bookings list... 'Ah, numero ventisei'. Room 26 turned out to be an 'en suite cell', 10ft by 10, with a pair of single beds; shower and lavatory. It was clean and adequate, although during the night my wife was to develop a peculiar devotion to the cast-iron radiator. On the back of the door was an injunction against whispering and giggling after 10pm.
For a number of reasons, this is not a place for honeymoon couples. All beds are narrow and chastely single. Hic hankum nullum pankum. Indeed, only in recent years have married couples been allowed to share rooms, although in our case Sister Priscilla had the delicacy not to demand documentary proof.
For anyone more familiar with hotels, the biggest problem is protocol. Should you say grace before eating? (Optional) Do you tip a nun? (No) Or do you discreetly drop a couple of coins into the offertory box? (That'll do nicely. God bless.)
Nor should you expect too much in the culinary department. The Franciscans, it soon becomes clear, are not a gastronomic order. Turning over our place-cards at dinner, we were heartened to see vitello ai ferri and anitra arrosto on the menu. This, we told ourselves, would be a meal to remember. At this point something like a miracle occurred as the grilled veal and roast duck were transformed into a hard boiled egg, a slice of cheese and half a pilchard. OK, so a fish was once the secret sign of Christianity - but, Madonna, a pilchard?
When we pointed to the back of the place-card, our server shook his head: 'That's the summer menu. This is winter.' A diner at the next table murmured 'Buon appetito', thoughtfully adding, 'Good hunger!'.
Dinner over, we were about to settle in with a compensatory glass of the monastery's excellent Lamponi - a diabolically tempting 33 degree proof raspberry liqueur - when we were sent to bed. Lights out, doors locked, heating off. Buona Notte. It was 9.30pm.
None of this is to diminish the power of the place. You might even argue it helps concentrate the mind. La Verna is Gethsemane without the coaches; Lourdes minus the plaster knick-knackery. As a born-again atheist, I'm hardly qualified to judge but I've no doubt that anyone seeking 'the spirit of St Francis' is more likely to find it here than at Assisi (of which my clearest memory is buying our daughter a plastic globe of St Francis in a snow storm). It's a chastening experience to open the door on one of the sanctuary's many chapels, guidebook in hand, camera cocked, to discover a cowled monk kneeling, still as a statue, in silent prayer.
The morning of our second day, I woke to the sound of bells. Leaving my wife still incanting a fitful 'Shiver me cloisters', I skipped the 7am service and set off in the mist for La Penna, the mountain peak where St Francis and his brethren used to meditate and pray. Visibility was down to 20 yards. As I climbed through the forest of pine and beech, the only sound was the occasional crack of gunfire from hunters in the valley below. St Francis would certainly not have approved.
This is not a walk for unsupervised children. At the very top there is a cross and, one pace beyond, a vertiginous drop of several hundred feet - an invitation, if ever there was one, to step into eternity. Walking back by a different route, you come upon a succession of tiny stone chapels. The most charming is that of the Blessed John - a Franciscan brother who, centuries before tree-hugging became fashionable, spent his days praying in front of a giant beech. When the tree died, the chapel with its low-walled courtyard was built in its place.
Back in the monastery, there are more than a dozen della Robbia glazed reliefs. The best is in the Basilica - a stunning Annunciation by Andrea della Robbia. In the Chapel of the Blessed Stigmata, before a Crucifixion by Andrea, you can see the stone on which St Francis received his wounds.
You don't have to be religious to appreciate La Verna, but it probably helps. If, as a bonus, you fancy a foretaste of Purgatory, make the trip in winter. On the other hand, it's telling that St Francis himself seems to have come here only during the summer months.
Santuario della Verna, 52010 Chiusi della Verna, la Toscana (00 39 575 5341) Full board: 62,000 lire per person (approx pounds 22)
Photo: Karen Robinson
Pilchards for dinner, en suite cells with sex-defying single iron beds, lights out at 9.30 - and no whispering. Born-again atheist Michael Delahaye mortifies the flesh at the monastery of La Verna in Tuscany
Some years ago a magazine ran a competition for the most unlikely newspaper headline. The winner, as I recall, was "POPE ELOPES". It was with a similar sense of the incongruous that, just after Christmas, I asked my wife to book us a double room in a Franciscan monastery.
The Sanctuary of La Verna is between Florence and Urbino. Its claim to fame is that for a decade, between 1214 and 1224, St Francis was a regular visitor. But what makes this the second most important Franciscan site in the world, after Assisi, is that it was here the saint received the stigmata - the holes in his hands and feet in imitation of Christ's crucifixion. Nearly 800 years later, La Verna is still a 'working' monastery, with two dozen resident monks and a couple of nuns. And, in the age-old tradition of offering hospitality to weary pilgrims, it takes in paying guests.
For anyone who has ever wondered why holy places are so often high places, La Verna provides the answer - closer to Heaven and about as hard to reach. More than 4,000 feet above sea level, the monastery is built on - and into - an extraordinary outcrop of rock. During the winter months it's literally lost in the clouds. As you approach through a forest dripping with moisture, up a series of increasingly tight switch-backs, it's hard not to feel like the unsuspecting Jonathan Harker in one of those early Dracula movies.
The night we arrived, Sister Priscilla was on reception, swathed in black anorak and white scarf. She referred to the bookings list... 'Ah, numero ventisei'. Room 26 turned out to be an 'en suite cell', 10ft by 10, with a pair of single beds; shower and lavatory. It was clean and adequate, although during the night my wife was to develop a peculiar devotion to the cast-iron radiator. On the back of the door was an injunction against whispering and giggling after 10pm.
For a number of reasons, this is not a place for honeymoon couples. All beds are narrow and chastely single. Hic hankum nullum pankum. Indeed, only in recent years have married couples been allowed to share rooms, although in our case Sister Priscilla had the delicacy not to demand documentary proof.
For anyone more familiar with hotels, the biggest problem is protocol. Should you say grace before eating? (Optional) Do you tip a nun? (No) Or do you discreetly drop a couple of coins into the offertory box? (That'll do nicely. God bless.)
Nor should you expect too much in the culinary department. The Franciscans, it soon becomes clear, are not a gastronomic order. Turning over our place-cards at dinner, we were heartened to see vitello ai ferri and anitra arrosto on the menu. This, we told ourselves, would be a meal to remember. At this point something like a miracle occurred as the grilled veal and roast duck were transformed into a hard boiled egg, a slice of cheese and half a pilchard. OK, so a fish was once the secret sign of Christianity - but, Madonna, a pilchard?
When we pointed to the back of the place-card, our server shook his head: 'That's the summer menu. This is winter.' A diner at the next table murmured 'Buon appetito', thoughtfully adding, 'Good hunger!'.
Dinner over, we were about to settle in with a compensatory glass of the monastery's excellent Lamponi - a diabolically tempting 33 degree proof raspberry liqueur - when we were sent to bed. Lights out, doors locked, heating off. Buona Notte. It was 9.30pm.
None of this is to diminish the power of the place. You might even argue it helps concentrate the mind. La Verna is Gethsemane without the coaches; Lourdes minus the plaster knick-knackery. As a born-again atheist, I'm hardly qualified to judge but I've no doubt that anyone seeking 'the spirit of St Francis' is more likely to find it here than at Assisi (of which my clearest memory is buying our daughter a plastic globe of St Francis in a snow storm). It's a chastening experience to open the door on one of the sanctuary's many chapels, guidebook in hand, camera cocked, to discover a cowled monk kneeling, still as a statue, in silent prayer.
The morning of our second day, I woke to the sound of bells. Leaving my wife still incanting a fitful 'Shiver me cloisters', I skipped the 7am service and set off in the mist for La Penna, the mountain peak where St Francis and his brethren used to meditate and pray. Visibility was down to 20 yards. As I climbed through the forest of pine and beech, the only sound was the occasional crack of gunfire from hunters in the valley below. St Francis would certainly not have approved.
This is not a walk for unsupervised children. At the very top there is a cross and, one pace beyond, a vertiginous drop of several hundred feet - an invitation, if ever there was one, to step into eternity. Walking back by a different route, you come upon a succession of tiny stone chapels. The most charming is that of the Blessed John - a Franciscan brother who, centuries before tree-hugging became fashionable, spent his days praying in front of a giant beech. When the tree died, the chapel with its low-walled courtyard was built in its place.
Back in the monastery, there are more than a dozen della Robbia glazed reliefs. The best is in the Basilica - a stunning Annunciation by Andrea della Robbia. In the Chapel of the Blessed Stigmata, before a Crucifixion by Andrea, you can see the stone on which St Francis received his wounds.
You don't have to be religious to appreciate La Verna, but it probably helps. If, as a bonus, you fancy a foretaste of Purgatory, make the trip in winter. On the other hand, it's telling that St Francis himself seems to have come here only during the summer months.
Santuario della Verna, 52010 Chiusi della Verna, la Toscana (00 39 575 5341) Full board: 62,000 lire per person (approx pounds 22)
THE IRISH INDEPENDENT, 3 NOVEMBER 2012
Sidney Nolan picture: The National Gallery, Canberra
The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin is hosting an exhibition of paintings by the celebrated Australian artist Sidney Nolan, opening 2nd November and running for three months. It will feature Nolan’s Ned Kelly series painted in 1946/47.
But who was Ned Kelly? Most of us are familiar with the legend but, as Michael Delahaye reveals, the historical Kelly is a more complex - and more Irish - figure than the comic-book caricature.
The bush town of Avenel, Victoria, is bisected by a ribbon of water called Hughes Creek. It was to play a pivotal role in the life of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly. Kelly was brought up in Avenel and would have been about ten years old when he jumped into the swollen waters to save a seven-year-old, Richard Shelton. In gratitude, the boy’s father presented him with a green silk sash. Kelly treasured it for the rest of his life and wrapped it round his body like a protective talisman for the final shoot-out at Glenrowan.
Today the sash is enshrined in a glass case at the Benalla Costume & Pioneer Museum. Darkly stained with Ned’s blood, it is the ultimate Kelly relic. There can't be many Irish visitors who, viewing it, don't hear 'The wearing of the green'. And therein lies the key to Kelly – his Irishness.
Despite this, Australians like to think of Ned Kelly as one of theirs. Old bucket head is right up there with the koala and the kanga – an Aussie icon of the first order. And for countless Australian males he’s something more: the embodiment of two things they hold particularly dear…
First, ‘mateship’. When the final shoot-out came, Ned chose to confront the police, all barrels blazing, rather than abandon his friends. Second, he was what Australians call a ‘larrikin’ – a bit of a lad who ‘larks around’ and shows scant respect for authority.
And of course no-one fixed the maverick Kelly more memorably in the Australian landscape - and consciousness - than the artist Sidney Nolan, setting Ned’s hallmark helmet starkly against the arid outback.
Yet Kelly was hanged – he was just twenty-five years old - two decades before Australia became a single, federated nation in 1901. Born in the Colony of Victoria, he was of Irish parentage on both sides. His father, John, had been transported from Moyglass, County Tipperary, for stealing pigs, while the family of his mother, Ellen (née Quinn), had emigrated when she was still a child. And, tellingly, we know that Ned himself spoke with an Irish brogue.
Starting out as a horse thief, Kelly went on to rob banks and kill cops. But, once outlawed by the colonial authorities, he became something of a guerrilla revolutionary, a champion of the impoverished immigrant population in north-eastern Victoria. More Robin Hood than Billy the Kid.
And not just in his own eyes; for two years a network of local sympathisers, possibly hundreds, provided the Kelly Gang with food, shelter, stabling and, most important, silent collusion.
Kelly may have been an Irish Catholic but, as Ian Jones, the widely acknowledged authority on the Kelly Gang, points out: “Many of his friends were Protestant. His mother married a Protestant (after the death of Ned’s father). Two of his sisters married Protestants. There were Englishmen – Cornishmen - very supportive of him.”
Kelly’s closest gang associate was his lieutenant, Joe Byrne. Of Irish rebel stock, Byrne had a natural socio-political bent. Before one of their bank raids, the two men composed a 56-page proclamation, the Jerilderie Letter. In part, it’s a justification for their criminal behaviour. But it’s also a Fenian manifesto – a demand for justice and equality, put in the context of the centuries-old struggle to, quote, “rise old Erins Isle once more from the pressure and tyrannism of the English yoke which has kept it in poverty and starvation...”
Jones believes that the ultimate intention was nothing less than the establishment of an independent ‘Republic of North-Eastern Victoria’. So could there today have been a green flag flying over an Irish enclave in the modern State of Victoria? Jones cites an intriguing parallel: the First Boer War in South Africa, also coincidentally at the end of the nineteenth century: “It was a farmers’ rebellion against British rule, in which farmers rode their horses and had their own rifles and used their intimate knowledge of the land to combat the English.” In the Kelly Gang’s corner of Victoria, says Jones, “you had the best shots, the best horsemen and the best bushmen the colonies could produce… Imagine a little army of men like that...”
The extent of Kelly’s Irishness is of more than historical interest. It’s become a hot topical issue since the discovery in 2009, and subsequent DNA verification, of his bones in an unmarked prison grave. Earlier this year the Victorian State Government decided they should be handed over to his family. Complications arise because ‘the family’ now comprises several hundred members through half a dozen separate lines – both Catholic and Protestant, Irish and non-Irish. Several months’ consultation lies ahead.
If the bones are to be buried among Kelly’s relatives, as seems likely, what sort of public commemoration would be appropriate? Given that Kelly was both a Catholic and a self-confessed killer, should he be accorded a requiem mass? Kelly, who by all accounts played ‘the gentleman bushranger’ with charm and humour, would doubtless be amused. 132 years after his death, he is still making news.
Michael Delahaye's film about Ned Kelly will be broadcast by RTE’s NATIONWIDE programme on 16th January 2013
POSTSCRIPT:
As predicted, the burial of the bones turned out to be a bruising and divisive affair, with the various branches of the extended ‘Kelly Family’ splitting along Catholic/Protestant lines. In the end the Catholic members won the day, any hope of consultation or consensus having evaporated early on. A full Requiem Mass was duly held at St Patrick’s Church, Wangaratta, on 18th January 2013, followed by a ‘private’ burial at Greta Cemetery, North Victoria, from which the media were excluded. To thwart souvenir hunters, Kelly’s bones were buried beneath a slab of concrete in an unmarked grave, not far from those of his mother and brother.
Sidney Nolan picture: The National Gallery, Canberra
The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin is hosting an exhibition of paintings by the celebrated Australian artist Sidney Nolan, opening 2nd November and running for three months. It will feature Nolan’s Ned Kelly series painted in 1946/47.
But who was Ned Kelly? Most of us are familiar with the legend but, as Michael Delahaye reveals, the historical Kelly is a more complex - and more Irish - figure than the comic-book caricature.
The bush town of Avenel, Victoria, is bisected by a ribbon of water called Hughes Creek. It was to play a pivotal role in the life of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly. Kelly was brought up in Avenel and would have been about ten years old when he jumped into the swollen waters to save a seven-year-old, Richard Shelton. In gratitude, the boy’s father presented him with a green silk sash. Kelly treasured it for the rest of his life and wrapped it round his body like a protective talisman for the final shoot-out at Glenrowan.
Today the sash is enshrined in a glass case at the Benalla Costume & Pioneer Museum. Darkly stained with Ned’s blood, it is the ultimate Kelly relic. There can't be many Irish visitors who, viewing it, don't hear 'The wearing of the green'. And therein lies the key to Kelly – his Irishness.
Despite this, Australians like to think of Ned Kelly as one of theirs. Old bucket head is right up there with the koala and the kanga – an Aussie icon of the first order. And for countless Australian males he’s something more: the embodiment of two things they hold particularly dear…
First, ‘mateship’. When the final shoot-out came, Ned chose to confront the police, all barrels blazing, rather than abandon his friends. Second, he was what Australians call a ‘larrikin’ – a bit of a lad who ‘larks around’ and shows scant respect for authority.
And of course no-one fixed the maverick Kelly more memorably in the Australian landscape - and consciousness - than the artist Sidney Nolan, setting Ned’s hallmark helmet starkly against the arid outback.
Yet Kelly was hanged – he was just twenty-five years old - two decades before Australia became a single, federated nation in 1901. Born in the Colony of Victoria, he was of Irish parentage on both sides. His father, John, had been transported from Moyglass, County Tipperary, for stealing pigs, while the family of his mother, Ellen (née Quinn), had emigrated when she was still a child. And, tellingly, we know that Ned himself spoke with an Irish brogue.
Starting out as a horse thief, Kelly went on to rob banks and kill cops. But, once outlawed by the colonial authorities, he became something of a guerrilla revolutionary, a champion of the impoverished immigrant population in north-eastern Victoria. More Robin Hood than Billy the Kid.
And not just in his own eyes; for two years a network of local sympathisers, possibly hundreds, provided the Kelly Gang with food, shelter, stabling and, most important, silent collusion.
Kelly may have been an Irish Catholic but, as Ian Jones, the widely acknowledged authority on the Kelly Gang, points out: “Many of his friends were Protestant. His mother married a Protestant (after the death of Ned’s father). Two of his sisters married Protestants. There were Englishmen – Cornishmen - very supportive of him.”
Kelly’s closest gang associate was his lieutenant, Joe Byrne. Of Irish rebel stock, Byrne had a natural socio-political bent. Before one of their bank raids, the two men composed a 56-page proclamation, the Jerilderie Letter. In part, it’s a justification for their criminal behaviour. But it’s also a Fenian manifesto – a demand for justice and equality, put in the context of the centuries-old struggle to, quote, “rise old Erins Isle once more from the pressure and tyrannism of the English yoke which has kept it in poverty and starvation...”
Jones believes that the ultimate intention was nothing less than the establishment of an independent ‘Republic of North-Eastern Victoria’. So could there today have been a green flag flying over an Irish enclave in the modern State of Victoria? Jones cites an intriguing parallel: the First Boer War in South Africa, also coincidentally at the end of the nineteenth century: “It was a farmers’ rebellion against British rule, in which farmers rode their horses and had their own rifles and used their intimate knowledge of the land to combat the English.” In the Kelly Gang’s corner of Victoria, says Jones, “you had the best shots, the best horsemen and the best bushmen the colonies could produce… Imagine a little army of men like that...”
The extent of Kelly’s Irishness is of more than historical interest. It’s become a hot topical issue since the discovery in 2009, and subsequent DNA verification, of his bones in an unmarked prison grave. Earlier this year the Victorian State Government decided they should be handed over to his family. Complications arise because ‘the family’ now comprises several hundred members through half a dozen separate lines – both Catholic and Protestant, Irish and non-Irish. Several months’ consultation lies ahead.
If the bones are to be buried among Kelly’s relatives, as seems likely, what sort of public commemoration would be appropriate? Given that Kelly was both a Catholic and a self-confessed killer, should he be accorded a requiem mass? Kelly, who by all accounts played ‘the gentleman bushranger’ with charm and humour, would doubtless be amused. 132 years after his death, he is still making news.
Michael Delahaye's film about Ned Kelly will be broadcast by RTE’s NATIONWIDE programme on 16th January 2013
POSTSCRIPT:
As predicted, the burial of the bones turned out to be a bruising and divisive affair, with the various branches of the extended ‘Kelly Family’ splitting along Catholic/Protestant lines. In the end the Catholic members won the day, any hope of consultation or consensus having evaporated early on. A full Requiem Mass was duly held at St Patrick’s Church, Wangaratta, on 18th January 2013, followed by a ‘private’ burial at Greta Cemetery, North Victoria, from which the media were excluded. To thwart souvenir hunters, Kelly’s bones were buried beneath a slab of concrete in an unmarked grave, not far from those of his mother and brother.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES MAGAZINE, 11 NOVEMBER 2000
Illustration: Bruno Haward
COPING WITH CAPITALISM - IN GEORGIA
I am waiting for a taxi outside my guesthouse in the suburbs of Georgia's second city, Kutaisi. Taking a closer look at what I at first thought to be lamp standards, I realise they are trolley-bus gantries. But there is no sign of any trolley-bus. I ask the taxi driver about them. 'Oh, somebody shinned up the poles and stole the cable back in the early 1990s… Too expensive to replace them now.'
Time spent in the former Soviet - now democratic - Republic of Georgia is a kaleidoscopic experience, a jumble of vivid, but often contradictory, images that slip and slide into one another. Just when you think you have a handle on the place, it comes off in your hand.
For much of the day, there is no electricity. If you don't have a generator or can't afford the diesel to run one, you creep around with oil lamps. Driving between Kutaisi and the capital, Tbilisi, you pass the hulks of huge, Soviet-era factories, now silent and crumbling because they too have been starved of power. Between 1989 and 1998, Georgia's GDP plunged by two-thirds. The roads are now pitted and pot-holed . Diesel-belching buses zig-zag in search of asphalt. You begin to understand the importance of the word 'infrastructure'.
As we head down to the centre of Kutaisi, the taxi driver switches off the ignition to save petrol. It is a common practice in former Soviet countries - and potentially lethal. A couple of weeks earlier, according to my travelling companion, a local bus driver did the same. When he stepped on the brakes, there weren't any. Several children died.
For many Georgians, the post-Soviet era is about survival. In Kutaisi city centre, we come across a small child begging in the rain. She tells us her name is Christina and that she earns five lari a day - about £1.75. We ask if she is alone. No. She takes us to her mother working in the nearby market. The mother explains that her children have to beg because she cannot earn enough from her stall. Of course, she would rather they were at home or at school, but what else can she do? The family has to eat. And her husband? He is in prison after stealing a bag of flour. 'To feed the family,' she adds without emotion.
Moving through the market, we are approached by a bevy of beauties who, in this city of child beggars, force free cigarettes upon us: 'Promotion! Take one, try one. First quality - German!' Squealing their wares, the girls strike strangely static poses, as though they had been cut from the pages of a western fashion magazine. But beside this tableau of capitalism stands an ironic subtext - a middle-aged woman, arms outstretched and selling, in one hand, candles… in the other a toilet roll. In the post-Soviet world the occasional luxury may come free but you still have to pay for necessities.
Yet all around us the stalls are piled high - fruit and vegetables, home-grown mandarins, apples, hazelnuts, pomegranates, garlic and a dozen different varieties of beans. With its fertile soil and sub-tropical climate, Georgia is still a land of plenty. In Soviet times, this was the fruit bowl of the union. These days it sells to itself.
The street market is the one 'market economy' that works. At the macro level, the switch from communism to capitalism has been painfully slow. A nation that for seventy years had its prices fixed by a central bureaucracy doesn't change its psychology overnight. At dinner the previous evening, I had been amazed to see a Soviet-era bottle-opener with its price die-stamped into the steel.
Capitalism, it has become clear, is a more sophisticated mechanism than anybody realised. Just as the absence of war hasn't meant peace, so the end of communism hasn't meant capitalism. We gave it to them in 'flat-pack' form and forgot to include the instruction manual, which has now arrived in the form of myriad consultants… myself included.
Those who give society its essential continuity and cohesion - the teachers and doctors - are paid little and late. The police do better, but through a form of 'direct public funding' - bribery - you can see at every other road junction. Few Georgians pay taxes, either because they can't (they don't earn enough) or won't (they see no evidence of how their taxes are being used). Not only is the cake now smaller, but the slice that goes on health, education and social services has shrunk proportionally, from almost 36% of GDP in 1993 to less than 15% in 1997.
But the myth of western capitalism is powerfully enduring. Margaret Thatcher's reputation, whatever vicissitudes it may have undergone in her own country, remains untarnished here. A Georgian friend, Jano, tells me of watching television with his parents as a child back in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher came to power. The new British prime minister was not shown making a speech from some podium, but lining up the jars in her kitchen. Jano remembers his mother nodding in approval: 'A fine woman!' That single domestic image struck a deeper chord here than any number of 'Iron Lady' poses beside Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev.
One evening over dinner I submit another friend, Zurab, to some third-degree interrogation. He works for a US-funded non-governmental organisation and in Georgian terms is paid well - about $100 (£69) a week. But I know he supports his widowed mother and, I suspect, half a dozen other members of his extended family. Doesn't he ever yearn for 'the good old days' when life may have been regimented but at least it was secure and you didn't have toddlers and grannies begging in the street? Never, he assures me, and to explain he tells a story. When he was at school, aged seven, his teacher asked the class: 'What would you do if you were given a million roubles?' One girl said she would give it to the poor. The teacher snapped back: 'Impossible! There are no poor in the Soviet Union.' But, says Zurab, every child in the class knew she was lying - and, worse, they knew she knew she was lying. When children know but adults won't admit - it's a good definition of a bankrupt ideology.
But, if capitalism is complex, democracy is delicate. Many - perhaps most - Georgians these days look west. They remind you that Georgia is now a member of the Council of Europe; ergo, a European democracy. Yet there is also a realisation that it would take very little - a third, but successful, assassination attempt on President Shevardnadze, for example - to plunge the country into chaos or a renewed civil war.
Yet in Kutaisi at least the process of democracy is on show for all to see. One Friday evening I am invited to attend Ask the Governor. This is a live television programme, during which the governor of the Imereti region, Teimuraz Shashiashvili, sits in his office and submits himself to a public phone-in. It starts at midnight and can go on until 3.00 am. It is one of the few times you can be sure there will be electricity. As far as I can tell, the calls are unscripted and unfiltered, and the governor answers without prevarication. Whether the complaints from his callers produce any action, I can't say. But certainly Mr Shashiashvili, though himself a presidential appointee, seems to be more answerable to the electorate than most politicians in the UK.
The camera swings towards me, sitting in a corner of the office. Is there anything I would like to ask - from my 'western perspective'? Half-suspecting this, I had a question prepared: 'What does the governor think should be the role of the media in a democracy - to represent the authorities to the people, or the people to the authorities?' The governor is equally well prepared: 'I expect the media to be responsible, to assist our emerging democracy to become a full one.' No need for political consultants here.
And, for all the misery, people here do not come across as miserable. There is an equality in hardship - rather as in wartime Britain. One morning, picking my way with Jano through the pot-holes of a grim suburban road between depressing 1960s tower blocks, I'm surprised to see, first, a man walking his pig, and then a hunter with gun and dog. As he comes towards us, the hunter grins. Jano asks him where he's been. He points beyond the tower blocks. 'Shooting wild chicken in the wood on the other side of the road,' he replies and taps his bulging pouch.
In the last parliamentary elections, the slogan of President Shevardnadze's ruling party was: FROM STABILITY TO PROSPERITY! The party was re-elected. When I ask Georgians whether they believe prosperity really is on the horizon, they more often reply 'Yes, if…' rather than 'Yes, but…' That in itself is reason for hope.
Illustration: Bruno Haward
COPING WITH CAPITALISM - IN GEORGIA
I am waiting for a taxi outside my guesthouse in the suburbs of Georgia's second city, Kutaisi. Taking a closer look at what I at first thought to be lamp standards, I realise they are trolley-bus gantries. But there is no sign of any trolley-bus. I ask the taxi driver about them. 'Oh, somebody shinned up the poles and stole the cable back in the early 1990s… Too expensive to replace them now.'
Time spent in the former Soviet - now democratic - Republic of Georgia is a kaleidoscopic experience, a jumble of vivid, but often contradictory, images that slip and slide into one another. Just when you think you have a handle on the place, it comes off in your hand.
For much of the day, there is no electricity. If you don't have a generator or can't afford the diesel to run one, you creep around with oil lamps. Driving between Kutaisi and the capital, Tbilisi, you pass the hulks of huge, Soviet-era factories, now silent and crumbling because they too have been starved of power. Between 1989 and 1998, Georgia's GDP plunged by two-thirds. The roads are now pitted and pot-holed . Diesel-belching buses zig-zag in search of asphalt. You begin to understand the importance of the word 'infrastructure'.
As we head down to the centre of Kutaisi, the taxi driver switches off the ignition to save petrol. It is a common practice in former Soviet countries - and potentially lethal. A couple of weeks earlier, according to my travelling companion, a local bus driver did the same. When he stepped on the brakes, there weren't any. Several children died.
For many Georgians, the post-Soviet era is about survival. In Kutaisi city centre, we come across a small child begging in the rain. She tells us her name is Christina and that she earns five lari a day - about £1.75. We ask if she is alone. No. She takes us to her mother working in the nearby market. The mother explains that her children have to beg because she cannot earn enough from her stall. Of course, she would rather they were at home or at school, but what else can she do? The family has to eat. And her husband? He is in prison after stealing a bag of flour. 'To feed the family,' she adds without emotion.
Moving through the market, we are approached by a bevy of beauties who, in this city of child beggars, force free cigarettes upon us: 'Promotion! Take one, try one. First quality - German!' Squealing their wares, the girls strike strangely static poses, as though they had been cut from the pages of a western fashion magazine. But beside this tableau of capitalism stands an ironic subtext - a middle-aged woman, arms outstretched and selling, in one hand, candles… in the other a toilet roll. In the post-Soviet world the occasional luxury may come free but you still have to pay for necessities.
Yet all around us the stalls are piled high - fruit and vegetables, home-grown mandarins, apples, hazelnuts, pomegranates, garlic and a dozen different varieties of beans. With its fertile soil and sub-tropical climate, Georgia is still a land of plenty. In Soviet times, this was the fruit bowl of the union. These days it sells to itself.
The street market is the one 'market economy' that works. At the macro level, the switch from communism to capitalism has been painfully slow. A nation that for seventy years had its prices fixed by a central bureaucracy doesn't change its psychology overnight. At dinner the previous evening, I had been amazed to see a Soviet-era bottle-opener with its price die-stamped into the steel.
Capitalism, it has become clear, is a more sophisticated mechanism than anybody realised. Just as the absence of war hasn't meant peace, so the end of communism hasn't meant capitalism. We gave it to them in 'flat-pack' form and forgot to include the instruction manual, which has now arrived in the form of myriad consultants… myself included.
Those who give society its essential continuity and cohesion - the teachers and doctors - are paid little and late. The police do better, but through a form of 'direct public funding' - bribery - you can see at every other road junction. Few Georgians pay taxes, either because they can't (they don't earn enough) or won't (they see no evidence of how their taxes are being used). Not only is the cake now smaller, but the slice that goes on health, education and social services has shrunk proportionally, from almost 36% of GDP in 1993 to less than 15% in 1997.
But the myth of western capitalism is powerfully enduring. Margaret Thatcher's reputation, whatever vicissitudes it may have undergone in her own country, remains untarnished here. A Georgian friend, Jano, tells me of watching television with his parents as a child back in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher came to power. The new British prime minister was not shown making a speech from some podium, but lining up the jars in her kitchen. Jano remembers his mother nodding in approval: 'A fine woman!' That single domestic image struck a deeper chord here than any number of 'Iron Lady' poses beside Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev.
One evening over dinner I submit another friend, Zurab, to some third-degree interrogation. He works for a US-funded non-governmental organisation and in Georgian terms is paid well - about $100 (£69) a week. But I know he supports his widowed mother and, I suspect, half a dozen other members of his extended family. Doesn't he ever yearn for 'the good old days' when life may have been regimented but at least it was secure and you didn't have toddlers and grannies begging in the street? Never, he assures me, and to explain he tells a story. When he was at school, aged seven, his teacher asked the class: 'What would you do if you were given a million roubles?' One girl said she would give it to the poor. The teacher snapped back: 'Impossible! There are no poor in the Soviet Union.' But, says Zurab, every child in the class knew she was lying - and, worse, they knew she knew she was lying. When children know but adults won't admit - it's a good definition of a bankrupt ideology.
But, if capitalism is complex, democracy is delicate. Many - perhaps most - Georgians these days look west. They remind you that Georgia is now a member of the Council of Europe; ergo, a European democracy. Yet there is also a realisation that it would take very little - a third, but successful, assassination attempt on President Shevardnadze, for example - to plunge the country into chaos or a renewed civil war.
Yet in Kutaisi at least the process of democracy is on show for all to see. One Friday evening I am invited to attend Ask the Governor. This is a live television programme, during which the governor of the Imereti region, Teimuraz Shashiashvili, sits in his office and submits himself to a public phone-in. It starts at midnight and can go on until 3.00 am. It is one of the few times you can be sure there will be electricity. As far as I can tell, the calls are unscripted and unfiltered, and the governor answers without prevarication. Whether the complaints from his callers produce any action, I can't say. But certainly Mr Shashiashvili, though himself a presidential appointee, seems to be more answerable to the electorate than most politicians in the UK.
The camera swings towards me, sitting in a corner of the office. Is there anything I would like to ask - from my 'western perspective'? Half-suspecting this, I had a question prepared: 'What does the governor think should be the role of the media in a democracy - to represent the authorities to the people, or the people to the authorities?' The governor is equally well prepared: 'I expect the media to be responsible, to assist our emerging democracy to become a full one.' No need for political consultants here.
And, for all the misery, people here do not come across as miserable. There is an equality in hardship - rather as in wartime Britain. One morning, picking my way with Jano through the pot-holes of a grim suburban road between depressing 1960s tower blocks, I'm surprised to see, first, a man walking his pig, and then a hunter with gun and dog. As he comes towards us, the hunter grins. Jano asks him where he's been. He points beyond the tower blocks. 'Shooting wild chicken in the wood on the other side of the road,' he replies and taps his bulging pouch.
In the last parliamentary elections, the slogan of President Shevardnadze's ruling party was: FROM STABILITY TO PROSPERITY! The party was re-elected. When I ask Georgians whether they believe prosperity really is on the horizon, they more often reply 'Yes, if…' rather than 'Yes, but…' That in itself is reason for hope.
THE INDEPENDENT, 5 SEPTEMBER 1999
Photo: MD
Some time in the Twenties, a statue was erected alongside the road between Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. It portrayed Lenin and Stalin, sitting side by side on a bench, discussing - it is assumed - the onward march of Communism. When Stalin took over from Lenin as Soviet leader, he ordered the removal of his predecessor, leaving his own likeness to muse alone on the onward march. But then, when Stalin himself was discredited in the mid-Fifties, he too was removed. All that now remains is the bench.
Well, not quite. When I travelled the entire length of the road earlier this year, there was no sign of even the bench. It too seems to have been melted down.
Yet the story of the amazing shrinking statue remains a potent fable. It symbolises not just the Ozymandian transience of power but, more topically, the dilemma currently facing every former Soviet republic: what to do with all those grandiose chunks of marble and masonry, those mini-mausolea and Stalinist 'wedding cakes' that they inherited from their former masters. To prop up or pull down?
Certainly nobody wants to spend money on maintaining them. Politically, they're embarrassing; aesthetically, they're often an eye-sore. But the real problem is that removing them can create something even worse - a toothless gap in the urban smile.
In Kazan, the capital of the Russian state of Tatarstan, a woman in her fifties encapsulated the mixed feelings of her generation: 'The old Soviet leaders, yes, they may have been monsters - but their statues were like reference points when I was growing up. Now some squares are unrecognisable. When you take away the statues, you take away a part of my childhood - like removing your Nelson's column.'
A young man beside her would have none of it: 'They weren't erected by a grateful people. They had a purely political purpose - as symbols of repression, to remind us who was in charge. That's why we must get rid of them.'
But at least a statue can be readily replaced. Indeed, in Russia the recycling of plinths has a long tradition. In the town of Rybinsk, on the river Volga, you will still find a statue of Lenin. Even now, every 22 April, local Communists gather round it to celebrate his birthday. But the pink granite base is the very same as that which, before the 1917 Revolution, supported a statue of Tsar Alexander II (which, incidentally, was raised by public subscription). All that changed was that the double-headed eagle was chipped off and replaced by a plaque with the hammer and sickle. Now, in their turn, across the former Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle are being erased. The Albanian army even has a special belt-grinding unit to remove the emblem from military buckles.
Buildings are more difficult. Over seventy years, many of the Soviet republics were 'given' works of architecture by Moscow - often as a mark of favour or distinction. Sometimes these could be quite useful, and still are. Any Soviet city of more than a million people, for example, was entitled to its own metro - which is why capital cities such as Tbilisi, Yerevan and Baku have splendid underground transport systems modelled on the Moscow original, even if these days they can barely afford to run them.
But Tbilisi also got a rather less welcome gift. This was a huge 'tribune' - a dais on which the Georgian presidium could line up and take the salute at passing parades. To heighten the theatrical effect, it was backed by a multi-arched structure of sculpted shells soaring more than thirty metres into the air. With characteristic irreverence, the locals dubbed it 'Andropov's Ears'. Today, only the arches remain. Intended as a mere backdrop, they lead nowhere - a total mystery to any visitor ignorant of their original purpose.
Rather more practical is an imposing building with double columns on Rustaveli Avenue. This started life as the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute of Social Sciences, with each of the great men depicted in his own niche on the frieze above the columns. You can guess the rest… today every niche is empty and the building is known simply as 'The Institute'.
There is a fitting conclusion to this walk through architectural history. At the end of Rustaveli Avenue is Tbilisi's new McDonald's, opened in February amid great controversy on account of its proximity to the statue of Georgia's national poet, Shota Rustaveli. Its illuminated red-and-yellow 'M' blazes forth like a beacon to capitalism. From Marx to Mcdonald's. Every age has its icons, but at least the hamburger sign has the modesty - and foresight - to be in plastic.
Photo: MD
Some time in the Twenties, a statue was erected alongside the road between Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. It portrayed Lenin and Stalin, sitting side by side on a bench, discussing - it is assumed - the onward march of Communism. When Stalin took over from Lenin as Soviet leader, he ordered the removal of his predecessor, leaving his own likeness to muse alone on the onward march. But then, when Stalin himself was discredited in the mid-Fifties, he too was removed. All that now remains is the bench.
Well, not quite. When I travelled the entire length of the road earlier this year, there was no sign of even the bench. It too seems to have been melted down.
Yet the story of the amazing shrinking statue remains a potent fable. It symbolises not just the Ozymandian transience of power but, more topically, the dilemma currently facing every former Soviet republic: what to do with all those grandiose chunks of marble and masonry, those mini-mausolea and Stalinist 'wedding cakes' that they inherited from their former masters. To prop up or pull down?
Certainly nobody wants to spend money on maintaining them. Politically, they're embarrassing; aesthetically, they're often an eye-sore. But the real problem is that removing them can create something even worse - a toothless gap in the urban smile.
In Kazan, the capital of the Russian state of Tatarstan, a woman in her fifties encapsulated the mixed feelings of her generation: 'The old Soviet leaders, yes, they may have been monsters - but their statues were like reference points when I was growing up. Now some squares are unrecognisable. When you take away the statues, you take away a part of my childhood - like removing your Nelson's column.'
A young man beside her would have none of it: 'They weren't erected by a grateful people. They had a purely political purpose - as symbols of repression, to remind us who was in charge. That's why we must get rid of them.'
But at least a statue can be readily replaced. Indeed, in Russia the recycling of plinths has a long tradition. In the town of Rybinsk, on the river Volga, you will still find a statue of Lenin. Even now, every 22 April, local Communists gather round it to celebrate his birthday. But the pink granite base is the very same as that which, before the 1917 Revolution, supported a statue of Tsar Alexander II (which, incidentally, was raised by public subscription). All that changed was that the double-headed eagle was chipped off and replaced by a plaque with the hammer and sickle. Now, in their turn, across the former Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle are being erased. The Albanian army even has a special belt-grinding unit to remove the emblem from military buckles.
Buildings are more difficult. Over seventy years, many of the Soviet republics were 'given' works of architecture by Moscow - often as a mark of favour or distinction. Sometimes these could be quite useful, and still are. Any Soviet city of more than a million people, for example, was entitled to its own metro - which is why capital cities such as Tbilisi, Yerevan and Baku have splendid underground transport systems modelled on the Moscow original, even if these days they can barely afford to run them.
But Tbilisi also got a rather less welcome gift. This was a huge 'tribune' - a dais on which the Georgian presidium could line up and take the salute at passing parades. To heighten the theatrical effect, it was backed by a multi-arched structure of sculpted shells soaring more than thirty metres into the air. With characteristic irreverence, the locals dubbed it 'Andropov's Ears'. Today, only the arches remain. Intended as a mere backdrop, they lead nowhere - a total mystery to any visitor ignorant of their original purpose.
Rather more practical is an imposing building with double columns on Rustaveli Avenue. This started life as the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute of Social Sciences, with each of the great men depicted in his own niche on the frieze above the columns. You can guess the rest… today every niche is empty and the building is known simply as 'The Institute'.
There is a fitting conclusion to this walk through architectural history. At the end of Rustaveli Avenue is Tbilisi's new McDonald's, opened in February amid great controversy on account of its proximity to the statue of Georgia's national poet, Shota Rustaveli. Its illuminated red-and-yellow 'M' blazes forth like a beacon to capitalism. From Marx to Mcdonald's. Every age has its icons, but at least the hamburger sign has the modesty - and foresight - to be in plastic.
THE TIMES OF LONDON, 11 SEPTEMBER 1998
Photo: EPA
Russia's pioneering city television is fighting for survival, says Michael Delahaye
It is six in the evening and Channel-3 is putting together its nightly news bulletin Stolitza. This is television in its pioneering prime. The studio backdrop has been lashed up from a slatted window blind and the presenter, Angela Askabova, has to sit on a stack of books to bring her up to camera level. Angela, 26, is also the station’s general manager and news editor.
Channel-3 is the independent television station for Syktyvkar (population: 250,000), the capital of the Komi Republic in Russia’s frozen north.
Across the country – from Siberia to the Black Sea – there are an estimated 500 city-based stations, pumping out a daily fare of news, features, quizzes, soaps, movies and commercials. Competing against the two state networks, they are an expression of both democracy and capitalism. Today their role has never been more important – or more threatened.
Such stations started almost by accident. Most Russian apartment blocks have a master antenna on the roof which transmits programmes to individual flats. Entrepeneurial occupants realised they could relay tapes of pirated films and American soaps plucked from the sky to their neighbours for small change. Add to this a camcorder for some personalised linking material and you have a television station. From that it is a small step to hire or hoist a transmitter, and beam farther afield.
Channel-3’s six-hour evening schedule is a respectable mix of the bought-in, sponsored and home-grown. But its flagship is its nightly news.
Tonight’s bulletin comprises six stories: a local opera diva has returned from a masterclass in Moscow; a saw mill is installing new Western machinery; there have been a couple of killings; and, for the republic’s border guards, today is an excuse to get well lubricated on their annual holiday. The entire package will be pre-recorded two hours before broadcast. Fortunately there aren’t many breaking stories in Syktyvkar. In fact, during July and August the news service closes.
Channel-3s half dozen reporters, all women in their twenties, are skilled journalists and almost all of them are familiar with working on computers. The three cameramen lack formal training, but they turn in broadcast-quality material using Super-VHS cameras costing a tenth of the Sony Betacams favoured by the ‘big boys’. Channel-3 is one of the more accurate of the home-grown stations. It is lucky in having a local university with a progressive faculty of journalism from which to recruit.
For seventy years in Russia a ‘journalist’ was someone who lightly edited the latest government handout and, in their approach to reporting, many city-based stations still take their cue from the old Soviet handbook. The result can be a visual version of Pravda, with a reluctance to humanise social issues and focus on individuals. Nor do stations always distinguish between news and adverts. Paying to appear in a news item is not unknown.
Few stations can live by commercials and sponsorship alone. Unlike in Britain where television advertising is more lucrative than both print and radio, in Russia it is the cheapest of the three. A station is doing well if it gets more than $100 for a one-minute slot in prime time. And often the payment will be not in cash but in barter. Many stations end up doing a deal with their local municipality for subsidised accommodation or a contribution to operating costs. In return, the authorities may demand a right of access to the airwaves, which can come dangerously close to editorial interference. For good reason, such stations are often referred to as Mayors’ Stations.
The only other source of income is the sale of airtime to candidates in Russia’s seemingly endless local, parliamentary and presidential elections. At up to $500 a minute, it can prove irresistible. Some stations generate more than half their income this way. But again there are dangers: at best, pressure on the station to be less impartial; at worst, the inclusion of paid-for propaganda within news bulletins.
In the present economic climate, a national shake-out is inevitable. Some larger Russian cities now have five or more local channels, and a station has to broadcast for most of the evening to hold its audience. There are only three options: show pirated material (risky), produce its own programmes (costly), or sign up with a ‘network provider’ to fill the hole, often in return for a stake in the company.
TNT, part of the influential Media-Most Group, which also owns Russia’s best-known independent channel, NTV, is one of the newest – and most aggressive – network providers. It already has about a hundred stations on its books and owns a few of them outright. Its latest acquisition is Syktyvkar’s Channel-3.
Once part of a group, it is even harder for the city-based stations to maintain their free-wheeling independence. Igor Malashenko, NTV’s general director, denies they would ever use their TNT affiliates as political tools: ‘We always advise our partners to be as distanced or detached from political parties as much as they can.’
Yet during the 1996 presidential elections, NTV – along with most other broadcasters – was seen as actively promoting Boris Yeltsin’s candidacy against the Communists. The charitably inclined argue that this support was less for Mr Yeltsin than for Russia’s fledgeling democracy, as represented by Mr Yeltsin. Mr Malashenko believes that there would be no justification for supporting individual candidates next time: ‘I do not think that in the year 2000 the choice is going to be as dramatic or as historical as it was in 1996, when there was still a threat of some return to Communism.’
That was before the political turmoil of recent weeks. Mr Malashenko and his colleagues in the independent sector may yet find themselves forced into a more overtly political role. For the city-based stations, though, the more immediate worry is less of editorial compromise than of financial ruin as Russia’s market economy self-destructs. The only consolation will be journalistic: that of living in interesting times. Certainly there will be no lack of news for the evening bulletins.
Michael Delahaye’s visit was financed by the British Government’s Know How Fund and organised by the Thomson Foundation and Internews Russia.
Photo: EPA
Russia's pioneering city television is fighting for survival, says Michael Delahaye
It is six in the evening and Channel-3 is putting together its nightly news bulletin Stolitza. This is television in its pioneering prime. The studio backdrop has been lashed up from a slatted window blind and the presenter, Angela Askabova, has to sit on a stack of books to bring her up to camera level. Angela, 26, is also the station’s general manager and news editor.
Channel-3 is the independent television station for Syktyvkar (population: 250,000), the capital of the Komi Republic in Russia’s frozen north.
Across the country – from Siberia to the Black Sea – there are an estimated 500 city-based stations, pumping out a daily fare of news, features, quizzes, soaps, movies and commercials. Competing against the two state networks, they are an expression of both democracy and capitalism. Today their role has never been more important – or more threatened.
Such stations started almost by accident. Most Russian apartment blocks have a master antenna on the roof which transmits programmes to individual flats. Entrepeneurial occupants realised they could relay tapes of pirated films and American soaps plucked from the sky to their neighbours for small change. Add to this a camcorder for some personalised linking material and you have a television station. From that it is a small step to hire or hoist a transmitter, and beam farther afield.
Channel-3’s six-hour evening schedule is a respectable mix of the bought-in, sponsored and home-grown. But its flagship is its nightly news.
Tonight’s bulletin comprises six stories: a local opera diva has returned from a masterclass in Moscow; a saw mill is installing new Western machinery; there have been a couple of killings; and, for the republic’s border guards, today is an excuse to get well lubricated on their annual holiday. The entire package will be pre-recorded two hours before broadcast. Fortunately there aren’t many breaking stories in Syktyvkar. In fact, during July and August the news service closes.
Channel-3s half dozen reporters, all women in their twenties, are skilled journalists and almost all of them are familiar with working on computers. The three cameramen lack formal training, but they turn in broadcast-quality material using Super-VHS cameras costing a tenth of the Sony Betacams favoured by the ‘big boys’. Channel-3 is one of the more accurate of the home-grown stations. It is lucky in having a local university with a progressive faculty of journalism from which to recruit.
For seventy years in Russia a ‘journalist’ was someone who lightly edited the latest government handout and, in their approach to reporting, many city-based stations still take their cue from the old Soviet handbook. The result can be a visual version of Pravda, with a reluctance to humanise social issues and focus on individuals. Nor do stations always distinguish between news and adverts. Paying to appear in a news item is not unknown.
Few stations can live by commercials and sponsorship alone. Unlike in Britain where television advertising is more lucrative than both print and radio, in Russia it is the cheapest of the three. A station is doing well if it gets more than $100 for a one-minute slot in prime time. And often the payment will be not in cash but in barter. Many stations end up doing a deal with their local municipality for subsidised accommodation or a contribution to operating costs. In return, the authorities may demand a right of access to the airwaves, which can come dangerously close to editorial interference. For good reason, such stations are often referred to as Mayors’ Stations.
The only other source of income is the sale of airtime to candidates in Russia’s seemingly endless local, parliamentary and presidential elections. At up to $500 a minute, it can prove irresistible. Some stations generate more than half their income this way. But again there are dangers: at best, pressure on the station to be less impartial; at worst, the inclusion of paid-for propaganda within news bulletins.
In the present economic climate, a national shake-out is inevitable. Some larger Russian cities now have five or more local channels, and a station has to broadcast for most of the evening to hold its audience. There are only three options: show pirated material (risky), produce its own programmes (costly), or sign up with a ‘network provider’ to fill the hole, often in return for a stake in the company.
TNT, part of the influential Media-Most Group, which also owns Russia’s best-known independent channel, NTV, is one of the newest – and most aggressive – network providers. It already has about a hundred stations on its books and owns a few of them outright. Its latest acquisition is Syktyvkar’s Channel-3.
Once part of a group, it is even harder for the city-based stations to maintain their free-wheeling independence. Igor Malashenko, NTV’s general director, denies they would ever use their TNT affiliates as political tools: ‘We always advise our partners to be as distanced or detached from political parties as much as they can.’
Yet during the 1996 presidential elections, NTV – along with most other broadcasters – was seen as actively promoting Boris Yeltsin’s candidacy against the Communists. The charitably inclined argue that this support was less for Mr Yeltsin than for Russia’s fledgeling democracy, as represented by Mr Yeltsin. Mr Malashenko believes that there would be no justification for supporting individual candidates next time: ‘I do not think that in the year 2000 the choice is going to be as dramatic or as historical as it was in 1996, when there was still a threat of some return to Communism.’
That was before the political turmoil of recent weeks. Mr Malashenko and his colleagues in the independent sector may yet find themselves forced into a more overtly political role. For the city-based stations, though, the more immediate worry is less of editorial compromise than of financial ruin as Russia’s market economy self-destructs. The only consolation will be journalistic: that of living in interesting times. Certainly there will be no lack of news for the evening bulletins.
Michael Delahaye’s visit was financed by the British Government’s Know How Fund and organised by the Thomson Foundation and Internews Russia.
LONDON EVENING STANDARD, 27 JUNE 1990
Photo: Esme Johnstone
You are giving a dinner party… as you pour the wine, you pause just long enough for a perceptive guest to notice your name on the label. ‘You buy at source?’ he asks, impressed that you seemingly have a personal supply bottled by a French chateau. ‘Well no,’ you demur, ‘actually, it’s from our own vineyard.’
For as little as £200,000 it could be your name on the bottle. Satiated with mere manoirs, a number of those British agents who specialise in French property are now offering the ultimate wine-making kit – a chateau, complete with vines, vats and bottling plant. It sure beats the flagons of Boots ’89 burping under the stairs – and no more jokes about mis en bouteille dans le garage.
The appearance of vineyards in agents’ lists represents a triumph of investigative energy over traditional secrecy; not by accident has the grapevine become the symbol of clandestine information. Even owners who want to sell will sometimes insist that their property is not advertised within France. Indeed, Philip Beaushire of Chaumières de France makes his job sound like an extension of the Maquis. ‘You’ve just got to know the right people in the right places’.
As for the potential purchaser, the hope is tht vineyards will appeal across the board, from the big institutional investor to the private individual seeking a mid-life challenge or a holiday home with a diverting sideline.
But, given that wine-making is a science-cum-art, one wonders whether this really is a serious proposition for the bored advertising executive who knows his way round Oddbins but thinks phylloxera is something that fights dandruff. There is certainly more to it than running a pub, agrees Robin Dunipace of the recently formed Vineyard Agency, but he sees no problem so long as the new owner hires the expertise he lacks himself. In most cases, that will mean recruiting a live-in foreman to manage the property and a local wine-maker to come once a week to give guidance.
Even then, will you earn a living from it? Wine-growing, says Dunipace, is like farming, with the difference that the better the wine, the higher the price. ‘Whereas with, say, corn, the price is fixed the day you plant it.’ A typical return on an undeveloped vineyard with the necessary potential is claimed to be 10-15 per cent before tax and before interest on working capital.
The trick, even more than with most property, is to choose the right location. Anything in the first-rank areas – Margaux, Medoc, Graves, Pomerol – will be in the ooh-là-là price bracket. But a sauternes by another appellation can taste as sweet, and if you go just over the boundary – a three-metre-wide track – you may find a vineyard for sale at a fifth of the price with wine hardly inferior.
Take, for instance, the Chateau Bel-Air, just five kilometres down the road from where the world-famous St Emilion is grown. It is at Castillon, the site of the battle in 1453 which marked the final defeat of the English in the Hundred Years War. If the idea of making wine from grapes grown in soil soaked with the blood of your forefathers is one that appeals, this could be the vineyard for you. The six-bedroomed, 17th century house, draped in wisteria and vigne vierge, sits on its own hill surrounded by fifty acres of Merlot and Cabernet Franc vines. It produces 130,000 bottles a year of good quality claret (Appellation Bordeaux Supérieur). To its £1 million price tag, buyers should add perhaps 25 per cent for ‘working capital’.
The present owner, Jean Grima, has no qualms about selling to the old enemy: ‘Pas du tout! They’re already here. The first English vineyard owner I ever met, I asked him, “Why are you here?” He replied, “La bière est bonne, mais le vin, c’est meilleur!”’
And if your first vintage of Chateau Cartwright (méthode anglaise) is undrinkable, don’t despair. There is a buoyant market for industrial alcohol.
Chasing the taste in a million
Now in his late thirties, Esme Johnstone and his family (youngest member six) are busy moving into their new home - the Chateau de Sours in the Entre-Deux-Mers region south-east of Bordeaux. But finding the right vineyard, he admits, has been a full-time occupation over the past six months. 'In all, I probably looked at seventy properties. Having seen what the agents had to offer, I decided the best thing to do was to get in my car with a large-scale map and just drive the lanes.'
Half the vineyards, he found, were not actually for sale. 'The owner often just wants to see how much it's worth, or he's trying to keep his family or his bank happy. Also there are a lot of pups.'
Johnstone came upon Chateau de Sours by chance. Dropping in just for a tasting, he was impressed by the wine and asked to be contacted if the owner ever thought of selling. Whereas one of us might have bought a case, Johnstone ended up buying the chateau. It cost him about £1 million.
Admittedly, as the founder and former owner of Majestic Wine (he sold the company last September), he had a head start. Yet expert advice, he says, is essential all along the way. 'There are three requirements for success. First, you've got to buy land that is actually capable of making good wine… then you've got to to make good wine… and finally, you've got to be able to sell it.'
And the worst moment to date? 'Signing the contract in the notaire's office. We had to deal with about five members of the family who were selling and it took some three and a half hours arguing. When finally it was all settled and I handed over the cheque for the deposit, they looked at it and said, "Où est Barclays?"'
Photo: Esme Johnstone
You are giving a dinner party… as you pour the wine, you pause just long enough for a perceptive guest to notice your name on the label. ‘You buy at source?’ he asks, impressed that you seemingly have a personal supply bottled by a French chateau. ‘Well no,’ you demur, ‘actually, it’s from our own vineyard.’
For as little as £200,000 it could be your name on the bottle. Satiated with mere manoirs, a number of those British agents who specialise in French property are now offering the ultimate wine-making kit – a chateau, complete with vines, vats and bottling plant. It sure beats the flagons of Boots ’89 burping under the stairs – and no more jokes about mis en bouteille dans le garage.
The appearance of vineyards in agents’ lists represents a triumph of investigative energy over traditional secrecy; not by accident has the grapevine become the symbol of clandestine information. Even owners who want to sell will sometimes insist that their property is not advertised within France. Indeed, Philip Beaushire of Chaumières de France makes his job sound like an extension of the Maquis. ‘You’ve just got to know the right people in the right places’.
As for the potential purchaser, the hope is tht vineyards will appeal across the board, from the big institutional investor to the private individual seeking a mid-life challenge or a holiday home with a diverting sideline.
But, given that wine-making is a science-cum-art, one wonders whether this really is a serious proposition for the bored advertising executive who knows his way round Oddbins but thinks phylloxera is something that fights dandruff. There is certainly more to it than running a pub, agrees Robin Dunipace of the recently formed Vineyard Agency, but he sees no problem so long as the new owner hires the expertise he lacks himself. In most cases, that will mean recruiting a live-in foreman to manage the property and a local wine-maker to come once a week to give guidance.
Even then, will you earn a living from it? Wine-growing, says Dunipace, is like farming, with the difference that the better the wine, the higher the price. ‘Whereas with, say, corn, the price is fixed the day you plant it.’ A typical return on an undeveloped vineyard with the necessary potential is claimed to be 10-15 per cent before tax and before interest on working capital.
The trick, even more than with most property, is to choose the right location. Anything in the first-rank areas – Margaux, Medoc, Graves, Pomerol – will be in the ooh-là-là price bracket. But a sauternes by another appellation can taste as sweet, and if you go just over the boundary – a three-metre-wide track – you may find a vineyard for sale at a fifth of the price with wine hardly inferior.
Take, for instance, the Chateau Bel-Air, just five kilometres down the road from where the world-famous St Emilion is grown. It is at Castillon, the site of the battle in 1453 which marked the final defeat of the English in the Hundred Years War. If the idea of making wine from grapes grown in soil soaked with the blood of your forefathers is one that appeals, this could be the vineyard for you. The six-bedroomed, 17th century house, draped in wisteria and vigne vierge, sits on its own hill surrounded by fifty acres of Merlot and Cabernet Franc vines. It produces 130,000 bottles a year of good quality claret (Appellation Bordeaux Supérieur). To its £1 million price tag, buyers should add perhaps 25 per cent for ‘working capital’.
The present owner, Jean Grima, has no qualms about selling to the old enemy: ‘Pas du tout! They’re already here. The first English vineyard owner I ever met, I asked him, “Why are you here?” He replied, “La bière est bonne, mais le vin, c’est meilleur!”’
And if your first vintage of Chateau Cartwright (méthode anglaise) is undrinkable, don’t despair. There is a buoyant market for industrial alcohol.
Chasing the taste in a million
Now in his late thirties, Esme Johnstone and his family (youngest member six) are busy moving into their new home - the Chateau de Sours in the Entre-Deux-Mers region south-east of Bordeaux. But finding the right vineyard, he admits, has been a full-time occupation over the past six months. 'In all, I probably looked at seventy properties. Having seen what the agents had to offer, I decided the best thing to do was to get in my car with a large-scale map and just drive the lanes.'
Half the vineyards, he found, were not actually for sale. 'The owner often just wants to see how much it's worth, or he's trying to keep his family or his bank happy. Also there are a lot of pups.'
Johnstone came upon Chateau de Sours by chance. Dropping in just for a tasting, he was impressed by the wine and asked to be contacted if the owner ever thought of selling. Whereas one of us might have bought a case, Johnstone ended up buying the chateau. It cost him about £1 million.
Admittedly, as the founder and former owner of Majestic Wine (he sold the company last September), he had a head start. Yet expert advice, he says, is essential all along the way. 'There are three requirements for success. First, you've got to buy land that is actually capable of making good wine… then you've got to to make good wine… and finally, you've got to be able to sell it.'
And the worst moment to date? 'Signing the contract in the notaire's office. We had to deal with about five members of the family who were selling and it took some three and a half hours arguing. When finally it was all settled and I handed over the cheque for the deposit, they looked at it and said, "Où est Barclays?"'
THE INDEPENDENT, 23 MAY 1998
In Chiavari on the Italian Riviera you start to wonder what continent you're in, writes Michael Delahaye
As with all the best discoveries, we came upon Chiavari by chance, late one evening en route from Bordeaux to Florence. It was 8pm and we'd been driving for twelve hours. Our little hire car was protesting - and here we were, just past the French-Italian border and facing the interminable string of tunnels that punctuate the autostrada of the Ligurian Riviera. We needed to eat and sleep. But where? The only names that stood out on the map were Genoa, La Spezia and San Remo - a choice between a port, a naval base and a song festival. Scanning more closely, my eye focused on a seaside place I had never heard of and, as it turned out, couldn't even pronounce: Chiavari (the accent is on the second syllable: key-ah-va-ree - important, as otherwise it can be confused with the verb meaning to have sex).
Along its front, Chiavari is an unremarkable Mediterranean resort with perhaps a tad more timbre than most . The water and the beaches are scrupulously clean and - a boon for those with small children - the swimming areas are enclosed by low breakwaters of boulders that still allow the sea to circulate. If you want to stay on the front there's a fair choice of two- and three-star hotels. Our room in an unpretentious three-star establishment - with en suite bathroom, breakfast and parking - cost just 80,000 lire (about £30). And there was the bonus of waking up to the weather forecast on RAI-1, given in full military fig by one Captain Paolo Capizzi - no doubt of the Carabinieri Cloudbusters Brigate. In Italy the weather is too important to leave to civilians.
But what really justifies at least a stop-over is what you may never find unless you walk 100 metres away from the front, under the railway line. Behind it lies the old town. The atmosphere is a mix of Italian and, bizarrely, South American. The streets have names such as Corso Montevideo; there are huge white churches and consulates for Peru, Chile, and Uruguay. When you spot an old gentleman in a linen suit doffing his panama, you start seriously to wonder which continent you're in.
The explanation is that towards the end of the last century, many of the town's sons emigrated to South America, made their fortunes and either came back themselves or sent their money back. The blend of architecture that resulted can make you gasp or laugh. Take five minutes to inspect the palazzine along the Corso Millo. Even Italy doesn't offer many chances to see peach plasterwork with terracotta embellishments and turquoise shutters - on the one building.
Now take a right turn off the Corso Millo into the commercial centre of the old town and, a second time, you start to wonder whether you've stumbled on to the back lot of a film studio. What from a distance look like ordinary architectural features - carved stone, pointed brickwork, protruding sills - turn out to be painted illusions. The technique - finta architettura - started in the 17th century as a cheap way for the average Chiavarese to tart up his modestly plastered pile. In spirit, it wasn't so different from the penchant of today's DIY enthusiasts for taping instant leaded lights to their double-glazing. Down the centuries, the effect in Chiavari has been to make even the relatively recent look instantly old.
The town's undoubted wealth is reflected in the quality of the shops. Old money never dies here; it just turns over. If you have a weakness for designer kitchenware, if names such as Guzzini and Alessi make you weak in the wallet, prepare to shed your lire. And remember: the great thing about any Italian gadget - Parmesan grater, a cappuccino foamer or a humble orange squeezer - is that, if you get bored looking at it, you can always use it.
Predictably, the local culinary specialities are fish based. For a taste of the best at around £15 a head, try the Creuza de Mar in the Piazza Cademartori. The fresh anchovies in oil and the clam spaghetti make excellent starters, particularly when sluiced down with the tangy Sardinian house white. And, if you really want to impress your fellow diners, pat your lips and murmur: "Siamo nati per soffrire" - we're born to suffer. But if, on the day you leave, you just want to pack something snackable for the journey, do what we did: go along to one of the bakers in the Via Martiri della Liberazione, buy a large tile of freshly baked focaccia (the flat, dimpled bread made with olive oil) and then walk along to the Bottega del Formaggio at No 208, where Gianni or Mauro will fill it with cheese and prosciutto. Chiavari is that sort of place.
In Chiavari on the Italian Riviera you start to wonder what continent you're in, writes Michael Delahaye
As with all the best discoveries, we came upon Chiavari by chance, late one evening en route from Bordeaux to Florence. It was 8pm and we'd been driving for twelve hours. Our little hire car was protesting - and here we were, just past the French-Italian border and facing the interminable string of tunnels that punctuate the autostrada of the Ligurian Riviera. We needed to eat and sleep. But where? The only names that stood out on the map were Genoa, La Spezia and San Remo - a choice between a port, a naval base and a song festival. Scanning more closely, my eye focused on a seaside place I had never heard of and, as it turned out, couldn't even pronounce: Chiavari (the accent is on the second syllable: key-ah-va-ree - important, as otherwise it can be confused with the verb meaning to have sex).
Along its front, Chiavari is an unremarkable Mediterranean resort with perhaps a tad more timbre than most . The water and the beaches are scrupulously clean and - a boon for those with small children - the swimming areas are enclosed by low breakwaters of boulders that still allow the sea to circulate. If you want to stay on the front there's a fair choice of two- and three-star hotels. Our room in an unpretentious three-star establishment - with en suite bathroom, breakfast and parking - cost just 80,000 lire (about £30). And there was the bonus of waking up to the weather forecast on RAI-1, given in full military fig by one Captain Paolo Capizzi - no doubt of the Carabinieri Cloudbusters Brigate. In Italy the weather is too important to leave to civilians.
But what really justifies at least a stop-over is what you may never find unless you walk 100 metres away from the front, under the railway line. Behind it lies the old town. The atmosphere is a mix of Italian and, bizarrely, South American. The streets have names such as Corso Montevideo; there are huge white churches and consulates for Peru, Chile, and Uruguay. When you spot an old gentleman in a linen suit doffing his panama, you start seriously to wonder which continent you're in.
The explanation is that towards the end of the last century, many of the town's sons emigrated to South America, made their fortunes and either came back themselves or sent their money back. The blend of architecture that resulted can make you gasp or laugh. Take five minutes to inspect the palazzine along the Corso Millo. Even Italy doesn't offer many chances to see peach plasterwork with terracotta embellishments and turquoise shutters - on the one building.
Now take a right turn off the Corso Millo into the commercial centre of the old town and, a second time, you start to wonder whether you've stumbled on to the back lot of a film studio. What from a distance look like ordinary architectural features - carved stone, pointed brickwork, protruding sills - turn out to be painted illusions. The technique - finta architettura - started in the 17th century as a cheap way for the average Chiavarese to tart up his modestly plastered pile. In spirit, it wasn't so different from the penchant of today's DIY enthusiasts for taping instant leaded lights to their double-glazing. Down the centuries, the effect in Chiavari has been to make even the relatively recent look instantly old.
The town's undoubted wealth is reflected in the quality of the shops. Old money never dies here; it just turns over. If you have a weakness for designer kitchenware, if names such as Guzzini and Alessi make you weak in the wallet, prepare to shed your lire. And remember: the great thing about any Italian gadget - Parmesan grater, a cappuccino foamer or a humble orange squeezer - is that, if you get bored looking at it, you can always use it.
Predictably, the local culinary specialities are fish based. For a taste of the best at around £15 a head, try the Creuza de Mar in the Piazza Cademartori. The fresh anchovies in oil and the clam spaghetti make excellent starters, particularly when sluiced down with the tangy Sardinian house white. And, if you really want to impress your fellow diners, pat your lips and murmur: "Siamo nati per soffrire" - we're born to suffer. But if, on the day you leave, you just want to pack something snackable for the journey, do what we did: go along to one of the bakers in the Via Martiri della Liberazione, buy a large tile of freshly baked focaccia (the flat, dimpled bread made with olive oil) and then walk along to the Bottega del Formaggio at No 208, where Gianni or Mauro will fill it with cheese and prosciutto. Chiavari is that sort of place.
THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL, 25 MAY 1991
Photo: BBC TV
CROSS CHANNEL SURGERY
David Jones is not one to take things lying down. When told by his GP in Ramsgate that he would probably have to wait two years for an NHS operation to replace his arthritic right knee, he asked a state hospital in France what they would charge to do it privately. 'Two thousand, five hundred pounds - and as soon as you like,' they replied. Mr Jones went to his bank manager, borrowed the money against his pension, and booked his ticket to Boulogne. A fortnight after the operation, he was back in Britain and starting physiotherapy. Mr Jones is 83.
As an increasing number of people are discovering, there is an alternative to the NHS waiting list - and at a price that is not crippling. The list of operations performed on British patients by the Centre Hospitalier in Boulogne includes joint replacements, hysterectomies, hernias, cataracts, even circumcisions - for between a half and a third of the cost quoted by private hospitals in Britain. The hospital's doctors now refer to the corridor on the fourth floor as their 'English Colony'.
How do the French do it? The answer is that they have more medical staff and more facilities than they know what to do with. In France it's not the patients who wait for operations but the hospitals who wait for patients. As Dr Jacques Schreiber, the head of the 'British Department' at the Boulogne hospital explains: 'At one time, doctors here were making pots of money and many people streamed into the profession. Now we have to busy them, to give them work.' So the hospital has borrowed a trick from the airline business: to offset its fixed costs, it's putting 'bums on beds'.
What we're seeing, though, is essentially a publicity drive that masks a far more extensive campaign. At £2500, Mr Jones' knee replacement is clearly a loss leader; the French themselves admit they're losing £1000 on it. A couple of hip operations, however, should make up for that. Besides, as a matter of principle, Mr Jones is paying exactly what a French patient would be charged. (The French system of health care is essentially one of reimbursement. The patient 'pays' on paper but is in fact reimbursed by the government three-quarters of the price for minor treatment and in full for major treatment.)
What the Boulogne hospital is really after is a couple of lucrative block contracts with British district health authorities - for their NHS patients. They've already had talks with half a dozen health authorities in the south east. What better time than now, just as the NHS reforms are being implemented, for Boulogne to set itself up as an 'offshore provider'.
The attitude of the French government to Boulogne's initiative has been something between a shrug and a nod. So long as the French taxpayer doesn't end up subsidising shoals of British patients, pourquoi pas? When I suggest to Edouard Couty, technical adviser to the French health minister, that the French might be undermining our NHS, he expressed surprise. 'You know, now you have to think in European terms… When you live in a frontier zone, why not go for treatment in a neighbouring country, if you think that you'll receive better treatment there? It's the patient himself who must be the judge.'
The British government, by contrast, seems embarrassed that certain health authorities - notably Medway in Kent - have taken the new commercial credo rather more to heart than the 1990 Health Service Act envisaged. THE NHS, WITH THE HELP OF THE FRENCH, IS SAFE IN OUR HANDS is not the most compelling slogan with which to go into the next election. The official line, as put to the House of Lords by Baroness Hooper, Under-Secretary at the Department of Health, smacks of school-marmish irritation: 'The question does not arise. Health authorities do not have powers to make general contracts for the treatment overseas of patients normally resident in England and Wales' - although individual patients, the Baroness added, could be referred for treatment to EC hospitals 'but only with the prior authorisation of the Department of Health.'
Yet why should the government's new 'internal market of purchasers and providers' stop at the Channel? Philip Jenkinson, the lawyer acting for the Boulogne hospital reaches for his copy of the Treaty of Rome and points to Article 59, which requires the free movement of goods, capital, workers… and services. Health care, he argues, is a service like any other: 'If I want to get my car serviced in Belgium, I can go over the border and get it serviced. There's no reason at all why I shouldn't want to get my body serviced and go to another country within the EEC and have it done there.'
The first test case, however, could come from London - from Phillip Lothian, of Islington, who went to Boulogne for treatment after being told that he would have to wait at least a year for an NHS hip replacement. Mr Lothian is consulting his solicitor in the hope of getting the Department of Health to reimburse him for the price of the French operation: 'They enter a contract, the government. You must pay National Insurance stamps, otherwise you go without a pension and whatnot. But it now appears that the National Health side of it has just collapsed.'
Significantly, the quality of the treatment at the Boulogne hospital is not in question. Clinical concern, such as it is, focuses on aftercare. If you need physiotherapy, for example, you may find that your local NHS hospital is either unable or unwilling to fit you into its schedule - in which case you will have, once again, to pay. It all adds up.
More worrying is that in a percentage of even the best performed operations post-operative complications do occur. What happens, though, when you're back in Britain and your surgeon is in France? Mr Nicholas Goddard, an orthopaedic consultant at the Royal Free Hospital who has also worked in France, says he would 'offer the patient back' to the surgeons in Boulogne. And not out of pique. 'It's just that perhaps they use "A" hip replacement; I use "B" hip replacement. And I don't happen to have the instruments for revising hip "A". One must be aware of those complications.'
Other consultants make the point - more moral than medical - that, if a Boulogne patient needs urgent post-operative treatment back in Britain, the effect will be to lengthen the queue for those patients who have been waiting their turn. The doctors' dilemma is well summed up by David Jones' GP, Dr John Neden: 'I had to say to him, "If you want to go and you can afford it, I'm not going to stop you. But, as your doctor, I am happier with a system I know.'
So does Dr Neden think Mr Jones made the right decision? He pauses. 'I'll let you know in six months' time.'
Michael Delahaye's report, 'A Foreign Operation', was broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 May. The producer was Halina Kierkuc.
POSTSCRIPT, April 2014
Shorty after our television report was broadcast and a number of other articles had appeared - all gleefully publicising the possibility of getting one's hip or knee operation done across the Channel - there was a flurry of diplomatic activity between London and Paris. This was the sort of embarrassment which the NHS, in the throes of re-organisation, did NOT need… The UK's south-east regional health authorities and the Centre Hospitalier de Boulogne were sent to their rooms by their respective parents and told they couldn't play with each other. However… elsewhere within the EC the practice of 'medical tourism' has taken off. Germans, for example, now regularly cross the border into Poland for cut-price dental work and cosmetic surgery.
Photo: BBC TV
CROSS CHANNEL SURGERY
David Jones is not one to take things lying down. When told by his GP in Ramsgate that he would probably have to wait two years for an NHS operation to replace his arthritic right knee, he asked a state hospital in France what they would charge to do it privately. 'Two thousand, five hundred pounds - and as soon as you like,' they replied. Mr Jones went to his bank manager, borrowed the money against his pension, and booked his ticket to Boulogne. A fortnight after the operation, he was back in Britain and starting physiotherapy. Mr Jones is 83.
As an increasing number of people are discovering, there is an alternative to the NHS waiting list - and at a price that is not crippling. The list of operations performed on British patients by the Centre Hospitalier in Boulogne includes joint replacements, hysterectomies, hernias, cataracts, even circumcisions - for between a half and a third of the cost quoted by private hospitals in Britain. The hospital's doctors now refer to the corridor on the fourth floor as their 'English Colony'.
How do the French do it? The answer is that they have more medical staff and more facilities than they know what to do with. In France it's not the patients who wait for operations but the hospitals who wait for patients. As Dr Jacques Schreiber, the head of the 'British Department' at the Boulogne hospital explains: 'At one time, doctors here were making pots of money and many people streamed into the profession. Now we have to busy them, to give them work.' So the hospital has borrowed a trick from the airline business: to offset its fixed costs, it's putting 'bums on beds'.
What we're seeing, though, is essentially a publicity drive that masks a far more extensive campaign. At £2500, Mr Jones' knee replacement is clearly a loss leader; the French themselves admit they're losing £1000 on it. A couple of hip operations, however, should make up for that. Besides, as a matter of principle, Mr Jones is paying exactly what a French patient would be charged. (The French system of health care is essentially one of reimbursement. The patient 'pays' on paper but is in fact reimbursed by the government three-quarters of the price for minor treatment and in full for major treatment.)
What the Boulogne hospital is really after is a couple of lucrative block contracts with British district health authorities - for their NHS patients. They've already had talks with half a dozen health authorities in the south east. What better time than now, just as the NHS reforms are being implemented, for Boulogne to set itself up as an 'offshore provider'.
The attitude of the French government to Boulogne's initiative has been something between a shrug and a nod. So long as the French taxpayer doesn't end up subsidising shoals of British patients, pourquoi pas? When I suggest to Edouard Couty, technical adviser to the French health minister, that the French might be undermining our NHS, he expressed surprise. 'You know, now you have to think in European terms… When you live in a frontier zone, why not go for treatment in a neighbouring country, if you think that you'll receive better treatment there? It's the patient himself who must be the judge.'
The British government, by contrast, seems embarrassed that certain health authorities - notably Medway in Kent - have taken the new commercial credo rather more to heart than the 1990 Health Service Act envisaged. THE NHS, WITH THE HELP OF THE FRENCH, IS SAFE IN OUR HANDS is not the most compelling slogan with which to go into the next election. The official line, as put to the House of Lords by Baroness Hooper, Under-Secretary at the Department of Health, smacks of school-marmish irritation: 'The question does not arise. Health authorities do not have powers to make general contracts for the treatment overseas of patients normally resident in England and Wales' - although individual patients, the Baroness added, could be referred for treatment to EC hospitals 'but only with the prior authorisation of the Department of Health.'
Yet why should the government's new 'internal market of purchasers and providers' stop at the Channel? Philip Jenkinson, the lawyer acting for the Boulogne hospital reaches for his copy of the Treaty of Rome and points to Article 59, which requires the free movement of goods, capital, workers… and services. Health care, he argues, is a service like any other: 'If I want to get my car serviced in Belgium, I can go over the border and get it serviced. There's no reason at all why I shouldn't want to get my body serviced and go to another country within the EEC and have it done there.'
The first test case, however, could come from London - from Phillip Lothian, of Islington, who went to Boulogne for treatment after being told that he would have to wait at least a year for an NHS hip replacement. Mr Lothian is consulting his solicitor in the hope of getting the Department of Health to reimburse him for the price of the French operation: 'They enter a contract, the government. You must pay National Insurance stamps, otherwise you go without a pension and whatnot. But it now appears that the National Health side of it has just collapsed.'
Significantly, the quality of the treatment at the Boulogne hospital is not in question. Clinical concern, such as it is, focuses on aftercare. If you need physiotherapy, for example, you may find that your local NHS hospital is either unable or unwilling to fit you into its schedule - in which case you will have, once again, to pay. It all adds up.
More worrying is that in a percentage of even the best performed operations post-operative complications do occur. What happens, though, when you're back in Britain and your surgeon is in France? Mr Nicholas Goddard, an orthopaedic consultant at the Royal Free Hospital who has also worked in France, says he would 'offer the patient back' to the surgeons in Boulogne. And not out of pique. 'It's just that perhaps they use "A" hip replacement; I use "B" hip replacement. And I don't happen to have the instruments for revising hip "A". One must be aware of those complications.'
Other consultants make the point - more moral than medical - that, if a Boulogne patient needs urgent post-operative treatment back in Britain, the effect will be to lengthen the queue for those patients who have been waiting their turn. The doctors' dilemma is well summed up by David Jones' GP, Dr John Neden: 'I had to say to him, "If you want to go and you can afford it, I'm not going to stop you. But, as your doctor, I am happier with a system I know.'
So does Dr Neden think Mr Jones made the right decision? He pauses. 'I'll let you know in six months' time.'
Michael Delahaye's report, 'A Foreign Operation', was broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 May. The producer was Halina Kierkuc.
POSTSCRIPT, April 2014
Shorty after our television report was broadcast and a number of other articles had appeared - all gleefully publicising the possibility of getting one's hip or knee operation done across the Channel - there was a flurry of diplomatic activity between London and Paris. This was the sort of embarrassment which the NHS, in the throes of re-organisation, did NOT need… The UK's south-east regional health authorities and the Centre Hospitalier de Boulogne were sent to their rooms by their respective parents and told they couldn't play with each other. However… elsewhere within the EC the practice of 'medical tourism' has taken off. Germans, for example, now regularly cross the border into Poland for cut-price dental work and cosmetic surgery.
THE LISTENER, 24 AUGUST 1989
France, it has to be confessed, was not the first choice. For years I was hung up on Italy in the belief that only the land of Petrach and Michelangelo could satisfy man’s deepest literary and artistic sensibilities. Two things changed that: the hordes of other foreigners bent on satisfying their sensbilities and, more decisively, having the car broken into twice in one week. While it still had wheels, therefore, we headed north into France – and discovered what we had been missing all this time.
Ours is a jewel of a medieval citadel perched on a rocky outcrop above the River Lot in the south-west of the country. It’s been a fortified place since Celtic times. The Romans built a camp here to protect the Agen-Périgueux road. They were followed by the Vandals, Visigoths, Saracens and Normans. Throughout the Hundred Years War, it was – and against all assaults remained – a French stronghold.
Until now. We are the first English to buy a house within the walls, actually on the ramparts. Thus, what our ancestors failed to do by force of arms, we have accomplished with a fistful of francs. I don’t kid myself. We are welcomed and yet we are uninvited. I know it’s a backhanded compliment when I ask a neighbour how she really feels about our moving into the village and she says, ‘We’d rather have you, monsieur, on and off for half the year than have the Parisians every weekend.’
And yet if you examine the village letter-boxes, you will see many of them bear Italian names. For in the 1920s thousands of Italian workers were encouraged to migrate here to reinvigorate a sparsely populated agricultural area. Our builder, our plumber and our electrician – Messrs Rasera, Kal and Bonizoni – are all of Italian descent. In the street you still hear old men calling to each other, ‘Come stai?’ Look more closely too at the car outside the priest’s house – and that NL on the back. He is Dutch, drafted in because there are no longer enough French priests to go round. I feel better. I may yet have the courage to call our house Bugger Bognor.
The past has its own inverted perspective here. The latest history of the area, published last February, devotes just seven of its 360 pages to the events of 1939-45 – ‘une période de division’. Yet, when I ask a gentleman in the tourist office why the magnificent old West Gate has acquired a shiny new plaque renaming it La Porte des Anglais, he doesn’t miss a beat: ‘Because, monsieur, that was where we saw you off in the fourteenth century’. The bicentennial of that other period of division, the Revolution, was celebrated by some here but only marked by others. While Monsieur Bret, the baker, was carrying sans-culotterie to its logical extreme by parading around the village with only a light dusting of flour about the croissant, the proprietor of the local hotel, Monsieur Chiffoleau (a Chouan whose ancestors were staunch Royalists) had pulled down the blinds and filled the foyer with fleurs-de-lis.
And yet civility is everywhere evident. Not just the frequent handshaking and the multiple kissing (A 100-yard walk through the village can take half an hour). Nor just the unfailing courtesy of the market stallholders who, realising you are a foreigner, make a point of counting out your change t-r-è-s slowly.
I’m thinking as much of that sense of public decorum that displays itself best at this time of year, when every small village round about has its summer festival. Apart from affording the local band a chance to show how each member is a soloist in his own right, it’s an occasion for young people, often in their hundreds, to gather, dance, and enjoy themselves till 2am – and yes, drink too. Yet there are no fights, no over-drunkenness, and seldom more than a solitary policeman – usually to control the traffic. I don’t know of any such saying, but the French couldn’t be blamed for thinking that the barbarians begin at Dover.
‘Community’ is not an empty notion here. Soon after buying the house, we presented ourselves at the Mairie – the Town Hall. It was expected, we were told. The Mayor, a caricature Frenchman most often to be seen in black beret and battered Peugeot, formally welcomed us as new residents. We were then taken through to another office where the Town Clerk assured us that, in the event of any problems, his door was always open. And he’s been as good as his word – on three occasions to date. In Oxford, I don’t even know who is our local councillor, still less have I ever met him/her.
And the sense of community is matched by a genuine pride in it – fuelled this year by the choice of a local girl from Monflanquin as Miss France (Not, mark you, Mademoiselle France). She appears everywhere – opening festivals, antique fairs and, less flatteringly, on countless tins of foie gras. Not to be outdone, one of the regional wine producers has just named a more-than-usually-full-bodied vintage after her – Cuvée Miss France. The only problem – though itself testimony to the cultural melting-pot – has been her name: Peggy Zlotkowski. Having given up on the second part, the locals still have trouble with the first, so that she is invariably referred to as ‘Miss Piggy’.
Of course there is a darker side. While it would be easy to create a fictional hameau rustique à la Marie Antoinette, complete with beribboned sheep, the truth is that France, like Britain, has not coped easily with her colonial legacy. Since the mid-1950s, our area has been chosen as the site for two immigration camps – one for Indo-Chinese, the other for Algerians. Although the former have integrated well, the latter have not and, rightly or wrongly, are resented by many locals who regard them as work-shy spongers living off government hand-outs.
And yes, I realise that no part of any country can be taken as typical of the whole, any more than Little Scrotum-on-the-Wold can be put in the same category as London or Manchester. I hear the outraged squeals of those of you who have been ripped off in Paris, beaten up in Marseilles, or goosed in the Gironde (which is nothing compared with what they do to the poor creatures themselves there).
The point I make is that in this tiny corner of France a United States of Europe already exists and, despite historic divisions, does so in a quiet and civilised way. It is proof, pace Mme Thatcher, that being Europeans means not defending the worst of our respective cultures but exchanging the best of them. It is a Europe I feel privileged to be a part of – and, in saying that, I do not feel that my Englishness has been diluted one drop.
Which is why my heart sinks when, in some corner of a foreign camp-site, I come across a swill of lager-louts, comatose and ghetto-blasted. Nor in truth do I feel much more hopeful when, passing Bricomarché, the local DIY superstore, I notice a right-hand-drive Ford Sierra with the socks ‘n sandals brigade sitting around the picnic table, pouring Lipton’s Best from the trusty Thermos. Right there in the car park.
Yes, I mean you, B448 NKS. Bon appétit.
France, it has to be confessed, was not the first choice. For years I was hung up on Italy in the belief that only the land of Petrach and Michelangelo could satisfy man’s deepest literary and artistic sensibilities. Two things changed that: the hordes of other foreigners bent on satisfying their sensbilities and, more decisively, having the car broken into twice in one week. While it still had wheels, therefore, we headed north into France – and discovered what we had been missing all this time.
Ours is a jewel of a medieval citadel perched on a rocky outcrop above the River Lot in the south-west of the country. It’s been a fortified place since Celtic times. The Romans built a camp here to protect the Agen-Périgueux road. They were followed by the Vandals, Visigoths, Saracens and Normans. Throughout the Hundred Years War, it was – and against all assaults remained – a French stronghold.
Until now. We are the first English to buy a house within the walls, actually on the ramparts. Thus, what our ancestors failed to do by force of arms, we have accomplished with a fistful of francs. I don’t kid myself. We are welcomed and yet we are uninvited. I know it’s a backhanded compliment when I ask a neighbour how she really feels about our moving into the village and she says, ‘We’d rather have you, monsieur, on and off for half the year than have the Parisians every weekend.’
And yet if you examine the village letter-boxes, you will see many of them bear Italian names. For in the 1920s thousands of Italian workers were encouraged to migrate here to reinvigorate a sparsely populated agricultural area. Our builder, our plumber and our electrician – Messrs Rasera, Kal and Bonizoni – are all of Italian descent. In the street you still hear old men calling to each other, ‘Come stai?’ Look more closely too at the car outside the priest’s house – and that NL on the back. He is Dutch, drafted in because there are no longer enough French priests to go round. I feel better. I may yet have the courage to call our house Bugger Bognor.
The past has its own inverted perspective here. The latest history of the area, published last February, devotes just seven of its 360 pages to the events of 1939-45 – ‘une période de division’. Yet, when I ask a gentleman in the tourist office why the magnificent old West Gate has acquired a shiny new plaque renaming it La Porte des Anglais, he doesn’t miss a beat: ‘Because, monsieur, that was where we saw you off in the fourteenth century’. The bicentennial of that other period of division, the Revolution, was celebrated by some here but only marked by others. While Monsieur Bret, the baker, was carrying sans-culotterie to its logical extreme by parading around the village with only a light dusting of flour about the croissant, the proprietor of the local hotel, Monsieur Chiffoleau (a Chouan whose ancestors were staunch Royalists) had pulled down the blinds and filled the foyer with fleurs-de-lis.
And yet civility is everywhere evident. Not just the frequent handshaking and the multiple kissing (A 100-yard walk through the village can take half an hour). Nor just the unfailing courtesy of the market stallholders who, realising you are a foreigner, make a point of counting out your change t-r-è-s slowly.
I’m thinking as much of that sense of public decorum that displays itself best at this time of year, when every small village round about has its summer festival. Apart from affording the local band a chance to show how each member is a soloist in his own right, it’s an occasion for young people, often in their hundreds, to gather, dance, and enjoy themselves till 2am – and yes, drink too. Yet there are no fights, no over-drunkenness, and seldom more than a solitary policeman – usually to control the traffic. I don’t know of any such saying, but the French couldn’t be blamed for thinking that the barbarians begin at Dover.
‘Community’ is not an empty notion here. Soon after buying the house, we presented ourselves at the Mairie – the Town Hall. It was expected, we were told. The Mayor, a caricature Frenchman most often to be seen in black beret and battered Peugeot, formally welcomed us as new residents. We were then taken through to another office where the Town Clerk assured us that, in the event of any problems, his door was always open. And he’s been as good as his word – on three occasions to date. In Oxford, I don’t even know who is our local councillor, still less have I ever met him/her.
And the sense of community is matched by a genuine pride in it – fuelled this year by the choice of a local girl from Monflanquin as Miss France (Not, mark you, Mademoiselle France). She appears everywhere – opening festivals, antique fairs and, less flatteringly, on countless tins of foie gras. Not to be outdone, one of the regional wine producers has just named a more-than-usually-full-bodied vintage after her – Cuvée Miss France. The only problem – though itself testimony to the cultural melting-pot – has been her name: Peggy Zlotkowski. Having given up on the second part, the locals still have trouble with the first, so that she is invariably referred to as ‘Miss Piggy’.
Of course there is a darker side. While it would be easy to create a fictional hameau rustique à la Marie Antoinette, complete with beribboned sheep, the truth is that France, like Britain, has not coped easily with her colonial legacy. Since the mid-1950s, our area has been chosen as the site for two immigration camps – one for Indo-Chinese, the other for Algerians. Although the former have integrated well, the latter have not and, rightly or wrongly, are resented by many locals who regard them as work-shy spongers living off government hand-outs.
And yes, I realise that no part of any country can be taken as typical of the whole, any more than Little Scrotum-on-the-Wold can be put in the same category as London or Manchester. I hear the outraged squeals of those of you who have been ripped off in Paris, beaten up in Marseilles, or goosed in the Gironde (which is nothing compared with what they do to the poor creatures themselves there).
The point I make is that in this tiny corner of France a United States of Europe already exists and, despite historic divisions, does so in a quiet and civilised way. It is proof, pace Mme Thatcher, that being Europeans means not defending the worst of our respective cultures but exchanging the best of them. It is a Europe I feel privileged to be a part of – and, in saying that, I do not feel that my Englishness has been diluted one drop.
Which is why my heart sinks when, in some corner of a foreign camp-site, I come across a swill of lager-louts, comatose and ghetto-blasted. Nor in truth do I feel much more hopeful when, passing Bricomarché, the local DIY superstore, I notice a right-hand-drive Ford Sierra with the socks ‘n sandals brigade sitting around the picnic table, pouring Lipton’s Best from the trusty Thermos. Right there in the car park.
Yes, I mean you, B448 NKS. Bon appétit.
THE INDEPENDENT, 7 MARCH 1998
Photos: Eason family archive, MD
Adopting children with deep emotional scars can lead to serious problems in adolescence. Michael Delahaye reports
Anne and John Easson are both teachers - and that's significant. Eleven years ago when they adopted an 'instant family' of three sisters, aged two, three and five, their professional experience must have counted greatly with the adoption panel.
Today the Eassons' large Victorian house in Feltham, West London, is 'a war zone' - John's words - and bears all the marks of combat. He points to the heavy pine door leading into the living-room: 'One of the girls was threatening the youngest and, when she took refuge behind the door here, she pulled the door off its hinges… straight out of the door-post'. On several occasions the police have been called in.
Upstairs on the landing, John produces a bunch of keys. They are all for internal doors - one for the parents' bedroom and one each for the girls' bedrooms. Each of them (Samira, now aged 16, Disa 14, and Shirin 13) has her own key to stop them stealing from each other and sparking off more rows, more broken glass, more kicked-in door panels.
John and Anne no longer have a social life. They say they can't leave the girls alone for fear of the consequences. As for family visits to friends and relatives, Anne says it's just too embarrassing: 'If you go to other houses and there's cash sitting there, you have to say, "Please move it".
The Eassons' problems are clearly not normal. But nor are they unique, the common key is adoption and what happened in the Seventies and Eighties when the practice started of placing older, often emotionally-bruised children with new parents. It was done for the best of motives: to give every child, no matter what his or her 'history', the chance of a new beginning with a new family. lt was - and still is - carried out with almost evangelical zeal.
But such children, it is only now emerging, often have what are known as 'attachment' problems. Because they fail to bond with their birth parents (often due to neglect or abuse), they never create the vital internal model on which to base future relationships. Once they are in care, this deficiency may be compounded by the experience of being moved from one residential home or foster parent to another.
The result is a form of survival mechanism: they trust no-one and try to control everything and everybody. Lying, stealing and hysterical anger are part of the package. And, instead of growing out of such behaviour, they more often grow into it.
'The damage and disturbance caused by those first few years,' says David Howe, Professor of Social Work at the University of East Anglia, 'can ricochet throughout the rest of your life. Even though family life is wonderful, positive and warm, you don't recover totally.' Professor Howe, the author of Patterns of Adoption, estimates that several thousand families in Britain could be facing problems similar to the Eassons'. He compares what is now emerging to other social phenomena that were once dismissed as isolated aberrations: 'It's like dyslexia and domestic violence. Twenty or 30 years ago, people had their suspicions but the scale of it was unknown.'
The failure to recognise a common cause can mean that the adoptive parents continue to struggle on in ignorance and frustration, blaming themselves. They feel a particular sense of failure because, after all, they were thoroughly vetted before being allowed to adopt. The cruellest twist is the advice frequently given at the time of adoption that 'a loving and stable home will compensate for the rockiest start in life'.
Traumatised children can often traumatise an entire family. One mother who was finally forced to throw out her adopted son described her family's experience 'as if a hand-grenade had been tossed into our midst. Even now, four years since he left, we're still picking out bits of emotional shrapnel.' Her marriage - as frequently happens - buckled under the strain.
The difficulty that these families face is that attachment problems, in their full-blown form, often emerge only when the children hit adolescence - which can be five or even 10 years after adoption. By then, the local authority which placed the child will, understandably, feel that its obligation to provide post-adoption support has long passed. John recalls that, when they were vetted as an adoptive couple, he and Anne were asked whether they were the sort of people who would ask for help if they hit problems. But when you do ask, he says, 'The instant reaction is: "Well, you must have done something to have caused this; you're the cause of the problem." And in that situation where you're already down and depressed and feeling defeated, that's the last thing you need.'
But the saddest casualties are the children themselves. An insight into the depth of their emotional confusion comes from the Easson's middle daughter, Disa. After several periods of exclusion from school, she is now splitting her time between school and a special adolescent unit for 'behavioural modification'. Asked what she wanted to say to her parents, she replied: 'I don't mean to be angry with them. They've not done anything wrong. They didn't have to adopt us - and I do love them for adopting us and caring for us'.
Michael Delahaye reports for BBC2's First Sight, 7.30pm, 12 March
Photos: Eason family archive, MD
Adopting children with deep emotional scars can lead to serious problems in adolescence. Michael Delahaye reports
Anne and John Easson are both teachers - and that's significant. Eleven years ago when they adopted an 'instant family' of three sisters, aged two, three and five, their professional experience must have counted greatly with the adoption panel.
Today the Eassons' large Victorian house in Feltham, West London, is 'a war zone' - John's words - and bears all the marks of combat. He points to the heavy pine door leading into the living-room: 'One of the girls was threatening the youngest and, when she took refuge behind the door here, she pulled the door off its hinges… straight out of the door-post'. On several occasions the police have been called in.
Upstairs on the landing, John produces a bunch of keys. They are all for internal doors - one for the parents' bedroom and one each for the girls' bedrooms. Each of them (Samira, now aged 16, Disa 14, and Shirin 13) has her own key to stop them stealing from each other and sparking off more rows, more broken glass, more kicked-in door panels.
John and Anne no longer have a social life. They say they can't leave the girls alone for fear of the consequences. As for family visits to friends and relatives, Anne says it's just too embarrassing: 'If you go to other houses and there's cash sitting there, you have to say, "Please move it".
The Eassons' problems are clearly not normal. But nor are they unique, the common key is adoption and what happened in the Seventies and Eighties when the practice started of placing older, often emotionally-bruised children with new parents. It was done for the best of motives: to give every child, no matter what his or her 'history', the chance of a new beginning with a new family. lt was - and still is - carried out with almost evangelical zeal.
But such children, it is only now emerging, often have what are known as 'attachment' problems. Because they fail to bond with their birth parents (often due to neglect or abuse), they never create the vital internal model on which to base future relationships. Once they are in care, this deficiency may be compounded by the experience of being moved from one residential home or foster parent to another.
The result is a form of survival mechanism: they trust no-one and try to control everything and everybody. Lying, stealing and hysterical anger are part of the package. And, instead of growing out of such behaviour, they more often grow into it.
'The damage and disturbance caused by those first few years,' says David Howe, Professor of Social Work at the University of East Anglia, 'can ricochet throughout the rest of your life. Even though family life is wonderful, positive and warm, you don't recover totally.' Professor Howe, the author of Patterns of Adoption, estimates that several thousand families in Britain could be facing problems similar to the Eassons'. He compares what is now emerging to other social phenomena that were once dismissed as isolated aberrations: 'It's like dyslexia and domestic violence. Twenty or 30 years ago, people had their suspicions but the scale of it was unknown.'
The failure to recognise a common cause can mean that the adoptive parents continue to struggle on in ignorance and frustration, blaming themselves. They feel a particular sense of failure because, after all, they were thoroughly vetted before being allowed to adopt. The cruellest twist is the advice frequently given at the time of adoption that 'a loving and stable home will compensate for the rockiest start in life'.
Traumatised children can often traumatise an entire family. One mother who was finally forced to throw out her adopted son described her family's experience 'as if a hand-grenade had been tossed into our midst. Even now, four years since he left, we're still picking out bits of emotional shrapnel.' Her marriage - as frequently happens - buckled under the strain.
The difficulty that these families face is that attachment problems, in their full-blown form, often emerge only when the children hit adolescence - which can be five or even 10 years after adoption. By then, the local authority which placed the child will, understandably, feel that its obligation to provide post-adoption support has long passed. John recalls that, when they were vetted as an adoptive couple, he and Anne were asked whether they were the sort of people who would ask for help if they hit problems. But when you do ask, he says, 'The instant reaction is: "Well, you must have done something to have caused this; you're the cause of the problem." And in that situation where you're already down and depressed and feeling defeated, that's the last thing you need.'
But the saddest casualties are the children themselves. An insight into the depth of their emotional confusion comes from the Easson's middle daughter, Disa. After several periods of exclusion from school, she is now splitting her time between school and a special adolescent unit for 'behavioural modification'. Asked what she wanted to say to her parents, she replied: 'I don't mean to be angry with them. They've not done anything wrong. They didn't have to adopt us - and I do love them for adopting us and caring for us'.
Michael Delahaye reports for BBC2's First Sight, 7.30pm, 12 March
THE 'SPECIAL RESERVE' COLLECTION
The above articles were all published and paid for - but, as any freelancer can testify, there are always those that don’t make the cut, irrespective of their quality. Sometimes they will have been accepted, commissioned even, but pass their consume-by date while sitting on the editor’s shelf. Other times – an occupational hazard in my case – they may be linked to a proposed television programme but the programme doesn’t happen and the article goes down with it. And finally, there are those which are written for the sheer pleasure of the process, of articulating a particular thought or emotion, rather than for an immediate financial return. Occasionally, they even improve with age...
So here are some items from the cellars – and, if any editor out there wishes to invest in some fine, nicely matured vintages, do get in touch.
The above articles were all published and paid for - but, as any freelancer can testify, there are always those that don’t make the cut, irrespective of their quality. Sometimes they will have been accepted, commissioned even, but pass their consume-by date while sitting on the editor’s shelf. Other times – an occupational hazard in my case – they may be linked to a proposed television programme but the programme doesn’t happen and the article goes down with it. And finally, there are those which are written for the sheer pleasure of the process, of articulating a particular thought or emotion, rather than for an immediate financial return. Occasionally, they even improve with age...
So here are some items from the cellars – and, if any editor out there wishes to invest in some fine, nicely matured vintages, do get in touch.
A scattering of memories
My father Jack died in December, 2002. Two years later his ashes were still sitting in the wardrobe. What, pray, is one supposed to do with the mortal remains of a loved one?
‘Don’t hold it by the top unless you’re handy with the Hoover’, said Carol the undertaker, handing me the large plastic, burgundy-coloured sweetie jar containing my father’s ashes. It was a week after the cremation. I took Carol at her word and, strapping the container upright in the passenger seat – as I had often done with the ashes’ former incarnation - I drove my father home.
The words ‘final resting place’ have a sombre resonance and I was aware that the choice of that place was not a decision to be taken lightly. Once done, it couldn’t be undone – and eternity, I'm assured, is a long time. It does, though, give one an insight into the dilemma which must face murderers when deciding where best to hide the body.
My father was 93 when he died, having led a peacefully unspectacular life. His favourite joke was that, had he known he was going to live so long, he would have taken better care of himself. In the last twelve months of his life he suffered increasingly from multiple infarct dementia. Yet a year earlier he had been reading his daily broadsheet from front to back, was capable of a good argument – and, amazingly though terrifyingly, was still driving.
The bleak municipal crematorium was keen to offer ‘scatterage’ in their rose garden, with the added incentive of an entry in the Book of Remembrance and a personalised plaque in The Wall of Memory, the rent on which (in discreetly hushed tones) came up for renewal every five years. The whole business struck me as not just a tacky con but, considering the recurring rent, a less than ‘final’ resting place. I recalled a television news item about a London graveyard that had been sold off for development – and a woman complaining, ‘When we buried my father here, we thought it would be for life!’ Besides, already harbouring doubts as to whether the ashes really were Father’s (despite the undertaker’s assurances), I wasn’t inclined to have them mix with those of people he had never met and probably wouldn’t want to meet, but who just happened to have been cremated the same day or week. It all seemed a little over-familiar, carrying 'mingling' to an extreme.
I consulted friends – but the best they could come up with was ‘somewhere meaningful’. I was sure I could do better. It just required a little thought...
The main focus of Father’s last thirty years, since retirement, had been his garden – an idyllic two-thirds of an acre outside Winchester, with a river running through the middle. Dotted around it were five stacks of logs - Father’s personal Five Year Plan to ensure that the voracious Jotul log-burning stove never lacked for fuel. Using them in rotation, he often explained, would ensure adequate ageing and see him well into the Millennium. As he entered his tenth decade, still sawing and chopping, we wondered which Millennium he had in mind.
So where better to cast his ashes than in the garden beneath one of the spreading three-hundred-year-old oak trees or around the ornamental pond where he would often stand and feed the fish? Only one problem… the river that ran through the garden also ran through the house, with bi-annual frequency. When therefore the family home had to be sold to pay for my mother’s nursing home fees, the only interested party was a local property developer whose idea of ‘development’ involved a large ball and bulldozer. Scattering Father’s ashes on a building site lost its appeal.
His other abiding passion had been tennis. Wimbledon fortnight was sacred in our house for as long as I can remember. In fact, it was one of Father’s tennis partners who had persuaded him to take early retirement - by dropping dead in the middle of a five-setter. Nothing would have given Father greater pleasure than to think that his ashes might be scattered on Centre Court, but I doubt that the Wimbledon officials would be so accommodating. As for the municipal court where, religiously every Sunday, he used to play, it had long since been hard-surfaced.
More innovative ideas took hold (For ‘innovative’, read desperate). A corner of a foreign field perhaps? Though he personally never got farther than the Channel Island of Jersey, where he met my mother, Father was an inveterate armchair traveller. The castors were jet-powered. David Attenborough was a constant companion and, as I discovered when it came to the house-clearing, he must have single-handedly kept Reader’s Digest travel books department in profit for decades. So what could be more appropriate than to take him in death to those places he had only ever vicariously experienced in life?
As it happens, my job requires me to work in a score of different countries around the globe. An idea took hold – a teacup in Malawi, a spoonful in Guyana, a pinch in Russia… Armenia… Uzbekistan… and so on. A Farewell World Tour like no other. And feasible. Unlike Australia with its strict control of anything organic, down to the mud on the soles of one's shoes, these countries aren’t greatly bothered about imports of a ‘personal nature’. But superstition – even in denial – has a powerful hold. The Stanley Spencer picture of Resurrection Day came to mind. Hard enough to collect oneself together when strewn across the rose bed of the local crematorium; how much more difficult across four continents?
Finally, my wife decided enough was enough. By now – two years after his death – Father had taken up residence in the bottom of the wardrobe. In our bedroom. So, one sunny late summer Tuesday, we headed out for the New Forest, a place that had always been close to Father’s heart. I remembered him showing me, as a child, the spot where William Rufus had been killed by Sir Walter Tyrrell and what he claimed to be the largest oak in England. So, for a number of reasons, it seemed right.
God indeed moves in a mysterious way. We were heading for Lyndhurst when, for no reason that I can explain, I took a right turn and, a mile or so on, down a winding leafy lane, we found ourselves at the crossroads of one of those impossibly picturesque villages which are dotted across the forest. In front of us was a pub and to the right, a cricket ground that evidently doubled as a football pitch in winter. And there, to one side, a large overhanging oak - the tree that had become the leitmotif of Father's life.
It was as though a fiery finger had descended from the sky and pointed to the spot marked ‘X’. Cricket and football, in addition to the tennis, had been Father’s favourite sports; in his youth he had played both and had the scars to prove it. As the years passed, he hung up the pads and boots and moved to the grandstand and terraces.
Surreptitiously I took the sweetie jar and, with due reverence, tipped its contents around the roots of the oak. Nothing had ever seemed so fitting. It was the ultimate season ticket - not just for life, but for Eternity.
My father Jack died in December, 2002. Two years later his ashes were still sitting in the wardrobe. What, pray, is one supposed to do with the mortal remains of a loved one?
‘Don’t hold it by the top unless you’re handy with the Hoover’, said Carol the undertaker, handing me the large plastic, burgundy-coloured sweetie jar containing my father’s ashes. It was a week after the cremation. I took Carol at her word and, strapping the container upright in the passenger seat – as I had often done with the ashes’ former incarnation - I drove my father home.
The words ‘final resting place’ have a sombre resonance and I was aware that the choice of that place was not a decision to be taken lightly. Once done, it couldn’t be undone – and eternity, I'm assured, is a long time. It does, though, give one an insight into the dilemma which must face murderers when deciding where best to hide the body.
My father was 93 when he died, having led a peacefully unspectacular life. His favourite joke was that, had he known he was going to live so long, he would have taken better care of himself. In the last twelve months of his life he suffered increasingly from multiple infarct dementia. Yet a year earlier he had been reading his daily broadsheet from front to back, was capable of a good argument – and, amazingly though terrifyingly, was still driving.
The bleak municipal crematorium was keen to offer ‘scatterage’ in their rose garden, with the added incentive of an entry in the Book of Remembrance and a personalised plaque in The Wall of Memory, the rent on which (in discreetly hushed tones) came up for renewal every five years. The whole business struck me as not just a tacky con but, considering the recurring rent, a less than ‘final’ resting place. I recalled a television news item about a London graveyard that had been sold off for development – and a woman complaining, ‘When we buried my father here, we thought it would be for life!’ Besides, already harbouring doubts as to whether the ashes really were Father’s (despite the undertaker’s assurances), I wasn’t inclined to have them mix with those of people he had never met and probably wouldn’t want to meet, but who just happened to have been cremated the same day or week. It all seemed a little over-familiar, carrying 'mingling' to an extreme.
I consulted friends – but the best they could come up with was ‘somewhere meaningful’. I was sure I could do better. It just required a little thought...
The main focus of Father’s last thirty years, since retirement, had been his garden – an idyllic two-thirds of an acre outside Winchester, with a river running through the middle. Dotted around it were five stacks of logs - Father’s personal Five Year Plan to ensure that the voracious Jotul log-burning stove never lacked for fuel. Using them in rotation, he often explained, would ensure adequate ageing and see him well into the Millennium. As he entered his tenth decade, still sawing and chopping, we wondered which Millennium he had in mind.
So where better to cast his ashes than in the garden beneath one of the spreading three-hundred-year-old oak trees or around the ornamental pond where he would often stand and feed the fish? Only one problem… the river that ran through the garden also ran through the house, with bi-annual frequency. When therefore the family home had to be sold to pay for my mother’s nursing home fees, the only interested party was a local property developer whose idea of ‘development’ involved a large ball and bulldozer. Scattering Father’s ashes on a building site lost its appeal.
His other abiding passion had been tennis. Wimbledon fortnight was sacred in our house for as long as I can remember. In fact, it was one of Father’s tennis partners who had persuaded him to take early retirement - by dropping dead in the middle of a five-setter. Nothing would have given Father greater pleasure than to think that his ashes might be scattered on Centre Court, but I doubt that the Wimbledon officials would be so accommodating. As for the municipal court where, religiously every Sunday, he used to play, it had long since been hard-surfaced.
More innovative ideas took hold (For ‘innovative’, read desperate). A corner of a foreign field perhaps? Though he personally never got farther than the Channel Island of Jersey, where he met my mother, Father was an inveterate armchair traveller. The castors were jet-powered. David Attenborough was a constant companion and, as I discovered when it came to the house-clearing, he must have single-handedly kept Reader’s Digest travel books department in profit for decades. So what could be more appropriate than to take him in death to those places he had only ever vicariously experienced in life?
As it happens, my job requires me to work in a score of different countries around the globe. An idea took hold – a teacup in Malawi, a spoonful in Guyana, a pinch in Russia… Armenia… Uzbekistan… and so on. A Farewell World Tour like no other. And feasible. Unlike Australia with its strict control of anything organic, down to the mud on the soles of one's shoes, these countries aren’t greatly bothered about imports of a ‘personal nature’. But superstition – even in denial – has a powerful hold. The Stanley Spencer picture of Resurrection Day came to mind. Hard enough to collect oneself together when strewn across the rose bed of the local crematorium; how much more difficult across four continents?
Finally, my wife decided enough was enough. By now – two years after his death – Father had taken up residence in the bottom of the wardrobe. In our bedroom. So, one sunny late summer Tuesday, we headed out for the New Forest, a place that had always been close to Father’s heart. I remembered him showing me, as a child, the spot where William Rufus had been killed by Sir Walter Tyrrell and what he claimed to be the largest oak in England. So, for a number of reasons, it seemed right.
God indeed moves in a mysterious way. We were heading for Lyndhurst when, for no reason that I can explain, I took a right turn and, a mile or so on, down a winding leafy lane, we found ourselves at the crossroads of one of those impossibly picturesque villages which are dotted across the forest. In front of us was a pub and to the right, a cricket ground that evidently doubled as a football pitch in winter. And there, to one side, a large overhanging oak - the tree that had become the leitmotif of Father's life.
It was as though a fiery finger had descended from the sky and pointed to the spot marked ‘X’. Cricket and football, in addition to the tennis, had been Father’s favourite sports; in his youth he had played both and had the scars to prove it. As the years passed, he hung up the pads and boots and moved to the grandstand and terraces.
Surreptitiously I took the sweetie jar and, with due reverence, tipped its contents around the roots of the oak. Nothing had ever seemed so fitting. It was the ultimate season ticket - not just for life, but for Eternity.
HOUSE-HUSBANDS – THE DARK SIDE
The truth about house-husbands: they don’t work
It was the sort of small ad that appears regularly in the back of the Radio Times: ‘House-husbands, do you enjoy being at home with the kids or are you tired of the household chores? If so, a BBC TV programme would like to hear from you or your partner…’ .
Actually I wanted to hear. As a former house-husband (eight years before the distaff), I was suspicious of all those programmes about Jason the scaffolder who is learning to breast-feed and ex-broker Tarquin who has discovered the joys of bread-making. I wondered – now that the novelty of homo domesticus has worn off – how many of the species had been trapped by the social and economic pressure that can turn an option into an obligation?
True, most of the men who responded were happy. One even hinted that the old joke about the housewife and the milkman had been politically corrected. ‘Being a house-husband’, he wrote, ‘hasn’t damaged my sexuality or my interest in sex. Quite the opposite!’
But among this happy band of cross-jobbers there was, as I had suspected, a significant minority who desperately missed the social contact and cama-lad-erie of the workplace. They felt cut off and isolated. One former high-flier confessed his only company now was the dog and Radio 4. Another was moved to sub-Keatsian melancholia: ‘It’s like standing on the quayside while the Liner of Life slips by. You see the lights and hear the laughter but you’re not part of it.’ Above all, they missed being something, as well as someone.
The most revealing letter came from from a wife who had written without her husband’s knowledge.
In 1993, Martin and Rosy Philips had it made. Martin worked in a university library; Rosy was an accounts clerk for a charity, just a walk away at the end of the street. Their combined income was a comfortable £22,000. Now, they felt, was the time to start a family. Also, Martin – then in his early forties – wanted to do the Phd he had been planning for years. Since Rosy was bringing in the bigger wage packet, the solution was obvious: she would have the baby, go back to work and leave Martin at home to look after the house and James (born a year later). That way he could also do his Phd, for which he now had a grant.
Fatherhood came naturally to Martin: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. And I feel I understand James a lot better because I’ve looked after him.’ And he relished the role of mature student.
But what about the housework? In common with nearly all the men who wrote in, there was noticeably less enthusiasm there. On Martin’s domestic agenda it came bottom: ‘My primary task was looking after James. Then doing my Phd, because I had to finish it while I had the grant coming in. Apart from that, I suppose just keep the place running… hoovering if we had people round, quickly tidying -’
Rosy interrupts. ‘It didn’t really work like that, did it?’ she says, gently trying to reconcile loyalty with accuracy. ‘For example, you used to put the washing in the machine, yes – but I used to sort the colours out first. Otherwise you’d have put them all in together.’
And there, in a single domestic vignette, you have it – the truth about house-husbands. We wash up but we never wipe down. We’ll happily shake a duvet but never make a bed. We’ll do the cooking but, when it comes to shopping, the modern hunter-gatherer needs a more challenging habitat than the local Sainsbury’s. One of our respondents wrote despairingly, ‘Housework must be the biggest waste of time ever conceived by humans. What’s the point?’ One wonders whether he ever ventured the same opinion when his wife did it.
If proof were needed, a survey by the magazine Top Santé and BUPA earlier this year found that more than half (52%) the full-time working women still did most of the household chores. It echoed the findings of a study by the Rowntree Foundation two years ago which concluded: ‘There was little evidence of any marked increase in the contribution made by fathers at home when they were unemployed and their partners were working. Mothers in these families appeared to carry an especially heavy burden.’
But back to Martin… In 1996 he finished his Phd and became suddenly aware of his social nakedness. ‘If people asked me, “What do you do?” I couldn’t any longer say, “I’m doing a Phd.” To say that I was looking after James didn’t seem enough – which is sad.’ He's not alone. Few men, it seems, will admit to being ‘just a house-husband’. Most, when asked, will be ‘doing a bit of freelance writing’ or ‘part-time consultancy’… or just ‘working from home’. Not even working at home.
In fairness to Martin, he had tried to integrate himself socially in his reversed role. Twice a week he would take James to the local toddler group but, as the only man, he says he found it hard to strike up any sort of rapport. ‘There were twenty-three women with children. They all sat up one end and I sat this end. I felt… I think “silly” is probably the right word.’ Other men told of being ignored, shunned or even ostracised as proto-paedophiles. Mothers would discourage their children from playing with theirs. The hurt was doubled.
So why not team up with other males in the same situation? Again, Martin had tried. But men, it seems, just aren’t good at networking. ‘Whereas women will start talking about clothes, nappies, whatever… men don’t… Looking after a child just isn’t a conversation piece.’
By August 1996, Martin’s confidence had all but drained away. Much as he still loved the fathering side of house-husbanding, he needed, for his sanity and self-esteem, to get back to work. But by now Rosy was expecting their second child. The plan had been that, after maternity leave, she would go back to her well-paid job. ‘What with the salary,’ she recalls, ‘everything logically weighed up in favour of it.’
Logic was ditched. ‘There was this gut-feeling we had,’ she says, ‘that this was no longer right. It wasn’t working. There would always be these tensions.’
The Job Centre had little to offer Martin. Finally a vacancy came up at a local psychiatric hospital, as a Nursing Assistant. The pay for a 38-hour week on shift was just short of £8000 a year – barely half what Rosy had been earning as an accounts clerk. Martin took it.
In financial terms, the swap-over was disastrous. The family lost their flat when they couldn’t keep up the mortgage repayments – and were then saddled with a £13,000 debt because it was sold for less than they had paid for it six years earlier. Finally, last September, Martin and Rosy were declared bankrupt. They’re now renting but face the possibility of being homeless when the landlord returns from abroad in a few months. The best the council can offer is a B&B.
And yet, talking to the couple, you sense a stoic serenity. Martin is happy because, even though he’s being paid a salary that many people have told him they wouldn’t get out of bed for, he feels he counts again.
And Rosy? She’s happy because Martin is happy. ‘Yes, really,’ she insists. ‘Of course I miss my job. We live with help from the State and we’re always broke. But we went for quality of life, so in terms of our happiness there really was no other option.’
As for the television programme, it never got made. The editor decided that ‘sad men’ were not the stuff of cutting-edge current affairs. In a perverse way it proves Martin’s point: nobody loves a loser.
NOTE: Martin, Rosy and James are pseudonyms. Since the article was written in 1998 but not published at the time (it sank with the programme), it would be unfair to identify the couple now without their permission - the more so if their situation has radically changed. That said, all their quotes are verbatim and of course all the facts are accurate.
The truth about house-husbands: they don’t work
It was the sort of small ad that appears regularly in the back of the Radio Times: ‘House-husbands, do you enjoy being at home with the kids or are you tired of the household chores? If so, a BBC TV programme would like to hear from you or your partner…’ .
Actually I wanted to hear. As a former house-husband (eight years before the distaff), I was suspicious of all those programmes about Jason the scaffolder who is learning to breast-feed and ex-broker Tarquin who has discovered the joys of bread-making. I wondered – now that the novelty of homo domesticus has worn off – how many of the species had been trapped by the social and economic pressure that can turn an option into an obligation?
True, most of the men who responded were happy. One even hinted that the old joke about the housewife and the milkman had been politically corrected. ‘Being a house-husband’, he wrote, ‘hasn’t damaged my sexuality or my interest in sex. Quite the opposite!’
But among this happy band of cross-jobbers there was, as I had suspected, a significant minority who desperately missed the social contact and cama-lad-erie of the workplace. They felt cut off and isolated. One former high-flier confessed his only company now was the dog and Radio 4. Another was moved to sub-Keatsian melancholia: ‘It’s like standing on the quayside while the Liner of Life slips by. You see the lights and hear the laughter but you’re not part of it.’ Above all, they missed being something, as well as someone.
The most revealing letter came from from a wife who had written without her husband’s knowledge.
In 1993, Martin and Rosy Philips had it made. Martin worked in a university library; Rosy was an accounts clerk for a charity, just a walk away at the end of the street. Their combined income was a comfortable £22,000. Now, they felt, was the time to start a family. Also, Martin – then in his early forties – wanted to do the Phd he had been planning for years. Since Rosy was bringing in the bigger wage packet, the solution was obvious: she would have the baby, go back to work and leave Martin at home to look after the house and James (born a year later). That way he could also do his Phd, for which he now had a grant.
Fatherhood came naturally to Martin: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. And I feel I understand James a lot better because I’ve looked after him.’ And he relished the role of mature student.
But what about the housework? In common with nearly all the men who wrote in, there was noticeably less enthusiasm there. On Martin’s domestic agenda it came bottom: ‘My primary task was looking after James. Then doing my Phd, because I had to finish it while I had the grant coming in. Apart from that, I suppose just keep the place running… hoovering if we had people round, quickly tidying -’
Rosy interrupts. ‘It didn’t really work like that, did it?’ she says, gently trying to reconcile loyalty with accuracy. ‘For example, you used to put the washing in the machine, yes – but I used to sort the colours out first. Otherwise you’d have put them all in together.’
And there, in a single domestic vignette, you have it – the truth about house-husbands. We wash up but we never wipe down. We’ll happily shake a duvet but never make a bed. We’ll do the cooking but, when it comes to shopping, the modern hunter-gatherer needs a more challenging habitat than the local Sainsbury’s. One of our respondents wrote despairingly, ‘Housework must be the biggest waste of time ever conceived by humans. What’s the point?’ One wonders whether he ever ventured the same opinion when his wife did it.
If proof were needed, a survey by the magazine Top Santé and BUPA earlier this year found that more than half (52%) the full-time working women still did most of the household chores. It echoed the findings of a study by the Rowntree Foundation two years ago which concluded: ‘There was little evidence of any marked increase in the contribution made by fathers at home when they were unemployed and their partners were working. Mothers in these families appeared to carry an especially heavy burden.’
But back to Martin… In 1996 he finished his Phd and became suddenly aware of his social nakedness. ‘If people asked me, “What do you do?” I couldn’t any longer say, “I’m doing a Phd.” To say that I was looking after James didn’t seem enough – which is sad.’ He's not alone. Few men, it seems, will admit to being ‘just a house-husband’. Most, when asked, will be ‘doing a bit of freelance writing’ or ‘part-time consultancy’… or just ‘working from home’. Not even working at home.
In fairness to Martin, he had tried to integrate himself socially in his reversed role. Twice a week he would take James to the local toddler group but, as the only man, he says he found it hard to strike up any sort of rapport. ‘There were twenty-three women with children. They all sat up one end and I sat this end. I felt… I think “silly” is probably the right word.’ Other men told of being ignored, shunned or even ostracised as proto-paedophiles. Mothers would discourage their children from playing with theirs. The hurt was doubled.
So why not team up with other males in the same situation? Again, Martin had tried. But men, it seems, just aren’t good at networking. ‘Whereas women will start talking about clothes, nappies, whatever… men don’t… Looking after a child just isn’t a conversation piece.’
By August 1996, Martin’s confidence had all but drained away. Much as he still loved the fathering side of house-husbanding, he needed, for his sanity and self-esteem, to get back to work. But by now Rosy was expecting their second child. The plan had been that, after maternity leave, she would go back to her well-paid job. ‘What with the salary,’ she recalls, ‘everything logically weighed up in favour of it.’
Logic was ditched. ‘There was this gut-feeling we had,’ she says, ‘that this was no longer right. It wasn’t working. There would always be these tensions.’
The Job Centre had little to offer Martin. Finally a vacancy came up at a local psychiatric hospital, as a Nursing Assistant. The pay for a 38-hour week on shift was just short of £8000 a year – barely half what Rosy had been earning as an accounts clerk. Martin took it.
In financial terms, the swap-over was disastrous. The family lost their flat when they couldn’t keep up the mortgage repayments – and were then saddled with a £13,000 debt because it was sold for less than they had paid for it six years earlier. Finally, last September, Martin and Rosy were declared bankrupt. They’re now renting but face the possibility of being homeless when the landlord returns from abroad in a few months. The best the council can offer is a B&B.
And yet, talking to the couple, you sense a stoic serenity. Martin is happy because, even though he’s being paid a salary that many people have told him they wouldn’t get out of bed for, he feels he counts again.
And Rosy? She’s happy because Martin is happy. ‘Yes, really,’ she insists. ‘Of course I miss my job. We live with help from the State and we’re always broke. But we went for quality of life, so in terms of our happiness there really was no other option.’
As for the television programme, it never got made. The editor decided that ‘sad men’ were not the stuff of cutting-edge current affairs. In a perverse way it proves Martin’s point: nobody loves a loser.
NOTE: Martin, Rosy and James are pseudonyms. Since the article was written in 1998 but not published at the time (it sank with the programme), it would be unfair to identify the couple now without their permission - the more so if their situation has radically changed. That said, all their quotes are verbatim and of course all the facts are accurate.