French Letter: Brittany goes Country and my GPS loses its mind
It’s high summer in Brittany, and you know what that means: country music and rodeos.
Yes, the good folk of the Côtes-d’Armor may not always wish to be seen as French, but with temperatures this month hovering around 30 degrees, they have no objection to whooping it up in ten-gallon hats while the band Rednex — from Sweden, where else? — belt out that old crowd favourite, “Cotton Eye Joe”.
At the rodeo, in downtown Callac, there will, I am told, be calf roping, steer wrestling, and bull and saddle bronc riding (whatever that is), followed in the evening by Rockin’ Chairs, a concert of Country classics, in the Salle des Fêtes.
Finally, on Monday, just to show that we haven’t gone completely Texas, the holiday weekend will round off with a concours de boules, no-holds-barred Breton-style.
So let’s all join in now, y’hear?
The latest heatwave has, in fact, eased somewhat over the last few days. But on Monday, Brittany was briefly the hottest region of France, registering, according to our local pharmacy clock, 42 degrees — 108 degrees Fahrenheit. In Carhaix, where the annual rock festival known as Les Vieilles Charrues, or Old Ploughs, had mercifully concluded, the streets were empty, which was just as well as the tar was starting to melt on the roads.
But life goes on… just. My wife and I had appointments to be fitted up for new glasses, which meant two hours in the steaming heat in the company of our friend Pascal, who actually lives in Chateaulin, some 45 kilometres away, but has managed to make himself a celebrity in Carhaix.
Halfway through the forest of paperwork (which takes a lot longer to complete than the actual optometry), Pascal suddenly stood up. “Come with me,” he says, “I want to show you our new shop.”
For the last few months, Optic 2000 in Carhaix has been operating out of a recently closed-down newsagents while its own premises are renovated and extended. The transformation, now almost complete, is impressive. As well as an air-conditioned split-level customer area, there will be a children’s playroom, ateliers with floor-to-ceiling windows (through which to watch the elves at work) and a suite of offices, all accessible by a lift that announces which floor you have reached in English as well as French.
“We are the largest Optic 2000 in Brittany,” Pascal told us, proudly. “Even in Rennes, they do not have as big a staff as we have here in Carhaix.”
“Nor as much bad eyesight,” my wife whispered.
Thursday is cake night in Les Fous. Usually, the gateau in question is provided by Gill, from Yorkshire, whose pastry-making skills are, as they say in Leeds, non-pareil. But on this occasion, the conch had passed to Anne, a clinical psychologist from Exeter, who was worried that her iced Victoria sponge, made with month-old margarine, would not pass muster. She needn’t have worried. We tucked in in silence, the only sound that of fork against porcelain.
Then we waited for Gill to pronounce. “Lovely,” she said. Anne looked genuinely relieved.
We have had the same car, a nine-year-old Renault Mégane, ever since we arrived in Brittany from New York in the summer of 2015, and things are just starting to go wrong. Nothing major: the engine is as good as ever, even with 125,000 kilometres on the clock. But the bodywork is starting to show its age and, annoyingly, both the heating and air-conditioning unit and the GPS have started to act up, sometimes for days at a time.
Currently, the GPS thinks we are located about fifteen kilometres north of where we actually live, which means it has no idea where we are at any one time and routinely advises us to drive across open fields or into rivers and lakes. A friend advises us to trade the car in and lease a hybrid instead, and I have decided to follow up on this by paying a visit to our local Renault dealer.
My neighbour, Jean-françois, a full-time mechanic, says I’m mad. Electric cars will never catch on, he says, not in the countryside, where diesel is king.
And he might be right. But even if he’s not, the fact remains that new hybrids are extremely expensive and in electric mode cannot be relied on to keep going beyond 60 kilometres, which is not a lot of use if you are setting off from Brittany for Lyon or Nice. But the technology is improving with each passing year and I reckon by the time I celebrate my 90th birthday, an e-Mégane may fit my needs exactly — especially if it drives itself.
In the meantime, I will ask Anne to offer my GPS some expert therapy. Maybe it’s just confused and needs to get its head straight.
In Paris recently, we stayed at a hotel in Montmartre dedicated to the novelist and short story writer Marcel Aymé. I confess, I had never heard of Aymé, who died in 1967 aged 64, but I was intrigued by the opening paragraphs to several of his stories that, in 90-point type, were inscribed on the walls of the hotel lobby. I at once sent off to Amazon for a collection of his writings, published, in floppy format, by Gallimard, and am now waiting for a companion volume, in English, that will be my fallback as I read in bed each night, my head drooping, between eleven o’clock and twelve.
I will start with Le Passe-Muraille — The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls – the author’s most famous short story, telling of Dutilleul a man who at the age of 43 finally realises that his unusual ability could actually make him rich. There’s a bronze sculpture in Montmartre, in the appropriately named Place Marcel Aymé, that shows Dutilleul half-in and half-out of a wall — a bit like our car if we followed its GPS.
It now remains for me to discover if I can make it through Aymé’s less than limpid prose without constantly referring to my English primer.