French Letter: Brittany in hibernation as it awaits the Spring

My wife says I’m suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder, meaning that I get a bit down when I look out the window, and the only reason I can’t see the rain is that it’s already dark. She’s right, of course. Everybody in Brittany has Trouble Affectif Saisonnier, which is why they go to bed at eight o’clock, lulled to sleep by the sound of the rain on the roof. 

It doesn’t get particularly cold here in the winter. We get fog in the mornings and dustings of frost, but it hardly ever snows. There have even been a couple of days recently when it was warmer in Brest than in Nice. But colour drains from the landscape as soon as October hits, and it doesn’t return until late February at the earliest, and some years not until April. 

In this, it reminds me of Connecticut, where I used to live, and indeed the entire US East Coast as far south as Washington in the days that usher in the winter’s first blizzard. The ground is squelchy and the sky is grey. If it’s not raining, it’s about to, and if you haven’t got the wood in for the fire before five in the evening, you need to put on a thick jacket and scarf and carry a torch. 

I was thinking of this yesterday when a friend who lives in Cannes called me to catch up and broke off to adjust the blind in his study so that it shielded his eyes from the sun. 

“What’s it like there at the moment?” I asked him, already knowing the answer. 

‘’Sky’s a brilliant blue. A bit cold, but beautiful.’’ 

Pah! 

Some of you may recall that I was shocked in late November to discover that the weather in Languedoc – or as we must now call it, Occitanie – was worse than it had been in central Brittany on the day we headed south. But this, I am assured, is not usually the case. 

As I write, it is sunny and dry in Montpellier, with a slight breeze from the North West. On the other side of the Pyrenees, in Biarritz, where we spent a fabulous September four years ago – like August, but without the crowds – it was sunny and 24 degrees one day last week, which I have to admit had me green with envy. 

I’m not a great walker (or cyclist), and in the winter months, it is as much as my wife can do to get me to accompany her on a stroll around our local lake. This morning, having returned from her solitary perambulation of said étang, she reported that another tree had fallen across the path, having lost the will to live, and that the heron, striding mournfully through the muddy water, looked a bit sorry for himself. He has my sympathy. 

In the summer, I am bound to say, it’s a very different story. From May through to the end of September, Brittany can be magical even into October. We have no mountains (though the remaining stumps were once, apparently, higher than the Himalayas), but any number of hills, with more woods, rivers and lakes than you could shake a stick at. 

On a good day, the temperature can hit 25 or 26 degrees, and the wildflowers are, as my mother would have said, a picture. 

Summer is when you see the old men in their shorts. When we first bought our house here, in 1999, it was rare to come across a man over the age of 40 who hadn’t worn the same dilapidated trousers every day for the previous twenty years, reminding me of what someone once wrote about the Press Association correspondent in Belfast, that his suit had creases in places where other people didn’t have places. 

Now, shorts are a commonplace mostly baggy and multi-pocketed, worn as often as not with socks, a flat cap and a mask as a chinstrap. I weep for my generation. 

At the pub, opinion is divided on the coming of Spring. Some say it will show up, out of the grey, as early as mid-February, which has been known. Others caution that it could be delayed until the end of April or may never turn up at all. 

My own view is that we are due a long-hot summer and that Brittany is fated to end up as one of the few places on Earth to actually benefit from climate change. 

If I’m right, homes overlooking the spectacular north coast, which already attract price tags of as much as half a million euros, could become some of the most desirable residences in France. 

The Côte d’Emeraude and the Côte de Granit Rose, running from Cancale in the east to Roscoff in the west, could be the new Riviera, requiring sunblinds in December. 

But then I recall the wry humour of my old friend Alexei, who died in 2007, at the age of just 74. He was a hod-carrier who had helped build half the houses in our neighbourhood only to end up almost unable to walk, with knees the size of watermelons. 

He had just received a glossy publication put out by the Conseil Départemental of the Côtes d’Armor and was studying it in the shade provided by the oak tree next to his modest lean-to house. 

The sun looked as if it had just dropped in from the Sahara and the bottle of cheap white wine on the table next to him was warm to the touch. But he wasn’t fooled.

“Côtes d’Armor, indeed!” he said scornfully, referring to the department’s new nomenclature, taken from Armorica, the name the Romans gave to western Gaul. 

“They just want the tourists to think it is the Côte d’Amour. The truth is, it is what it aways was – the Côtes-du-Nord.” 

And then he smiled. Warmly, like the day.