Any Fool Can Be An Expat

Lego

jamesir — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:26:18 +0000

Wildlife is a bit more in your face here than in France. A monkey cleaned up the bird table yesterday and one has to be careful that it doesn’t come inside to raid the fridge. Zebras cud peacefully beside the road leading to this house. The house is a charming curiosity at the top of an estate of new fat cat Lego houses surrounding a golf course. A rather sour-faced bloke below us stomped round with a bucket and a paintbrush flicking what must have been some sort of animal repellent over the plants in his immaculate new garden. Once he was indoors a couple of duikers arrived and delicately nibbled at his roses.
I’ve been coming to this country since 1967. It remains astonishingly different from the rest of the continent with an infrastructure far superior to anywhere else. Crime, corruption, unemployment and grinding poverty have always been problems but now there’s a prosperous African middle class. The greatest change seems to be that racism has all but disappeared. It’s very surprising.

Justin

jamesir — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:25:57 +0000

A stushie in the local (South African) press today. A couple of traffic policewomen were caught on CCTV augmenting their income by selling sexual favours from their police car to passing punters.

And Justin Beiber came to Johannesburg over the weekend. The baddies, of which there seem to be an inordinate number in this country, broke into the safe where the boodle was being kept and escaped with millions from his concert but I suspect he could afford it. The pic is of Himself with my 15 year-old great niece. She blagged her way into his presence and outcooled all the squealie boppers of the nation by having her pic taken with him. Apparently he was much more charismatic than he appears from the snap.

We spent last night in a game park and drove round the appalling dirt roads in an ancient estate car oohing and aahing at the beasties. The drawback was that the car had a faulty starter motor, so I had to exit the car to push start it. WARNING! Under no circumstances leave your vehicle as the animals are dangerous! Knowing that a couple of tons of rhinoceros was certainly lurking behind a bush made sure that I did not hang about.

The weather remains practically perfect – what France should be but, I gather, isn’t at the moment.

Zig-zags

jamesir — Sun, 12 May 2013 15:01:42 +0000

Here, 9,000 miles from France, the terrace is called the veranda. The birds that come to the feeders are weavers, barbets, mannikins, Cape robins, as opposed to tits, great and blue. They’re also rather tamer here and are quite happy to sit tight until you’re a couple of feet from them. The view is not dissimilar although there are probably half a million people within long telescope range, rather than 500.
We arrived to rain and 17 degrees, similar to France, but it’s now blue and 23. Here winter is approaching, the trees are changing colour and the maize is desiccated waiting to be harvested. They worryingly drive on the left which no longer feels natural and one feels a bit of a prat when you automatically say ‘bonjour’ and ‘merci’ in the shops. Zig-zagging down the runway at Heathrow amid white-knuckled passengers on the way to pick up a connection was different from last time I made that flight. But the pilot, just like last time, apologised for keeping us on the plane because, inexplicably, there were no steps to disembark us or bus to take us to the terminal, which meant we made to next flight just as the gates to it were closing after a sprint through Terminal 5. Does flying have to be such a profoundly distasteful experience?

Coochie coo

jamesir — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:33:41 +0000

The end of the month is the deadline for filing tax returns. Consequently the tax offices are besieged by punters trying to obtain help in filling in the forms. In order to cope, the opening hours of our local office have changed. They have decided to take an extra half hour for lunch and now close at 11.30 am. This is very French.
I have been busy cutting grass, trying to avoid showers, in order to avoid coming back to a meadow after a trip to foreign parts. It’s 23, still, humid and I badly need a shower. The trip involves an 11-hour flight in cattle class, which is a little depressing. My neighbour will take the house keys and come to inspect the premises at regular intervals. He may well set up shop on the terrace since the view from it is better than his. I have not yet decided whether or not to ask him to water the garden. He and family have gone to the fair in the town up the road. I did it once – streets crammed, po-faced line dancers, rip-off stalls and guys on stilts – so I don’t have to do it again. I had the small dog tucked under an arm and the guys of stilts freaked him out, particularly when they swooped down from a great height to say coochie-coo.

Tories

jamesir — Sun, 05 May 2013 17:06:56 +0000

I was faintly horrified that I found myself rooting for the Tories in the local council elections. I’ve voted for almost everybody else during my electoral life. None of my selections have yet gone to jail, but it’s been a pretty close run thing. Bar an aberrant moment when I voted for Tony Blair, I have nothing of which I am ashamed. I even voted for the far right once when some bloke wanted to do some almighty stir in the Scots parliament. I thought this was a good thing, but quite what he wanted to do I have long forgotten. But to think, in my dotage, I may be a closet Tory is definitely shaming.
It’s now broken into proper summer here, and about time too. We had people here for lunch this afternoon and most of the time was spent on the terrace, which reminded me of why I came to this country in the first place. The countryside is lushly green and the birds are still noisy with spring.

Moneyman

jamesir — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:18:39 +0000

When I can’t be bothered to take the dog on a sensible walk, we perambulate round the village. During the school holidays I have been joined by the son of one of the neighbours who swoops round me on his bike. It shows how unexciting this place can be if I am an attraction. I’m not great shakes in conversation with reticent 10 year-olds in English, let alone in French and we either progress in silence or I make laboured small talk about very little indeed and receive monosyllables in reply. He does have the grace to pretend to understand my French. Today we discovered a small, squashed serpent on the road. He thought it a viper, me a grass snake. His identification was the more dramatic so I did not press my case.
I am in the process of trying to go French with my tax. I think it’ll be bone simple and I should be able to do it myself next year, but I have engaged a professional to launch me into the system. Coincidentally I was approached by a moneyman from one of the largest of such companies in France, specialising in expat affairs. Thinking I might as well milk him for free, I asked him a couple of questions that had arisen. The information he gave was directly contradictory to that of the Paris accountant. I am still unafraid of French bureaucrats so I will do what will cost me least.

Baguette

jamesir — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:02:19 +0000

I had an email congratulating me on the third anniversary of my arrival in France. It seems like a moment when I should share such insights that I have gained from uprooting myself and going to a strange land to live amongst foreigners. I haven’t really got any – bar that baguettes are overrated, one should never annoy a frelon or a gendarme and make damn sure there’s a decent central heating in any house you buy out here.

Granny is being tucked into a little, currently superfluous house in the middle of the village. There she can live on her own and has a dozen of her descendants within 50 yards of her front door to scoop her up when she tumbles down the stairs.

Wisteria

jamesir — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:10:34 +0000

My neighbour returned from the half-term holiday in Brittany bearing a bottle of Medoc, lableless, made by one of his mates. His family is in the midst of trying to work out what to do with Granny. She’s over 90 and has her own small house in a nearby town – without any hot water – but needs a full time carer if she’s to stay there, which is what she wants. That’s not practical and the family will have to pay for whatever is decided. The state doesn’t pick up the tab. Granny is a long-term enemy of the sorciere. The latter has got it into her head that Granny died last year. I tried to tell her Granny was still in life, but this depressed the old bat so much that I haven’t disillusioned her since.
I counted five trilling nightingales last night. A couple close by and the others fading into the distance. At night the whole of southern France must be covered by the racket. They are obviously singing their claims to a certain patch of territory and it’s quite sensible of them to keep going when others are quiet as they aren’t drowned out by everything else. But when do they sleep? Wisteria has been running rampant at the chateau for a dozen years. It is over the roof this year and has spread itself across the ground to create a carpet of blossom.

Bishops

jamesir — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:54:37 +0000

Two sunny days, if breezy. I imagine some of the redundant houses in the vicinity have been rented to half-termers since a couple of groups of people in urban summer garb have picked their way through the brambles up the track to the chateau under the interested gaze of those drinking wine on the terrace of this house. The forecast crashes downhill from today with nothing but chilly sog for the next week. But the weather window has been long enough to let many of the farmers into their fields. Their tractors are behemoths, all four-wheel drive, double-wheeled and I even seen one with tracks to cope with the clay. They leave their spoor of clods as they move between the fields.
They’ve been rioting in Paris against gay marriage, part smart since the law permitting it has been passed. This neck of the woods is not sophisticated, even less so than the depths of rural Devon where I spent many years. Here they don’t like gypsies, Arabs, city-dwellers – particularly Parisians – Germans, witches or politicians but I have never heard the remotest angst expressed about homosexuality. In fact active benignity seems to be the common attitude. The protesters themselves are hamstrung with the difficulty that the constitution forbids a religious dimension to politics, so they can’t invoke God as a supporter. A large part of the fuss is simply down to the unpopularity of the government, but the anti-gay argument is bizarrely incoherent without an Old Testament and a few bishops to fall back on.

Chute

jamesir — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:57:47 +0000

Since it’s half term, most of the village is off on holiday and it’s very peaceful. Even the next door dogs are sulking and can hardly be bothered to come out to yap when a car passes by. The sorciere had a ‘chute’ and is in hospital for an indeterminate period so visiting duties are light. The poor old thing does a lot of chuting but otherwise she’s as tough as old boots and is notoriously expected to outlive everyone else in the village, thanks to her judicious use of certain spells.
I see that a new sport is hunting for grooming paedophiles on line and then confronting them. It must have been about 1992 that I first obtained a modem and crept out into the brave new world of the internet and soon found myself in a chat room. I couldn’t understand why they all seemed to be arseholes. And what they chatted about was banal beyond belief. I wanted to exchange ideas that would change views of the world across cultures. Eventually when someone inquired about what boys liked best, I asked the questioner how old she was. I think it was something like 12. She asked back. 50. And I soon found myself all alone in the infinity of the world-wide web.