Saint Barbara to the Rescue

Two young 'pompiers' came by the house a couple of days ago with their calendar for 2009. They do this every year, at about this time which is another reminder that winter is setting-in.

The Sapeurs-pompiers is France's fire and rescue service and is largely voluntary for the smaller communes. It is expected that we give a donation for the calendar. We always oblige - you never know when you might need their services and besides, next year is our local brigade's 150th anniversary.  The busy, six-page glossy calendar is full of dramatic scenes

of their derring-do over the past year as well as some homely, family touches such as a large photograph of 'Le petit Luca et son papa, le sergent Jérôme Courcelaud'.

The first page of the calendar is entirely taken with 'mugshots' of the whole brigade; one Chief, 14 other officers down to the rank of 'caporal' and 11 more 'sapeurs, 1st classe'. Out of these 26, four are women. On the last page we are treated to photographs of five more under the title "La section Jeunes Sapeurs-Pompiers" in their uniforms - sort of apprentices or 'cadets', aged form 11 to 16 years. Four out of the five are young women. All this for a town of 3,000 inhabitants. A bit like the scouts, but with some serious hardware to play with. Wikepedia has a description of these cadets and their duties here in English.

A small 'flyer' accompanied the calendar inviting us as residents, to a free knees-up ('Grand Bal Gratuit'. It does sound better in French), in January in the sports hall. The occasion is an address on behalf of the patron saint of pompiers, Sainte Barbe, to be followed by general jollity with dancing - all organised by 'Fred et Lulu'.  Sounds intriguing.

Sainte Barbe  - Saint Barbara was an interesting, albeit shadowy saint in the catholic world. Originally she was prayed-to to protect one from lightning strikes.

Really? Is it worth it, I ask myself. Then again, we get some pretty awesome thunderstorms in these parts at times.

 Anyway, the way she came to be associated with lightning was through a typically tortuous set of circumstances. Her father didn't like the way she was always eyeing the boys so he locked her up in a tower. Having little else to do while she was in there, she somehow learned about christianity and converted to it. From what, I don't know (flirting?). This made her father even madder so he had her tortured.  She held-out against that, so he beheaded her (himself!). It seems that fathers were pretty strict in those days. It makes me feel that I got off lightly when I was smacked - hard, mind you, on the bum by my dad when I wouldn't stop asking for an ice-cream which he was not inclined to buy for me at the time. Ages ago, of course, but luckily not back in Bab's time.

I digress. As soon as Barbara's father had carried out the rather harsh punishment, he was struck by lightning and died. Served him right, you might say. Not for him our modern remedy of a spot of family counselling with a holiday at the seaside for all the family, just to help rekindle those happy earlier days.

After the unfortunate result of this mediaeval family spat, Sainte Barbe then acquired even more admirers and is now the patron saint of lightning-avoiders, architects, geologists, miners, gunners, metallurgists(!) and so on. Anything vaguely related to fire. Which finally brings us to the pompiers - she is well and truly, their guardian angel.

With a list like that, I suppose you could say that it goes some way towards compensating her for a rather heavy-handed bit of scolding from her dad.

Mapmaker

A Burning Issue

This morning we hear that the UK is once again under cloud, but 'mild' for the time of year. It's amusing how this sort of weather 'anomaly' still makes news back there in Blighty. Here, at the same moment, we are recipients of the opposite; a light frost under a pale blue sky. A harbinger of winter.

We're experiencing one of those not infrequent weather patterns which occur from autumn to spring, when a finger of high pressure pokes across the northern half of France delivering its slow, clockwise circulation of warm, damp, 'claggy' air from the Atlantic to Britain while at the same time dragging down crisp, dry, cold continental air across us here in the 'bottom half' of this country.

We Brits get 'caught out' by these European mainland weather phenomena quite often in our first few years as French immigrants, especially those who think that 'south of the river Loire' means 'southern Europe', ergo a Mediterranean climate.  In fact our winters can be much harsher than those of southern Britain, 800 kilometres to the north.

Almost all residents of France, with the exception perhaps of the well-heeled who can afford to inhabit the Côte d'Azur, have to accept the fact that they need heat in their houses for at least 7 months of the year. This means that the natives here are well-versed in the use of wood-burning stoves.

Wood-burning for heating has been around for a very long time - obviously. The stoves nowadays are very efficient - more than 70% of the heat generated is going to come into the room. What's more, 27% of France is still covered by forest and woodland so the 'industry' of growing and harvesting wood for fuel is still strong and actually increasing in activity. The French state now gives tax credits equal to 50% of the cost of installing in a home any device which uses renewable sources and this includes wood-burning stoves. We get a special low VAT rate for this also.

If the wood is dried for at least 18 months before it is sold as fuel, as any decent wood-farmer would do, the best (oak, beech, ash and particularly hornbeam, the hardest of all and better even than oak as fuel) can cost as little as around 2 euro centimes for kilowatt-hour of heat. Natural gas costs around 4.5 centimes for a kilowatt-hour, domestic fuel costs nearly 7 and propane gas, over 10!

Here, the wood is sold by volume.  This doesn't seem fair at fist because, in fact, weight  for weight, all woods are closely matched for calorific value. However, water content would make it heavier so the French prefer to sell it by this way. (Nevertheless, the Italians sell it by weight - ok, as long as it's dry).

The standard measure for us is the 'Steyre' which is, sort of, one cubic metre.  In fact, it is a pile of one-metre-long logs stacked, one metre high, on a one metre base. This means, the amount varies slightly, depending on how straight they are! It also means that if the logs are already cut into two or three (we use the latter for our stove) before delivery, they will stack closer so a cut 'steyre' will give you more wood than an uncut one.

All this is a bit academic as the supplier-farmers always deliver, cut and jumbled on a trailer behind a tractor and simply tip it somewhere near where you want it. It's all based on trust really. We pay a little extra for the cutting.

It's interesting to note that new Brit immigrants here have no idea how to manage a wood-burner as their main source of heating. We all had to learn, despite the fact that the wood burner has been a fashionable addition to the 'ideal UK home' for many years now. It's still more likely to be an aesthetic assembly in the fireplace, rarely lit and fuelled by a few sacks of logs, purchased at the local garage or from a dodgy itinerant local trader with a pickup piled with some scruffy bits of trees which were probably still growing, a few days earlier.

Here, we gradually realise that, as the main source of heating a house, the wood must be properly harvested and dried, the stove must be kept going, pretty well continuously throughout the colder months. The walls of the house will take 24 to 48 hours to reach a steady, warm state and must not be left too long without a heat source in the rooms.

It's alien to a Brit at first to stoke up the stove just before retiring for the night. Coaxing it into life again before breakfast is also a lost memory, passed over with the death of our grandparents. It was more dangerous then; now we have modern, efficient burners, often with warm air circulatory additions which make a real difference, capable of heating a house, most likely more economically than other systems.

Finally, but actually firstly, - make sure you insulate otherwise the draughts will suck away all this eco-heat and leave you with cold feet....

Mapmaker 

Kissing Cousins*

*Click here for definition

We left Siena on the Wednesday and drove out to the Italian coast at Livorno to follow the Mediterranean motorway to France. It was somewhere along this route that I spotted an Italian (at least, his car had Italian numberplates) peeing at the side of the road, just like his cousins, the French. For some time I'd had the idea of a blog on this subject (if I could come up with a polite title), hitherto being convinced that they, Frenchmen, were the only nationals in Europe, if not the world, who practised this art.  I was wrong. Perhaps I'd better abandon the idea of an essay on this topic for now; suffice to say, you can substitute the 'K' in the title of this piece for a "P" if you like.

The differences between these euro-cousins becomes apparent as soon as you cross the border at Ventimiglia. Tidiness take over. Confusing roadsigns, particularly the temporary ones setup for roadworks no longer leave you guessing. A sense of order - efficiency even, whispers its name again in the warm breeze coming from the sparkling sea, gliding over the fabulous rooftops of Monte Carlo. It's not until Nice, still on motorways but now crammed with traffic, that you are reminded of the auto-scrum that you get around all northern Italian towns and cities.

At last we were able to leave the motorway and, guided by Fifi, our faithful GPS comforter, start to take the road to the hills nearby.

Biot is a village in these hills a few kilometres inland from the ugly, urban coastal strip along the 'Bay of Angels' which stretches from Nice to Antibes. It must crawl with tourists from Easter to November, but when we arrived  (late October), it was almost normal with very few obvious tourists and the genuine feel of a French village, slowing down for the 'low-season', politely keeping its attractions available but in a sleepy sort of way. A delight after the mêlée of Siena.

We headed for 'Les Arcades' hotel-restaurant at the top of the oldest part of the village.  We'd passed-by a few years before, briefly, with Marina (once again) as our guide. She knew it from her earlier days as a photo-journalist as it was only a short dash from Nice and Cannes and thus became known to the press-crowd and their filmstar targets during the Film Festival weeks.

The hotel is a delight. The proprietors, M. and Mme Brothier (André and Mimi) have run it for over 50 years and treat their guests like relatives, who drop-in from time to time for a meal and to catch up on the family news. Each room is hung with original artworks of no mean value (artistic as well as financial). Mimi will show you her large private art collection in the cellars as well as expounding some useful medicinal advantages of some of her recipes - "The entrée you have chosen is a diuretic.  Makes you peepee," she said with an encouraging smile.

The village of Saint Paul de Vence is only a few kilometres distant and so we made a visit in order to ogle at the (very) up-market galleries, artworks and residences in the ancient hilltop settlement, tucked inside its ramparts, from where you can peer down onto its millionaire neighbours' villas and swimming-pools.

Enough. Time to return to the cool, green valleys of Corrèze by way of the fabulous Millau bridge, designed by Sir Norman Foster. Another 'Kissing Cousin' perhaps? Well, he is English - from a working-class north-of-England family who has risen to 'Baron Foster of Thames Bank'. Sadly, I can find no information on his propensity to kiss, unlike the Italians...

Mapmaker

Tuscan Travels

This morning, 26th Ocober, we had the first frost. At least, the car had ice on the windscreen, just after sunrise when I went out to buy fresh bread. It's just thirteen days since we left Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, in warm sunshine, to drive down to Siena in Tuscany to finish our short holiday.

We were now five friends in two cars, Roz and Bob having left by train for Venice, Florence and Rome before flying back to California after another week. We set off heading south across the interminable Lombardy plain, on what must be the most boring and ugly drives in europe, flat as a board and as picturesque as an enormous industrial estate in decline. Siena was 450 kilometres distant and not until Bologna (300 kilometres) can you find anything worth looking at from the motorway.

We knew that Bologna to Siena via Florence meant crossing the Apennine mountains and sure enough, green hills hove into view a few kilometres north of Bologna. We swept into them, climbing steadily, by-passing the city with welcome views of farms and woodlands. I was a bit surprised to find the maximum altitude attained was only 750 metres (according to Fifi, our GPS locator) and the motorway was in pretty poor condition at this point, two lanes only and an uneven surface (not unusual for Italy, even on newly-laid carriageways). 

The route by-passed Florence as we left the 'mountains' passing through more ugly industrial activity and yet more road construction work with the city itself just a smudge in the haze to the east of us. We were now well and truly in Tuscany.

Thomas Patch, an English painter living in Florence painted this 'Distant View of Florence' in 1763. The words 'spinning' and 'grave' come to mind.

Later in the afternoon we were threading our way through the northern suburbs of Siena towards the walled city centre with some trepidation. Complex meeting arrangements had been made; we were not going to be able to park or even unload our luggage near our apartment as it was inside the mediaeval city walls, legal access by vehicle being only available to residents. The plan was, to telephone Jacopo, an old friend and former work-colleague of Marina through whom the accommodation had been arranged. His son-in-law, Pino (who, we imagined, was the owner of the apartment), would drive to meet us, transfer our luggage to his car and then somehow show us where to park and lead us to the apartment at the same time.

All this came to pass- eventually. The apartment was on a steep bluff, just inside the city walls on the north-east side of the city, at the corner of the Piazza San Francesco

I found this photo which actually shows the apartment and part of the mediaeval wall - our green balcony on the yellow building where we took our evening drinks just visible above the trees in front of the looming mass of the Basilica of San Francesco. 

There is an alley between the two buildings which leads to a series of escalators descending to the street and the public car park where we had to leave our vehicles - at 30 euros a day each.

There is no doubt that Siena is one of the world's surviving wonders. The 'Campo' in the centre is a marvel and must not be missed. Of course, we expected and were not wrong in assuming that to sit there at one of the numerous bars and cafés to admire the view while sipping a refreshing drink would not be the cheapest way to quench our thirsts. Beers were three times normal price and nearly nine euros for a gin-and-tonic was mildly eye-watering (not due to the alcoholic strength, I might add).

If one's 'thing' is to visit, study, imbibe the magnificent monuments crammed into a marvel surviving from the middle ages such as Siena, then one could spend a week or more there, discovering new joys by the hour. After two days however, having been let down on various lodging arrangements (Marina had to move twice to nearby B&Bs at the last minute) and worrying somewhat about the security of the vehicles and the haemorrhaging euro in our pockets, we decided to review the situation. Personally, I found the bane of Siena was the noise and local pollution of constant roaring, rattling mopeds weaving in and out of the pedestrians in the narrow streets. The noise was amplified as in canyons so eating out on the pavement, although pleasant in the warm weather, was a spoilt experience.

In addition, Michel was obviously contracting a cold, or worse so we made a trip out to the hilltop village of San Gimignano as everyone should, who visits this region, then headed back to France on the third day.  Michel needed to see a GP and we had decided to settle for a visit to Biot, near Antibes on the Côte d'Azur as a possible rest stop for last part of our trip.