Foreign Perspectives

This is the time of year when the vines that aren’t free-standing are reattached to their supports. As usual, this task proceeds at the typical speed of such things in France ie slowly and only on good days. Fortunately, there are many such days at this time of year and I’m writing this piece on one of those where it’s very much t-shirt weather for me.

The landscape retains the stark look that you see until after Easter when the grapes start to grow once again as you can see from the Year in the Vineyards feature. Whilst in January things can be very quiet with even Queribus closed for the month, by February preparations are underway for the full-scale reopening in March so it’s not so quiet as you might expect. For example, just 90 minutes or so from us the ski resorts are in full swing.

Well, almost. You didn’t expect it to be so simple as that, did you?

There are various regional languages in France from Breton in Brittany to Catalan in Catalonia. For the most part, these languages are barely paid lip service by the French authorities. For example, the capital of the Pyrenees-Orientale departments bills itself as “Perpignan le Catalán” yet in reality the Catalan language is only represented by the bilingual signs outside villages in Catalonia and the odd article in the magazines distributed by the Conseil Regionale. This lack of support for the language is effectively killing the language in France so, for example, our neighbour’s father speaks Catalán as a native tongue, he speaks it as a second language and his children don’t speak it at all.

Things are very different just over the border where more and more of the signs have dropped bilingualism and are only in Catalán. Even the brochures in the shops are almost exclusively Catalán only. In fact, Catalán is pushed so much that in a recent shopping trip to Girona one or two of the shop assistants all but refused to serve us when we asked for some things in Spanish.

I think it’s sad that the children can’t speak to their grandparents in their native language in France but Spain has definitely taken it too far and I feel sure that it will end up as being very devisive.

This series is available in reference form on our Living in France pages.

A few years on and the local supermarkets offer a fairly reasonable choice as you can see. Prices aren’t what they might be though with baked beans costing 49p in the UK being sold at the equivalent of around 87p for instance. However, that’s for specialist food so to speak as the existence of the British section has also been accompanied by various brit-foods appearing elsewhere in the supermarket at local prices. For instance, Carrefour even put out their own brand salt & vinegar crisps and Leclerc sell proper bacon these days.

Noticeable too is that it really is a British section and not just an English one. After all, who but the Scots drink Irn-Bru?

What is a little odd is that the Catalán food has started to disappear into the ethnic foods section when in the past it was spread around the supermarkets.