Foreign Perspectives

If it had gone ahead in either of the forms proposed there would have been much that would have been different in the last 50 years. The European Union would never have gotten off the ground for a start or at least it would have but in a very different form with countries joining either the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and France or the British Commonwealth depending on which option they had ran with back then. Would the Commonwealth have once again become the British Empire?

Presumably either way the British Commonwealth would have remained a source of goods rather than being pushed to the one side as sourcing for bananas and the like moved towards European countries.

Would it have made a difference to how the settlement of France by the brits has actually happened in recent times? It certainly could have started to happen much earlier as it was only possible to move easily to France after various European laws came into force but with a UK including France that movement could have started nearly 30 years earlier.

I think that the timing of things is perhaps the major difference that there would have been. The channel tunnel would have been built a lot sooner as a means of tying the new kingdom together and we might even have had the BritishFrench Airways Concorde still flying as the symbol of a much larger nation.

‘Tis a shame that it didn’t get off the ground.

Whatever way they get there, sooner or later you start to see adverts on the sites. Do they make money though?

Our own relatively low-key efforts have made us around $10 and I suspect that’s a reasonably typical income for most blogs. After all, few will get the high level of traffic that’s required to pull in the advertising income but then that’s the case for a lot of ordinary websites.

On the other hand, if the blog attracts a particular audience things can change. For instance, you’ll see a fairly small advert on the relatively high profile site Petite Anglaise for clothing which I suspect works quite well as it fits in very well with the overall theme of the blog. Others make the blog one of the main planks of their Internet promotion such as Europe A La Carte. We sometimes seem to have the market cornered on French toilets and French septic tanks, neither of which are in our main line of business but both have attracted people to the blog and have moved us significantly up the blog rankings as a result.

As personal blogs meld into business ones, there’s money to be made through mentioning your business in the blog. I don’t think you can realistically do this by “in your face” advertising and so we’ve adopted a very low-key approach through telling people what it’s like here at various times of year and via our series on buying a house in France. However, whilst both may attract people to the region, they might not stay with us.

What about the “in your face” approach though? Would that work? Actually, I suspect that it would work in that google shoots blog postings right into the top 10 within a day or two. Snag is that they don’t stay there for long. For instance, we were briefly the world expert on French septic tanks when we posted on that topic and by mentioning French septic tanks several times in this piece should be the top site once again, if only for a few days. It’s even possible to stay in the top 10 if you choose your key words properly. For instance, the top entry for google on “French military victories” has remained there for several years and indeed we still get a regular trickle of hits on our septic tank page.

Where this “in your face” approach falls down is that it’s a one-shot deal and doesn’t use the power of blogs which is to attract a regular readership.

What is it about the French and their toilet habits? Whilst the rest of the world has moved on from pissoirs (in regular use in Paris well into the latter decades of the 20th century), France seems to have maintained their habit of peeing up against a wall.

A very common site in the countryside here is a car stopped alongside the road with a man standing peeing beside it. You might think that a coach would pull into a hotel and use the facilities as they do in other countries. France habits are different. Here, they pull into a hotel car park then the men head toward the hotel wall and the ladies squat beside the nearest hedge or parked car, totally ignoring overlooking windows or security cameras.

Of course, that’s just urine, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t. I’ll leave how they deal with “number 2s” along the road to your imagination but it’s certainly not in any kind of sanitary way. After all, why did you think the French invented perfume?

In the rest of the world boats have a holding tank for toilet and other waste water. French canal boats simply empty it straight out the bottom of the boat and the only reason why canal boats aren’t followed by a trail of toilet paper is that it sinks to the bottom. Bet that’s put you off paddling your feet in French canals!

Septic tanks tend to frighten the life out of brits moving to France. Quite rightly too. In the UK they are widely used in the country but there they are built well away from the house although you could quite safely drink the water coming out the other end. In France? Well, we’ve just been to a lovely park with a nice little sportsground and childrens’ playground. A rather smelly sewage plant is right inside the park! We even know of someone who built their septic tank right outside their kitchen window. I think that it’s safe to say that neither would be permitted under UK planning regulations but then who needs regulations to tell them that having a septic tank under your kitchen window isn’t a good idea?

Why can’t they clean up their act and get on like the rest of the world?

For a start, they’re almost all entirely in French. You’re probably thinking, why wouldn’t they be, after all French is the language of France, isn’t it? Well, yes, but the French don’t use the Internet that much so most people looking at the site won’t be French. Last year, the local Chambre of Commerce paid serious cash for a brand new website to attract tourists to the area yet it’s entirely in French when the majority of tourists coming here aren’t French and neither speak nor read French particularly well.

In fact in some cases French sites clearly don’t work and have obviously never been tested. For instance, it’s actually impossible to register for a job interview on the ASSEDIC site if you’ve not had a job before. One reason that we’re registered on very few French listings sites is that few of them actually work; when we looked up one of the local hotels a few years back we found that only one out of about 4 or 5 of the websites that they were listed on worked.

The other thing that’s quite typically French is to have a beautiful website which is totally invisible to google et al because it’s all graphics. For instance, the brand new website for the Sense winebar in Perpignan looks lovely but try turning the graphics off and all you get is the empty screen which is seen by the google bots.

Where there are more sensible developments are with the utilities and banks which generally provide at least a minimalist website in English and you can even phone EDF and France Telecom in English.