Foreign Perspectives

Even people who’ve been living abroad for decades and plan to live out their days here still consider “home” as being where-ever they came from.

Is that realistic though? After all, someone who’d moved to France even as recently as 10 years ago would find difficulty in discussing a number of topics with the people “back home”. Even aside from the changes in the political landscape over that time, there would be sigificant changes in the road layouts and even new words that they wouldn’t know.

Take Belfast as an example. In just three years there has been massive construction in the city centre and in another year or so the centre will look very different than it did when I left. The road layout hasn’t changed much but there’s a lot of work ongoing with various roads and it won’t be long before it does change a lot. Even the aiport has changed its name and the signs say George Best Airport rather than Belfast City Airport.

So how long before “home” isn’t home? I don’t know that there’s a set time but after as little as four or five years, it would certainly take a period of settling in to move “back home”.

James went on his first school excursion last Friday.

Not a massive one, of course, since he’s in the nursery school. As we’re in a wine growing area it was to a vineyard where they gathered some grapes and went through the whole process of wine production (except the fermentation, naturally). Thoroughly enjoyed by all and each child was sent home with a bottle of the grape juice that was produced on the day.

One difference from the equivalent schools in the UK is that small excursions such as this one seem to be very common in the schools here with an average of around one a month throughout the year. As in most things in France, they usually ask for a “contribution” towards the cost of these but aren’t terribly insistent on actually getting the money.

As we’re in a country area, this excusion even qualified as news and the photo on the left is from the Independant which managed to run up a 1/4 page article on it in todays paper.

Not only are roads getting worked on in a fairly major way but everywhere there are houses and office developments under contstruction. And, for the first time every, you see signs along the lines of “development opportunity” just about everywhere. In fact, they seem to be almost as thick on the ground as they are in London. In some places it seemed as if every property on a corner site with a bit of land had “scope for development” and presumably prices to match.

Of course, the downside of all this work is that it now take ages to get anywhere in the city.

Of course, there are books similar to that in the UK which depict a typical first day in nursery school. The difference is that in France, the drawings in the book look almost identical to the school that James goes to. Not because the drawings are of his school but rather that the schools are very standardised in France. Not so long ago for instance, if it was October 5th and you were in the fifth year then you were on page 5 of the maths book, regardless of where you were in France.

So there’s a very similar little cloakroom in other schools and zero privacy for the kids going to the toilet. Actually, I suspect that the drawing of children going to the toilet would be contrary to one or two laws in the UK.

Anyway, we’ve read the book to James in English. That’s probably not quite what the school intended us to do but to get him fully bilingual we need to balance his French and English; the simplest way to do that at the moment seems to be to use English all the time when he’s at home and keep the French to school time.

Want a laugh? Wendy’s going to propose us as parent representatives for the school board.

No more FP’s for a week as I’m off to Belfast tomorrow and won’t have any computer power ’til Saturday week.

Since then, the butcher has closed, the bank has closed and when we walked round the village in July the sheer number of boarded up shops was quite a shock. That’s what happens when a village is almost completely dependent on a single industry and that industry hits hard times.

Yet, even in these hard times for the wine industry, the English have been busy buying up vineyards in the area. More intrestingly perhaps is that they are much more successful at running the vineyards than the locals. Whereas the locals simply can’t shift their 2‚€ wines, the English are selling their stock at 25‚€ a bottle. How come? Simple really: the locals are trying to sell the cheap plonk that they’ve always sold in the way that they’ve always sold it but peoples’ tastes have changed. They drink less wine these days but it’s higher quality wine that they drink nowadays.

It’s not just the vineyards that the English are buying in the area. I’m told that some 90 English familes have bought property in Paziol for instance. So many in fact, that Paziol is pretty much an English village now.

Other indications that things aren’t good economically in this area is the closure of the Rolex shop in Perpignan. OK, people aren’t going to nip out and buy a Rolex every day but it is an indication that there’s a distinct shortage of money across the Pyrenees Orientale.

The downturn in the wine business has depressed property prices even more in an area that’s still relatively affordable so perhaps now would be a good time to buy in this area.