Foreign Perspectives

For the most part they don’t, of course. A few weeks ago we had Halloween here. For a start, it’s a public holiday in France (November 1st is All Saints Day) and they haven’t gotten the hang of Trick or Treat and instead wander round the streets demanding bon-bons (sweets) from the locals.

Obviously they don’t mark November 5th as being anything special but the next special day was Remembrance Day which “obviously” is an international thing, isn’t it?

Well, sort-of. Yet again it is a public holiday here but they don’t seem to have the minutes silence at 11am. Neither do they have poppies which I’d always assumed were the standard symbol around Europe, if not the world although Wendy tells me that it’s a sprig of rosemary in Australia. I’ve not seen the equivalent of either in France though they do take the day quite seriously with small ceremonies in every village in France as you can see.

The effect of this is that there are many more people coming here with kids and, for the most part, they haven’t considered what to do about the languages that their children will speak and particularly about how their English should or could be developed.

That wedding was interesting as we saw a fair cross-section of children too with most of those having lived here from about 3 to 7 years with ages from 2 to about 20. The effect of living here was very noticeable in how they spoke English. For example, a 17 year old who has been here for about 5 years spoke English well but with perhaps 10-20% of his words spoken with a French accent. A 13 year old who had been here around the same time didn’t speak English nearly so well and it was easier to speak to her in French. The worst was a 10 year old who could barely speak English.

Some would say that wasn’t a bad thing. After all, the children are living in France so they should be speaking French, shouldn’t they? Of course, they should be speaking French but the point is that they should be developing their English too. To give your child the chance to be bilingual is a wonderful thing but the vast majority of people living here seem to be throwing that opportunity away by accident or design.

How did all this come about? Well, the standard advice for people moving here is to get their French up to speed as soon as possible. The way to do that is to immerse yourself in the language so you should have French TV, read French papers, speak French as much as possible and continue with your French lessons. If you do that, you should be fairly fluent quite quickly and if you keep it up you’ll continue to improve your French over time.

The snag is that it’s a total disaster for your kids.

Children pick up quite a bit of vocabulary from watching TV programmes. If you only have French TV, then they’ll not pick up the majority of “kiddies English” that they need to speak to other English speaking kids. Likewise for childrens’ magazines of course. What about the likes of story books? Stick to reading the French ones and they’ll never learn the nursery rhymes etc. and naturallly their English vocabulary will have even more gaps. That’s even before you consider that, unless you send them to a bilingual school, they’ll only learn the French words for the various school subjects and, of course, won’t learn about British history. Actually, learning history from a French aspect might mess them up even more eg they’ll be taught that Nelson was the enemy.

The effect is much more pronounced with younger children and the parents of one ten year old that we know are finding it more and more difficult to communicate with her. They’ve only been here five years yet are now at the point where her English isn’t really good enough to speak to them and their French isn’t good enough to speak to her. That’s how bad it can get.

So what should you do? If you want your children to be completely bilingual it’s not an easy task but there are a number of relatively easy things that you can do which will help. Only use English at home, have UK TV and read to them from English books (you can order these from amazon.co.uk). Going a bit further, you can get subscriptions to English magazines for them. To go further, you need to send them to a bilingual school (I doubt that it would be viable to teach them the various subjects in English yourself).

Patrick and Collette were both city lawyers so they’re clearly not stupid. Yet, so far, we’ve seen all of two actual attempts at marketing their property, neither of which seems more than vaguely appropriate.

Baby Goes 2 (Baby Goes 2 from the first series had a truly dreadful website back then (much improved since) which simply wasn’t up to the job ie not exactly the kind of place that you’d ordinarily have bothered to attempt to list a holiday property with. Sawdays from the second series is much more established but in the guidebook market which has been declining rapidly in recent years as the internet bookings increase; a last attempt to retain a grip on the listings market perhaps? Both of them seemed to me to be much more interested in promoting themselves than in promoting Chateau Ribagnac.

Not that it really matters in the case of Chateau Ribagnac. With the effort that Patrick and Collette put into keeping their castle in the public view through TV and magazine articles, it scarcely matters whether or not they do any marketing of the type that the rest of us need to do for our places.

But there are other non-TV backed chateaux and castles out there. Consider Le Castel in Normandy, Chateau de Gurat and Chateau les Peaux. All three have prices under half of those of Chateau Ribagnac. How come? Are they naff castles or something? No, just that they don’t have the benefit of the enormous publicity that Patrick and Collette generate.

Publicity and marketing are what it’s all about of course. The more you have, the higher the prices you can get because the majority of people don’t shop around that much. Chateau Ribagnac has the added advantage that it’s been on TV which a number of people out there are quite prepared to pay extra for: just think for EUR 200 or so you get to talk to Patrick all night and have a nice meal thrown in too. OK, not everyone can pick up the “TV premium” but you can probably add at least a few euro to your prices with that little bit more marketing.

So if you want a few more euro next year, now is the time to get started on ramping up your marketing for the new year. Why not make a start with Our Inns?

For a start, the actual holiday is November 1st (All Saints Day) when just about everything in France closes, much to the surprise of foreigners who are more used to Halloween being just for the kids and being the day before.

Secondly, it’s not really a French traditional holiday and they haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. Imported from America (no doubt to the disgust of a number of the French), there are numerous outfits for the kids and, of course, the usual Halloween goodies seen elsewhere. On the other hand, they may well have the outfits and troup round the houses but haven’t worked out a proper translation of “trick or treat” and therefore just go round the streets calling out for “bon bons” (sweets). The householders, for the most part haven’t got the hang of it either so the vast majority of houses remain closed and it’s noticeable that the groups of kids are very selective in the houses that they call on.

Anyway, if you’re on holiday here around Halloween, don’t forget to buy your petrol etc. on the 31st of October and wonder at the spread of an American holiday to France.

Things were working out quite well with them but the girl that had been specifically recommended to us left the accountancy firm late last year. As she spoke quite fluent English and knew how accountancy worked in the UK, the firm had used her to attract a lot of English speaking clients.

Unfortunately, when she left they found themselves with a whole lot of English speaking clients of which the majority don’t have good enough French to be able to use a normal French accountant. They in turn don’t speak good enough English to be able to deal with them properly either. Net effect? Well it seems that they decided not to bother doing anything with the clients that she had brought to the firm.

We only found this out last week after we received what is now a growing pile of penalty notices from various organisations due to our books not being done and called them to see why these were arriving.

Anyway, after being told that “this firm is in a bad way”, we’re now looking for yet another accountant.

As with leaving the last accountants, it should be “interesting” to leave this lot. We already have penalty charges which exceed the bill that they sent us recently so I’ll be forwarding a bill to them.