Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

It’s time for the fields to be sprayed locally with fungicide and, as usual, we’ve all coughing and have sore throats even though we’re quite a bit away from where the spraying is being done at the moment.

Naturally, the concentration of the spray is a good deal higher around those doing the spraying but, of course, they’re wearing masks, aren’t they? Well, since it is France, no, they aren’t wearing any masks or other protective gear. This photo shows that there’s a mild breeze blowing which is great when the guy is driving the direction in this photo. I have a photo of him driving in the other direction but you can’t see the tractor in it as it’s totally enshrouded in the cloud from the spray.

Incidently,  in case you were wonder, yes, the packaging that the spray comes in is marked with untold numbers of warnings about the necessity of wearing protective gear when using it. Not that you really need to be told that working in a cloud of fungicide is not a good idea.

This total disregard for health & safety is typical for the area. Granted, the guy doing the spraying is making his own decision to ignore the warnings as it’s his field but even in the supermarkets you constantly come across wet and slippy floors that are ignored by the staff. In the UK, they have 2 minutes to clear any spillage or they’re legally liable, here it seems like hours are fine (and, yes, we have been in a supermarket a few hours where a spillage we saw on the way in was still there as we went out).

French banking practices are very different from those in the UK in several key areas and it’s those differences that we’ll concentrate on here.

Conseilleurs

In the UK, a bank advisor is there to do things like advise you what to invest your money in and to sell you insurance but in France Conseilleurs don’t do anything as complex as that and are required to do really simple stuff like changing a direct debit or opening a savings account. This wouldn’t be so bad but you always need to make an appointment to see “your” advisor because, for reasons which escape me, the others that may be there on the day you go in can’t do that kind of simple task for you. Of course, this approach means that each advisor is clogged up with work at the trivial end of the scale. If you want to open a savings account in the UK, you fill in a form, hand in ID and cash and the cashier opens it there and then. Here it can take several weeks to open even the simplest account. So, ’tis best to develop a relationship with your advisor here as you’ll be making untold numbers of appointments to see them.In the UK, a bank advisor is there to do things like advise you what to invest your money in and to sell you insurance but in France Conseilleurs don’t do anything as complex as that and are required to do really simple stuff like changing a direct debit or opening a savings account. This wouldn’t be so bad but you always need to make an appointment to see “your” advisor because, for reasons which escape me, the others that may be there on the day you go in can’t do that kind of simple task for you. Of course, this approach means that each advisor is clogged up with work at the trivial end of the scale. If you want to open a savings account in the UK, you fill in a form, hand in ID and cash and the cashier opens it there and then. Here it can take several weeks to open even the simplest account. So, ’tis best to develop a relationship with your advisor here as you’ll be making untold numbers of appointments to see them.

Overdrafts in the UK are “permanent” in that there is no problem in running an account that is constantly in the red. In France, you can only be overdrawn for 10 days per month and for the rest of the month the account must be in credit. That said, you can get a permanent overdraft facility from some of the proper banks. They all seem to implement this by giving you a credit card which is linked to your current account; when you are overdrawn outside the 10 day limit an automatic cash advance from this card takes you back into credit. French banks don’t charge cash advance fees so in practical terms this gives you something that works very like a UK overdraft.

Debit cards come in two basic varieties: immediate debit or deferred debit. Immediate debit operates just like a UK debit card ie purchases are charged to your account right away. With deferred debit, your purchases are charged to your account at the end of the month. In both cases there is a spending limit of around EUR 3000 per month and a withdrawal limit of EUR 300 per week.

Credit cards are quite rare in France at the moment but operate much the same as in the UK with the exceptions that there is no cash advance fee and they charge per transaction for all international purchases. Interest rates are generally higher than in the UK too. The other difference is that the amount you repay per month isn’t a set percentage but goes in bands eg EUR 15 or EUR 30 per month.

Store cards are available but usually require proof of your French income so can’t be obtained until a year or two after you get here. The one exception that we’ve found is Auchan which offers you it’s store card about a year after you sign up for it’s loyalty card and doesn’t require anything beyond a passport.

Almost all of the press coverage that you see is of the view that global warming is a “bad thing” and we should be getting the finger out to stop it happening. But, is it?

This is a painting by Hondius in 1684 of one of the regular Frost Fairs taking place on the Thames. In fact both the Thames and the Baltic Sea froze over quite regularly in the 1600s.

That was prior to the industrial revolution of course and combined with a much lower population, pollution at that time was considerably less than it would have been 150 or so years later. The “Black Country” wasn’t named that for nothing as it was filled with major league polluters during the industrial revolution.

Did the industrial revolution stop us getting into another ice age? Nobody can really say as there are just too many variables in the equation: you’ve everything from the industrial revolution raising pollution levels considerably to sunspot cycles and to top it all the records over the period simply weren’t accurate or complete enough to really give a definitive answer.

What if the alternative to global warming were global cooling? Would that be a “good thing”?

Thanks to Panthère rose for bringing a report highlighting the French as a bunch of whiners this morning.Why is that though? Well, simply put: because it’s an industrial relations tactic that always works in France.

Normally the French beach resorts basically close in mid-September and don’t fully reopen until the following June but the season has been expanding in recent years.

When we went out to Canet Plage yesterday we were pleasantly surprised to find just about everything had been opened up. In fact, the resort was even more lively than it usually is most of the Summer season courtesy of a two day kite surfing run by the Canet Plage kite surfing club.

It remains a different story during the week though as most things can be expected to be closed, with the possible exception of the coming week which is a major holiday in France.

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.