Foreign Perspectives

Of a total population of 53 million voters, an estimated minimum of 2 million are resident abroad. Now 4% or so might not sound like a very big proportion but critically, the political makeup of the overseas French is considered different from the political makeup of those remaining in France and, on the whole, they are more to the right than to the left. How come? Well, the typical left wing approach of bribing the electorate by increases in social security payments clearly won’t work with this group as they simply won’t receive them ie there is no pull towards the left for them. On the other side, they will, for the most part, be in countries that are more to the right than France is and can see a less socialist system actually working ie there is a pull to the right. Combine these and you get a drift to the right for this group as compared to the makeup of those remaining in France.

Surely, that doesn’t really matter as there aren’t really that many of them, are there? Whilst it’s true that the absolute numbers represent a mere 4% percent of the population compare this to the typical predictions of the share of the vote for each candidate: you’ve around 27%, around 25% and around 20% for the leading candidates. That means that only 2% percent can change the running order and that’s why those overseas voters are so important.

Consequently, we have the peculiar sight of a political rally in London conducted entirely in French.

Is it right that these people should be able to vote at all though? After all, some of these people have been abroad for 20 years or more. I’d question the validity of the vote of someone who has been living outside France for that long. What contact would they really have had with the issues affecting people who live in France? Would they even understand the issues after so long? Yes, some will, but the majority will not.

They both liked the Scalextric car racing set which I was amazed to find still operational after over 30 years. All that it needed was a bit of sanding on the tracks to get rid of a little bit of rust. James was really keen on it so we’ll have to see about getting some new brushes for the cars.

James loved the little moon rovers too which also, quite amazingly, worked perfectly with new batteries. It seems a little odd to have toys with the big D size batteries rather than the much more common AA size that you get these days. On ‘tother hand, I’m not so sure that the present day toys will still be in working order 30 years on.

But, the toy that they both liked best was this little motorbike. No batteries required and the back wheel has broken off but it was always their choice to go to sleep with.

The toy choices of children are strange, aren’t they?

One of the best we’ve been to lately was the strawberry festival at Bellesta which is a village quite close to us but one we’d not been to before. They were lucky enough to hold the festival on a particularly sunny day following some of the last of the Winter rain. Combine that with the Vide Grenier (car boot sale or flea market) and the village was seriously struggling under the weight of traffic and people looking for parking spots on the day.

In fact, there were only two small stalls selling strawberries but the other stalls gave a very good representation of the local produce ranging from excellent honey as you can see, through the spicy sausages that you find everywhere here, and olives. Strangely, the wine makers didn’t have a big presence but then there are numerous wine festivals from now through to harvest time.

The majority of the festivals are only publicised locally so it’s potluck as to whether or not you’ll see the sign for one as you travel along the road. Larger villages are generally a better bet than small ones but really you can get a wonderful experience from even the tiniest village which is, of course, as happens in what we’d call church fetes.

Anyway, as part of the pre-trip plans, I’ve started tidying up and updating the outline guides that I used to run up for the big trips and they’ll be starting to appear on the trips section of this site in due course.

The first one is for New England which I spent about four weeks going round way back in mid-September 1996. That’s quite an unusual area for America in that it has quite a bit of history behind it and is quite compact too. So compact in fact that we ended up spending almost three weeks within 150 miles of Boston.

The unexpected highlight of the trip for me was Concord Massachusetts which is where the War of Independence started or, as we would refer to it, the rebellion. Whilst in the rest of America us brits feel very much at home, this is the place where our history books diverged. So, whilst they would say something like “American patriots killed two of the occupying British forces” we would say, using present day terms, “American terrorists murdered two British soldiers”. It’s a very peculiar place to be if you’re British as you feel very much as though you are intruding and shouldn’t be there.

As I say, it’s very historic and filled with a wide assortment of living history museums. You can experience life in the early 1700s in Plimouth Plantation, the 1800s in Old Sturbridge Village and into the 1900s in the mansions of Newport Rhode Island. It’s so compact that you could quite easily base yourself in Boston and see most of the sights as day trips.