The English Book Club

September 4, 2015

     I spent yesterday afternoon having lunch in a private home and talking about books with eight members of a book club, all English.  The lunch was held in a home that had been built from a building that was previously part of a cave cooperative, an association of wine growers that had disappeared.  A compound of buildings behind a main gate were all put to residential purposes after the cooperative failed.  The house included a private garden with a small swimming pool.  It is small, but comfortable.

     The book club members are mainly women, although the husband of one also attended.  They are enthusiastic readers and articulate about their likes and dislikes --and there was nothing stuffy about them.  Anyone who thought the English reserved, has not seen them along their compatriots, the wine flowing, enjoying good food and talk.  I knew the group wanted, in addition to ideas for novels, suggestions for biographies to read.   So I brought "Just Boris", about the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson; and a biography of Turner, the painter, as my biography suggestions, plus "The Man In The Yellow Hat", the second book in Jane Gardam's "Old Filth" trilogy, which I am reading now.  My offerings were welcomed and I was made to feel at home by everybody.

     To preserve the anonymity of the book club members, I will not describe them individually, but anecdotally.  One woman, a widow twenty years, confessed that although she travels widely, she feels lonely, her children grown and living independent lives.   Another brought what she said was "non-alcoholic sangria".  It was, in fact, 9% alcohol.  So they are a diverse and lively group.  All the club members have retired to France and interact mainly with their compatriots, their French being limited.

     Which doesn't mean they do not observe their French hosts closely.  At one point the conversation turned to "SatNavs" --the British word for GPSs, and from there to the difference between driving in Britain and l'Aude.   Everyone agreed driving in France, where there are often few cars on the road, was generally much more pleasurable than driving on the U.K.'s crowded motorways.

     At that point, I mentioned that I agreed with everyone, except that I found French drivers do not keep their distance, even on an entirely empty road.  Instead they come up to your car's bumper, which I find nerve-wracking.  Everyone knew what I was talking about:

     If you're driving on an empty road in the middle of nowhere, a car behind you will still hug your bumper!  They do it all the time --they're afraid of not being close to another car, so they group like sheep.  --They can't stand being alone.

     --And they had methods for dealing with this "tic" of French drivers:

     Flash your fog lights --they don't like that, and will back off when you do that.

     If you're driving a manual transmission, engage the emergency brake --the back lights will flash, and they'll think you're going to stop suddenly!  Then they back away in a shot.

       (After hearing about the fog lights, on the road later, I tried flashing my brights and can report that it works.)

         It seems odd to me that anyone would retire to a country where they have a limited command of the language, but the English have been retiring to France since the end of the Second World War.  The French used to retire to Morocco and Tunisia, former French-speaking colonies, but today, they are more likely to retire to Portugal, where few will learn the language.  Canadians and Americans retire to Puerto Vallarta in Western Mexico; or Merida in the East, without mastering Spanish.

      So perhaps living as an ex-pat in a monolingual enclave is less unusual than I thought.  At one point during the lunch, the talk turned to the hassles of traveling between Britain and France: having to fight the traffic on the motorways to the airport; the surly porters at Stansted (the airport Ryanair serves with flights to Carcassonne), travel delays at the airport--

      Perhaps a "staycation" could be just as nice, one book club member offered.

      Except for the WEATHER! a wiser person rejoined.

      So the English come to France in droves: for the weather, for the wine, and because it is cheaper to live in France than England.  Property prices are much lower, so it's possible to make money on the sale of a house in England and have money left over after buying a place in France.  As a result, the ex-pats live more comfortably than would be possible in the U.K.  And there's a new French tax law that allows foreign residents to choose their domicile for estate tax purposes, another incentive to buy in France.,   (It means children can inherit without paying 35% of the value of a house in French estate taxes.)  While the French are moving to Portugal because food prices are 30% cheaper than in France, British are moving to France for the same reason.

      And there's no need to learn French.