COLUMN
Woody’s worries
S
ometimes I dream of moving to France and setting up an English tearoom just to call it
Liberté, Egalité, Cuppa thé. There seems to be a shortage
of cheesy puns in France and I think it’s one of the few ways I could add value to the economy. You never see a sweet shop called Bonbon Appetit or a bookshop called Joie de Livre or a bakery called Je ne baguette rien. Hmm. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? Whimsical dreaming about running a business in France is a regular ritual for me and my husband, Jon. We’ve often talked about moving to our holiday home in rural Brittany in our 50s and enjoying an early semi-retirement. But what exactly would the ‘semi’ bit entail? We’d need to do something to keep ze little grey cells ticking over and to be able to aff ord the cheese at the Marché de Josselin. I don’t think we’re natural
gîte owners (Home Gîte Home); we wouldn’t have the stamina to run a café (Mange Tout) and we’d be hopeless hairdressers (Je ne sais Coiff e). Jon would love to keep bees
and sell honey (La Vie est Miel) or make stuff out of wood to sell at the market (Raison d’Hêtre). I think I would try
assistant in Charente-Maritime in 1994, there were four bars in my sleepy town and I only ever saw one of them open – and that was only on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 4pm to 10pm. When my sister, Jen, lived in
Ruth Wood is not very open- minded about the thought of running a business in France
my luck getting a part-time job in a shop or café. One thing I fi nd both endearing and exasperating about shops and cafés in rural France is that they seem to be part-time by their very nature. If you walk past a gift shop (Cadeau là là!) that happens to be open, why it feels like a gift in itself! If you see a bar (Bar oui!) with customers inside, you feel as if fortune is smiling down on you. I notice that it’s not just
our corner of the French countryside that has an aversion to the ‘ouvert’ sign. When I worked as a teaching
a glamorous Alpes-Maritimes village in the early 2000s, her local convenience store was inconveniently closed every day from 12pm to 4pm. And when my husband and I
honeymooned in the Cévennes mountains in the autumn of 2006, the tourist information centre was pretty much the only place open. Driving home through the Champagne region, we saw an intriguing sign for the Musée du Mariage and decided to take a detour, then panicked that if it were closed it would be a bad omen for our own matrimony. It was closed, but luckily someone heard us grumbling from an upstairs window and kindly let us in. It’s not just on these dark
autumnal days that our corner of rural Morbihan shuts up shop either. It can happen at any moment. When Jen
“It’s not just our corner of the French countryside that has an aversion to the ‘ouvert’ sign”
and her friends stayed at our cottage for a few days in the last week of August, the half-hearted opening hours of shops, pizzerias, crêperies, boulangeries and activity centres soon became a running joke. “Is the canoe hire place open?” they asked the tourist information lady in one pretty village. She blew through puff ed up cheeks and shrugged. “Logiquement, oui.” But the canoe hire centre was
not open – at least not until the lady from tourist information rang the owner to tell him that he had seven eager customers.
KEEP AN OPEN MIND After their paddle, Jen and her friends struggled to fi nd a place where they could sit down and have a drink. Finally, to their relief, they stumbled upon a bar called L’Open. I fi nd this closed-mindedness admirable in a funny way. Back in August, the skies were blue, the temperatures were nudging 30°C and Brittany was brimming with tourists escaping the ferocious
heatwave in the south. But business owners weren’t going to stick around just because it made sound commercial sense – they were off enjoying their own holidays. Good for them, or as we say in our family: Liberté, Egalité, Fermé!■
From leſt : L’Open by name, open by nature; Ruth fi nds some appropriate graffi ti in Paris; this shop is mostly… closed 106 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: November/December 2023
© RUTH WOOD
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
