So here we all are, hanging on a knife-edge. On the 23rd
of this month, we shall be tuning into the national news via satellite – a
thing which of course we don't very often do – to see whether the ayes or the nays have it. That's yes or no to leaving Europe and, at the
moment, it looks suspiciously like it's the ayes who will prevail.
There are valid points on both sides of the argument, but
since the Brexit camp seems to be stocked full of entrenched conservative
politicians, contrarian economists and the kind of football yobs who were provoking all and sundry in Marseille with their brainless chants, I'm
inclined to vote for a far-from-perfect centralised bureaucracy crying out for
concerted reform.
The European Union has at least promulgated important
change in areas like the environment and animal welfare – areas about which the
other camp rarely give a monkey's, since the only thing that seems to stir them
is the spectre of immigration. The idea of Britain going it alone in a modern
world overseen potentially by Putin on one side and Trump on the other is
frankly horrifying. Let's just go back to Palmerston's day of gunboat diplomacy
and see whether we can make Britain great again by gobbling up new colonies.
Without a vote, we three can but wait and see – and hope
that rational thought will prevail at the 11th hour. It'll be a
close-run thing and I'm not banking on it. I had high hopes of being able to
deliver our paper-weighty French citizenship dossiers before the 23rd.
I imagined that we'd maybe have to book up our appointments with Grand Frère in Toulouse about a week
before, but Tilley the Kid delivered a bombshell the other day. No block of
three available till the back end of August.
Clearly, there are many
more people than I would have credited applying for French citizenship. In
getting in early, my hope was that it would earn a few plus points from the
adjudicators. It would show them that it wasn't a simple knee-jerk reaction to
losing our EU membership rights. Ah
oui, these Sampson family have clearly thought about all these carefully. Admeet
them? D'accord, très bien. The rubber stamp descends with a brusque
thump.
So this, too, is out of
our hands. Nothing more to be done apart from checking and double-checking that
every single certificate and attestation is included, so that there's no excuse
for rejecting our applications on a technicality. At least it means that I can
get on with other things. I've embarked at last on a long-nurtured musical
non-fiction project and have set myself a target of 60 days in which to finish
it.
With all this rain, I
won't be side-tracked by strimmer and mower, but can sit back and watch the
grass grow while I endeavour to spurn the temptation of the European football
championships held, this time around, in my adopted country. With England
already throwing away two precious points against dem Russkies, I'm banking on a giant-killing
act from Norn Iron. Alas, this time there are no Danny Blanchflowers, Jimmy
McIlroys or George Bests. Not even a Norman Whiteside or a Gerry Armstrong. Failing
them, I'll root for the Welsh. And then the French.
We're rapidly approaching
the half-way mark in June and have yet to see any semblance of a summer. Even the
weekly barquette of
local strawberries I buy from Martel market have shown little sign of
sweetness. Not enough sun, you see, I can pronounce with the certitude of a
countryman. Normally I'm in shorts and bare feet from about the beginning of
May, but periodically I've been reaching for my fleece-lined slippers to keep
my tootsies warm.
Whether this estival
absence will worsen or improve my mood come the longest day remains to be seen.
It's a time when I customarily go into mourning for all the beauty of spring
that has just passed, but maybe the hope of warmer weather to come will give me
the strength to ride out the depression and come out fighting for July. Anyway,
spare a thought for the poor Sri Lankan cricketers forced to take on the
hardened English in sub-wintry conditions. They must be dying for home.
It will hurt The Season of course. People like James
Heath and Louise Baker, whom I met for an article on vegetarianism in France (surely a non-starter, you might protest) rely
heavily on the few months of the tourist trade to keep going for another year.
It's even harder for them, since they took the courageous (and some might say
insane) step of opening a vegetarian restaurant here in rural France – thereby at
least halving at a stroke their throughput of potential customers.
With The Daughter armed to
the teeth with her mother's grown-up camera, we met up for lunch in the
enchanting garden of their concern, Le Jardin de Cabrarets. It serves as
restaurant, afternoon tea room and bed & breakfast, so they've got their
work cut out. Cabrarets is an extraordinary little village that nestles under
the scarred limestone cliff that circumscribes the rive droit of the Célé, not far from its
confluence with the Lot. It depends largely on the renowned and remarkable Grottes
de Pech Merle for its tourist trade.
Talking to them about the
motivation behind their resuscitation of a restaurant that had lain fallow for
a couple of decades, it was clear that they weren't crazy, just young and
fearless. Pioneers. Five years ago, perhaps, when they first opened for business
in 2011, I might have pronounced them clinically insane, but it seems now that
there is some evidence to back my gut feeling about a recent gastronomic shift. Encouragingly, for example, most of their customers are actually French.
My research took me to the
AVF (the Association Végétarienne Française) and I felt so buoyed by my
discussion with their president that I became there and then a fully paid-up
member of their community. There is such a strong vegan and vegetarian movement
among the young, for example, that a district of Paris around the Gare du Nord
has earned the appellation 'Veggietown'. It seems that 3% of the French are
vegetarians now (compared to about 0.3% when we first moved here) and 10% have
stated that they would like to be.
For once in my cussed
pessimistic life, I felt positively optimistic about the future. It's not just
Albert Einstein who recognises that a change to a vegetarian diet is the only
way to ensure our survival on a planet teeming with billions of human beans. Currently
70 billion animals are slaughtered every year worldwide to feed us. Yes, 70
billion farting farm animals. Imagine the quantity of methane gas produced.
There won't have been many
ethically or environmentally motivated vegetarians among the legions of
football fans who came to France to do battle in the streets of Marseille. Yes
sirree Bob, the spectre of the English football hooligan has raised its ugly
shaven head yet again. But this time they have met their match in the form of a
new breed of super-yob from Planet Russia, where their posturing putain of a president offers his foot soldiers
the very model of modern machismo.
Enough alliteration already! What was that I was saying about optimism? Look upon the news pictures ye mighty and despair. Look upon the weather for that matter. Ridley Scott's depiction of the future in Blade Runner (be it director's cut or not) is looking increasingly prescient.
