Bonjour mes amis!
I have decided that quite a lot of French life is quite bizarre – just as an example, I’ve just been to the local Pharmacy (….and why does every tiny town have at least 4 pharmacies! Do the French get ill a lot, are they just a bunch of hypochondriacs, or maybe they are just more concerned about beauty products than the British!), anyway, in France you can buy almost anything over the counter, regardless of whether it is prescription only in the UK. So I asked for two boxes of these prescription tablets (and they are less than 3 euro a box here, compared to whatever the prescription charge is per box in the UK) and the chemist was quite happy to sell them to me, but strangely he would only let me take one box at a time from the shop! I paid for two boxes, but he would only give me one and told me to come back at 6.30pm for the other! Why!

Another oddity which I observed last week – while queueing up in the local train station for tickets, the Frenchman in front of us didn’t seem in much of a hurry, and when he approached the counter, he held up a brand new paperback book to the ticket lady, then after a very brief word with her, he proceeded to open the first page, wrote a message and signed the book, then handed it over to her, then left! What does this mean? Can anyone get on a train if they bring a new book for the ticket clerk? Or is she someone special in the literary field like a book reviewer who gets paid to read books and has this second job as well as being a ticket clerk to supplement her income? Or were they both spies who were secretly passing messages to each other?

And finally, another strange observation, this time about French tv (which is basically rubbish). When they have a preview or trailer of a future programme, sometimes the trailer is clearly over-dubbed in French, and to start with, we thought we wouldn’t bother to watch it later in that case, because by the time I’ve had to look up so many words in my little pocket French dictionary, I get behind in the plot and lose the will to live. But we subsequently found by accident that when the actual programme is shown, it is in English, with no French sub-titles! What’s the point of that? Is it to try and lure the French into thinking they can watch something later? Or is it to stop the English from watching it as they think it will be in French? This only seems to be the case for USA tv serials like “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy” but I’ve also noticed it for some films made in English, but the trailer is in French! And another bizarre thing – I tried to record an English speaking programme the other day, “House” I think it was, then when we played it back later it came out all in French with no English sub-titles possible!

Thank goodness I’ve got less than a week to go, then I go back to normality for a while when we return to the UK at the end of the month. I can’t wait to have an overdose of trash TV, and a pile of English papers and magazines! When we return to Beaucaire around Easter, we plan to move Fandancer to a boatyard nearer the coast, have the masts put back in, then we’ll be sailing in the Med!