How Blue Is My Valley by Jean Gill

Author:Jean Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: provence, migrant, moving abroad, France, travel, non-fiction, true story, memoir, wales, writer, literary, senior travel
Publisher: Jean Gill
Published: 2016-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

10.

The Badlands and Olive Oil Chocolate

There is more to life than a kitchen – or even a house – and so we fill in forms. Our application for a carte grise, to register our car in France and get French plates, has been bounced yet again, or, as the nice lady in the mairie said, ‘I told you – they like their paperwork at the préfecture’.

We check the forms together, add some, change some and I explain that we can’t send the old carte grise with our dossier because we don’t have a carte grise in the U.K system. In fact, as I have explained in a polite letter to the préfecture, the whole point of sending the dossier is in order to get a carte grise.

The nice lady understands this perfectly but we both know how little chance there is that this will crack ice at the préfecture. We wish the dossier luck as we send it once more on its way. The only thing which cheers me up is the knowledge that French bureaucracy has dealt a worse hand to le Pen, the should-be-leader of the French National Front.

After a recent near-thing in the run-in for President, where the abstainers nearly left the National Front in national power, le Pen’s luck ended this year with him unable to even stand for his own constituency because of – yes – for not filling in the right forms.

After it was too late for him to do anything about it, he was informed that he did not meet the residency requirements and could not stand. I picture the glee with which a civil service clerk sat on this information. I think of my dealings with the préfecture and go a stage further, imagining the planning that went into downfall by paperwork. My conspiracy theories are outdone by le Pen’s rival, who declares that le Pen deliberately messed up his residency forms to gain publicity.

In a country where prosecution for corruption seems to be a fundamental requirement for following high office, I am definitely an innocent abroad. Where are the minor sexual scandals, the marital infidelities, the nepotism that fascinate the British press and destroy their politicians? Hardly worth mentioning, here, not when you have key politicians implicated in fraud on the scale of millions.

There definitely is more to life and we head off to explore the Badlands. They really are referred to as the Badlands, even in French, and only now do I discover what the word actually means. To our children, the Badlands are the wastelands where the baddies hang out in post-nuclear sci-fi films; to me, they’re the rocky American deserts where the baddies hang out in cowboy films.

Both generations have missed part of the point. Badlands, so my dictionary informs me, are ‘wastes of much eroded soft strata in southern Dakota and therefore any similarly eroded region’. Our badlands are iced over, cliffs of shimmering white rock, sheer above green valleys, the domain of trolls and cave bears.

I

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