The British Are Coming To Live In France - (Le Bout Du Monde 5) Article By Basil Howitt

“There are too many damned Brits for my liking." Thus wrote my oft-quoted friend Peter in an email to me on his recent return from the UK to our tiny village of Cansal. He has been staggered during the last year to find so many planeloads of Brits on the new direct, year-round cheap flight from Manchester to Perpignan. (Unlike me Peter is a very sociable traveller and manages to tease out life stories from half a dozen fellow passengers during these two hour journeys plus all the tedious waiting around in airport lounges. Whereas I, miserable so-and-so, on my very rare trips to Blighty, always bury my head in a book and grunt if anyone tries to engage me in conversation.)

Eat your heart out, Peter. These Brits are here to stay in ever increasing numbers, even though so far they haven’t discovered our little spot of paradise at Le Bout du Monde - though we did have a very narrow escape recently of which more anon. Fortunately the Brits prefer to invade towns like Laroque-des-Albères, Prades, Vernet-les-Bains, Argèles-sur-Mer … There’s one café in the main market place in Prades that is deafeningly British as everyone bawls across the tables to each other in their affected, drawling accents.

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Since the millennium there has been a mass exodus of disenchanted Brits seeking new lives in France, Spain, Australia (top choice), America and elsewhere. Compared to the steady flow of emigrants through the nineties (about 150,000 a year), 1.1 million Brits left the UK in the last 6 years (198,000 leaving in 2005) while less than 600,000 have returned. (All facts and figures hereabouts courtesy Daily Mail online.)

“Will the last person to leave Britain please swith out the lights."

Why are they all leaving? “People are emigrating because of a sense of hopelessness about the problems here. They see us going round and round in circles but nothing is ever done about the big problems like education, health care, and crime. [Only one crime in 39 currently ends with a conviction.] There is a growing sense that politicians will never deal with the problems. There is a lot of talk, then people pay more tax and get less back for it.” Thus one guru and analyst Robert Whelan of the Civitas think tank.

To make matters worse, British teenagers in the UK are now the worst behaved in Europe. According to Tony Blair's favourite think-tank, the Institute of Public Policy Research, 27 per cent of British teenagers are regularly drunk, the highest in Europe. That compares with just three per cent of French teenagers and five per cent in Italy. British teenagers are also the most aggressive with 44 per cent having been involved in a fight in the last year. In France only 22 per cent of teens have had sex compared with 38 per cent in the UK.

So now you know why Brits are emigrating! Not to mention also because of the general joie de vivre (enthused over in my last article), the climate, and the much cheaper cost of living. One normally only has to heat the house down here for about five and a half months a year, from November through to mid April - a staggering difference from the north east of England where I’m told the heating often has to stay on throughout the year! And the wine, like many other commodities, is a fraction of British prices. A decent litre of local red (bag in box) can cost the equivalent of a bare 1GBP or about $1.9.

Go Away!!

And so to the vexed topic of unwanted visitors from Blighty. It is common knowledge that if you emigrate down here you are pestered, if you are not careful, by a lot of “friends” you hardly ever saw back home.

As soon as they step off the plane and get into their hired cars, or drive all the way down in the summer months, these people decide you must be dying to see them for lack of company in your new village or town. They are convinced you must be so lonely among all these strange French people. So having wheedled your phone number or whereabouts from a mutual acquaintance they ring you up and say they’ll be calling in if that’s OK – or often they will turn up unannounced.

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The cheek of it all! An orchestral flautist I worked with, but never ever socialised with beyond a pint with the band after the show, felt he was entitled to barge in with his wife and only son at lunchtime. He didn’t even ask if they were disturbing us! They were, they were! - especially as they ruined our digestion by droning on and on about their brilliant child prodigy before us who had just composed his second symphony and had sailed into Manchester Grammar School – that reputed bastion of intellectual elitism!

My wife and I are now used to all such disturbances and roll out the porkies with abandon. “So sorry, we are going out in 10 minutes”; or, if they ring and ask if they can call in, we say “Oh dear we won’t be in for the rest of the day. And tomorrow we are going away for a few days.”

One of my former adult pupils had the nerve to ring and ask me to book him a hotel in Villefranche because his French wasn’t good enough. “Sorry, no, I said. I’m too busy – and in any case paying your deposit would be too complicated. Keep trying until you find a hotel where the receptionist speaks English.” Alas without being impossibly rude I couldn’t avoid him making a requested brief visit for a cup of tea with his wife (whom I’d never met). He spent the afternoon banging on about his prostate and she blabbed on about her exhausting teaching job in a primary school, and how much she was missing their dogs kennelled up in Wigan and (she swore) pining for them!

One real skinflint, a remote relative of mine whom I had hardly ever met, rang with very heavy hints on the lines of “It would be nice to see you Basil. Could you recommend a guest house nearby to you with very reasonable prices? And are there buses to get us there?”

“Oh dear, sorry (said I). There is really nowhere we can recommend! And there are no buses within 10 miles of Cansal and even those don’t run on Sundays.” He persevered on several other occasions but got nowhere! He could, after all, have afforded to stay at the nearest Hilton and come all the way in a limousine!

A chap I had not seen for nearly 30 years somehow got hold of my email address. He started to send me lots of unsolicited porno material (does nothing for me) as a prelude to hinting heavily that “it would be nice to come down to your area now that the flights are so cheap.”

“Oh dear – so sorry Brian (I replied) – we no longer have a spare bedroom. We have converted it to a studio for Clare. Do drop in for a glass of rosé, but remember my poor eyesight no longer allows me to drive, so anyone who wants to visit me in our very remote spot has to provide his own transport.” I never heard from Brian again!

Never Again!!

One of my very best friends, a bassoonist I’ll call Paul who loves this area and the Mediterranean climate, recently got married, so we booked the newly weds a hotel near Perpignan and invited them to come up to Le Bout du Monde for lunch. In fact Clare actually drove all the way down to fetch them and then later took them back. They won’t be coming again! Paul’s wife, who is dotty about horses and other animals went for a walk round the village and declared ever so tactfully as she surveyed all the lovely autumnal vineyards and oak woods: “I don’t like this place. In fact I HATE it. It looks like in Genesis before the Lord came and put animals upon the earth. Where are the lambs?”

“There’s nowt so queer as folk” as my Lancastrian grandmother used to say. Or to put it another way, there’s no accounting for taste.

Narrow Escapes

Out of the blue, an Englishman who lives in Vernet whom we had never met decided he and his wife might like to live in Cansal, having discovered a nice house for sale. They found our number by trawling the phone book for English names in the village. As I came in from my walk Clare was being polite on the phone to him. When I quickly twigged what he was about I shook my head vigorously. I mimed and wildly gesticulated that she should put him off by telling him about all the production noises that came from the two wine Domaines opposite the house they were interested in. So they said they would come to Cansal again on the Friday and call in to see us if we were there..

We made a point of not being, albeit at some inconvenience to ourselves. But they didn’t buy the house and Peter was also extremely grateful to us – because the house in question is next door but one to his!

One time we came back from our walk to find a heavily loaded English car parked near our house. Our French neighbour Thomas said that the people who had arrived in it were looking for us. “They went that way” he said, pointing towards the cemetery up the hill. So we skulked off in the opposite direction and fortunately they had gone when we returned!

Our friends Mark and Rosemary down in St Marc are more tolerant than us regarding visitors – or at least they were until recently. They had a couple to stay in midsummer. Instead of enjoying the good weather on their roof terrace these guests stayed inside and did crosswords all and every day. More than that, they drank tea and coffee out of mugs they had brought with them because “we don’t like yours.” So as soon as the wretched couple had gone home, Rosemary smashed their damned mugs in front of the whole family!!!

Rosemary is now taking a much tougher line with such pains in the proverbial.

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The Sultan Of Cansal

Please don’t think I’m a misanthrope. Even I have to admit that there are plusses in all these cheap flights to the land of sun. From being “orphaned” in my late fifties with no siblings nor children (sob sob) I acquired a very large extended family, including a delightful stepdaughter, when I married Clare (wife number three) seven years ago. Thanks to cheap flights they can all visit us in relays. Likewise my first wife Tricia, with whom I have remained on very good terms and who is being absorbed into the extended family, also comes to visit us.

When she came recently I fantasised about being the Sultan of Cansal. She quickly stepped into the breach to get me a drink when Clare said “get your own, you lazy so and so”! All in fun of course.

In fact life is very much fun at the moment. Particularly when one has had the good fortune to take part in events like the one below!

La Calcotada-A Woman in White

She stood out a mile in the packed hall of the huge leisure centre at Vernet-les-Bains as she approached the dancing area with her partner for the sardanes. The aperitifs (bottles of sweet, almost honeyed grenache) were being served and la cobla was striking up. (Sardanes, if you don’t know already, are the uniquely Catalan communal dances performed in a circle to a very strict and intricate foot routine. The music for them is played by a cobla, a none-too-refined but gutsy oom-pah-pah Catalan band which includes a unique, wobbly sounding double-reed instrument called the tenor.)

Slim, dark-haired and probably well into her 50s, the lady who so bewitched me from afar was wearing a snow-white, frilly peasant blouse with a matching, equally virginal floaty skirt, cinched in and trimmed with broderie anglaise. In readiness for dancing she had also donned her vigatanes – special, very feminine Catalan sandals strapped elegantly above her shapely ankles.

What was amazing was that she was just as spotless when the blackened onions were all eaten, and she floated around the floor once again, this time to the tango and paso doble during the thé danse. There wasn’t a speck of ash on her anywhere, whereas the many novices and cack-handed among us were filthy – our hands, faces and beards daubed greasy black, ravaged by burned onion skins as we queued up to wash at the solitary sink with only cold water. Some, especially those among us with large chests, bosoms and tummies, had also made a disgusting mess of our shirts and tops – in spite of the pretty bibs we had been given printed in Catalan and French: “Vernet dels Banys – Vernet les Bains”. Vernet being the picturesque spa town, long favoured by the English since the era of Rudyard Kipling, at the foothills of Canigou. Mount Canigou is the highest in the region (over 9,000 feet) and the symbol of all Catalan aspirations and loyalties.

We had come for La Calçotada, a festival of grilled onions held in late March. Not just any old onions but truly special scallions or spring onions looking as though they have been “grown on steroids and viagra”. The Catalan word for them is calçots, with the t pronounced, and they are grown in the Valls region of Southern Catalonia to the west of Tarragona. (The town of Valls, the capital of the county of Alt Camp, is the true cradle of the calçot and the Calçotada. The Valls region includes three other counties also: Baix Camp, Tarragonès and Baix Penedès.)

Fortunately for those of us on the French side of Catalonia, a fraction of the 20 million calçots produced each year down there find their way over the border to Calçotadas at Cerbère (end February), Vernet les Bains and Toulouges (both in March, though sadly the event in Toulouges has become a private function).

On the face of it the idea is barmy – a hall full of many hundred gourmets (with just a smattering of north Europeans and Scandinavians) assembling to eat this delicacy and get themselves mucky. But if you enjoy exquisitely tender, grilled spring onions grown in a unique way and dipped in an unforgettable fiery sauce (“salvitxada” or “romesco”) this is the experience of a lifetime.

To find the venue in Vernet – the Salle Polyvalente (or multi purpose leisure centre) - we more or less followed our noses on that cool, crisp and windless early spring day. Our olfactory senses were drawn there irresistibly by the siren scents of wood smoke and the delicate fragrance of calçots blackening on large grills over well-stoked fires. So very, very different from those queasy-making fried onions that waft their greasy odours from tatty hot dog stalls.

So what exactly are calçots?

Xat De Benaiges – A Hero

The first farming of Calçots was reportedly the brainwave or accidental discovery of a peasant farmer from Valls by the name of Xat de Benaiges in the 1890s. Nowadays they are big business and cultivation is subject to stipulations as stringent as those for French wine production. The rules are laid down by the government agency Indació Geogràfica Protegida - a registered EU Protected Geographical Indication. A calçot must be between 16 and 25 centimetres long, with a diameter from 1.6 to 2.5 centimetres. Basically, it looks like something between a leek and a spring onion: “a strange looking creature, which when sufficiently cooked easily sheds its skin to reveal a shining white bulb of the most delicate flavour.” (If only it were that easy!)

A drawn out process

Cultivation takes up to 14 months in all. The seeds are sown in late autumn/early winter (under a waning moon of course!) and planted out from January through March. In July and August the onions are lifted, divided and laid out to dry before being replanted (August/Sept) with 7 or 8 sprouting shoots, the bulbs being exposed. They are then periodically earthed up, and harvested from November through to the following spring.

At Last!

After the sardanes, aperitifs and starter of good liver pâté on that day in Vernet, the calçots finally started to arrive to roars of approval all round. (Some of us were, after all, already well oiled by the robust red wine.) They were carried to the long tables by a cheerful army of bénévoles or volunteers. Wrapped in newspaper (just like the British fish and chips of old) they were served in bundles of twelve on individual tiles to keep them warm. The bowls of the accompanying hot and spicy sauce - salvitxada - were already on the table. What a heavenly concoction of onions, tomatoes, red peppers, pimentos, garlic, ground almonds, oil, vinegar and salt!

We unwrapped the newspapers and let battle commence. These excellent instructions I found on the Internet (Sal de Traglia’s Virtual Tapas Bar) sound so simple:

With one hand, grab the calçot’s burnt exterior at the bottom. With the other hand, grab a couple of the green stalks at the top—but only the stalks in the center; not those of the perimeter. Then—like a samurai unsheathing his sword—give it a tug! The calçot’s tender, white core will pull out of its charred, fibrous exterior. Dip the calçot’s core in the sauce, tilt your head back, dangle it above your gaping mouth, drop it in and bite. Then remove your shirt and send it to the dry cleaner — unless, that is, you heeded my earlier advice about wearing a bib.

As I’ve already said, bib or no bib, if you’re like me you get dirty! - my bib not being big enough to reach even the ledge of my stomach.

“Madame est à la toilette!”

The fun of the day was greatly boosted by our very friendly Catalan fellow revellers. One very jovial wag sitting next to Clare hit on a mischievous way of getting second helpings. There was a single empty seat opposite us. So every time someone came with anything he pointed to the empty seat and said “Madame là est à la toilette.” So the spectral Madame was served in absentia and we had extra calçots as well as everything else that followed.

The calçots were eventually consumed and we moved on to la grillade, done on the glowing embers of the same fires that had been used to grill the calçots. In this case the grillade included three of the four classic ingredients: Catalan sausages, belly pork slices, and black puddings (botifarras). Lamb cutlets are also often included but were not necessary in such a feast as this.

During the ensuing thé danse featuring my spotless dream lady in white, we made our way through some decent camembert and then portions of fougasse (a kind of flat sweet bread) and coffee.

When three singers mounted the stage and started to perform after dishing out the tombola prizes we decided it was time to leave. The raucous and rather corny “Cal Tres Calçots”, as they were called, were not our cup of tea.

However, we stayed just long enough to enjoy the fruits of one last ploy by our mischievous neighbour. He decided that the tombola prizes – mainly bottles of pernod, anise, and exotic liqueurs – were being unfairly distributed to the table next to ours! So he ran round there with a glass for what he considered to be his rightful share of their winnings, shouting “Hey! - why are you lot winning all the bottles?!” Returning to our table with a full glass, he shared his trophy by pouring us each a few drops of the precious nectar.

Ever generous, our neighbour saw us on our way with some slices of big juicy oranges that he and his wife had had the foresight to bring with them! What a refreshing, cleansing treat to the palate after all that indulgence!

Merci Monsieur et Madame. A l’année prochaine! We do hope we get to sit next to you in 2007!

Au revoir et à bientôt!