The Bloody Horrible Weather [again] and the even more Bloody Horrible News.

Sorry but it can’t be helped. At the risk of boring everybody to death, yesterday was the day that one of the worst storms ever hit the south-west of France, causing floods, huge winds and tides, electricity failures, collapsing building as well as loss of life and so, even though my last blog posting was about weather, it must be mentioned. We felt this storm here in the Correze - there have been trees blown down onto roads and floods in nearby valleys, but it hasn’t seriously affected us. This is the second big weather disaster to shake France, particularly the southern half of France, in the last month. A couple of weeks ago there was an enormous snowfall in Marseilles which closed the roads and schools for a week and which had the radio stations buzzing with Sacre Bleus and Quelle Horreurs. *

The odd thing is that I wouldn’t have known about the disaster in South-West France if friends and family from home hadn’t thoughtfully contacted us through email and text to ask if we were ok, hoped we were surviving the deluge, not squashed under a tree, et cetera.

One of the biggest changes about being here is the lack of news. We don’t get English-language papers, unless someone brings them when they visit. It is possible to get international versions of UK papers in one or two shops in towns twenty odd kilometres away, but it’s almost always the Daily Mail on the rack. I’d like to think that it’s because all the others have gone by the time I get there but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Perhaps large numbers of people who become ex-pats are more likely to read the Daily Mail, since the Mail seems to believe that Britain’s a lost cause which seems a bit self-defeating. However, I’m not that desperate, so I usually go without.

We hardly ever watch television news here, either. Although we do have Sky, we decided from the beginning that we wanted to be in France, in mind as well as body, so we don’t watch the UK news as we used to do practically every day back home, although we did weaken and watch President Obama’s inauguration. A couple of weeks ago we finally had French telly installed as a way to help us learn the language, and we have watched French news one or twice but as I still don’t understand most of it, I tend to get distracted by thinking about how much better looking and better dressed French politicians are than ours are. I’ve never got into reading news on the internet much so, all in all, this tends to be pretty much a news-free zone. Hence the shock when by chance last week, I picked up a couple of UK broadsheet papers from a shop I hadn’t been in recently, and brought them home for what I thought would be a good old news fest.

I did know about the recession, course I did. Two members of my family have recently lost jobs and others are nervous. Our income is dropping fast and we daren’t look at what our savings are doing. I knew things were bad, are bad, and are likely to be worse in the future. This isn’t Mars. On the other hand, because I hadn’t experienced the shed-load of hysteria, despair and doom that fills up the papers and screens every day, I hadn’t quite given up the will to live that the media seem to be encouraging us to do. Not having this daily diet of horrors - horrors that I can do nothing about - may be boring, but it’s a bloody sight less frightening.
I’ll think again before searching out a real newspaper. Sometimes it’s just better not to know.

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* I’m not well up on modern French damning and blasting, so sorry if this sounds a bit Three Muskateers-ish. So far we’ve only met nice respectable French people – and not even a merde has crossed their lips in our hearing. They don’t seem to have scallies, teenagers, drunks or football hooligans in this village, so I’m a bit limited in the swearing department but I hope to learn.

See: http://www.parislogue.com/travel-tips/essential-french-swear-words.html