Our place in France Chapter 8

For several weeks now, on our frequent visits to the local supermarket, we have noticed a sign pointing down the same road, to a ‘Pre-Roman Church’. As we are always keen to see old things and visit old buildings, we thought that we should really go and see what it meant. There was no  indication of how far away it was, so we just carried on driving on what appeared to be ‘main’ road, until Neels eventually said, ‘No, no. This is going nowhere. I’ll find a place to turn around’. And, would you believe it, at the next turn-off was another sign that said ‘Pre-Roman Church’. And there it was. What a strange looking building! Built of stone and about ten metres high, it was twenty to thirty metres long but the only windows we could find in the walls were two tiny slit windows near what I would presume would be the altar end of the building. Unfortunately the doors were locked but I doubt if there would have been anything to see inside. A noticeboard outside said, if I understood it correctly, that it was built in the 8^th and 9^th century and stood on the site of an earlier church dating from the 5^th and 6^th century. Amazing! There it stands on a little piece of land where someone has cut the grass neatly while right next door is a large house, also three storeys high which is obviously deserted. Some of the windows are boarded up and others are broken and it looks very sad. What I found quite poignant though was that on the door facing the church was fastened a St James shell, the sign of the Compostela pilgrims. Seeing one on a door, anywhere, generally means that there is accommodation for pilgrims available, but it would be a very brave person who spent a night in this tumbledown place.

I mentioned last week how difficult this language is to learn. Pronunciation has to be spot on or you will find yourself saying something quite different to that which you intended. A good example happened this week. Our friend Christian had popped in for a coffee and seeing that he is so completely bilingual, I decided to ask him the meaning of a word I seen a number of times on posters along the side of the road. The word is ‘QUINE’ and knowing that one has to pronounce the ‘e’ at the end of a word, I asked him the meaning of the word, pronouncing it ‘Keen-a’. He looked puzzled. “Do you mean ‘enthusiastic’”, he asked. I told him it was a French word and he just looked more puzzled. So out came the paper and pencil and I wrote what I had seen on the posters. Light  dawned. “Ah! You mean quine?” he said, pronouncing it ‘keen-a’. “But that’s what I just said” I complained. He pointed out that I hadn’t pronounced the final ‘e’ strongly enough and without that, it meant nothing to him. And after all that, it turned out to be another name for a kind of Bingo game that is very popular around here.

Seeing that I am writing this chapter a day later than usual, and there is no real excuse for that, I feel that I should include yesterday as we actually did something and went somewhere!

I think I mentioned that we had sold our faithful little Peugeot 106 and replaced it with a slightly bigger model. It was a stroke of luck really, because few people want a right-hand drive car in France, but this buyer was really keen. There were various delays but finally we got word that he was going to take it. Then we discovered that a car may not change ownership if there are less than four months left on the roadworthy certificate. Cars in France have to be tested every two years and brought up to standard failed. So we phoned the new ‘owner’ and told him this and he agreed to pay for the test if we would put it through. We did this and the little car passed with flying colours. So we took it to the Wishy-washy too, so that she was all clean and sparkling. The new owner said that they would be here on Sunday to collect and although we had had other plans for Sunday, we agreed. We had wanted to drive over to Rodez, where we will have to go to renew our residence permits at the end of this month and having not been there before, we thought Sunday would be a good day for a recce. We planned to find the best parking area to use and then to have a lovely lunch and wander around the old part of the city with no danger of being run over by a hasty motorist. However, we would be going back there in a couple of weeks’ time so we cut short our sightseeing trip to be back home again in time to hand over the car. The mobile phone coverage is not all that good when one is out and about, and when we got home, there was a message on my phone from the buyer to say they were very sorry but they would not be taking the car after all. To say that we were fed up was putting it mildly. Without a buyer in sight we would not have gone for the roadworthy test and may even have scrapped the car. Oh well! C’est la vie!