OTHER PAGES ABOUT FRANCE
A BLOCKAGE IN FRANCE
Above: Three views of the river at Agde, Herault, France.
WIFFY FRENCH DRAINS
Outside the
garage of our house in France there is, located in the pavement,
a broken concrete manhole cover to the sewerage system for the
road.
I say 'garage', but it beats me how anyone
could have ever used it as a garage as, due to the slope of the hill,
the left hand edge of the floor giving on to the pavement has a
vertical
upstand of about nine inches - that would certainly sort your tyres out!
The
first summer that we holidayed
in
the house in France I noticed, on leaving one day to walk
down
to the town, that sewerage was overflowing from this manhole. Not
a
pretty sight.
Madame
blamed the previous owners who she reckoned used to dump lumps of
gone-off plaster down the drain and the problem had obviously been
aggravated by the fact that, being summer, the previously unoccupied
French holiday homes further up the hill from us were now all fully
occupied.
I was inclined to ignore the problem, with the assumption that Madame or one of the other French neighbours would probably contact the Mairie; but, after a couple of days of ear bashing from my wife cumulated one morning outside the café when I was trying to enjoy my morning coffee and read the paper, I lurched into action and went to the Mairie's office. Having had no chance to look up any appropriate French words beforehand I had to improvise a bit about the blockage and ended up saying, in French, to the young woman behind the desk at the Mairie's office,"Sorry, I don't know the polite word, but the sh*t is in the road." Luckily, she seemed to find this quite amusing, and assured me that she would tell the Mairie, though not I hoped in those exact words. Later on in the holiday a French sewage lorry turned up and pumped out the manhole.
THE BLUE CROSS
All was well until the
following summer when exactly the same problem re-occurred.
Once
again I reported it to the Mairie's office and this time, as well as
the sewage
lorry turning up to pump it out, we noticed several days later that a
blue cross had been spray painted on the manhole cover. "Ah, we
thought, they're actually going to do something about the problem
rather than just treating the symptoms," and indeed Madame informed us
that the Maire was intending that a new, larger sewer pipe be laid.
The
next few times we visited the house in France the situation was
unchanged apart from the blue cross fading a bit with time and the
following summer the manhole overflowed again. Once again I went to the
Marie and as luck would have it Monsieur le Maire was in the office and
I was able to complain directly to him. Knowing it was election year
for the Mairie I mentioned the fact that this situation was very
unpleasant for the many tourists who have to pass the manhole when
walking
up to the top of the hill.
The next
time we were in France and went to visit the house I really had to
laugh although I don't think my wife was quite as amused. On the
adjoining land to us further down the
hill, which is owned by the Commune, was a gang of about six French
workmen laying stone steps as a shortcut up to the top. (Actually, to
be more precise, two of them were
laying the steps and the other four were leaning on their shovels and
watching).
Now of course, the Mairie might have been planning this
for years, and call me a cynic if you will but, it occured to me that
the Marie had killed several birds with one stone. The tourists
wouldn't be walking past an overflowing manhole anymore so that job
could be posponed indefinately, the Mairie could claim, (in an election
year), that he was encouraging tourism by making a more direct route to
the top of the hill for pedestrians, and, last but not least, it
presumably
cost one heck of a lot less to cut a few steps out of the hill than it
would to dig the whole of the road up and lay a new sewerage system.
Masterly!
Meanwhile,
the manhole cover is still broken after four years, but that's O.K.
because now it's got a blue cross on it.
