Hasparren, local festival.
TALES
FROM FRANCE
Adjoining to the left of our house in
France when you face it
there is a two storey, stone built addition which at ground level has
some
wooden garage doors. It beats me how anyone could have ever used it as
a garage though as, due to the slope of the hill, the left hand edge of
the floor giving on to the pavement has an upstand of about nine
inches!
Anyway, to get back to the point, located in the pavement just outside
the garage doors there is a broken concrete manhole cover with the
tarmac around it also in a state of disrepair.
The
first summer that we holidayed in the house in France I noticed on
leaving
the house one
day to walk down to the town that the manhole was overflowing and
excrement was trickling down the pavement and into the gutter. 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
in French, 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.
All
was well until the following summer when exactly the same problem
re-occurred.
Once again I reported it to the Mairie 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 tourists who have to pass
the manhole when walking up the hill to visit the remains of the
Chateau at the top.
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 which is owned by the
Commune and further
down the hill, was a gang of about six French workmen
laying stone steps up the hill to the Chateau. (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 Chateau 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.
