Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
health, as more often than not she would come home from work emotionally shattered, and
would then have to look after Samuel and Maurice because I was away. It was a draining ex-
istence for her.
One of the plus points of her three years, though, was that she got to know so many people
in the area. We walk around the market even now and have to stop every few minutes as an-
other one of her 'clients' wants to say hello to her. This is something else that I've yet to fully
come to terms with: kissing or handshakes? It's a bloody minefield.
I get the sense that the English have this idea that in France total strangers will meet in the
street and lots of hugging and cheek-kissing will ensue. We just don't like that level of pri-
vacy invasion. In truth, though, the whole meeting and greeting thing is far more subtle, far
more complicated than that, and as such the potential for social
faux pas
is enormous. You
don't kiss strangers of either sex; if you are introduced then you shake hands and graduate to
kissing later on if some sort of relationship (however flimsy) develops.
The day after we moved in, Monsieur and Madame Lebrun, the couple who we had bought
the house from, threw a little welcoming soirée for us and invited the Giresses and the
Rousseaus, two large farming families and our immediate neighbours. We arrived and were
greeted at the door by the Lebruns. I shook Monsieur Lebrun's hand and kissed Madame
Lebrun twice, once on either cheek, before she introduced us to the others. I shook the men's
hands warmly, but it was clear, by subtle body movements, that the first farmer's wife was
open to a warmer welcome and I kissed her on the cheeks also. The second farmer's wife,
a short, stocky woman, wanted no truck with such an obviously louche attitude to social
etiquette, and she gripped my hand firmly, started crushing it and began to push me back-
wards. It was like shaking hands with a wrestler and I was convinced that she was going to
throw me over her shoulder and pin me down on the kitchen floor.
It was a confusing message. When we had arrived we had shaken hands, but by the time we
left a couple of hours later we had exchanged cheek-kisses, even me with Monsieur, appar-
ently thereby showing respect for his age and position. We had drunk a fair bit of local hooch
and had a good time, a friendship had been forged and therefore kissing, in this context, was
entirely appropriate.
What is not appropriate, however, is when an enthusiastic effort to do the right thing in the
right situation ends up looking like some kind of sexual advance. We had gone round to in-
troduce ourselves to our closest neighbours, Monsieur and Madame Le Boeuf, a lovely old
couple who had moved down from Paris some years before. They were enchanted by four-
year-old Samuel, saying how nice it would be to hear the sound of children in the area, and
promptly introduced us to their nieces who were staying with them, two very attractive, very
chic, confident young women in their early twenties.
Maybe I was taken up by the bonhomie of the whole thing, the affectionate welcome we had
received was genuinely heart-warming and it may have got to me. Combine that with at least
