Deep in the Dordogne, I can’t find a damned thing to be miserable about
Sometimes in this job you feel you’re right in the thick of it, setting agendas, kicking butt, lobbing firecrackers into the national debate. Other times you might as well be some no-mates blogger in the middle of the night. Here I was at the start of August, listing positive economic signals that justified a mood of mild optimism as we set off for our holidays, and declaring that worries about an extended recession should be left for September. And what happens? Did postal disruptions prevent that issue reaching Threadneedle Street? Why else would the Governor of the Bank of England follow it with such a gruesome assessment of Britain’s recovery prospects, wrongfooting us all by adding another £50 billion to his ‘quantitative easing’ programme just when we thought he was about to scrap it. Then ‘über-bear’ Bob Janjuah, a Royal Bank of Scotland analyst with a devoted City following, advises his clients urgently to take profits on recent equity and commodity price rises, because he expects markets to crash in the autumn back to where they were in March, or worse — and sure enough, the FTSE starts wobbling in sympathy. Finally, environment minister Hilary Benn advises us to start developing a taste for genetically modified foods if we don’t want to starve to death in the not too distant future.
Well I’m staying cheerful, even if no one’s listening to me. I’m deep in the Dordogne where life flows as gently as always and the only markets to watch are the ones in the little mediaeval towns where we go daily to buy abundant, unmodified produce for lunch. Here the only economic newsflash has been a bulletin from finance minister Christine Lagarde, announcing that France — relatively unburdened by credit crunch and debt crisis — has returned from recession to growth (as indeed have Germany and Japan), with both consumer spending and export sales looking notably perky. The weakness of the pound against the euro makes a gigot painfully expensive in the village boucherie, but that apart, I’m embarrassed to say I can’t find a damned thing to be miserable about. I promise I’ll try harder when I get home at the end of the month.
Sarkozy’s green disguise
In my favourite market — at Cazals, just over the hills in the Lot — there’s a man with a clothing stall who is the uncanny double of Nicolas Sarkozy. Maybe it actually is him, spending the summer learning about the free enterprise system which he claims to embrace when it suits him; and perhaps that’s his wife Carla behind big sunglasses on the hippy jewellery stall. But whatever the strutting little President is up to, his government is certainly smarter than Gordon Brown’s at looking progressive on the green energy front. As the UK nuclear chief Lady Judge reminded us recently, most of France runs on nuclear power, but not only has the state-controlled utility EDF just announced a huge investment in solar technology, but vast numbers of wind turbines have sprung up everywhere since I last drove across the country — or at least, everywhere that can be seen from the main north-south autoroutes. That may be because the great arable plains which these highways traverse happen to be consistently windy — or it may be because Sarkozy has given orders for turbines to be planted wherever they can be seen by large numbers of foreign motorists, who duly report back how green France has become. I shall lob this at the man in Cazals market — but I suspect he’ll dodge it and try to sell me a cheap shirt.
Holiday reading
Stopping in Normandy en route, we were treated to a private tour of the Château de Miromesnil, birthplace of Guy de Maupassant. To be honest, no one in our party knew much about de Maupassant beyond the fact that he was a late 19th-century master of the short story, but an iPhone connection to Wikipedia provided an instant bluffer’s guide before we met the enterprising chatêlaine, Natalie Romatet, whose great-grandfather — from a champagne-making family in Rheims — bought the château in 1938. For a more advanced course of de Maupassant studies, I picked up a copy of his 1885 novel Bel-Ami, which became the Flintstone equivalent of a talking book as we took turns to read it aloud for the rest of the journey.
It’s steamy stuff, strongly recommended for boring autoroutes. Bel-Ami tells the story of Georges Duroy, a young man of humble background and little talent — except when it comes to pleasing the ladies — who blags a job on a Parisian equivalent of The Spectator and proceeds to cheat and canoodle his way to the editorship, the hand of the proprietor’s daughter, a title, a fortune and the prospect of a glittering future in politics. The tale ends with this shameless rogue still on the up — and I can’t help wondering whether, if syphilis had not driven de Maupassant mad (thank you, Wikipedia), there might have been a second volume charting the disgrace that clearly ought to have been Duroy’s ultimate fate.
It would not be advisable, legally speaking, to start naming public figures, media titans and City big-shots with a streak of Duroy in them today — especially since we no longer have the option, as de Maupassant’s anti-hero did, of settling libel accusations with duelling pistols (that would certainly make Tom Bower’s enemies think twice before taking him on). The blurb on the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition calls Bel-Ami ‘an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic’. John Galsworthy did the same, less steamily, for turn-of-the-20th-century British bourgeois capitalism, with all those old Forsytes hoarding possessions and worrying about the price of consols. Martin Amis could claim to have done it for the 1980s in Money. But no one has yet truly captured the Noughties in fiction: the apotheosis and disgrace of global financial capitalism awaits a de Maupassant to chronicle the Duroys de nos jours.
Calm before the storm
Miromesnil, deep in wooded parkland near Dieppe, is a classic 17th-century confection with 19th-century wings and turrets — but only one room deep, so surprisingly homely inside. The charming Mme Romatet offers chambres d’hôtes and cookery lessons as well as guided tours. If you’re heading home from the holidays, it’s the perfect oasis to escape those grim economic forecasts for one more day before you cross the Channel.
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