French Phenomenon

French women are perfect- fact. Tanned and thin- even women with tiny babies that can’t be more than a week old have flat stomachs. Yet France is the country of food lovers, everywhere you go there are gastronomic delights. Once I overheard two couples arguing over the best bakery to buy their baguettes from, and they weren’t arguing about the price. No, they were discussing which boulangerie made the best quality baguettes (at least I am pretty sure that’s what they were talking about without the benefit of subtitles in real life situations).

Every day Jacques and I see French families arriving at the beach laden down with cool boxes, picnic baskets and paper bags filled with baguettes. In the morning at the bakery you can witness French women buying six loaves at a time on the bread run- such copious amounts of food, and yet still so svelte.

Utilising my newly found discreet skill of people-watching (facilitated by the huge black sunglasses the Jacques brought me from the market in Le Penon) I now spend approximately four to six hours a day happily engrosses in watching other people go about their lives. After all there’s only so much conversation that Jacques and I can fill the day with, given the fact that we’ve been together for nearly ten years now! Anyway, I digress, through the course of watching these slim French beauties I have discovered their secret. I have unlocked the key to the so-called ‘French Paradox’ when it comes to maintaining a stunning figure whilst simultaneously appearing to eat and drink as much bread, cheese and red wine as you want. The truth is that French women (and I don’t claim to be able to speak for all of them, only those that I have whiled away the hours observing) don’t eat....except for fruit.

It’s true! Now, I can’t tell you what a typical French woman will eat for breakfast or dinner in their own homes (Jacques wouldn’t let me follow a family home, apparently that escalates the harmless pass time of people watching to stalking and is generally frowned upon) but I can tell you that they don’t eat lunch on the beach. Those cool boxes filled with lovingly prepared homemade vegetable tartlets, baguettes oozing with delicious cheeses & meats, whole roast chickens and stunning gateaux that the French mothers dole out to their husbands, fathers, children, nieces and nephews never, ever pass their own lips.

There is a certain theatre involved in the whole process: the mother is the head of the show and each dish is revealed from the cool bag or picnic basket with much razzle and dazzle. The tin foil is peeled back to expose another exquisite culinary delight and every family member is served, everyone must have a bit. However the mother, as the server, omits her own plate and only when everyone else’s plates are heaving does she dig into the bottom of the hamper and produce a lone apple or nectarine, and this is all that she will eat.

So, how do French women maintain such envious figures? It’s simple; replace lunch with fruit and fatten up everyone else around you so that you look even more gorgeous on the beach- voila! A French figure envied by all.

Camping etiquette and cleanliness

We’ve spent the last week in Hossegor/Seignosse experiencing our first proper slice of van life, which basically means very little washing, and lots of time on the beach. Hossegor is a town that has embraced the surf lifestyle so fully, you wonder what it would be without the surfing industry to sustain it. Every other shop sells surf clothes or hardware and if you’re not walking down the street with a surfboard under your arm you are the odd one out. It’s a surfer’s paradise and it is definitely getting rich off the industry. Everything is more expensive than last time we came here, including the aire de campings where you can park your van for the night, and the shops, bars and restaurants. Its an amazing place to be- so vibrant and full of life, but when your budget is €20 a day, it is difficult to do anything here other than park up, pay for the privilege, eat rice and beans (Jacques and I have eaten this meal and variations of it so often that the smell of it has permeated the van and we spend hours discussing whether the smell has got stronger, or whether it has dissipated a bit!) and drink cheap wine from the supermarket. We’re having a great time, but its so frustrating when you’re walking down the street with the smell of crepes and croissants and moules and frites wafting at you from every direction, and you know that you’ve got rice and beans for dinner.........AGAIN!!! Despite the rice, we have loved our week in Hossegor.

We split our time between two aire de campings- one in Seignosse and one in Capbreton. The places are just big areas (Seignosse in the woods and Capbreton in a car park next to the beach) where motorhomes can park up for the night, and use the toilets, fill up with water and hook up to 240v. They’re really popular and often close to full, so the good spaces are at a bit of a premium. Jacques will deny this, but he’s developed an obsession about getting the good spots, and if anyone else has parked in them when we’ve been out for the day, he gets extremely angry! In fact, in Seignosse, when our prime space furthest from the road had been taken by a Spanish van Jacques decided to overcome this small obstacle by haring towards the van with Michael Jackson blaring from the speakers and wheel spinning into the smallest space in the world directly behind their van, next to the fence. Great- we had ‘our’ space, not so great we were so close to the Spanish van that I could hear everything, even when they farted in their sleep and they didn’t even start cooking their dinner until 11pm, so I was kept awake all night, whilst Jacques slept next to me oblivious to the noise and smug that we hadn’t been usurped by another van.

Small things like your van space become so important when you’re on the road, probably because we don’t have jobs to think about. If you’re relaxing for the evening under the awning (another of Jacques’ obsessions, but we won’t go into that) and another van comes into the aire de camping everyone, and I mean everyone, stops what they’re doing and stares at the new van. I promise that I am not exaggerating- even the small children haring around and around the camping areas on their bikes brake hard and stare. You see all nationalities do this; it’s not just an English thing. Everyone stares and stares until the driver of the van has done a lap and decided where to park and people only stop staring once the van has been manoeuvred into the chosen space, and the engine turned off. The people who the new van has parked closest to are the losers, because they’ve lost a bit of their space, their little empire has been reduced, and everyone else breathes a sigh of relief because their space hasn’t been encroached. Its’ strange, and I try to stop myself doing it but whenever I hear the familiar rumble of a van my territorial receptors prick up and I have to join in the staring.

I won’t lie, washing has been a problem this week. Oh, for the heady days in Ile D’Oleron when the aire de camping had showers.....These aire de campings in Hossegor don’t have showers, the one in Capbreton doesn’t even have a toilet. And the toilets, it is making me cringe to write about them, they are singularly disgusting. They are little capsules, which automatically ‘clean’ themselves once the person leaves. I use the word clean in the loosest sense- what they actually do is spray foul smelling disinfectant all over the floor and then the toilet fills up with water and everything floats out of it, all over the floor and swills around for a bit, getting the toilet paper sopping wet, the bin wet, the toilet seat wet, and then all of the water is sucked out through a drain. I know this because I stupidly went into the toilet after someone left- they kindly held the door open for me and I walked straight in without thinking. Oh, but I did think when the lights wouldn’t come on, the automatic lock came on and the disinfectant started spraying all over the floor and my feet, and my ankles and then the toilet overflowed with the kind person’s excrement floating out, past my shins whilst I beat the door with my fists like a hysterical mad woman. Not nice. The horrors I have seen in these toilets (if you’re squeamish, don’t read the next sentence): A used nappy with a cigarette stubbed out in the poo; used tampons stuck to the floor because of the ingenious self-cleaning mechanism, hairballs- I can’t go on, you get the picture.

So, as you can imagine, nobody wants to have a wash in the toilets- it would be a physical impossibility to come out of them cleaner. This has left us with the dilemma of what to do about washing. We do have a shower in the van, but one use would take all of the water that we can put in our tank and it takes us a long, painful time to fill the tank up because we are too stingy to buy a hose and have to use a laborious bucket and bottle method that we’ve made up. So, without the option of our own shower, we have turned to the fresh water showers at the beach for cleanliness. The problem i that they drain off down the beach and you don’t really want to be using shower gel or shampoo, or anything that foams in them because it becomes obvious to everyone that some skank is having a proper shower and you’re only supposed to use them for rinsing off sea water. Also, the showers are cold, freezing, teeth-chatteringly cold, so going after dark when the air temp is pretty low too, isn’t really an option. Instead we’ve taken to stealth showering when no one is looking and creating diversionary tactics like pointing out to sea with animated looks on our faces in the hope that anyone around will look to see what we’re making such a fuss about, and then we can whip out the shower gel from Jacques’ shorts and frantically wash our arm pits without being detected.