Wish I Was There.

[poliphilo]

The jig-saw puzzle I'm labouring over at present shows a little hill-town in the Dordogne, with a castle at the top and a wildflower meadow in the foreground- with big red poppies and other flowers I can't name in yellow and purple and blue.

It's a real bitch to do- all that random patterning- but that only means I get to spend more time brooding over it- which is nice.

There's a piece in the paper this morning about all the Brits who are flooding into the Dordogne because of Brexit. Apparently that's a thing- and they're transforming the local economy. The French themselves aren't particularly enamoured of their countryside; they think provincial life is stultifying; just read anything by Balzac that isn't set in Paris. Another thing that's been in the news is that they've been killing off their birds by killing off their insects by spraying their prairies with poison- and up until now they've hardly noticed. But then they never had a Wordsworth, or a Clare or a Hardy- or a Shakespeare, come to think of it- whose verse is simply stuffed with wildflowers and songbirds.

Comments

[shewhomust]

The Dordogne has been a hive of British expats for decades already; it makes sense that Brits who decide they'd rather live in France than in post-Brexit Britain will head that way, but you can't blame it all on Brexit.

I suspect the rest of what you say is similarly half-true. There's certainly been the same more from the country to the towns as there has here: but France was a much more rural country to begin with. That snobbery about the provinces exists, or has existed - not just Balzac, look at Flaubert, too - but Paris is less all-consuming than London. There's a lot of nostalgia for 'terroir', which carries much of the emotional baggage that 'tradition' does here...

And so on. But I'd better stop here.

[poliphilo]

One could write a book comparing and contrasting French and British attitudes to town and country- and I expect someone has....

[chochiyo_sama]

My mother constantly preaches to me that the end of the world is at hand for a variety of reasons, one of which is the dying of so many bees. I keep telling her that if she is truly worried about the bees, she needs to stop having her lawn sprayed to kill the dandelions and other small flowering weeds. But she sprays it two to three times a year anyway.

And continues to predict the end of the world is at hand.

[poliphilo]

As a fundamentalist Christian she presumably thinks the end of the world would be a good thing. Heigh-ho.