Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This is the verse you grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Here is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.'

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Friday, 1 June 2012


La Croissance

 Shortly after we arrived to live in France on the 30th January 2012 the French newspaper headlines were all about La Croissance. I knew it was something to do with politics or economics and it wasn’t good news but I had to wait until I unpacked my dictionary to learn that it meant growth and in that context economic growth.  Nothing is ever wasted as I had to use the word again. Back to the dictionary to check that this was in fact also the right word for the growth of a tree. It was.

Outside our house but on our land is an enormous chestnut tree which in the past has been severely pollarded just like those strangely stunted and lumpy trees which, shorn and bald, form part of the winter’s municipal street furniture in most French towns.  However our tree had grown wildly since it was last cut back. Not only is the tree very tall but it also is on a very steep slope so I quickly gave up any idea of climbing up the tree myself to prune it. Enquiries revealed that a Monsieur Gay (yes really, and the only one in the village) would be able to prune it. This necessitated a phone call to Monsieur Gay and again a visit to the dictionary in advance to look up the word to prune emarder as I didn’t want him to get the impression that he should cut the tree down.

There was a certain delicacy in the phone call as he was a neighbour i.e. he lived in the next  house down the lane so there was even more embarrassment than usual about my French. Before I get comments that if you live in France you should learn the language I should add that I have learnt it and my French is quite passable but I still have to work up to some phone calls. Whilst phoning a tradesman who is a stranger is one thing phoning a tradesman who is also a neighbour is quite another.  At the time I had already been a topic of conversation in the village for some days probably something to do with my launching my car off another neighbour’s hillside drive and over a bank in the snow with the car ending up balanced a bit like the coach in the Italian Job. So I didn’t want the village to ring with mocking laughter or sniggers (ricanement) at my French as well as at my driving.

I took a deep breath and made the phone call and fortunately was understood and then another ritual of French life came into play which involves not hurrying over anything. Monsieur Gay agreed to give me an estimate or  devis which as he has always cut the tree and he drives past it every day and it is only a couple of hundred yards from his house should not have been an involved process. Two weeks went by and then just as I was thinking I would have to phone him again he strolled up the lane and surveyed the tree from all sides with his hands on his hips. Then after one minute he knocked on the door and gave us a price which was about half of what it would have cost in England. He left the time for the work to be done as unspecified i.e. la semaine prochaine. I have learnt from experience that French workmen never specify which year they will start work so I was extremely surprised when he turned up and  it was in fact a week after he gave the devis.  He started work in the most glorious weather in March. 


If you own a chainsaw  tronconneuse ( I love that word so I had to put it in ) you will be familiar with the handbook safety warnings and the diagram of a man working up a ladder using the chainsaw above his head firmly crossed through with a big black X. MUCH TOO DANGEROUS!  Monsieur Gay had plainly not read any safety information as he balanced and stretched at the top of a ladder chain sawing away above his head as you can see in the picture. The prunings then crashed thirty or more feet to the ground sometimes bouncing off his ladder. I couldn’t actually bear to watch head on I had to sort of sideways glance when I passed the window as it looked so risky.  The regrowth looked big when it was on the tree but when they plunged down onto the ground the prunings were even bigger.  Four lorry loads of branches later and after one and half day’s hard work he has finished.

 I wanted to know if that was only one year’s growth or more so that was why I needed the word la croissance. I was reassured when he said it was three or four years and we agreed that the tree needed to be pruned at least every two years. The previous owners of our house had been elderly and ill so towards the end they couldn’t help but let some things slide. The tree had been one of them. 

Then I began to worry had the pruning been too severe, was the pruning too late, was the weather in March too dry, would the tree ever recover? Perhaps this is a metaphor for what keeps the British Chancellor awake at night or perhaps he sleeps soundly who knows. I needn’t have worried the first shoots started to come through ahead even of the trees in the middle of our nearby town. Now they are sprouting everywhere. But no green shoots of recovery in Britain it seems with the recession even deeper than the earlier figures suggested. Perhaps the Chancellor should look again at his economic pruning technique.