| With apologies for the misuse of the lyrics.. |
If I'm not in it for love......
If I'm not in it for all I've got.....
Then
I'm outta here.
And over the last few years, with my friends dying off, my husband exploited as a guinea pig in the hospital where he had been treated for years, the scandal of water pollution and the unpleasantness of some in the expat community then I am clearly no longer into France for life, nor for love and I'm giving it nothing more.
I'm not alone in this....I was lucky enough to have known the rural France where people helped each other from sheer necessity....where Republican values still counted...where the winter evenings were spent among neighbours instead of being isolated in front of the television...not idyllic, not ' A Year in Provence', but a real life in a real community.
As the years passed and life became easier, so did the sense of solidarity weaken....'chacun tire la couverture a soi'...everyone pulls the blanket over themselves and to hell with the others...as more and more people can afford the blankets.
Everyone who earns two sous more than did his parents thinks he is rich..and assimilates his interests to those of the real rich, who give their payments to the political parties in brown envelopes.
Jealousy, that bane of French life, is given free rein as there is less and less need of co operation.
Didier complains that no one in his hamlet wants to continue the little 'fetes'..the ball trap, the pique nique, the feu d'artifice du 14 juillet...they go off to things organised and paid for by the local authorities. All automony, all sense of comradeship, is lost.
He feels the difference and so do I.
And the physical climate is not what it was either.
When I was first in France I could place a pretty sure bet on being able to have Christmas lunch outside....and now we have temperatures below freezing in November. The summers would be warm...not so hot as to drive me indoors behind the shutters or, alternatively, so wet as to make me buy an umbrella.
So I'm outta here..and into there...or outta there and into here.....
Costa Rica....
Where we have had a holiday home for a few years..have begun to make friends...where the climate suits us...the original banana republic upon which France seems to be modelling itself...
The best way I can think of to show you Costa Rica is in the following video from the best known Costa Rican group, Malpais
I shall be nattering about life in Costa Rica (here), but will be carrying on on this blog too for a while as I can no more leave France behind without a backward glance than I could the U.K.which I left so many years ago.
And I still haven't sold the house!
So ..ce n'est qu'un au revoir mes freres...
The old crone will be here for a while yet, casting the bones....
.
