Pass the pub

One of the features of life in France is pub day. No, not what you're thinking, but the day when the weekly batch of publicité hits some twenty million post boxes, just in time for the week's promos to start on Tuesday or Wednesday.





Before we moved here I always assumed, somewhat smugly, that being green sort of people with all the right credentials for Saving the Planet we would put a 'Pas de pub' sticker on our post box and thereby eschew the weekly enticements to save (and spend) money. But that was, as I said, before ...

The weekly promotions, and the publicité that announces them, really are the oil that lubricates the wheels of buying here. We learned fast that it would be unwise to think that you can just go out and shop for something whenever you feel like it. It's possible to do that, of course, but it's likely to hurt the wallet quite a lot more than going down the pub route and is therefore regarded as rather foolish. The weekly promotions cover everything from food to fridges to plants to parasols; there is a true art to understanding when, and how, to get the best bargains.

First, you need to understand the concept of seasonality. If you want garden chairs or a new garden parasol, for example, as we did this week, the time to be on the ball is the first or second week in April; if you want a good price on a wood burner, it's the middle of October. The best time to find plants, shrubs and trees on promo in the grandes surfaces is the first week of the February school holidays; we bought three small fruit trees this year for less than 8 euros each. If you're looking to stock up on a year's worth of pig, then the Foires au Porc in November are for you, when prices are often less than half their normal level. Ditto, in this region at least, the ubiquitous magret de canard. And so on. It's no good hoping to find bargains at the end of the season, as one does in England; by that time there's nothing left. If you happen to need a garden table in August, forget it (on the other hand if your child needs a new cartable for the imminent rentrée...).

Secondly, don't think you can slouch around and just turn up on the last day of the promo. You'll have missed it. No, you need to be there on the first, or at the latest the second, day if you want to find what you're looking for - because if you're not, you can be sure that any number of canny others will be.

And thirdly, if you're to stand any chance at all against the time-served local promo-hunters, you need to observe their behaviour and copy it. This means that you enter the shop blatantly carrying your copy of the appropriate promo catalogue, prominently marked with your item of choice for which you make a beeline. You examine it every which way; you find an assistant to 'sell' it to you (only the English buy without discussion, even if it is the bargain of the day); you compare it minutely against the description in the catalogue. Finally convinced, you take it to the checkout, where you check that it's gone through at the promotional price and/or that you've received the correct number of points on your loyalty card. Often it hasn't or you haven't, such things being set centrally and therefore not always being completely up to date, so you point to the catalogue and wait (as does everybody behind you) until it's sorted out.

If you're really keen, you can even check the promos of all the grandes surfaces online at http://www.promoconso.net. I have to confess to having done this on more than one occasion, which may well make me into a slightly sad person in your eyes, as indeed it does in my own. But in mitigation, it is rather good fun; it is the French way; and in these times of la crise it certainly saves more than a few hard-earned euros.

Interesting things to do with bread rolls

Just when you thought that there couldn't possibly be any more to say about the financial crisis, there was.

Last night I watched a documentary on Arte about the events of the last month, which was followed by the inevitable panel discussion: two French and two German economists slugging it out to see who could be most right. "S o o o o ...." began the (German) presenter, "What can you say about why this crisis has come to be?".

"Well, it's like this" explained one of the German economists. "When we were adolescents, we used to put petit pains down our swimming trunks to impress the girls. Our financial institutions have had their trunks full of bread rolls for a long time, but now the investors have pulled them down ..."

So now you know. And I'll never look at a German on the beach in quite the same way again.

So tell me - am I a Luddite?

So the renovation funds are safe, apparently. Thank you, Mr Darling. My view of life, the universe and everything, however, has not remained similarly unscathed.

Sometime in the last ten or so years the world as I knew it - or at least thought I knew it - appears to have changed without my really noticing. Call me sheltered and hopelessly naive if you like, but it's taken the extraordinary and cataclysmic (add your own superlative) events of the last week to really bring home to me the way in which The Market Rules Okay and the extent to which so much of western life has been underpinned by credit, credit and more credit. When the markets no longer have faith in the institutions and the system that they themselves have created; when the supply of credit funding that we once believed to be bottomless is suddenly no more; when governments all over the world have to sit and watch as traders swiftly and systematically reduce the value of commodities and institutions to a pittance; when all of those things happen at the same time, as they did last week, the once revered political and economic theories that created them reveal themselves to be no more than a house of cards. When they collapse, they take down more than a few banks and big companies. They take down with them our sense of safety in living in the world, for nothing is as we believed it to be, and therefore nothing is to be trusted.

Here's an example. I read an article by Seth Freedman on Guardian Online last week arguing that savers don't deserve to have their savings protected. "Anyone entering into a contract with their bank, in which they loan the bank money in return for interest paid" he wrote, "should do so in the full knowledge that there is no guarantee they will see their money again – an entirely fair and proper situation, as in any other free market financial undertaking". I'm sorry, but what????? Is this really how I'm supposed to be thinking these days? I'm not making an investment, in which case I'd be told by innumerable wealth warnings about how the value can go down as well as up. I'm depositing my savings, for which I've worked bloody hard, into a bank who agrees to pay me a reasonable but certainly not startling return for the privilege of being able to use or invest it themselves for a while. But rightly or wrongly I do so in the expectation of being able to have it back when I choose. That's the deal.

Tell me, am I the only one who still thinks this way? A financial Luddite perhaps? A hopeless idealistic liberal who for many years has banked and saved and insured with mutually or co-operatively owned companies? (Except Icesave of course ...). Who doesn't change her mobile phone every six months or borrow money to buy the latest clothes or expect to have 'it' (whatever it may be) just because she wants it? Who sees nothing wrong with some appropriate regulation and doesn't believe that because the market has dictated it, it must be right? Who finds the kind of bonus regularly paid out in the financial world not only outrageous but downright immoral?

Yes, I'm angry, because I'd failed to see how low we'd collectively sunk; and yes, I'm sad, that I and countless others had to find out the incredibly painful way that was last week, and may yet be this one too. The question is, dare I also be hopeful that things will never be the same again?

So long and thanks for all the fish

When I sat down at the computer this morning I was going to write about the gorgeous sunny weather and the vegetable garden throwing goodies at us and the fig festival at Le Mas d'Azil and how (oh joy) the four month old electric tile cutter broke down with just two cuts to go. But then the day turned a little less good, because a friend in the UK emailed me to tell me that the merde in Iceland has not only hit the fan but in the process has been spattered a thousand miles southwards, towards him, and me, and possibly you.

I've been following the Icelandic financial crisis since the weekend, partly because it's such a microcosm of the bust bit of boom and bust capitalism that's currently bringing the world as we know it to its knees, and partly because it's a country I've always somehow felt connected to since I spent several weeks there in the seventies. Things were very different then: there was barely an 'economy', fishing and farming being the orders of the day for most people, foreign visitors were a rarity and Icelanders looked inwards rather than outwards. It was certainly one of the most welcoming places I've ever been: we were backpacking but spent very few nights in our tent and rarely had to cook for ourselves - mostly we were invited to peoples' homes on a whim as we walked on the roads and paths. And there was no TV on Thursdays, or in July. But the last 10 years or so brought this tiny country, with a population the size of Coventry, into the super league as deregulation and fish quota cash allowed it to ride the crest of the credit boom and build the highest per capita wealth in the world.

And now? A currency losing nearly half its value over the last year; inflation at 14%; interest rates at 15.5%; people drawing out money from what remains of the country's banking system up to their overdraft limits and stashing it under the bed because they fear there won't be any money left; a serious chance that the country itself will be bankrupt before the week's out ... And (closer to home; this is the bit that hurts) this morning Landsbanki has pulled the plug on its UK based internet savings arm, Icesave, freezing (no pun intended) all withdrawals and guaranteeing UK savings only up to the legal minimum of around £16,000 while maintaining business as normal in Iceland and protecting domestic deposits 100%. Even that guarantee, of course, is useless if the country goes belly up, but it feels at this point (and I hope I'm wrong, I really do) that UK savers have been sold down the river in the interests of Icelandic ones.

And here's the bit that's going to make it difficult for me to sleep for a while. The Grillou renovation fund is - was? - stashed in Icesave. After much Libran agonising I decided to leave it in the UK, where interest rates were much better than in the Eurozone, until it was needed for the first payments to artisans late this year (er - that would be in a couple of months ...). Yes, I'm aware that that'll teach me to act like a capitalist pig, but honestly, what would you have done? Word is that Landsbanki will be declared insolvent at any point now, meaning that I (and some 349,999 others, apparently) will have to salvage what we can from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and sing for the rest.

There comes a time when even I don't know what to say next.