Solidarité

One of the very few things I miss from England is its plethora of charity shops, which for many years kept me supplied with books and clothes and all sorts of weird and wonderful things, most of which eventually found their way back again to whence they'd come. One of the things I don't miss, however, is the concept of charity that lies behind them.

I don't think of myself as being a particularly uncharitable - as in mean spirited or ungenerous - being. But nevertheless I do have huge problems with the notion of 'charity'. It's divisive: it divides those who have the means to give from those who receive. It creates a distance. It creates inequality, and therefore classes. It sets up a situation where I do something for you, not with you or alongside you; in doing so I fail to offer you the chance to be an equal partner in our encounter and therefore I disempower you. And so it encourages and perpetuates paternalism: something which, however well meant, I find intolerable.

To me the concepts of justice and equality, of exchange, and of mutuality and reciprocity are the crucial ones. So, for example, I don't offer a concessionary rate to therapy clients, but because I see money as simply a form of energy, I do offer the opportunity to take sessions on the basis of energy exchange, as in 'I offer you therapy, you offer me gardening or woodwork or produce from your land or whatever skill you have that I can use'. That way, I don't turn into the magnanimous bestower of favour and the power balance between us starts, and stays, equal. (Interestingly, and to my surprise, very few people have ever taken me up on it, although I'm frequently asked for concessions ...).

And then of course there's the particularly French notion of solidarité. Not the same as the much more political (and oft-maligned) use of the word in the UK, la solidarité is not only a much-used word but also an accepted part of day to day community life here. But what is it? Strangely enough one of the best attempts I've found to define it comes from Martine Aubry, the president of the Parti Socialiste, who isn't, it has to be said, one of my favourite politicians, if using those two words together isn't too much of a contradiction in terms. But she writes:

"Solidarity is first and foremost a behaviour that we can all embody in our everyday lives. It's supporting other people when they need it. But then it's also a collective value. So that we can all live better together, and so that each one of us feels comfortable in our society, we need to help each other on a mutual basis. To be in solidarity with someone is to be 'with' that person; to feel their problems and their pain as if they were our own. And solidarity is also doing our best to live better together as a part of our country; to accept the other person as they are, whatever their origin, their neighbourhood, their differences".

Heavens. You could almost believe she's been reading Carl Rogers ...

And so (finally getting to the point ...), now you'll understand why I was truly delighted to encounter the new espace non marchand - non-trade area - at the market in Saint Girons this morning. Basically, the espace non marchand is a higgledy piggledy collection of trestles, stands and simple tarps laid out on the ground, covered with all manner of goods from books to boots to bottles of apple juice, from surplus produce to craftwork to clothes to tools. And people are also there milling around (it's a very convivial spot) offering their services on the same basis. The philosophy here is that you take whatever you need or want when you need or want it, and/or leave whatever you no longer need or want. Need some new working boots? Take them. Fancy a cup of tea? Pour yourself one. But - and here's what makes it radical - no money is involved. At all. Ever. Period. Nor is a tit for tat on the spot exchange required. It all works on the concept of there being sufficient resources for everybody, and it works on responsibility and trust: it's Freecycle (without the begging emails) and freeganism all rolled into one and then some. You don't have to prove your pitiful income or be a - gulp - 'person in need' to be able to benefit, nor is there any monetary value - even in the LETS / SEL* sense - put onto your giving or your taking. It's all very karmic, in the simplest sense of what goes around comes around. All that's expected of you is your willingness to engage in the process, and with the other people involved in the process, as a person.

Charity it ain't. So if this sounds like your thing ... the last Saturday of every month, at St Girons market. See you there.

* LETS: local exchange trading scheme. SEL is the French equivalent, système d'échange local.

We have plumbing, we have hemp, and we have ... landfill

This has been a good week. (Mainly. More of that in a minute).

We've finished destroying two ancient shower rooms, chiselled off more white tiles than you'd need to open a shop, knocked down a wall or two and a few bits of serious concrete, and become very friendly with the guy at our local déchetterie, who now thinks we have nothing better to do than to visit three times a day with a trailer full of building rubble. Plays hell with the fingernails, but it's great for my arm muscles, which haven't been so - er - obvious since the days when I used to unload and dry up 144 heavy white plates from the dishwasher every night.

We had an exciting moment (yes, I know, sad) when a fork lift truck from our lovely builders' merchants in Saint Girons actually made it down our narrow, rocky track (weight limit: 3 tonnes) with a huge pallet of stone for the new terrace (weight carried: 8 tonnes). Oh, and it's coming again next week, twice. Don't tell the local council. Don't you just love France?

Following the complex task of completely replumbing, from scratch, the rooms in our new guest accommodation, Wednesday saw the Ceremonial Turn On: and yes, we have water, we have waste and we have no leaks. Not one. Not even a dribble. I - unlike our uber-perfectionist artisan (it takes one to know one) who spent several nervous minutes pacing and biting his nails before we turned on the stopcocks - expected nothing less. But it was cause for a bit of a celebration nonetheless.



We have hemp. Two thousand litres of it, ready to be mixed with sand and lime to make an insulating plaster for the stone walls in what will be the bedroom of L'Atelier. Now this is really exciting: it's brilliantly environment-friendly, hugely effective, and pretty damned attractive to boot. It's also how I first met The Uber-Perfectionist. Long story.

And finally, after half a millenium of wet weather delay, we've managed to start digging out and preparing the ground for a new car parking area, a dining terrace and a stepped path to L'Atelier. It's backbreaking clod-by-clod work, largely because the ground is so wet, but hey, it's only 69 square metres ...

And here comes the yes-but. Ever since we've moved in I've wondered why there was a strange shaped grassy hummock outside the door of L'Atelier; today I found out. It's a landfill site.

Sand, gravel, big pebbles, small pebbles, bits of broken tile, bits of broken glass, bottle tops, medicine labels, a Belgian franc, a shoe, a belt buckle, bits of skeleton ... okay, the last one's a lie. Possibly. 

Don't you just love France?

An ordinary life

As I was ruminating on my sunbed late yesterday afternoon (yes, it finally stopped raining), I got to thinking about the kind of life that we've begun to settle into here. As you do. Or at least I do. And I realised one thing in particular. We're ordinary. 

For many years living in England, I felt my own sense of What Really Matters becoming more and more out of kilter with the prevailing ethic. As a person-centred therapist, for example, I was - and remain - shocked and angry at, and disturbed by, the ceaseless moves towards statutory regulation of the practice of counselling and psychotherapy. (If you want to know why, you could do worse than visit The Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy and watch the video talk by Brian Thorne, who was my tutor and mentor. I can't put it better than he does. Never could, actually ...). As a restaurateur, I was saddened by the general belief that we must be motivated by, and in it for, profit ... and exhausted by continually having to explain that we didn't see things that way. I lost count of how many presumably well-meaning people told us how much more we could earn by opening on more days or for longer hours, or turning tables, or cramming more people in, or using wholesalers instead of small producers, or any number of so-called 'normal' trade tricks; explaining that we were simply interested in creating a life that sustained us and was sustainable usually led to (at best) disbelief and (at worst) pity. And as a person, the things that most inspire me - growing things, creating things, sharing things, community and communities, meditation, nature, creating space for people to be and discover themselves and others, living a simple but not a plain life - were certainly not those that surrounded me on a daily basis. 

Here in rural France, and in particular in Ariège, I'm no longer counter-cultural. As everyone well knows, the French work to live rather than live to work; in spite of Nicholas Sarkozy's best efforts to get everyone to "work more to earn more", the nation remains singularly unconvinced: earning enough is what it's all about. Commuting is rare, and despised - a last resort, to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Almost everybody grows their own vegetables. Credit cards are all but unknown: you want something, you pay for it, now. Houses are bought as homes, not as investments, and mortgages are strictly and legally regulated. The consumer society is muted: shops are closed for two hours at lunchtime, and on Sundays. Cars go on for at least twice as long as they do in the UK, other machinery even longer; there really is no pressure to have the latest equipment or the fastest PC or the trendiest trainers or spend the most on your child at Christmas or dress in the most stylish fashions (if you've visited a rural market and seen some of the clothes on offer, you'll understand what I mean and wonder why on earth the French have a reputation for being elegant ...). In spite of la crise, the essence of daily living continues to be dominated rather more by simple pleasures than by desire or by fear. What Really Matters here is living a life of quality not quantity; living well, and appropriately.

And so, blessedly and with a great sigh of relief, I find myself finally to be living an ordinary life, just one amongst countless others doing the same. 

Before and after

Writing is a funny thing: very often a piece has a life of its own and ends up being completely different from the one you (thought you) intended to write in the first place. Take my previous post, for example. I actually set out with the idea of showing a few before and after pictures of The Project So Far, just to reassure you that we do in fact manage to find the odd thing to do to fill our days ... and I ended up talking about Slow Design and quoting Rilke. Ah well. There's process for you.

And here's a bit of The Project So Far:

Part of the salon-as-we-inherited-it, complete with its latex-covered, oil painted walls (I kid you not. But that's nothing. I have a friend whose kitchen walls were covered in lino) ...



There's a very good reason why John is dressed up in a North Norfolk District Council bin bag. I just can't quite recall now what it is ...

What you don't see here, of course, is the way the plaster fell off the wall every time we tried to paint it; or the horrific mess I made (mainly of myself) when I lightened the wooden staircase from its previous ghastly red colour to light oak. Nor do you get any hint of the seagrass trauma that was to come) ...



But finally, our salon has now settled into this, complete with wood burning stove that arrived last week, just too late for the really cold weather but just in time to catch the euro-sterling rate at its lowest:






Okay, so it's not always that tidy. Moving swiftly on ... next door (through the opening on the right above), my study/therapy room, previously a bedroom that didn't really have any walls at all, just lengths of silky material stretched on battens over render (when we took it down it was so full of dust that I sneezed for a month ...):



And back the other way, the kitchen, with John trying unsuccessfully to unstick his hand from a cupboard ...






... under its previous régime. Admittedly you don't get the full effect of twenty-plus years of cooking gunk ingrained into the oak units, nor can you see the breathtaking variety of paint effects, but you can see it was pink. Very pink. Very very pink. After several centuries (no, that's not an exaggeration) of stripping, sanding, more sanding, sealing and seven - yes, seven coats of paint, it now looks like this:






And yes, thank you, I know it would have been easier to strip it out and replace it with an IKEA kitchen. Don't think we didn't contemplate it. But oak is oak, and green is green. And as we all know, it's not easy being green.

Living a 'both-and' life

Yesterday was a real chilly, wet autumnal day - the kind of day when all you really want to do is to stretch out on the sofa in front of the wood burning stove with a good book. Given that we don't yet possess either a sofa or a stove that was not an option. So I tiled the floor instead (yes, that floor), and ruminated on life and some of the strange turns mine has taken. It's not something I do all the time, but the previous day a friend had asked me how we had come to be running a restaurant and how we came to be here, and as I was trowelling the tile adhesive onto the floor my train of thought meandered on, as thoughts do, from there.

As you probably know, I was something of a late convert to life at the stoves. Ten years ago, after nearly half a lifetime of doing Socially Useful Things - civil servant, welfare rights activist, CAB manager, advocacy campaigner - I made my move towards the somewhat more laid back world of Slow. It wasn't by any means my first break-out: the early eighties had seen me quitting the hallowed halls of the Department of Health to run a vegetarian retreat centre and guest house in North Yorkshire. Whilst being great fun, it didn't pay the bills (too idealistic ... too cheap!), so all too soon it was back to the rat race for a while until the pull of freedom got the better of me again and I set off to spend a couple of years 'on the road', living in community in west Wales and Dorset, and helping to facilitate dance retreats and camps. Then it was the turn of my more serious side again: I was accepted on to the (then) new person-centred post-grad diploma in Norwich, where I stayed as a practising therapist until the Cley years ...

What somehow came into sharper than usual focus yesterday was how I had been swinging manically between head-down all-out ultra serious work mode (and I was - am - seriously serious about what I did) and live-lightly drop-out mode. Sated with one way of being after a few years, I'd go back to the other, only to find that part of me still wasn't getting what it wanted. Because at heart - and here's the rub - I'm a 'both-and' type of person, not an 'either-or' one. For instance, whereas many of my friends are (reputedly) happy with being either lifelong career professionals or downshifting simple-lifers, I'm not. I'm both, at the same time. In the same way, I enjoy writing both serious and frivolous posts in this blog. I love good wine; I can also rave about a 1.89€ Cité de Carcassonne bargain from Leader Price. I love silence, and a raucous rock concert makes me happy. I bask in the stillness of Grillou, and I love the buzz of Toulouse. And so on. Running alongside all of that are my intense curiosity about life and seemingly endless quest for lived experience, both of which have taken (and, I hope, will continue to take) me into some places in my life, both real and metaphorical, that are probably best left unelaborated. Though many may disagree, I couldn't imagine being a person-centred therapist, or indeed a person, without either of those things.

So why am I here? Partly because living in France is something that I've wanted to experience for a very long time. Partly to find, at last, the space and a way to live a 'both-and' life. And partly to explore the whole idea of living Slow: that doesn't mean doing everything at a snail's pace, but living a simple, meaningful, sustainable, mindful and pleasurable life, in the present, in a way that honours the bizarre complexity that is me.

Maybe I should tile floors more often.