Sogger’s Blog

I need to explain a bizarre law in France that maybe you are already aware of, but has several subtle side-effects, which, if you have not driven in France, may be new to you. The law I am talking about is the “priorité à droite” (priority to the right) law.

Priorité à droite basically means that any car pulling out from the right onto the road you are driving on takes priority over you. To explain, imagine you are driving down a straight road, you can see for miles in front of you, but, to your right, a road joins yours. A person arrives at the junction and you see him in plenty of time. However, what you don’t know is that this person has right-of-way over you, so can pull out in front of you and you have to stop to let them in, even though, for you, there are no road markings that suggest that it is a junction.

But unfortunately, its not as simple as that, because you should notice two things:

1. Some towns don’t apply this law
2. Not all junctions follow this rule even in towns that do apply the law

The only way you can know if the person arriving from the right has right of way over you is that there will be a Give Way sign and road markings. However, this is not always visible, so you are required to watch each junction as you approach it.
Lyon is a town where this law does not seem to be applied; let’s say that I haven’t come across such a junction in any case. Here’s the catch though: I live in a town, which, although on the outkirts, is part of the city. However, the town which is 100m down that road is not part of Lyon, which means that, guess what, it does apply the priorité à droite law. But not everywhere.

So yesterday I was driving to the tip (who doesn’t make a few trips to the tip on a rare day off work?), when, I realised that the law applied as I was nearly - but luckily not quite - shunted from the side - the side that my son happened to be sitting on. Another catch in the law is that, if you are French, the only way to pull out blind onto a main road is to studiously avoid looking at what is approaching from your left. This means for me, as an untrusting person, I look at the person pulling out in order to guess whether they will chicken out or not. In most cases though, they don’t even bother to look left for fear of getting into some kind of standoff.

Once, I was driving along a straight road and slowed down for the driver approaching from my right. However, the driver refused to pull out in front of me and we both inched forward, me not wanting to break the law, he not wanting to get shunted by me. Why didn’t I drive on? Well because I have even heard of cases where in a similar standoff position, the person arriving from the right gave the impression that they were waiting, only to pull out as the other car started to move forward. Why? Because the car arriving from the right is in the right (if you see what I mean) and they can use this if they want to get a bit of money out of the insurance company. But this might be an apocryphal story.

A friend summed it up: it’s as if every junction should be treated as a roundabout. That is correct, however, in France, on a roundabout you give way to the left!

Go figure.

I mentioned a long time ago that my son had got himself elected to the local council, campaigning on a green agenda (OK, that’s over-blowing it a bit, but he did ask for bigger recycling bins). His enthusiasm has waned a bit in the meantime as he’s called to various events when he would rather be outside kicking a football. However, last weekend, as a member of the “Environment” sub-committee, he was required to take part in an organised litter-picking exercise. This involved taking black bin-liners and picking up the litter on the street, weighing it and publicising the results. All very worthy, so I decided to help out.

This post will describe the event - not only those directly related, but something that happened as a result of my participation. Intrigued? Not really? Well, read on anyway.

It was last Saturday morning and it was pouring down - not a steady drizzle, but a real downpour. This dissuaded many people from taking part (either that or apathy). So there were 5 parents with 30 children to manage. We were allocated parts of town to target and to set off at 9AM (”Don’t pick up any syringes”), meeting back at 11:30AM for the weigh-in. I was allocated a group of 6 children (not including my son), and off we went. One of the children (10 years old) proudly informed me that last year he had found a condom and a bottle of urine, so I was on my guard. Our town is not a particularly scruffy one (probably quite the opposite) but we were soon on the way to filling 3 large bin-liners, mostly with beer bottles and Coke cans (thankfully no condoms, but a bottle of water with contents that did look suspiciously like urine). By 10:00, everybody was soaked and enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I managed to get them to go down a couple more streets, promising that we would get back to the town hall where no doubt we would be greeted with wine and Coke (obviously placing the empty bottles in the recycling bin afterwards rather than throwing them in a ditch at the side of the road).

It’s 10:30 and we arrive back at the town-hall - nobody is there, the doors are locked, we are all soaked and my back is killing me from all the bending over. What should I do? Four kids moaning (the 2 others were friends who tagged along for the ride and had long since gone home) and still one hour to go before we are due back. Next door to the town hall is a theatre, but that is locked, but at least it has a bit of shelter in front of the main door. There’s nothing for it: if in doubt call your wife to help out. She suggested that we bring them back to the house and let them play on the Wii for half an hour or so while they dried off. An excellent idea, so along she came and we were soon back in the house.

However, in the meantime, unbeknownst to me, the parents of one of the children in the group had called the organisers to see where their son was so that they could take him home and get him dried before the lunch that was organised for afterwards (any event in France is always followed by a meal and wine of some kind). In order to help them, they also wanted to know which area of town he was in. Unfortunately, the response of the organiser was, “erm, I don’t know who they were with, but it was a man that I don’t know and I don’t have his contact details”. Put yourself in their position now: you don’t know where or with whom your son is and when he might be coming back. What do you do? Their reaction, perfectly understandably, was to call the parents of all the other children in the group and follow up with a call to the police, engendering mass panic.

So now a posse is forming, anxiously looking for any sign of the children around town. We, of course, are holed up in my house, playing Mario Kart. Because they are having such a good time, we don’t manage to get away in order to arrive exactly at 11:30, so arrive back at the meeting point at 11:40. I fail to understand the gasps as I arrive back with the children and have to explain myself, feeling more and more uncomfortable as I explain to a large group of parents that I had taken their children back to my house “to dry off”. In fact I felt sick as I said the words. The only thing that made the story less paedophilic was that my wife had been with me, but even that might not wash.

Anyway, having seen me, and seeing that my son was there (and wasn’t denying that he was my child), my explanation was accepted and the tension lowered. The organiser then realised that in fact, silly me, of course they were with Monsieur Soggers! This, as you can imagine did not make me feel any better at all, knowing what, unwittingly, I had put the parents through.

I was due to stay for lunch and to join them in the afternoon for a walk, but I admit that I felt slightly sick, made my excuses and left. I think that it must have taken some time for the organiser to realise the impact of her words, because it was only this morning that she sent me an email, asking me to accept her heartfelt apologies and hoping that she hadn’t caused too much embarrassment. Well, actually, yes you did, but I’ll get over it.

And so, you might be asking, how much litter did we collect: I haven’t got a bloody clue.

…falls mainly on Barcelona it seems.

Two months ago, I organised a surprise weekend away with my wife for her birthday. I chose Barcelona because I figured that you could fairly much guarantee sunshine in mid-May. Or so I thought. You would not believe the planning that went into it - I shipped the kids off for the weekend, even engineering an “unexpected family event” to get the kids out of school for the Friday (hey parents, don’t you ever try this, it could have lasting detrimental effects on your child’s well-being. Maybe).

We flew off on Friday afternoon in glorious sunshine. We were a little surprised when the pilot announced that the weather was “not so good on the ground, with a light drizzle and temperatures of 16°C”. When we got off the plane, we were greated with driving rain and were soaked before we even got into the airport terminal…

…and so it continued…for 2 days…non-stop. I have never been so wet in my life. You couldn’t even marvel at the unfinished Gaudi-inspired cathedral because you couldn’t see the top, whether it be for the rain or the unbroken sea of umbrellas.

To top it all, we were in a bit of a rush to get back to the airport for the flight back, so asked the helpful staff at the train station which platform we needed to go to. Without hesitation he said “9″. In fact he was totally correct. We arrived at the platform and jumped on the train as the doors were closing. As we made our way to the airport, we recognised all the landmarks that we had seen on the way in - a piece of graffiti here, a discarded shopping trolley there. However, just as quickly as the airport loomed into view, it loomed out of it again as the train continued. And continued. In fact, it continued for another 40 minutes. In fact, we didn’t check that there were two different trains alternating from platform 9. Guess what - we chose the wrong one. The upside is that we got to see some nice bits of Spanish coastline as we headed down towards Portugal!

When it finally stopped, we managed to get back onto a train heading back to Barcelona straight-away and somehow back to the airport with minutes to spare, only to be confronted by a massive queue to get through airport security. Having none of that, my wife cut through the crowd, heading straight for the front, with me in tow, timidly apologising and humphing along the lines of “what can you do? She’s French and hasn’t grasped the concept of queuing”.

When I was 23, I headed off round the world on my own with a rucksack for company. I think that person is long gone.

Nobody believes it, but I am deaf. My wife says it’s selective hearing, but I choose not to listen to her.

I was reminded of my deafness today. It not being England, May tends to bring out the sunshine, so we went off to the restaurant for lunch. No space outside meant that we had to eat inside the restaurant, where it was already quite loud and busy. It is in exactly this circumstance where I am reminded that I have tinnitus and that French is not my language. If you are in a similar situation, but where people are speaking your native language, you can generally follow the conversation, filling in the gaps even if you don’t catch all of the words. However, if it is not your language, you have to concentrate that bit more in order to put things together or formulate an answer - at least, that’s what I have to do. And I can tell you that it can be very tiring.

Today, as the conversation whipped around the table, it was all I could do to keep up with things - a constant, loud background noise meant that I could barely hear what was being said. It was all I could do to watch the visual signs, laugh wholeheartedly at the correct moment and give nodding encouragement or frown at the right moment, taking my cue from the others around the table and hoping that I hadn’t got things wrong, laughing as a colleague described his mother’s funeral, that type of thing. I felt like I was inside a fish bowl, looking out at the people, seeing their mouths move, hearing a sound that sounded mostly like “Flob-a-lob”.

It’s always been there, but having to make an conscious effort to follow a conversation brings it,  unlike the words, sharply into focus. Once, many years ago, a friend confessed to me that she found me aggressive when we were in a group sitting in the pub. I think it is because, in order to hear better, I need to lean across the table into the conversation and this can come over as aggressive. Or maybe it’s the wild gesticulating and snarling features. I don’t know.
Every night, I go to bed, where, instead of silence, I am treated to a high-pitched screech in my left ear, and a low-pitched hum in the right ear. It’s funny how it’s a constant companion, but you don’t even know it’s there until exactly the point you don’t want to know it’s there.

Luckily though, as I am writing this, I am sat on the terrace as the sun goes down, listening to the birds singing. I’ll enjoy it while I can. “What’s that, shift your arse and wash the pots? Sorry darling, I can’t hear you”.