Cold Calling Fraudsters

Cold calling fraudsters are a notorious menace in France.  Many people simply don't answer their landlines and habitually let them go through to the answer machine. We do answer our home phone, because about 50% of the time it is someone we know or want to speak to. Normally we simply hang up on the cold callers. Technically it is illegal to call French numbers to try to sign householders up for government sponsored insulation or heat pumps, but of course, that doesn't stop the practice. And some of them are very credible. They are polite and personable. Usually we just hang up on them when it becomes clear that they are not legit. But sometimes it is not so clear, and the other day I got caught to the extent of giving personal information like my tax file number (numéro fiscal) to the caller. I kicked myself afterwards of course.

 

Heritage carrot.

The clue should have been the polite, patient but persistant questions requesting information about me, my circumstances and the house. I should have just hung up, but they claimed to be from Ma Prime Rénov, and as it happened I did actually want to talk to Ma Prime Renov. I allowed myself to be sucked in because it seemed like too good a chance to miss.

Jane preparing to serve mulled wine at the end of a walk.

Once I got off the phone I got a questioning from Simon and then set about protecting us from whatever fraud it is that was the aim of the game. I assume it is a scam to get enough details to apply for a grant from Ma Prime Rénov whilst claiming to be me. I asked various contacts what I should do to protect myself. The advice was to change the password for my online tax office account, tell them, the bank, Ma Prime Rénov and the police.

Salon, Chateau de Candé.

The bank assures me the scammers would need more than they have to get access to my account. Ma Prime Rénov told me that no account existed on their records for either me or my tax file number, but that I should check again in a few days just in case. The tax office messagerie was down so I changed the password, but didn't get a message to them until the next day.

Detail of the stableblock at the Domaine de Candé.

I rang our local police station and got automatically transferred to the emergency switchboard, because it was lunchtime. The police officer I spoke to told me to ring my local police station again after lunch and make an appointment with them, which I did. 

Both the jug and the carafe hold the same amount of liquid.

The local police officer I spoke to offered to see me immediately, so off we went. I formally reported the incident, which in France is called making a 'main courante'. That means the incident is logged, and can be used later if I wanted to lodge a complaint and pursue legal activity. The police officer said that actually in these cases usually nothing further eventuates.

The centre of Le Grand Pressigny.

So far it appears that we have suffered no ill-consequences of me being too trusting, but it is a reminder that even in the season of goodwill not everybody is who they say they are.

Danielle wearing leggings.

This post includes entirely random photos which have nothing to do with the subject matter in the text.

Mamie Bigoude

 

Mamie Bigoude is one of a small chain of quirkily decorated restaurants in the Touraine Loire Valley. We ate at the Chambray les Tours branch with friends for my birthday this year and we have been there several times before. 

The treasure hunt led the kids with their staff attendant to the washing machine.

Tourists often ask on travel forums for recommendations of child friendly restaurants in France. Well, Mamie Bigoude not only has a kiddie menu, but it has a kids' play area, with an attendant. While we were there it was the weekend before Christmas so the attendant had plenty of kids to entertain and she was doing a treasure hunt.

The service is friendly and the food good value for money.

The ceiling of our booth.

An Organ Recital With a Difference

The curator waxing lyrical about a bakelite connection unit, without dozens of which the organ could not function.

For my birthday recently we went to the Domaine de Candé for one of their occasional and intimate organ recitals. Candé is in a somewhat unusual position that the Skinner organ in the library of the chateau is a listed monument, but the building itself is not. It means that they have had to be exceptionally creative in terms of how they access funding and how they keep the place running.

Stableblock.

The Skinner organ is one of only about 15 in the world and the only one in Europe which is in full working order. It was installed in the chateau by Charles Bedaux and Fern Lombard Bedaux in 1929. Fern was apparently a talented soprano, who might have had a professional career if she had not married. Neither of them were organ players though, and they used the organ's extensive collection of song rolls. The organ is a combination of house organ, church organ and theatre organ, and can be played manually or automatically. It is so powerful that I'm told it can be heard at the secret atomic research facility 3 kilometres away.

Gobelins curtains in the salon.

Curiously, once the organ was installed, the Bedaux's don't seem to have done any maintenance, despite how delicate and complex the instrument is. The pipes in the attic were open to the corridor in the servants quarters, not scrupulously protected from dust with a glass viewing partition as there is today after the restoration in 2010. One of the reasons the organ is played regularly is that it blows the dust out of connections.

We noticed for the first time that the door and doorway into the music room appears to have been altered but we don't know why or when.

On my birthday it was very cold, and the chateau interior had been heated to comfort levels for the audience of twelve people. It was misbehaving because it prefers to be cold and doesn't like changes in temperatures and humidity. Organs in churches don't suffer from this problem because they are always cold, and church organists have to get used to it.

The organist from Eglise St Cyr et St Julitte in St Cyr sur Loire playing the house organ in the library of the Chateau de Candé.

One recent change to the organ's operating arrangements was triggered by the fire in Notre-Dame de Paris. The bellows have been moved from the roof space to down where they can be more easily monitored, and modified to be more modern. The original bellows has two dynamos that throw sparks and it was feared that they might cause a fire in the roof.

There are nearly 2000 organ pipes, now protected behind a partition in the attic. The wooden louvres on the right are operated by the organist and control the level of volume that comes down the shaft into the library where the audience sits.

The curator was telling me that she has worked at the site for 15 years now. She can remember when the salon was empty except for a television. The television has now gone and the room has Fern Bedaux's furniture reinstated. When the property was gifted to the nation on Fern's death, all the furniture was removed to the National Furniture Collection as the chateau was not in a fit state to be open to the public. As a result, some of it has not come back to Candé.  Some government minister is using Charles Bedaux's desk, so the one in his study is a replacement. None of the furniture in Fern's bedroom is hers either, as she gave away more personal things to friends. The dining room table is from the Chateau of Plessis at Ballan-Miré, and the table from Candé is in the Chateau of Azay le Rideau, also owned by the State and furnished from the National Furniture Collection. 

 

View from one of the attic windows.

The curator would dearly like to get her hands on the FBI archive that has details of the arrest at the end of the Second World War and the death in custody of Charles Bedaux, but unfortunately she just doesn't have the budget. Because the property's budget is precarious and dependent on being linked to the organ, this interesting chateau has taken a long time to find its place, and is still almost unknown. Unlike the other more famous Loire Valley chateaux, which look back to the Renaissance, the Chateau of Candé represents the period between the Wars and the Nouveau Riche. It is a glimpse into a way of life most associated with the lost glamour of the Titanic, with its mix of the expensive wood panelling and luxury textiles from the 19th century blended with rare surviving gymnasium machines from the early 20th century and American style plumbing and telephone system.

In the dining room.

The console of the organ.

A corner of the corridor in the servants' quarters in the attic.

Detail of some of the organ controls.

A Ceremonial Cradle

 

These berceau d'apparat as they are known in French became a must have item for high status and pretentious parents. 19th century ones, as I assume this one is, are usually made of mahogany, and with their fanciful shapes and designs they look thoroughly unsafe, even for the newborns they were intended for. The most well known and ostentatious of them all dates from 1811, a gift from the City of Paris for Napoleon's son. 

This one can be seen in the Five Queens Bedroom of the Chateau of Chenonceau. Cradles like this are not intended for daily use, but for presenting a high status newborn baby to the world in a ceremonial way.

Oyster Mushrooms

Guanglai Zhang uses a Japanese technique for cultivating his mushrooms, unique in France.

At the fungi exhibition in Sainte Maure de Touraine in November one of the contributors was Guanglai Zhang who runs Bio-champi, a company producing fungi for Chinese traditional medicine and supplements, from the former army base at Nouatre. At the end of the event he gave me about a kilo of oyster mushrooms Pleurotus sp. I used them in a mushroom and chard quiche, braised chicken with leeks and mushrooms and a mushroom ragout. Simon used some in a beef and black bean stir-fry.

Guanglai Khang talking to some exhibition visitors about Bio-champi.

Cultivated oyster mushroom rosettes from Bio-champi.

Oyster mushrooms being cooked for ragout.

Homemade mushroom and chard quiche.

Merry Christmas

 

Wishing all our readers a very merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year.

Meeting in the Cold

Last week I was at a meeting of the refugee support association in the dark in the Preuilly community centre, this week it was the botany and mycology association meeting for 3 hours in an unheated meeting room in the community centre in Sainte Maure de Touraine when it was -1C outside. 

Actually last week there was no heating either, but that wasn't so noticeable, as it wasn't so cold outside. At least this week it was daylight, but frustratingly, the building next door, where our storeroom is located, was heated to sauna like temperatures.

The Nymphaeum Needs Saving

The nymphaeum at Grand-Pressigny, acquired in 2021 by the 'county' of Indre-et-Loire, will soon be restored. Which is just as well, as it is looking very sad and sorry at the moment, suffering from poor previous restorations, the effects of weather and neglect, and vandalism. Local kids have been climbing all over the site and have damaged the ugly modern concrete block buttresses. The building is now clearly dangerous and has been cordoned off from public access.

A unique site in Indre et Loire, rare on a national scale, a nymphaeum is a Renaissance construction of Italian inspiration with refined architecture and enhanced by paintings and sculptures. It is equipped with an elaborate hydraulic network with basins and fountains. Left abandoned until the 19th century, the building was largely used as architectural salvage and partly dismantled to recover  the stones. 

In 2004, a rescue operation saved the vault and the northern façade, which had been badly damaged. With the new restoration the façade will regain its architectural brilliance. This rebirth will be accompanied by the restitution of a part of the hydraulic network with its central basin. Stone benches will allow visitors to sit and admire the building. A staircase and a terrace will replace the current buttresses. Access will be facilitated and a link will be established with the chateau in order to give a feeling of the original arrangement. 

It forms part of the continuing development of Grand-Pressigny, and enriches visitor experience at the Museum of Prehistory, housed in the chateau.

Foresters Sound the Alarm

This is a reworked version of a post that was originally published in September 2015.

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Six million cubic metres of wood are produced in the Centre-Val de Loire region annually.

A private firewood pile.

 

Whilst the market for lumber has stagnated, with prices not having changed for 30 years [I suspect that this is no longer the case, and that prices have increased in recent years], the market for wood as a bio-fuel has really taken off in the last few years [and everything in this post about bio-fuels still applies].

Firewood in the Forest of Preuilly.

 

This has led to concerns expressed by the President of the Union of Private Foresters that without a unified management plan the Touraine risks deforestation. He has told his 440 members that if they opportunistically cut their woods for fuel without succession planning, bio-fuel is a mirage. Wood has already been in short supply for several years.

A parcel in the Forest of Preuilly managed for both lumber and firewood.

 

The development of power plants using wood-chip (Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, Orleans that partially serves the Touraine, and [maybe] soon Descartes) led some owners to develop coppice which allows a short rotation cycle. Long term though it exhausts the soil because it consumes a lot of nitrogen. The president of the Private Foresters Union, Antoine Reille, believes that the supply of wood chip is not well managed and wood that is still wet is often being burned. Although he doesn't say so, I suspect that there is also a problem with much smaller diameter wood now having a commercial value and being removed, whereas before it would have been left to rot and replenish the soil, even on sites that are being clearfelled.

A parcel of young oak trees in the Forest of Preuilly.

 

Reille is not ignoring the delicate balancing act required to ensure cash flow in the short, medium and long term. Coppice will make useable firewood in 25 years, a standard oak tree takes 80 years. But he feels that the market is only going to expand and there should be a sensible overarching management plan for the private forests.

A walking trail in the section of the Preuilly Forest put aside for leisure activities.

 

The Arbocentre Wood Energy Sector Manager is more optimistic. He acknowledges how tempting it is to seize the opportunity offered by bio-fuel. He believes the way forward is to set up a simple management plan and code of forestry practice. Included in this must be plots that are currently being stripped bare with no succession plan and profits must be reinvested in the forests of the future so there is no risk of deforestation.

He also thinks the demand for bio-fuel will slow down. At the moment the two existing power plants consume 30 000 tonnes of wood and don't have much potential for increasing that. In addition any increase won't be at the sort of rate the foresters have experienced in the recent past. The market took off very rapidly but it's a recent phenomenon of only 5 years. The evolution will be slower. 

I should point out that all the photos here were taken by us in the Forest of Preuilly, which is mostly managed by the very professional Office for National Forests and none of the issues discussed above apply. Also probably none of the wood shown above will be destined for wood chip, it will be to supply private households with wood burning stoves. There are private parcels in the forest though and I can't vouch for the management approach to all of them. 

I should also point out that the Descartes bio-fuel power plant that would have consumed more than six times the other two put together as well as waste from the paper mill was due to have opened soon after this post was originally written but seems never to have got off the ground.

Visiting Accident and Emergency in Amboise

No, don't panic. We weren't having an accident or an emergency. Quite the contrary. I was there to meet the Tete d'urgences, Dr Alain Deilgat. This had come about because I received a request from a client who wanted to research some elements of the novel she is writing. Part of the plot involves an ambulance and she wanted to see inside a French ambulance. 

The x-ray room in the Accident and Emergency unit at Amboise Hospital.

 

I wasn't at all sure I could organise such a thing, but then I remembered that my friend Antoinette teaches English at Amboise hospital. I put her on the job and she put me in touch with Patricia, the Head of HR at the hospital. Patricia basically did the rest, acting as an intermediary and setting up an appointment with Dr Deilgat for me and my client.

Patients are monitored in this room before a decision is made to admit them to the hospital or send them home.

 

We were warmly welcomed at the Hospital, a medium sized establishment with 100 beds, a psychiatric unit and an accident and emergencies service. Dr Deilgat explained how the service worked, telling us that there were 6 specialist emergency doctors who were rostered on two at a time 24/7. He said they got called out on average about three times a day. 

Patient recovery room.

 

First he showed us the various rooms where patients could be x-rayed, monitored, tested and examined. He explained that when someone rang 15, the French medical emergency number, a doctor and nurse would be dispatched in a car filled with medical equipment, known as SMUR.  They assess the patient and can treat them, but cannot transport them. If the incident was a car accident, then a big red fully equipped ambulance with driver and paramedic would be dispatched from the fire station. If the incident was domestic then a big white private ambulance with driver and paramedic would be sent. In larger centres, such as Tours, they have SAMU (Service d'Aide Medicale Urgente) vehicles and staff which are similar to the fire brigade ambulances, but based at the big hospitals. Depending on circumstances the doctor and/or the nurse may accompany the patient in the big ambulance on the return journey to the hospital. There are other vehicles known as ambulances, but they are really more like taxis, being private vehicles contracted to transport patients to and from medical appointments and outpatients when necessary.

We were curious about this banner and asked Dr Deilgat what the problem was. He said the service was being squeezed in terms of space and resources. He was very clear, it was not about more money for the staff -- they are adequately paid and if they wanted more would push off into private practice. But they were struggling to do their jobs to the best of their abilities because of space constraints.

 

My client and I found all this fascinating, and we both learned a lot. We were both really impressed at how kind and obliging everyone was. Luckily while we were there no real emergencies happened, but we did get to speak to a teenager who had torn a finger ligament in a rugby game and had been brought in by his mum. And one of the SMUR vehicles and a pompier (fire brigade) vehicle drove off as we arrived.  Throughout the visit we all wore masks of course, and Dr Deilgat told us that all patients were tested for Covid in the ambulance. The intake nurse would then send them through one set of rooms if they were Covid free and another set if they had tested positive.

PPE storeroom.

 

Best of all, one of the big white private ambulances turned up to deliver a patient, then very kindly allowed us to peer into the vehicle, ask questions about how the team worked in them, and to take photos. 

Dr Deilgat in the ambulance.

 

A big thank you to everyone involved!

Big white private ambulance.

Venison at Christmas

 

Me carving 'une gigue', our roast haunch of venison for Christmas from a few years ago.

Some years ago, on this day, at the butcher's in Preuilly the woman in front of me was collecting her Christmas dinner order. It was a boned rolled leg of venison. Thierry the butcher took so long describing two different ways of cooking it that the digital read out on his scales timed out and he had to weigh it again to get the price. (Marinate it in lots of red wine, with carrots and onions, then oven roast or pot roast. Don't overcook and serve slightly pink. Too many people overcook venison. That's his advice, but I don't think she listened too closely -- her husband was going to cook it, on Christmas Eve.) I caused a lively discussion by asking why a leg of venison is 'une gigue',  when a leg of lamb is 'un gigot'. 'Bonne question !' apparently, but no one in the shop had the answer. To make matters even more complicated, the word 'gigue' only applies to roe deer legs. A red deer leg is 'un cuissot'. Our chef friend Jean-Michel later added some more to the list -- wild boar (sanglier) also has 'un cuissot'; veal (veau) has 'un cuisseau' (pronounced the same as 'un cuissot') and beef (boeuf) has 'une cuisse'; whereas pork (porc) has 'un jambon'. There are lots of other words for 'leg' in French, like 'patte' and 'jambe' as well, and depending on what sort of creature you are talking about, you use a different word, especially in culinary French. 

Inside the butchers shop, Preuilly sur Claise.

Meeting in the Dark

Yolande and Valérie.

 

As I'm sure you've gathered, I'm on the committee of our local refugee support association, known as AARST. When I arrived for our last meeting, held in a syndicate room in the salle des fetes complex, the power was out and there were two elderly people stuck in the lift. They had been attending a jazz concert in the big main function room upstairs. Luckily someone arrived after about half an hour with a special key and they were released. But we held our meeting in the dark, lit by phone torches. Oh well, solidarity with Ukraine and all that...

Our formidable vice-president Nina, and president Christiane.

The power cut remains random and mysterious and the mayor was attempting to get to the bottom of it last I heard.

Les Entresols

An entresol is a level usually between the ground floor and the first floor of a building. They were originally designed to gain space above rooms that were not high status and did not require high ceilings. This type of entresol is often completely hidden on the facade, or presents an assymetrical facade. Entresols are distinguished from mezzanines because they are intermediate floors which are enclosed on the interior too, not open.

Entresols are essentially utilitarian, therefore their appearance on the exterior of the building is traditionally supposed to be as discreet as possible. But sometimes private houses have entresols that are obvious from the outside and decoratively treated.

Architects generally take the view that entresols should be as low on the building as possible, and it is considered ugly and out of proportion to set two entresols directly above one another.

Historically entresols are accessed by hidden staircases and discreet entrances. Often, for example there would be a shop on the ground floor, and residents could pass from there to an apartment in the entresol.

Initially designed for storage with lots of cupboards, they sometimes also had apartments for servants, with small but comfortable rooms. In some really big buildings the entresol was entirely dedicated to housing the staff who worked there.

In Paris, grand carriage entrances meant that the ground floor of 19th century buildings was very high and the first floor apartments were an entresol to compensate. On the exterior the facade was designed to look like the ground floor was one and a half times the height of the other floors, thus creating the characteristic appearance of Parisian avenues. Entresols had been used extensively in Paris since the 17th century, but the Haussmannian style of architecture really took advantage of them to create the unique architectural identity of Paris.

Tours, being a major provincial city, promptly copied the look along its main avenues, and all these photos come from central Tours. In all cases the entresol features big semi-circular windows.