In the letterbox there's a letter from the phone company. Our broadband is being upgraded to fibre. As a result the lane is ( for the first time in history ) to be given a name and The Rickety Old Farmhouse ( for the first time in its history ) given a number. The fibre optic company insists that every house have a number and every street a name for billing purposes. Our village of 67 inhabitants moves into the modern era although any indication of when all of this will happen is left gloriously vague.
After breakfast dog and master wander down to the stream for a drink. Goodness only knows what has been standing on the banks of the stream overnight but Sophie is in no hurry to leave. She sniffs away happily. We amble homewards along the roman road. The cows wander over to see us . My companion positions herself so that Angus is between her and these bovine interlopers. Our pace picks up.
The local paper has a story of a man 20 miles south of here who was driving along a country when he was hit in the head by a bullet from a hunters rifle. In the UK hunters use shotguns with pellets that lose their lethality after a hundred or so metres. Here in France the septuagenarian and octogenarian hunting folk use high powered rifles with bullets and a range of a kilometre or so. The political chance of regulating them is exactly zero. They are a powerful lobby.
Great BBC article on dogs :https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211105-the-bizarre-dog-breeds-time-forgot
'Masks on'. German military pomp during Covid times :https://youtu.be/n-puuL5Nbcc?t=2440
14 comments:
I'm impressed that fibre broadband is extending to your little village in France profonde.
On dog breeds, I read the book referenced in the article, 'The Invention of the Modern Dog' by Michael Worboys, a couple of years ago and would recommend it to the other dog lovers who read this blog.
In rural New Zealand, our house numbers are derived as to the distance we are from the start of the road we live on, ie we are 5.6kms from the beginning of Mangamahu Road so, therefore our property is 566 Mangamahu Road.
Supposedly, useful for emergency services, but considering our distance from our nearest town/hospital/fire service/police, the point is academic.
Thank you I shall get on to Amazon and order a copy.
Having a street name and house number will make filling in on line delivery instructions much simpler. Algorithms don't like addresses without streets or numbers.
Will the choice of street name be cause for new divisions in the village? Unless it's something like Grand' Rue (don't laugh, the Grand' Rue in my old village was as wide as I am tall, which is not very. One car at a time).
Re hunters, the president of the national hunter's federation, Willy Schraen, said, after another hunter gravely injured a passing car driver on a four-lane highway near Rennes, that "zero risk doesn't exist" and that a hedge between the hunting grounds and the highway should have stopped the high-caliber bullet. In other words, they really don't care who gets hurt.
They imposed a new street name and a house number on us about 4 years ago. A price I’d have been happy to pay for any form of broadband at all
Because of a spelling mistake in one letter of our house name delivery drivers insist that we are not on satnav , this causes frustration both to us and the drivers . We are expecting broadband next year so maybe we will a number or the little lane a name .
You'll be ahead of us in Tokyo with your street names and numbers. We don't have a formal street name, although we can tell taxi drivers we want to go to the intersection of Dark Slope, Badger Slope and Single Pine Tree Slope, and that will usually get us home (unless the taxi drivers are recent migrants from the countryside). And buildings in Tokyo are numbered in the order in which they were constructed. I enjoyed the dog article very much. One of the interesting things this past year has been seeing the difference between a real herding breed and a breed that has been bred as a companion for centuries. Cherry was always, always working to protect her flock (even if that sometimes that involved disciplining her humans), whereas Charlie generally believes that we live to serve. His duck retriever origins do surface whenever he sees water, however, and he has recently taken to patrolling the house, loudly, late at night. I sometimes wonder whether Cherry is reaching out and trying to train him as some sort of inept junior PON.
Oh Sophie, still no sign of the refillable yoghurt pot?
Outside the town centre here, building land (formerly terraced farming land) is divided up into areas, and all the roads follow old goatherd tracks, The whole urbanisation is divided into three main areas I, II and III, and each sub-division is given a letter of the alphabet, then each individual plot is given a number. We don't have street names, and the divisions are lettered somewhat randomly - my house is on G, but the houses opposite are D, and those above them are K! Houses immediately below mine, on the same parcel of land are also G, but the ones opposite those are C! Hopeless giving anyone my address without precise instructions where to find the house. When we first came here and gave our change of address we had several official letters from the UK demanding a correct English style address. They would not accept our Spanish address, and nor would the computer occasionally. Friends in the next town however, are blessed with two street names and two house numbers!
We have hunters here, too, in the valley below , and on occasions we locals have found spent cartridges in the road, and in our gardens - far too near to be safe. The hunters are such macho men and in the absence of boars, shoot the little birds! What a pity the birds can't shoot back.
We may have an address, but on our road, we are a bit away from being upgraded to fibre. I think our "new Governor" is supposed to help change that. We'll see who gets it first, you or us.
Just in from la Dépêche: The same Willy Schraen now says that hunters should "partner" with the police to "fight against rural and environmental delinquence"!!!!!!!!
https://www.ladepeche.fr/2021/11/14/chasse-pour-willy-schraen-les-chasseurs-ont-un-role-a-jouer-en-matiere-de-police-de-proximite-9926753.php?M_BT=38043163467#xtor=EPR-1-[newsletter]-20211114-[classique]
Our house in the Loire was given a number a couple of years ago. We arrived back from a visit to the UK to find a number 4 stuck to the gatepost. In the letterbox was a letter confirming that our house is now number 2 - the number stuck on our neighbour's door. Numbers 1 and 3 do not exist as there are only two in the hamlet but we pursued the error with the Mairie and a couple of days later the two sticky numbers, ours and the neighbours, were swapped over!
Were I grew up, on the farm, around the corner from the rickety old farmhouse my grandparents lived in, we were simply Rural Route 2. I was in about the second grade when we received a house number. The road had long had a name.
They always have an answer !
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