The Bugle Dordogne - Jul 2013

French start-up launches fine wine in a can A French start-up is launching a range of canned red, white and rosé AOC wines in an atttempt to create a new and untapped market. >> Page 9

Dordogne July 2013 - Issue #1

USB Rugby crowned champions of France

NEWS - First same-sex marriage in Dordogne A local British man has made history as part of the Dordogne’s first ever samesex marriage >> Page 3

NEWS - E-cigarettes face ban

France looks set to impose new rules on e-cigarettes, effectively banning them in many public places >> Page 8

R

ugby fans in the Dordogne have been celebrating after Bergerac won the final of the Fédérale 3 championship in June to be crowned champions of France. With the 29-17 victory over Saint-Marcel, the “black and whites” also won promotion into the Fédérale 2, France’s 4th division of rugby.

The Fédérale 3 is split regionally into 16 pools of 10 teams.

© USB Rugby

BILINGUAL - A brief history of Le Tour

At the end of the season, the top 4 teams from each pool enter a knockout stage to decide the champion of France. The top 16 teams are promoted to the Fédérale 2. Not only did Bergerac win their pool with 77 points – 26 points clear of second placed Cahors, but they also won all their 5 of their knockout games to lift the national title.

>> continued on page 6

We take a look at the origins of the Tour de France and how this year's competitors have got it easy compared to 100 years ago! >> Page 16

WHAT’S ON IN JULY

3 pages of events to enjoy this summer from across the region >> Pages 21-23

2 ♦ IN THIS EDITION

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

Welcome to

H

The Bugle

ello and welcome to The Bugle Dordogne!!

If you’re reading this, then I guess you have found issue #1 of the latest edition of France’s ONLY free English language newspaper.

Some people will already be familiar with The Bugle as we have been producing a Limousin edition for the last 4 years, and I know a good number of the 13,000 copies we print every month make their way south of the border and into the Dordogne.

We are a free, monthly paper, distributed across the region at the beginning of each month, so be sure to look out for next month’s paper at the start of August!

The Bugle has proved to be a big success in the Limousin and we are very excited about bringing our unique brand of news, practical advice, events and more to the Dordogne.

You will hopefully not have too much trouble finding The Bugle across the department; we have printed 10,000 copies of this launch edition and it is available FOR FREE from over 200 points. In larger outlets such

as supermarkets, you will see our high-volume branded distribution stands and you will also find The Bugle at Bergerac Airport, where we will be distributing the newspaper from 4 separate locations. If you have somewhere local to you where you would like to see The Bugle, do let us know.

The Bugle is very much a community paper and we are a small family business - if you see someone around the region delivering papers then it will almost certainly be me.

Unfortunately, my 2 daughters are both too young to ride a bike without stabilisers, so it might be a bit cruel to send them out on the paper round just yet!

We value your input and feedback and we are always looking to serve the interests of the expat community. In the very near future, we will be running a Clubs, Charities & Associations section of the paper where any not-for-profit organisations can place a listing for free, so if you are part of a group, charity or club, please do get in touch with details that we can share with everyone.

One of the most popular

sections of our Limousin edition has always been the Letters to the Editor pages. If you’ve got anything you would like to get off your chest, we would love to hear from you (by email where possible). Equally, if you have any suggestions for what direction you would like to see this newspaper take, we are always open to new ideas.

Our philosophy at The Bugle is one of integration. Life in France can be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling and you do not need to speak fluent French to live here (although every little helps!) But we do believe that following what is going on in France, both locally and nationally, as well as getting a feel for French culture, is an essential part of a well-rounded expat life. As such, we always aim to focus on articles with a French slant – we do not cover stories from ‘back home’ unless they are international ones that also involve France.

I have spent a fair deal of time in the Dordogne in the last couple of months as we laid the groundwork for this new edition.

It is a very beautiful department, but has a completely different

feel to the north of the Limousin where I live. I have always found it strange how different areas of France can look so different, even when they are not really so far from each other.

A few years back I broke my wrist. (I would like to tell you that I did so rescuing a little old lady from a mugger, but in actual fact it was on one of those arcade games where you see how hard you can hit the ‘soft’ punch bag!) I had to make several trips to a specialist in Clermont-Ferrand and each time I noticed how almost as soon as you crossed over into the Auvergne, the stonework of the houses and the style of roof tiles changed completely. It is literally like you have crossed into a different country. I am very much looking forward to discovering more of the Dordogne as I travel around the area with the paper.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this first edition!

Until next month!

Steve Martindale, Editor

INSIDE this edition 1 & 3-6 Local News 7-11 National News 12-15 French Life 16 Bilingual 17-19 Directory 20 Language/Games 21-24 What's On

CONTACT us Tel: 05.55.41.17.76 General: editor@thebugle.eu Advertising (EN): sales24@thebugle.eu Publicité (FR): publicite@thebugle.eu Subscriptions: subscriptions24@thebugle.eu Editor: Steve Martindale Write to: The Bugle Les Quatre Chemins 23150 St-Yrieix-les-Bois France

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LOCAL NEWS ♦ 3

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

Dordogne holds its first same-sex marriage

I

n May this year, France became the 13th country in the world to legally recognise same-sex marriage.

This was one of President François Hollande’s key election pledges and has been hailed as the most significant social change in France since the death penalty was abolished in 1981.

Since the bill came into law, same-sex marriages have been taking place across the country and June saw the first happy couple in the Dordogne tie the knot - and the ceremony had a distinctly British flavour, involving an Anglo-French couple.

Paul first met his husband Olivier over 30 years ago while holidaying in Wales with friends. At the time Olivier was working in the hotel where he was staying; it was love at first sight and the couple have been together ever since.

After many years in the UK, they eventually moved to France and have spent the last 11 years living in the quiet commune of St-Hilaire-d’Estissac.

“We chose to move to France principally for its open-mindedness,” Paul told The Bugle. “We found this area completely by chance and have been really well accepted by the local community.”

The couple had previously signed a PACS agreement in 2010. The PACS in France is a form of civil union between two adults, but which falls short of the rights and protections covered by marriage. At the time, a PACS was the only option available to gay couples. Once

same-sex marriage became legal, it was an option Paul and Olivier were keen to pursue.

Speaking to The Bugle, Paul said that they had not set out to become the first gay marriage in the Dordogne, nor indeed did they even know that was the case at the time. “It was simply down to logistics!”

Paul explained. “We knew we wanted to get married, but we run a busy gîte business and that was the only slot we had free all summer. If we hadn’t done it then, we would have had to wait until the end of the year.”

Legalising same-sex marriage has at times been controversial in France.

When the bill was being debated in parliament, despite the majority of the population being in favour, it provoked mass public protests. According to organisers, one rally in Paris opposing the new law attracted 800,000 protestors.

But did Paul and Olivier face any local opposition?

According to Paul: “Certainly not, quite the opposite in fact. Everyone couldn’t have been nicer.

We had more than 100 guests at the wedding and we even received letters of congratulations from people we had never met, not to mention the incredible support of our commune’s mayor, Mme Jeammet!” ■

Irish man jailed for string of thefts

A 55-year-old Irish man has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for a series of thefts across the Dordogne and surrounding departments. Gary Michael Richards appeared before magistrates in Périgueux in June and was found guilty on 40 counts of robbery, 6 attempted robberies and one count of stolen identity.

Between 2010 and 2012, the man in question broke into second homes, as well as primary residences, across the Dordogne, but also targeted households in the Gironde, Landes, Corrèze and Pyrénées-Atlantiques. The motive in each case was either food, somewhere to sleep or the theft of jewellery or other items of value.

Mr Richards travelled around by bicycle, selling on the haul of his thefts to a jeweller in Bordeaux. He was eventually apprehended in Savignac-de-Nontron on the 28th April last year and told police that he was being guided by the voice of Joan of Arc. Finding him guilty, the judge sentenced the man to 2 years in prison for the series of thefts and a further 3 months for the stolen identity. ■

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4 ♦ LOCAL NEWS

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Bergerac Airport is having one of its best years in recent memory, with 32,698 passengers travelling through the doors in the month of May, the highest number since 2008. “The target of 300,000 passengers for the calendar year is still on the cards,” said Christophe Fauvel, president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry for the Dordogne. “The 5 airlines that currently serve Bergerac-Roumanières Airport have already carried 76,893 travellers in the first 5 months of the year.”

Some of the increase in passenger figures has been down to the new Ryanair route to the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. The flights have not only attracted locals in search of sunshine, but are also proving popular with the region’s Moroccan expat community. There is a significant Moroccan population in the Dordogne, an estimated 4,000 in total, with an even greater number in the neighbouring Lot-et-Garrone department.

The Moroccan consulate in Bordeaux covers 11 departments in the south-west of France, where the expat population is an estimated 80,000. “For expats, as well as Europeans, this line is responding to a demand and a need,” explained the consulate.

Although the line has only been operating since the beginning of May, it offers a more practical alternative to more established routes from Bordeaux and Toulouse, as evidenced by a couple travelling recently to a wedding in Marrakesh: “We didn’t know that this was such a new line, but it worked out great for us.”

The latest link could also prove beneficial to the estimated 250 businesses in the Aquitaine region that currently have established commercial links with Morocco. ■

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nyone who lives in or has visited the Dordogne will testify that it is a beautiful department, but nothing speaks louder than facts: 10 of its villages are listed among the 157 “Most Beautiful Villages of France”. Given that there are 96 departments in mainland France, this number is disproportionately high.

In June, inspectors from the Plus Beaux Villages de France association visited the area to visit Domme and the Dordogne’s most recent edition, Castelnaud-la-Chapelle.

Germinal Peiro, mayor of the village of 470 inhabitants since 1983, clearly remembers the day his village was inducted in 2010.

“We were accepted at the third attempt,” recounts the mayor. “It was a massive source of pride for Castelnaud-la-Chapelle.

It was a fantastic achievement, even though we realised that being chosen was just the beginning!”

The idea for the guide came about in 1981 and a year later the first book was published containing 66 villages. Today the association includes 157 villages, spread over 21 regions and 69 departments, but does not give out its accolades lightly.

“At most, one in five villages that applies is accepted,” explained the group’s president, Maurice Chabert. The challenge, he says, is to avoid the pitfalls of the soulless “museum village” or, at the other extreme, of the “theme park”.

To be considered for entry a village most first fulfill 3 criteria: to be of rural size, in other words it has a maximum population of 2,000 inhabitants; to have at least 2 protected sites or monuments; and to give

© www.les-plus-beaux-villages-de-france.org

Bergerac Airport Dordogne’s most beautiful villages on course for record numbers

Castelnaud-la-Chapelle archway proof of mass support for the planned application for membership by furnishing the decision voted by the Town Council.

Then the hard work begins and an inspector will visit the village to evaluate 27 further criteria, from ar-

chitecture to heritage and environmental considerations.

Entry opens up a wide range of promotional opportunities from the group’s website and book, through to Michelin maps. ■

Dordogne’s most beautiful villages: Belvès, Beynacet-Cazenac, Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, Domme, Limeuil, Monpazier, La Roque-Gageac, Saint-Amand-de-Coly, Saint-Jean-de-Côle and Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère.

Along with Aveyron, the Dordogne has more than any other department in France.

Opération tranquillité vacances

T

he Dordogne is, for the most part, one of the safest departments in France, but during the summer months, homes are often more at risk of theft as their occupants leave for extended holidays. While many of us will go far away for a week or two at some point during the summer, many more people will be visiting the region - an estimated 3 million tourists are expected in the Dordogne this year. Unfortunately, not all of them will have good intentions. Houses with their shutters closed and the mail piling up on the doorstep make for obvious targets to those with nefarious intentions.

It is for this reason that the Police Nationale and Gendarmerie Nationale run a programme called “Opération tranquillité vacances” throughout the summer months. Under this scheme, homeowners can inform the local police or gendarmes that they are going away on holiday and officers will perform regular checks on their property in their absence.

Who can ask for their property to be watched?

Any homeowner in the region may ask to be covered by the scheme.

How do you ask for your home to be watched? All you need to do is write to (or visit) your local police station or gendarmerie, giving them your name, the address of the property, the dates of your absence and a number to contact in emergencies.

Does it work? In recent years, those using the opération tranquillité scheme have been less likely to be the victims of crime.

Is there anything else that can be done to avoid being the victim of burglary? Residents are advised

to ask someone to regularly pick up mail and to put a bit of life into your property by having a neighbour open the shutters every once in a while. Residents are also advised never to leave a message on your answer phone saying when you will be away. ■

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LOCAL NEWS ♦ 5

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

O

ver the past few years, the amount of wine being drunk in France has dropped, but one drink is bucking the trend... rosé. Consumption of rosé in France continues to increase, from 10.8% of total wine consumption in 1990 to 27.3% in 2011. During the same period consumption of red wine dropped from 77.8% of total consumption to just 56%. The same trends are being seen elsewhere in the world.

Rosé wine is riding the crest of a trendy wave and has definitely won over the general public: almost 9 out of every 10 wine drinkers now say that they drink rosé, which means that the potential market for pink drinkers in France is 27.5 million.

Although rosé wines are more traditionally associated with the Provence, a group of Bergerac winemakers are looking to tap into this growing market.

The CIVRB (Conseil interprofessionnel des vins de

la région de Bergerac) recently organised a half-day event to look at how rosé wines are evolving and, more importantly, how local winemakers can be part of their future.

Eric Hugot, marketing director of the CIVRB spoke to the Sud Ouest newspaper about the challenges surrounding the production and marketing of rosé wine.

“There is a burgeoning market and we want to be part of it. Around Bergerac, we have everything we need; we can already produce light, dark, sweet and dry wines. Yet, from a technical point of view, winemakers are not always up to speed with the modern methods of rosé production. Here, rosé is still made in a very traditional way. This new market, which is still in its infancy, is evolving quickly and we do not want to get left behind.”

The fact that rosé has become fashionable cannot be denied, but the CIVRB believe that the market has now moved beyond that.

The current boom is not just a passing trend, but a longterm change in drinking habits; more and more rosé is now being drunk year round and not just in the summer. Today, only 10% of the wine produced around Bergerac is rosé. The vineyards of the Dordogne can make rosés with a different character to those currently being made in Provence and the CIVRB believes that the region should be exploiting this fact as the market for rosé wine matures.

Part of the rise in popularity of rosé wine could have something to do with France’s changing eating habits. Red wine is a much more complex drink than the very straightforward rosé. As such, rosé is the ultimate “go with anything” wine. In recent years, the French are far less likely to sit down to a structured meal and are also eating less traditional food. Pairing the wine with the food is therefore also becoming less of an issue. People are eating lunch on the go and rosé is

© 2009 - Menérbes (WikiCommons)

Region’s wines target trend for rosé

the perfect accompaniment.

It also sits very well with ethnic cuisine from around the world, a market that has also seen strong growth in recent years.

The popularity of rosé was highlighted earlier this year when 6,000 bottles of the little-known Miraval Côtes de Provence wine

went on general sale. Reasonably priced at €105 for a case of 6 bottles, the internet sale started at 9am, and by 2pm every last bottle had been sold. A further 100,000 bottles have already been sold to wine merchants and restaurants. The fact that the vineyard’s owners were Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

and that this was their first vintage may have had something to do with its popularity, however!

So, next time you are having a drink out, why not see what all the fuss is about and try a glass of local rosé. Perfect for a warm summer’s evening. Bottoms up!! ■

6 ♦ LOCAL NEWS

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

Bergerac crowned champions of France All the way back in August of last year Stéphane Delage, president of the Bergerac rugby club known locally as USB (Union sportive Bergerac), stated that the goal for the season was promotion. No one dared to dream at the time that they may also become champions of France along the way. “It is a strange feeling,” the club’s president told the Sud Ouest newspaper. “We certainly had a good party after the game!

It is dawning on me that we have achieved something special, but it does not belong just to us. There is such a popular movement behind this club at the moment that sometimes I feel like I am literally watching from the sidelines.”

With the run to the final taking them all the way into the middle of June, has the club already begun preparing for next season? “We’re getting round to it!” explained the jubilant president. “We need to reinforce a few positions, but it is essential that we keep our balance.

We will play in the Fédérale 2 with humility – it has been a while since we have played at such a high level.

The backbone of the side will remain the same and we will look to bring in a few youngsters.”

The USB will also have to raise slightly more money if they are to compete at the higher level. The club currently operates with a budget of between 450,000-500,000 euros, but estimates that a further 150,000 euros will be required next season.■

© USB Rugby

>> continued from pg 1

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

Cross-border speeding fines

S

Denmark who have refused to adopt the agreement.

When the proposals were first announced in 2011, the European commissioner for transport, Siim Kallas said, “We know that a foreign driver is three times more likely to commit an offence than a resident driver.

These new rules should have a powerful deterrent effect and change behaviour.” According to EU figures, foreign drivers make up around 5% of the traffic on the roads of Europe, yet they account for 15% of all accidents.

In France, the figures for foreign drivers are far higher. Foreign heavy goods vehicles alone account for 28% of all traffic on France's roads and are involved in 14% of fatal accidents - this is an area that France is looking

to crack down on. Recent statistics also show that one quarter of all vehicles flashed by France's army of speed cameras are on foreign plates. This problem is even worse in the height of the summer tourist season when that figure rises to half!

Although excessive speed is still a factor in 26% of all road fatalities in France, average speeds on the county's roads have fallen by 10 km/h in the decade since the first introduction of fixed speed cameras in France. In 2012, there were 3,645 road deaths in France, significantly down from a peak of 9,000 in 2002, and the lowest on record since 1948, the year in which France first started accounting for road deaths. ■

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Best before dates?

The average French consumer apparently throws away 20kg of perfectly good food each year. In an attempt to tackle this high level of waste, Food Industry Minister Guillaume Garot has proposed scrapping the DLUO (date limite d'utilisation optimale - optimal use-by date) for certain kinds of food.

Citing dried foods such as rice, pasta and coffee, the minister has argued that once this optimal useby date has passed, consumers still have no risk of falling ill, unlike with fresh foods and meat products. Dried foods may simply just have lost some flavour or be slightly less crispy, “but are still perfectly edible!” insisted the minister.

Instead, these longer-life foods should have a consommer de préférence avant (preferably consumed before) date, implying that they may be past their best, but are still eminently edible. The minister insisted that this new wording would remove any confusion for consumers who were currently throwing away perfectly good food, thinking it to have gone bad.

The measure is part of a larger initiative, the “National Pact to Combat Food Waste”, which is the culmination of six months of collaboration and discussions. France aims to comply with an EU target of halving food waste by 2025. ■

New eco taxi proposals

© dutourdumonde - Fotolia.com

peeding is one the the most common causes of road accidents in France and foreign drivers are a particular problem. For years it has been an open secret that if you speed in a foreign country, you are unlikely to receive any penalty - unless you are stopped by the police themselves. Catching foreign drivers on speed cameras is easy... punishing them is not.

This is all now changing, however, as the French Senate has voted into law a text from a European directive which will enable police to identify foreign drivers and automatically send out speeding tickets to greet the holidaymakers when they arrive home.

“From now on we will be able to exchange digital files across the European Union so that when a foreign driver is flashed in France, because of the registration plate, we will be able to identify them and find out their address,” the Ministry of Transport told French daily Le Parisien.

“We don’t have the same driving rules across Europe and certain motorists are allowed to drive faster in their own country, like on German motorways, but European drivers must respect the rules of the road for the country they are driving in,” said Senator Odette Herviaux.

Any fines handed out will apply in the country where the offence takes place, and all countries will remain free to set their own fines.

This change has been coming for a while; since 2012 France has had bilateral agreements in place with Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The rest of the EU is progressively signing up, with the exception of Britain, Ireland and

NATIONAL NEWS ♦ 7

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A proposal has been presented to the French National Assembly requiring all new taxi registrations to be issued for hybrid vehicles only. The amendment to the law has been put forward by Philippe Plisson, a Socialist member of parliament for the Gironde, and is designed “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and minimise the ecological footprint of taxis”.

Hybrid vehicles have both electric and petrol engines. The electric engine is typically engaged when the vehicle is

stationary or travelling at low speeds. The petrol engine is engaged at higher speeds (usually around 30km/h) at which point the electric engine switches off and is recharged by the movement of the vehicle.

Unsurprisingly, taxi drivers are incensed by the proposed law changes, arguing that only inner city taxis spend much time travelling at less than 30 km/h and pointing out that hybrid vehicles are currently far more expensive than their traditional counterparts. ■

8 ♦ NATIONAL NEWS

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E-cigarettes to face public ban

© 2012 - Michael Dorausch (WikiCommons)

F

rance’s health minister, Marisol Touraine, has decided to establish “the same laws for electronic cigarettes as for regular cigarettes”, meaning that they will not be allowed in certain public spaces or sold to under 18s, and advertising will be prohibited. The move has sparked outrage among sellers and users of the battery-powered devices which contain liquid nicotine that is turned into a vapor when inhaled.

E-cigarettes have proved a big hit in France with an estimated 500,000 smokers opting for the electronic alternative.

People can use them freely in bars and restaurants, where traditional smoking is banned, as well as at work at employers' discretion.

A spokesman from the London-based market intelligence firm Euromonitor International said: “The e-cigarette market is developing very rapidly in France. The two main advantages of e-cigarettes are that they're seen as healthier than traditional cigarettes, and you can use them in settings like bars and restaurants, where traditional cigarettes aren't allowed. A measure like a public ban would reduce the public perception of harmlessness and remove the practical benefit of smoking an e-cigarette in the first place. So it would be highly damaging to the industry.”

E-cigarettes were first invented in China in 2003 and are aimed at giving the user a

similar sensation to smoking a cigarette. They were initially thought to be much healthier as, while they contain nicotine, they do not contain the tobacco and other carcinogens found in cigarettes. But many experts have since expressed concerns about certain chemicals contained in the liquid, notably the compound propylene glycol.

As long ago as May 2011 the French health agency AFSSAPS advised against using the devices, saying they still contained nicotine, which even at a low concentration could lead to “damaging side ef-

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fects”.

Not everyone agrees, however, and some experts have suggested that Touraine acted with an excess of caution rather than face the possibility of health risks from e-cigarettes being discovered in the future. “The French minister was overly cautious, and her zeal is catastrophic,” judged JeanFrançois Etter, a professor of Public Health at the University of Geneva. “The e-cigarette is an alternative that can save millions of lives. I don’t understand these disappointing declarations, which go against

the welfare of the population.”

The sale of e-cigarettes over the past few years has been particularly lucrative. According to the French Office for Tobacco Prevention, the gadget raked in 40 million euros in 2012, and is expected to make 100 million euros in 2013 roughly the same amount as nicotine substitutes sold in pharmacies.

About 73,000 tobacco-related deaths are reported in France each year. The state auditor has said that only major price increases would curb French smoking habits. ■

john.bonella@gmail.com

French finally get a word for French kissing France can sometimes be reluctant to embrace new words, especially when they have foreign roots, but amongst the entries making their debut in the 2014 edition of Le Petit Robert is “galoche”, the first time that a word has existed in French for none other than a French kiss!!

A verb has also been created: “galocher”, meaning ‘to kiss with tongues’. The term “French kiss” - once also known as a “Florentine kiss” - is popularly considered to have been brought back to the English-speaking world by soldiers returning from Europe after World War I. At the time, the French had a reputation for more adventurous sexual practices.

Laurence Laporte, from the Robert publishing house, said that “galocher” was a slang term that had been around for a while “but only now is it being officially recognized in a French dictionary”. A “galoche” is literally an iceskating boot, so the new term plays on the idea of sliding around the ice.

Although the French may not have had a specific word for French kissing, Ms Laporte added that it “never stopped us from doing it”! ■

NATIONAL NEWS ♦ 9

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

Will the French ever accept EDF forced to apologise fine wine in a can?

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ine purists will no doubt be up in arms, but a French start-up is hoping to develop a market for wine in a can. Canned wine has been proven to work in markets like Japan and Germany, but is virtually unheard of in France.

The 187ml cans (a quarter of the volume of a traditional bottle) of red, white and rosé “Winestar” come with a recommended retail value of €2.50 and do not contain just any old swill. Fabulous Brands, the company behind Winestar, hopes that by selling only AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controlée) wines, they will create a market that does not currently exist in France. Each can lists the wine estate, the appellation and the grape varieties as well as the vintage. Currently less than 1% of all wine in France is sold in a can, and none is designated AOC. “The idea is to give the consumer the wines that they really want to drink at any time, whether it’s red, white or rosé, whether fullbodied or light,” said Winestar founder Cédric Segal.

“What Nespresso did for the coffee market with single servings of high-quality coffee, we want to achieve for the wine market. We want to democratise the sale of quality wine.”

Winestar cans are essentially aimed for the at-home market, when you want a little wine with dinner but don’t want to open a whole bottle, and as a convenient, light and compact way of carrying wine to a picnic or on a trip. Segal cautions that it’s not cheap wine and should ideally be drunk from a wine glass.

Fabulous Brands is betting that sales of the cans, which are currently only available in a limited number of specialist outlets, will grow exponentially as the product is taken on by national supermarket chains and, they hope, the lucrative railway, airline and work canteen markets. Later this year, they plan to grow their range from the current Château de l’Ille from the Corbières AOC in southwestern France to include wines from famous regions of Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Côtes du Rhône.

Wine marketing specialist Galatée Faivre said

over zero euro invoice threat

she was not convinced the French would turn wholesale away from their traditional corked bottles.

“French wine will continue to be dominated by two types of container – glass bottles for quality and wine boxes for bulk sales,” she told Europe 1 radio. “Cans may work in some cases, such as for picnics or in train buffet cars, but mostly this is just a gimmick. Also, the cans do give the wine a vaguely metallic flavour.”

In a further blow to lovers of French wine, new research has suggested that the French learned everything they know about wine from the Italians! Shaped vessels called amphoras, known to have been imported from the Etruscan people of Italy around 500 BC, have shown chemical evidence of wine. “France's rise to world prominence in the wine culture has been well documented,” said Patrick McGovern, lead author of the study. “What we haven't had is clear chemical evidence, combined with botanical and archaeological data, showing how wine was introduced into France and initiated a native industry.”

Using state of the art chemical analysis techniques, researchers found tartaric acid, the biomarker of Eurasian grape wine.

They also discovered pine tree resin and herbs such as rosemary, thyme and basil in the wine residue, suggesting a medicinal use.

“Now we know that the ancient Etruscans lured the Gauls into the Mediterranean wine culture by im-

porting wine into southern France,” said McGovern.

“This built up a demand that could only be met by establishing a native industry, likely done by transplanting the domesticated vine from Italy, and enlisting the requisite winemaking expertise from the Etruscans.”

The earliest known chemical evidence for wine was found in what is now northern Iran at the site of Hajji Firiz, and dates to about 5,400-5,000 BC. Wine may have been imported into France from overseas, but these days France sends an awful lot in the other direction. In fact, French wines are in such demand in countries like China, that there are thriving counterfeit industries. There are said to be more bottles of 1982 Lafite currently in circulation in China than were ever produced in France!

Champagne producers will therefore be toasting a recent decision by Chinese authorities to restrict the use of the word Champagne to those bottles produced in France's famous sparkling wine region. Currently around 2 million bottles of Champagne are officially exported to China each year, a number that is rising sharply. “No more fake bubbly in China - at least in theory,” wrote Le Figaro.

According to the French daily, the name Champagne had until recently been misapplied to “mediocre sparkling wines and vulgar sodas”.

The Chinese decision represents a victory for President François Hol-

lande, who negotiated the deal during a recent visit to Beijing. Champagne joined Cognac, Scotch and Napa Valley wine as protected tipples in China. ■

If you speak to anyone who has lived in France for any length of time, you will eventually hear them complain about a utility company, be it phone, internet, electricity or water, etc. France is not unique in this problem - dealing with utility companies can be baffling wherever you live in the world.

The prize this month for the most bizarre waste of time and money goes to EDF, who have had to apologise to the owner of a bar in Villeneuvela-Guyard (Yonne) after sending him a bill and chasing him for his outstanding balance... of €0.00!!

The bemused bar owner received notification that

his electricity would be cut off within 10 days and that he was liable for penalty charges of €30.

EDF responded to the revelation published in l'Yonne newspaper by pointing out that more than 30 million bills are sent out each year. “The whole system is automated and sometimes there are mistakes, as was the case here.”

“I was all set to send a cheque for zero euros until a friend talked me out of it,” said the business owner who, ironically, is a former electrician. “Now, I'll just have to wait and see what happens. I've stuck the bill up behind the bar which makes my customers laugh at least!” ■

10 ♦ NATIONAL NEWS

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

Depardieu Wine auction raises €718,800 guilty of drink driving charge

ontroversial actor, Gérard Depardieu, is back in hot water after being fined €4,000 and having his driving licence suspended for 6 months for falling off his scooter in Paris while 3 times over the drink drive limit. No one else was involved in the accident. He potentially faced a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison, but prosecutors did not seek any jail time.

The Cyrano de Bergerac actor, who was not in court to hear proceedings, has rarely been far from the headlines in recent years. Over the winter, he took up residency in Belgium and acquired Russian citizenship in protest at the new French Socialist government's plans to impose a 75% tax rate on incomes above €1 million.

In June, he said he also planned to apply for an Algerian passport as part of a bid to become a “world citizen”.

He said in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche that he hoped to acquire 7 different passports.

In August last year, he was cautioned after punching a motorist who had forced him to swerve on his scooter, and in 2011 he generated global headlines when he was involved in “pipigate”. On that occasion, the larger-thanlife actor was ejected from a CityJet flight bound for Dublin after standing up shortly before take-off and declaring “Je veux pisser” before proceeding to do exactly that… in the aisle of the plane.

CityJet saw the funny side. Although declining to publicly name the actor, they tweeted later in the day: “As you may have seen, we are busy mopping the floor of one of our planes...” adding, “We'd also like to remind all passengers that our planes are fully equipped with toilet facilities...”

Depardieu later apologised, citing prostate problems and said he could “often behave like a complete a***hole” in public! ■

held as trophy wines far from their native French soil. Ambroise de Montigny, wine expert for the auction, agreed, telling RFI, “I would love everybody that buys one of these bottles to drink it. It’s better to collect good memories with somebody while drinking that bottle, rather than looking at it behind a glass window and saying 'Yes, I’m the owner of this thing, it comes from the Élysée Palace'”.

Unlike his predecessor Nicolas

Sarkozy, President Hollande is known to be a wine drinker. In a statement, the Élysée said that “the proceeds from this sale will be reinvested in more modest wines, and the excess will be returned to the state budget”. With the government looking to make €60 billion in public savings over the next five years, the money raised from the auction is a tiny, if delicious, drop in the ocean. ■

Mother caught sitting daughter's exam Just how far would you go to help your children?

The answer for one 52-year-old French woman was very far indeed, when she was caught sitting her 19-year-old daughter's English baccalauréat exam.

The baccalauréat is the French education system's equivalent of Britain's A-levels and is an important step into university.

Kitted out in typical teenage attire including Converse trainers, low-waisted skinny jeans and plenty of make-up, the woman made it into the exam hall at a Paris high school without arousing suspicion; the exam centre was not at her daughter's school and some adult students do also sit the exams.

She laid out her pens and settled down to begin work on the three-hour English composition paper, but could not fool one eagle-eyed invigilator, who remembered seeing the daughter sitting a philosophy exam a few days earlier. She notified the head of the exam centre but, not wishing to disturb the other students, did not

evict the mother straight away.

“Intervening during the exam could have disturbed the other candidates, and created a reason to cancel the test for everyone,” a representative from the school told Le Parisien. Four plainclothes police officers eventually arrived, and an exam supervisor quietly escorted the 'student' from the hall. The mother reportedly confessed all in the hope of improving her daughter's overall mark.

She faces a maximum €9,000 fine and three-year prison term for fraud, while her daughter risks being banned from taking all official exams for five years.

The incident came just after France's education ministry controversially stepped up measures to snare more exam cheats, including the use of electronic smart phone detectors. Some 298 pupils were sanctioned in 2011 compared to 266 the previous year, while the number of candidates banned from taking exams more than doubled to 140 last year compared to 67 in 2011. ■

Hollande in Chinese/Japanese gaffe

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resident François Hollande narrowly avoided a diplomatic incident during a news conference on a recent visit to Japan. Speaking at the conference, he mistakenly referred to the Japanese as “the Chinese people”.

His quick-thinking interpreter spotted the faux pas and seamlessly corrected the gaffe for his Japanese-speaking listeners.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of Twitter and microblogging and although the news conference was not broadcast live, some bilingual Japanese journalists noticed the slip. The French press leapt on the mistake and took to the internet to share it.

World leaders and top diplomats do occasionally slip up and Hollande was himself recently on the receiving end of a visiting headof-state gaffe when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, meeting him in Paris, referred to him as “François Mitterrand”. ■

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© 2010 - Geroges Biard (WikiCommons)

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he auction of 1,200 bottles from the presidential wine cellars has raised €718,800 - more than twice the sum expected. The bottles, which represent 10% of the Élysée Palace's cellar, were being sold as part of the government's commitment to austerity.

Among the most profitable items were a bottle of 1990 Château Pétrus, which sold at €7,625 - more than three times its estimated price and a 1982 Château Latour that went for €4,625, over twice the estimate.

Much of the wines' value can be attributed to their provenance and not simply their undoubted quality, with special labels on the bottle attesting to the fact that they came from the prestigious cellar. “There's always a risk in buying wine at auction but we know the wine has been kept in optimum conditions,” explained auctioneer Ghislaine Kapandji. “It hasn't moved out of the presidential cellar since it was bought. That's an important kind of guarantee.”

Wealthy Chinese constitute an increasingly important market for French wine, especially Bordeaux, and prior to the auction, many people expressed fears the bottles would simply find their way into the safety deposit boxes of foreign billionaires,

NATIONAL NEWS ♦ 11

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

Channel When is a restaurant not a restaurant?

4 runs French language advert break In the past, the closest you would see to a French advert on British TV would be the occasional tag line or cultural cliché. Who remembers “The French adore Le Piat d'Or”, or Renault's iconic “Nicole?

Papa?” from the 1980s and 90s? Stella Artois make adverts set in France with the odd smattering of the local lingo which is ironic for a Belgian beer brewed in a Flemishspeaking city.

But now, Channel 4 has become the first television station in the UK to run an entire advert break in a foreign language when it aired a series of commercials in June entirely in French. The groundbreaking move was part of the promotion for the first episode of its new French zombie drama The Returned (Les Revenants) - a supernatural crime thriller which follows a group of men, women and children in a small Alpine village who don't yet know they have been dead for several years.

Most of the commercials featured French brands - such as L'Oréal, Renault and Boursin cheese - and had previously aired on French television.

The adverts, which ran in the first commercial break of The Returned at around 9.10pm, were introduced by a French voiceover and featured subtitles for viewers who were not au fait with the language.

Jonathan Allan, Sales Director at Channel 4, said: “We're really excited to bring the first entirely French ad break to Channel 4 to herald the arrival of our eagerly awaited new zombie drama series - it should really make the ads fit within the context of the show and surprise the viewer, cutting through to the audience.” ■

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n an attempt to sure up its reputation as the gastronomic capital of the world, France is considering banning establishments from calling themselves restaurants if meals are not made from scratch by in-house chefs using fresh ingredients. The move, which is being backed by the Synhorcat restaurant union and a group of 30 MPs, aims to crack down on the increase in the number of restaurants serving boil-in-thebag or microwaved ready meals as restaurant-quality cuisine.

Speaking to television station TF1, Synhorcat’s president Didier Chenet said: “When they walk into a restaurant, customers don’t know whether their meal was just reheated, or lovingly cooked up by a whole kitchen staff. With this [restaurant] label, now they will know.”

Mr Chenet added that the fresh ingredients could still be “frozen or vacuum-packed”. “We are not that old-fashioned,” he said.

Figures from a recent union study suggest that today around 31 per cent of French restaurants use industrially prepared food products. But the same report found that 67 per cent of food outlets would take steps to replace pre-prepared fare with fresh ingredients if it meant keeping the “restaurant” label.

The study found that if the new rules were applied, 10 per cent of French food outlets would lose the right to be called restaurants.

The Synhorcat union claimed the measure could potentially create 27,000 jobs, even if it meant increasing the customer’s bill by around seven per cent.

But the proposal is facing re-

sistance from some restaurant owners and six other restaurant unions, who registered their “massive opposition” saying that it would “create complete confusion with the public, clients and especially foreign tourists”. The unions seized on the definition of the word “restaurant” in Le Petit Robert, one of France’s most popular dictionaries, as simply being: “An establishment where a meal is served in exchange for payment”.

Proponents of the new law hope it will emulate a similar law from the 1990s which stated that a bakery can only call itself a boulangerie if the bread is made and prepared on site. The

law was a success, but made no mention of viennoiseries (croissants, brioche, pains au chocolat, etc.), with the result that today an estimated half of all ‘home-made’ croissants sold in France’s 30,000 boulangeries are industrially made and simply heated up on site. Many of France’s bakers are choosing to purchase from catalogues run by companies such as Coup de Pâtes, which offer 700 preprepared bakery products, from lemon tarts to chocolate éclairs and pizzas... and almost a dozen varieties of croissant.

It is not just in France where the battle is raging against preprepared food. A few years ago,

Gordon Ramsay found himself in hot water over his boil-in-thebag meals. It was revealed that customers at four of the celebrity chef's restaurants were likely to be served pre-prepared meals produced by a central supplier.

The food would arrive in transit vans and then be reheated and sold for up to six times the cost price.

France’s traditional sit-down restaurants, once the envy of the world, were dethroned by fast food for the first time last year.

Fast food and takeaways accounted for €34 billion in sales in France - 54 per cent of the market - compared to 40 per cent in 2011. ■

Speed camera numbers approach limit

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he government has announced that it is to introduce more speed cameras in France, taking the total in operation across France to 4,200 by the end of 2013.

“We don’t want to indefinitely multiply the number [of speed radars],” announced the government’s delegate for road safety, Frédéric Péchenard, speaking to French daily Le Parisien.

“Between 2002 and 2012, we succeeded in saving 36,000 lives on our roads, and 80 per cent of that is thanks to the installation of speed cameras,” he added. He went on to say that 4,200 speed cameras was “the optimal number” and that in an 8km zone around speed cameras, the number of accidents drops by an average 63%.

The government plans to add roughly 100 new radars by the end of the year, but will also be replacing older models with a new generation of “more intelligent and more efficient” speed cameras. “Our objective is to lower the number of deaths on the road to below 2,000 by the

year 2020,” said Mr Péchenard. “It is easy to forget that in 1972 there were 18,000 deaths on the roads and 280,000 injuries. Today, we are amongst the pack in Europe with 55 deaths per million inhabitants, but the British are doing much better, with just 28 deaths per million.” In 2012, there were a reported 3,645 deaths on French roads.

On top of the existing network of radars, the government has also launched “undetectable” speed cameras mounted on unmarked police cars. According to Péchenard, these mobile cameras have been responsible for catching 10,000 violations in just the last three months, and 300 more of them will be sent out on to French roads in the next three years.

The special fleet of unmarked Renault Meganes are equipped with a radar speed detector installed behind the numberplate and an infra-red camera on the dashboard that takes a photograph without the need for a flash.

The equipment will be practically

invisible to motorists and virtually undetectable by GPS devices or smart phone apps, and the radar flash will not be visible to the naked eye. The only way you will know that the car in front is potentially a mobile speed camera will be the uniformed drivers.

Due to the fact that they are mobile, this new generation of speed control will have an increased margin of error; excessive speeding will only be punished at 10% above the speed lim-

it, i.e. above 145 km/h in 130 km/h zones.

Aurélien Wattez, head of the department for automated road safety, said that speeding motorists now have nowhere to hide: “There exists a minority of people that will only respect speed limits in areas where there is a fixed camera. This system exists to reinforce the fact that you must obey the speed limits all the time, not just where there are signs.” ■

12 ♦ FRENCH LIFE

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

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n the 3rd June, the château des Milandes in Castelnaud-laChapelle, unveiled a new Maison des Illustres plaque on the entrance gates of the former residence of Josephine Baker. Introduced in 2011, the Maison des Illustres plaques indicate a place of cultural significance in France in a similar way to the blue plaques issued by English Heritage in the UK. Today, there are 171 locations across France to bear this label.

The owners of the château, Claude de Labarre and his daughter Angélique de Saint-Exupéry, did not choose the date by chance: on the 3rd June this year, Josephine Baker would have been 107 years old. She was a dancer, singer, and actress who at the height of her fame was one of Europe’s most popular and highest-paid performers.

Born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine spent most of her youth in poverty. Her black American mother was a washerwoman who had given up her dreams of becoming a music hall dancer and her father left shortly after she was born. After dropping out of school, she finally ran away from home aged 13. She was ‘discovered’ dancing on street corners and before long she was travelling the country as

© 2006 - Jean-Yves Didier (WikiCommons)

Château des Milandes receives Maison des Illustres label

part of a road show.

Baker moved to New York City and performed in the floor show of the famous Plantation Club, where again she quickly became a crowd favourite. In 1925, at the peak of France’s obsession with American jazz and all things exotic, Baker travelled to Paris to perform in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She made an immediate impression on French audiences when, with dance partner Joe Alex, she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt.

It was the following year, however, that her career reached its turning point at the Folies Bergère music hall, one of the most popular of the era. In a performance called La Folie du Jour, Baker danced wearing little more than a skirt made of 16 bananas.

The show was wildly popular with Parisian audiences and Baker quickly became one of the highest-paid performers in Europe, gaining the attention of cultural figures of the day like Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and earning herself nicknames like “Black Venus” and “Black Pearl”.

In the coming years, she would allegedly receive over 1,000 marriage proposals!

A singing career and movie roles followed and with the money she made, Baker bought the château des Milandes in the Dordogne.

Returning to the country of her birth in an attempt to replicate her European success, she was dismayed at the hostile, often racist reaction that she received from 1930s America. She returned to France, married French industrialist Jean Lion and obtained citizenship from the country that had embraced her as one of its own.

The next stage of her life would see her become an unlikely hero of the

French Resistance: her affection for France was so great that when World War II broke out, she volunteered to spy for her adopted country.

In addition to serving as a sublieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the French Air Force, Baker performed across Europe throughout the war, entertaining both French and American troops. These appearances in many of Europe’s wartime cities provided an excellent cover for the different covert activities she undertook on behalf of the Allied cause. On at least one occasion, Baker smuggled secret military intelligence reports into Portugal from France that had been written in disappearing or invisible ink on her sheet music. Her troupe also provided the perfect cover for intelligence agents to gain visas and travel with her throughout Europe.

For her many wartime contributions to her beloved France, Baker received the Croix de guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance, and was later made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

During the 1950s, Baker frequently returned to the United States to lend her support to the Civil Rights Movement, participating in demonstrations and boycotting segregated clubs and concert venues. In 1963, Baker took part in the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and was among the many notable speakers on that day.

Josephine Baker spent much of the rest of her life living in her beloved Dordogne château where she would eventually adopt 12 children, her “Rainbow Tribe”, from countries across the world. She died in Paris in 1975 of a cerebral haemorrhage, just days after a performance celebrating 50 years in the industry. The show opened to rave reviews and the first night audience included Sophia Lor-

en, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, Diana Ross and Liza Minnelli.

She was the first American-born woman to receive full French military honours at her funeral.

The château des Milandes is today open to the public and displays many of her stage outfits - including her banana skirt, of which there are appar-

ently several. It also displays many family photographs and documents and her Legion of Honour medal.

Most of the rooms are open for the public to walk through, including the bedrooms with little cots in which her adopted children slept, and a dining room where she often entertained large groups. ■

FRENCH LIFE ♦ 13

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

Pétanque - a national obsession

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game was born. The first pétanque tournament was organised shortly afterwards in La Ciotat in 1910 and today pétanque is by far the most popular form of the game.

© 2011 - BF_OBrien (WikiCommons)

he modern game of pétanque traces its creation to a moment in 1907 in La Ciotat, Provence when a local player, Jules Lenoir, did what can only be described as the opposite of a ‘William Webb-Ellis’ and picked up the boule and stood still.

The ancient Greeks played a game with flat coins and later flat stones, which involved throwing an object as far as possible. This game was refined by the Romans to include a target object. The Romans then brought the game to Provence, where the stones were eventually replaced with wooden balls and gave birth to a number of similar games, collectively referred to as boules. The most popular format of the game at the turn of the last century was jeu provençal, where the playing area was larger and players ran three steps before throwing their ball.

Jules Lenoir, a keen jeu provençal player from La Ciotat near Marseilles, was left unable to play his favourite game due to rheumatism and his sympathetic friends agreed to play the game pieds tanqués (literally ‘feet anchored’) – a new

At last count there were well over 300,000 registered boules players in France, making it officially only the eighth most participated in sport in the country. The numbers are slightly misleading, though, as many French play pétanque recreationally and are not registered.

Estimates suggest that the game is played by at least 17 million French

each year. Visit any public square anywhere in France in the summer and you are sure to see at least one match being played.

The stereotype is of old men playing while enjoying a smoke and there is some truth in this.

Boules maintains to this day a gender imbalance, with only 14% of France’s registered players being female. It is, however, one of the few sports worldwide where men and women compete directly against each other in competitions.

The traditional metal balls are also a relatively recent invention.

Until the turn of the last century, wooden balls were used. Félix Rofritsch, from the Alsace region, is credited with coming up with the idea in 1904 of covering these wooden balls in sheet metal to create what were referred to as boules cloutées, and these new boules quickly became de rigeur in parks across France. The solid metal balls, so synonymous with the game these days, did not officially come into use until 1930, an innovation credited to Jean Blanc. The first solid metal balls, dated at 1927 can to this day be seen in the Musée international pétanque et boules. ■

Only 14% of all players are women

Pétanque - Basic rules of the game Pétanque is played by between 2 and 6 people.

The team going first draws a circle in the dirt about 35-50 cm in diameter and throws the cochonet (jack – literally ‘little-pig’) 6-10 metres away. The jack must be at least 1 metre away from any boundary.

The player who threw the jack then throws their first boule. A player from the opposing team then makes a throw. Play continues with the team that is not closest to the jack having to continue throwing until they either land a boule closest to the jack, or they run out of boules.

Pétanque - Some essential vocab Pointer (verb) – ‘to place’ – throw your ball in such a way as to leave it as close to the jack as possible Tirer (verb) – ‘to fire’ – to throw your ball with the intention of making contact with another ball You can’t play pétanque amongst Frenchmen for long (and 86% of all registered players in France are male) without hearing the phrase “Tu tires ou tu pointes?”

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When all boules have been thrown, the winning team receives one point for each boule that it has closer to the jack than the best-placed boule of the opposition. A team wins when they have 13 points.

PHOENIX ASSOCIATION - Adoption

ALEX - 2 Year old Belgian Shepherd X Beauceron Alex is a beautiful boy who is simply and absolutely adorable.

He's safely in Phoenix foster care after a VERY rough start to his young life, having been shut in a dark garage and largely ignored.

Alex needs a special home with a fenced garden and ideally a doggy mate to play with. Due to his exuberant "I'm free!" nature, he does need a firm, but loving hand.

To meet Alex, please contact Sheelagh or Rik on 05 53 54 94 81 (please leave a message) or email sheerik@wanadoo.fr Thank you, The Phoenix Team Check out our ADOPTION PAGE at www. phoenixasso.com or FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/ PhoenixAssociationFrance for other Phoenix animals available for adoption.

14 ♦ FRENCH LIFE

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

The Chappe telegraph system - early 19th century internet

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group of French enthusiasts are trying to resurrect and recreate the world’s first telegraph network system. The Chappe semaphore telegraph, developed in the late 18th century by Claude Chappe and his brothers and used extensively during the first half of the 19th century, was one of the most important developments in the history of communications.

Like so much cutting edge technology, however, it became obsolete when newer, faster, more sophisticated solutions replaced it.

The Chappe telegraph system used semaphore to relay messages between manned towers spread across France, reducing the time it took to send a message from Paris to the south of France to just a few hours - significantly quicker than the 3 or 4 days it typically took by mounted courier. The technology was to play a major role in the Napoleonic wars.

At its most extensive, the Chappe system comprised well over 500 semaphore stations covering more than 5,000km.

But then it ended almost as quickly as it had begun. By the mid-19th century, electronic telegraphy, with stations set up along the new burgeoning railway network, began to take over and the Chappe system was quickly forgotten about.

Claude Chappe was born in Brûlon, Sarthe in 1763 and popular myth suggests that he first began to consider semaphore as a means of communicating with his four brothers who were at a different nearby school. Means of sending messages over large distances had been around for centuries: smoke signals, flags, torches and church bells being classic examples. Most British school children will remember learning that the arrival of the Spanish Armada was signalled by a series of beacons lit across the south coast of England.

These systems, however, could only usually contain one meaning - they were not suitable for transferring complex messages. Semaphore had also been around for a long time.

Indeed, the navies of the time used it extensively, but only across relatively short distances.

Nothing like Chappe’s idea existed. In fact, the very word telegraph was invented

by Chappe to describe his new system of long-distance messaging. At first, he wanted to call his invention the tachygraphe - from the Greek for “fast writer” - but he was eventually advised by a friend to go with télégraphe - from the Greek for “far writer”.

The Chappe brothers experimented with a number of designs, including clocks and shutter blades, before finally

making the crucial observation that the human eye is excellent at discerning angles. Their final design had two arms connected by a cross-arm. Each arm had seven positions, and the regulator could be positioned to be either horizontal or vertical, permitting a 98-combination code, subsequently reduced to 92 by reserving six signals for special indications. Operators used telescopes to see between the stations.

In 1791 Claude Chappe and his brother demonstrated a working system over a distance of 4 leagues (about 15km) between the towns of Brûlon and Parcé. Local dignitaries were invited to watch. A report from the day shows that officials dictated a message in one town that was relayed to the second town and decoded by Claude Chappe. The message read: “Si vous réussissez, vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire” - “If you succeed, you will soon be covered with glory!”

Transmission and decoding took four minutes. The coveringwith-glory stage would take rather longer.

The authorities in Paris

were soon taking notice and the brothers were invited to repeat their demonstration in the capital. They tried several prototypes on the walls of Paris, but on each occasion these were destroyed by mobs who thought they were being used to communicate with royalist forces.

Nevertheless, Claude Chappe was charged with creating the first line between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230km, required to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria.

In 1794, it brought news of the French capture of Condé-surl’Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred.

The government telegraphed back their congratulations, which were received in Condé the very same evening.

The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the Paris-Lille network typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes.

The basis for the network was a series of huts, each of which contained a single operator who had the task of surveying his neighbours by telescope. As soon

as there was activity, he copied down the signals and passed them on. On top of each hut was the semaphore equipment - two black movable wooden arms fixed to a 4.6-metre-long crossbar, the positions of which indicated alphabetic letters. The Chappe system was controlled by only two handles and was mechanically very simple and therefore reasonably robust.

Each manoeuvre was believed to take about 30 seconds, and the messages were transmitted in full, words like “de”, “à” and “les” included. Text speak had not yet been invented!

The stations were placed at roughly 15km intervals. For the operators it was tiring and laborious, especially as they had pay docked for delays, but the system worked. The record was 60 minutes for a message travelling from Paris to Strasbourg. It bore news of the birth of Napoleon’s son.

The line was soon extended to Dunkirk, and even to Amsterdam and Brussels. In 1798 lines were built to Brest, and to Strasbourg. In the space of a very few years, all the major French cities were

linked to Paris, and the network eventually reached as far as Italy.

With transmission speeds of two or three symbols per minute, it took no more than a couple of hours for a message to reach the furthest corners of the network.

Chappe himself, far from being covered in glory, constantly had to fight claims during his life that the true credit belonged to the clockmaker Breguet, who had designed and perfected the mechanism by which the arms were controlled.

Tragically, Claude Chappe developed cancer, and in 1805 he committed suicide by throwing himself down a well at his hotel.

The Chappe system reigned for more than 50 years, but was soon rendered obsolete by the electronic telegraph network. When Samuel Morse successfully sent an electronic message down a wire from Washington to Baltimore in the United States in 1844 , the writing was on the wall for lineof-sight telegraph systems.

The efforts of a group of amateur enthusiasts, however, have led to a resurgence of interest in recent years and to a handful of sites being rescued from oblivion. The station of Mollard-Fleury, half-way up a mountainside near Modane in the Alps, is one such example.

Using maps from the archives in Paris, the enthusiasts worked out the probable location of the semaphore tower and in 2002 they found the remains of the post in woods above the village of Sollières-Sardières.

Now they have just rebuilt an exact replica, using original designs drawn up by an inspector on the line. Visitors will find a two-room cabin, built from wood and stone, containing a system of wheels and pulleys which control the signal system set on a mast above the roof.

“This station was part of the Lyon to Milan line that Napoleon built in 1805 as he prepared to resume war in Italy,” explained Bernard Pinaud, one of the enthusiasts who will give demonstrations of the semaphore over the summer.

“Ultimately it extended as far as Venice, allowing the emperor to get messages to his armies in northern Italy in a matter of a few hours.”

A fascinating glimpse into this history can be found in one message, discovered in the local archives, that would have passed through the station: “The Legion of the South may recruit men in Turin from among the Piedmontese prisoners-of-war or Austrian deserters. However, it must not recruit men who are not from Piedmont.”

Chappe’s ingenious messaging system may have been superseded by more advanced technologies, but this French invention, for half a century at least, was the internet of its day. ■

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

It's that time of year again... flies!!

Our regular Environment contributor, Arthur Smith from Harlequin Developments, takes a look at one of the downsides of summer... flies!!

But why shouldn’t we use fly spray and what are the best options to tackle this nuisance...?

L

no intentions of getting used to them, instead of reaching for the traditional fly spray there are some other strategies you can use to at least try to control and minimize their presence before needing going to that extreme.

The problem with fly spray and other commercial insecticides is it contains some nasty stuff which isn't just nasty to flies but to humans and other creatures in the environment too, even the low allergenic varieties.

Some of the chemicals

include: Bioresmethrin - a suspected endocrine disruptor and highly toxic to fish even in small amounts Bioallethrin - a suspected endocrine disruptor and carcinogen Butylated Hydroxytoluene – a known human immune system toxicant Synthetic Pyrethroids Pyrethroids shouldn't be confused with Pyrethrum, which comes from the chrysanthemum. Pyrethroids are chemically designed to be

© 2010 - John Hann

iving in the France, my experience with flies has become extensive.

It seems sometimes that just talking outside during spring and summer can be a risky business because as soon as you open your mouth, kamikaze flies make a beeline straight for it. On any given day during the warmer months, my coffee cup is likely to be the final resting place for several of the little blighters. It’s said that you can eventually get used to them, but if you're like me and have

One of nature's solutions to the fly problem

more toxic and take longer to break down. Aside from being a suspected carcinogen, they are extremely toxic to aquatic organisms and are moderately toxic to birds. Pyrethroids are toxic to all insects, both beneficial insects and pests.

Here are some tips to help keep flies off you and control their presence to a degree around your home, the greener way.

Potted plants indoors - I recently heard about flies emerging from potted plants indoors. After a bit of research, it seems the best way to deal with this is to reduce moisture and organic matter in the soil of potted plants, particularly the top layer, as gnats and flies thrive in damp conditions where there's plenty of organic material.

Clear rubbish - As flies breed in rotting organic material, make sure your rubbish is secured and your bins have tight fitting lids.

It can take as little as 4-6 days for adult flies to emerge from these sources. Check all mouse traps regularly and check around your outbuildings for other animals that may have died, as even a small decaying animal can be a feasting ground for hundreds of flies.

Unfortunately, common houseflies have a flight range of at least 5

FRENCH LIFE ♦ 15 miles (8 km), so unless you can organize a mass effort in your commune, while clearing matter that flies feed on and breed in, at best you may minimize them.

Secure compost bins This is pretty much related to the above about rubbish. Try to keep dairy and meat scraps out of your compost bin as that will help discourage some types of flies.

Fly strip/paper - Not so popular now, but still very useful. These are nontoxic strips embedded with something such as honey and also an adhesive. The flies land on it and are well and truly stuck.

Fly curtain - If you have people coming in and out of your house regularly, especially children and pets, chances are they'll bring flies in with them. A simple fly curtain made of strings of beads will greatly reduce the number that does get in.

Citronella Oil and Candles Citronella oil is an essential oil extracted from the different species of Cymbopogon (lemon grass). It's considered a biopesticide and non-toxic.

Burning a citronella oil candle or incense sticks will not only repel flies but mosquitoes too. You can also buy special preparations of citronella oil to apply directly to your skin as a fly/mosquito repellent, but it does need to be applied more often than synthetic repellents.

Mint - Crushed mint can be placed in bowls or cloth bags and placed strategically around the home near common entrances.

In the garden - jobs for July

G

reen, green, green: 50 shades of vert!

Gardens are verdant, lush, overflowing with growth this year (although, admittedly, more in the borders and flower beds than the potager).

Established perennials have soaked up the recent rain and put forth inches, even feet, of new growth. This is « money » in the gardening bank, enabling plants to make up for past, drier years, and develop their structures. There are, however, some downsides.

Flowers, especially those with double flowers like roses, peonies, poppies, etc. have gone over much more quickly, and stems have buckled under the weight of wet petals. Cut off damaged or faded flowers, and any damaged stems.

Slugs and snails It sure has been a good year for les escargots and les limaces.

Wondering what to do about them? Well, you could collect and eat them. Or give them to your hungry neighbours,

by Michelle Pierce

or your chickens. Or you could kill them. But a garden without them wouldn't work.

They are the dustmen of the natural world. Think about all the waste they process, and that would accumulate without them. If you do collect them, put them on your compost heap instead of killing them, and get them to work for you.

I feel woefully ignorant about the various species of these

beer traps (disgusting to empty!) but a good solution is to sprinkle a line of wheatgerm around plants you want to protect, or even the whole veg patch. Slugs love eating this, which fills them up, and so they are less inclined to eat your greenery. The other advantage is that any extra composts down into the soil and feeds the plant. Lastly, it's very reasonably priced if you

beasts, and their life cycles.

The garden centres are full of toxic chemicals to eliminate them, and even the so-called 'environmentally-friendly' versions are dangerous for hedgehogs, dogs and other pets.

Yes, you can use traditional

buy it in bulk.

Young plants in the veg garden have had more difficulty. The cold, wet conditions have alternated with sudden very hot days and so growth has not been regular.

Now really is time for some

consistently nice weather. So if anyone up there is listening....

Tunnels, greenhouses and even cloches have all been really useful. Those plastic tubes you bend into hoops to make mini-tunnels seem an excellent standby to have to hand. Hopefully, after the time of publication of The Bugle, this weather will be a thing of the past, and we'll all be baking under the hot July sun.

If anything in the veg garden hasn't grown, resow or fill in the gaps. A little fertiliser can help boost growth, especially if replanting in the same row.

Start thinking about crops for later in the year and over the winter. Sow leeks, chicory, cabbages and other brassicas, onions, biennial flowers, etc.

Saving seed The earlier crops have set seed by now, if you left some to do so.

Mustards, chards, oriental greens, radishes, foxgloves, campanulas, aquilegias, poppies, etc. have all been harvested, bundled, labelled and hung up in open paper bags to finish drying off.

Eucalyptus Oil - Sprinkle a little eucalyptus oil on a scrap of cloth and place near entrances.

Fly repellent plants for the garden - Some species of plants that you may be able to grow in your yard - depending on your local climate conditions - can help discourage flies. These include Lemon Balm, Catnip, Mint, Chrysanthemums and Marigolds.

Check your fly screens Okay, so this is a no-brainer I guess, but small holes in fly screens are easy to miss, so it's a good idea to check them regularly during the season.

DIY fly traps - Fly traps come in various shapes and sizes, and some are very easy to make and it's a great way to keep at least one plastic bottle out of landfill.

"Green" fly sprays - If all else fails, there are some "green" fly sprays available on the market that contain natural pyrethrum and citronella blends. These can be quite effective on flies, however they usually also contain other chemicals, so they may be the lesser of the evils rather than a truly green product and should also be used sparingly.

Do you have some environmentally friendly fly repelling tips you'd like to share? I'm sure that many of us would be very grateful for the information. ■ Arthur Smith Harlequin Developments harlequindevelopments.com Tel: 05.55.68.67.56 Mob: 06.06.60.46.97

Later, they'll be stripped down, cleaned and packed into jars.

Endless future plants for free!!

Harvest, pick, process, store as much as you can, and as frequently as possible to get the best quality produce. This also helps avoid gluts, which can be frustratingly daunting things to deal with; we've all had years where the courgettes become enormous marrows, and the tomatoes become seas, vast oceans of tomato soup!

Remember to pick rose heads and buds, as well as other flowers, for drying as potpourri. They'll be most welcome come the winter.

Go round the garden with a bunch of labels and a pencil - That way you can label particularly beautiful plants, for propagation after their flowering has finished. It's easy to see that it's an aquilegia but as soon as flowering is over, can you remember whether it's the pale pink one that would look so nice in the pale border, or the claret coloured one that just wouldn't go?

So there's lots and lots to do this month, but if the weather improves, then it should be one of the most satisfying and productive months in the garden. Good gardening! ■

16 ♦ BILINGUAL

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The Tour de France

T

his year sees the 100th edition of the Tour de France bike race across France. The Tour de France is the largest annual sporting event in the world. Starting on the 29th June, the 2013 race will cover 3,404 km over 21 stages before finishing on the Champs Elysées on the 21st July.

The race is considered to be one of the toughest challenges of physical endurance in the world, although today's cyclists have it relatively easy when compared to those of 1903.

The first time the Tour de France was held the competitors covered 'only' 2,428km, but they did so in just 6 stages - each stage started one day, continued through the night and finished the following afternoon! The winner, Maurice Garin, won 6,075 gold francs for his efforts.

In its early years the riders were mostly French but within just ten years the race had become an international one with national teams competing against each other.

Although France has produced the most winners in the history of the race (36), the last Frenchman to win was back in 1985 when Bernard Hinault wore the yellow jersey down the Champs-Elysées for the fifth and final time.

The history of the Tour de France is full of famous stories, especially from the early years. In 1913, French rider Eugène Christophe was leading stage six by 5 minutes when his forks snapped on the descent of the Tourmalet. He collected the pieces together and ran to a nearby village where he found a forge, lit a fire, shaped a piece of metal and repaired his bicycle. Despite losing more than four hours he carried on and finished in seventh place overall. The forge he used is still standing and today the building is a national monument.

In 1967, Tom Simpson, the best British rider of his day, died on his bike while ascending Mont Ventoux.

Before the ascent, Simpson had been seen taking tablets with brandy, and empty bottles of amphetamines were later found in his pockets. He began to zigzag across the road and was

helped to the ground by spectators.

Allegedly, his last words were, “Put me back on my bike”. At the time, drug taking was not illegal in the sport. The monument on the mountainside where he died is still a popular pilgrimage site for riders.

Today, cycling is fighting hard to clean up its reputation. Many of the famous Tour de France winners of the last 2 decades have been found guilty of doping and the sport continues to fight this problem. Team Sky from Britain, who have a zero tolerance policy towards drug use, dominated the tour in 2012, with Sir Bradley Wiggins winning the race and his team mate Chris Froome coming second. They again start as favourites in the 2013 Tour, with Froome expected to lead the team, following Wiggins' withdrawal through illness and injury.. ■

Bilingual Crossword Clues in English - answers in French

Across:

L

e Tour de France célèbre cette année la centième édition de la plus grande manifestation sportive mondiale annuelle.

La course cycliste débutera le 29 juin et après un parcours de 3 404 km en 21 étapes, elle s’achèvera sur les ChampsElysées le 21 juillet.

La compétition est l’une des épreuves d’endurance physique les plus dures du monde, bien qu’en comparaison de l’année 1903, les cyclistes d’aujourd’hui aient la vie plus facile. Lors de la toute première course, les concurrents parcoururent «seulement» 2 428 km mais ils ne le firent qu’en 6 étapes: chaque étape débutait dans la journée, se poursuivait pendant la nuit et se terminait l’aprèsmidi! Maurice Garin, le vainqueur, gagna 6 075 francs or en récompense de ses efforts.

Au début, les coureurs étaient principalement français mais en l’espace de dix ans, la compétition est devenue internationale, mettant en concurrence des équipes de différentes nations. Bien que la France ait produit le plus grand nombre de gagnants dans l’histoire de la compétition (36), le dernier vainqueur français fut Bernard Hinault, lorsqu’il porta le maillot jaune sur les Champs-Elysées en 1985, pour la cinquième et dernière fois.

L’histoire du tour est émaillée d’anecdotes célèbres, notamment

The Bugle thanks French teacher, Sophie Arsac, for the translation of this month's bilingual article on a topical aspect of FrancoBritish culture.

dans les premières années. En 1913, le coureur français Eugène Christophe était en tête de 5 minutes dans la sixième étape lorsque la fourche de son vélo se cassa dans la descente du Tourmalet. Il rassembla les pièces et courut jusqu’au village le plus proche où il trouva une forge: il alluma un feu, forgea une pièce de métal et répara sa bicyclette. Malgré un retard de 4 heures, il poursuivit la course et finit septième au classement général. La forge dans laquelle il se rendit existe toujours et est devenue un monument national.

En 1967, Tom Simpson, le meilleur coureur britannique de son temps, mourut sur son vélo alors qu’il gravissait le Mont Ventoux. Avant l’ascension, on l’avait vu ingurgiter des comprimés avec de l’eau de vie et l’on retrouva des emballages vides d’amphétamines dans sa poche. Il commença à zigzaguer sur la route et reçut l’aide de spectateurs lorsqu’il

fut à terre. Ses derniers mots auraient été: «Remettez-moi sur mon vélo».

A l’époque, la prise de médicaments n’était pas illégale dans le cyclisme.

Le monument situé à l’endroit de la tragédie est toujours un lieu de pèlerinage célèbre pour les coureurs cyclistes.

Aujourd’hui, le cyclisme se bat durement pour se refaire une réputation. De nombreux gagnants du Tour se sont rendus coupables de dopage durant les deux dernières décennies et le sport poursuit la guerre contre le problème. L’équipe britannique Sky, qui respecte une politique de tolérance zéro en matière de dopage, domina le tour en 2012 avec le vainqueur Bradley Wiggins et son coéquipier Chris Froome à la deuxième place. Ils sont à nouveau les favoris en 2013 et l’on s’attend à ce que Froome soit le leader, suite à la maladie et à la blessure de Wiggins qui a dû déclarer forfait. ■

1. churches(7) 5. hard(3) 7. to like(5) 8. bag(3) 9. buoy(5) 10. shoelace(5) 12. pier(5) 13. modem(5) 17. street(3) 18. beard(5) 19. east(3) 20. positive(7)

Down:

1. state(4) 2. file(4) 3. sherbert(6) 4. bucket(4) 5. desert(6) 6. root(6) 10. ivy(6) 11. cement(6) 12. legs(6) 14. sheet(4) 15. loan(4) 16. nine(4)

Bilingual crossword solution can be found on page 23

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ow in their 5th year of business in France, PRINCE SARL trading as Jon - the carpet man, continues its rapid growth, gaining more and more satisfied customers throughout the country.

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Jon - the carpet man carry a full range of carpet, vinyl & laminate samples in their purpose-built warehouse, which they bring to you to give a no obligation quote. “The desire for decent carpets, fitted over quality underlay, remains a priority for many expats who have either a permanent or holiday

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18 ♦ DIRECTORY

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

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(€27/month)

Large Colour Directory Ad

(€36/month)

€144 €162 €216

12-Month Contract €162

(€13.50/month)

€216

(€18/month)

€243

(€20.25/month)

€324

(€27/month)

Directory Advertising is available either in black and white or colour, and in either small (30 words max) or large (45 words max) format.

Directory adverts may only contain text - no logos, images or artwork are allowed. The minimum contract length is 6 months.

Advertising is payable on publication. All prices are HT.

Large Directory Ad 46mm x 71mm (Actual Size) 45 words max Small Directory Ad 46mm x 46mm (Actual Size)

30 words max

ADVERTISING ♦ 19

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

ADVERTORIAL

Physical, emotional and spiritual well-being

A

warm welcome to Darren Leigh who has recently relocated to France with his Partner Tanya. Darren is a chef by trade and a medium and healer in his spare time and for the last 20 years has been working hard to maintain his passion for both.

A medium since birth, Darren has been seeing, hearing and conversing with spirits and as a small child did not realise that not everyone had this ability.

Darren has a unique insight and one which he never takes for granted; he uses his gift to help others, enabling them to move through the difficult and sometimes painful times in their lives.

Psychic/soul readings are healing by design and many, if not most clients, comment that

Readings or Healing ~ 30 mins ~ 35 Euros Readings or Healing ~ 1 Hour ~ 70 Euros they feel uplifted and sometimes euphoric after a reading with Darren.

Some people believe that to have an accurate reading it must be face to face with the reader but this is certainly not the case; a good and genuine

medium can tune into any soul who wishes a reading, no matter where they are in the world.

Therefore readings via Skype are a great tool if a client cannot logistically attend a face-toface consultation.

Darren has worked all

around the globe lecturing and giving demonstrations; his manner is direct, honest and down to earth... nothing mystical or pie in the sky, as Darren strongly believes that all clients deserve an authentic session delivered with empathy and integrity.

Darren resides in the HauteVienne, just five minutes from Bessines-sur-Gartempe.

If you are unable to attend for a reading in person, telephone and Skype video sessions are available.

All readings are recorded and stored on line indefinitely in your own secure folder, so you can download and access them at any time.

For more information visit www.ame-luna.com or call Darren on 09 70 46 13 06 Siret: 793 583 477 00013

ADVERTORIAL

New Classified Ad Service Takes Root Across France

E

xpats looking to place a classified ad that reaches the whole of France have a job on their hands, as many current providers only offer localised services.

However, that is all about to change thanks to a new company called RootstockAds. Set up by expat Martin Swanson, RootstockAds provides a France–wide service that is accessible through an easy to use interface on www. rootstockads.com. Users can place nationwide classifieds and manage them all in one place, whilst the site’s powerful search facility allows you to search for a specific item or service anywhere in the country.

Not only that, but it is completely free! There is absolutely no charge for placing an

ad on the site. That doesn’t mean it will be any less professional – in fact Rootstock ads is so good it is set to change the face of classified advertising in France, as Martin Swanson explains: “I have seven years expe-

rience in the online expat media business in France and during this time have realised that what was missing was a national database of all expat classifieds in France that could be made to be as local as you like by using filters, for

example, clicking on a map or searching on a post code,” he says.

“Now, for example, someone based in Nice and looking for a rare car can find it in Burgundy, Brittany or anywhere else in the country.”

“I am very proud of the site, I engaged with the team that re-designed the Skype website to create a web presence that is very good to look at and very easy and efficient to buy and sell through. We don’t do information, chat or news like some other sites – what we do is classified ads and we do them very well!”

And the reason for the unusual name?

“I chose RootstockAds because a rootstock is solid, durable, productive and symbolises everything that is good about living in France

ADVERTORIAL

News of RootstockAds has even reached the ears of Sir Peter Ricketts, the British Ambassador to France, who has been very supportive of the initiative.

– good wine, vineyards, sunshine and blue skies,” explains Martin. “I figured if the biggest company in the world named itself after a fruit then I could name mine after a rootstock!”

To find out more about RootstockAds or place a free classified advert, visit the website or send us an email: www.rootstockads.com hello@rootstockads.com

Spotlight your business to over 20,000 readers

T

his month, 10,000 copies of The Bugle Dordogne have been printed and are being distributed across the department. Thanks to our targeted distribution network, personally visiting each of our 200+ distribution points every month, we will make sure that the right number of copies go to the right places. As a result, this edition of The Bugle Dordogne will be seen by as many as 20,000 people!!

That means 20,000 pairs of eyes may be reading this text in the coming few weeks… and they could be reading about your business! Advertorials cost from just

€50 HT, that’s 400 potential new customers or clients for your business for every euro spent!

The Bugle Dordogne is our latest edition, but as a group, The Bugle has 4 years’ experience putting local businesses in touch with the expat community. Our experience shows that an Advertorial, often combined with regular advertising, has proved to be one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways of targeting our loyal readership.

Because we only feature a handful of businesses each month, we highlight those businesses prominently and deliver your message in a targeted manner.

Advertorials are just one of the advertising options we offer, and we would be delighted to talk to you about the other options we have for raising the profile of your business.

Advertorials are now available in 4 sizes (all prices are HT): 1/6 page - €50 1/3 page - €100 (this one) 2/3 page - €200 Full page - €300 If you would like to find out more about our Advertorials, or any of our other advertising options, please feel free to get in touch with us on 05.55.41.17.76 or drop us a line at sales24@thebugle.eu ■

20 ♦ LANGUAGE & GAMES

European Country Wordsearch Try to find the 35 European countries in the letter-grid below. Clues are in French, answers are in English.

Allemagne Angleterre Autriche Belgique Biélorussie Bulgarie Croatie Danemark Ecosse Espagne Estonie Finlande

France Grèce Hongrie Irlande Islande Italie Lettonie Liechtenstein Lituanie Luxembourg Macédoine Malte

Norvège Pays de Galles Pays-Bas Pologne Portugal République tchèque Roumanie Slovaquie Suède Suisse Ukraine

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

Jeans from Genoa

A

lmost everyone will have owned a pair of jeans in their life, and everyone knows jeans are made of denim, but what are the origins of these words? As you may have guessed from their inclusion on this page and in this paper, both are French!

The word ‘jeans’ comes from the French ‘bleu de Gênes’, or blue of Genoa, referring to the blue material originating in the Italian city from which the trousers were made.

Denim, the name of the fabric itself, takes its name from the French town of Nîmes; France bought its denim ‘from Nîmes’ or ‘de Nîmes’, the French town where the fabric would traditionally arrive from Italy.

Interestingly, at about the same time, tailors in the Indian city of Dhunga were making a type of trouser worn by its sailors, giving us the origin of modern-day ‘dungarees’.

Although popularised in American

I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant.

They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes. – Yves SaintLaurent

culture and most famously identified with the Wild West, the earliest examples of jeans were worn by the Genoese navy, which at the time was an independent republic and had a strong naval force. The trousers were designed to be hard-wearing and practical in both wet and dry conditions. The trousers would be laundered in bags thrown out in nets and dragged behind the ships which would cause them to eventually fade to white. ■

French Trivia • “La Marseillaise”, France’s national anthem, was composed in Strasbourg in 1792, not in Marseilles as its name might suggest!!

Anna à la française She’s here. She’s arrived. French Anna.

The French edition of my book Anna’s Secret Granny - Une Mamie de rêve - is in my hands at last. It was published on Friday May 10!

I’ve been a published author since 1996 with more than thirty books published by presses in Ireland. This is my first full-colour children’s book to be published, as well as my first French one, so it’s quite a celebration.

I am thrilled to bits with the book. I was worried it was a bit too pink when I saw the announcement for it on the Fnac site, and it is pink, but it’s beautiful. Artist Peggy Caramel has provided the loveliest illustrations for the book. I was chuffed to see Anna was a redhead like me! And Granny is fabulous, a real, elegant Mamie.

The story is about Anna who, like my kids, doesn’t have any grandmothers. Her friends are always going on about how their grans take them to the cinema, or the swimming pool, or buy them treats, but of course Anna misses out on all that. So she draws a picture of the Granny she’d like - and next morning that Granny turns up on the doorstep.

I used to say when I did workshops with kids at schools and libraries, and wannabe authors, that this book is based on an incredibly simple idea: a picture comes to life. Yet, although I say so myself, it works beautifully. It’s a fun story but with a real message at its heart.

The story has been changed very little in the French version. The only name change is when Anna's fictional Australian Aunt Matilda becomes grande-tante Eulalie. The only other slight deviation is that the original cod liver oil becomes a carton of fish soup. What exacly am I talking about here? Well, you’ll have to see for yourself!

And I hope you'll also read my self-published ebook Heads Above Water: Staying Afloat in France (available in all Amazon stores and from Smashwords) which recounts our very eventful first few years in France, as we established our business and a family life - and dealt with exploding toilets, reluctant roofers and very lively llamas!

Une Mamie de rêve is available now from all good bookshops. Stephanie Dagg

SUDOKU - EASY

SUDOKU - MEDIUM

The solutions to this month’s sudokus can be found on page 23

SUDOKU - HARD

WHAT’S ON ♦ 21

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

ON in July

5th-7th July

©Traumrune / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-3.0

WHAT’S

Félibrée

The Félibrée (Felibrejada in Occitan) is an annual festival of Occitan language and heritage. It travels around different towns and villages of the Périgord each year and this year it’s coming to Bergerac, which will be spectacularly decorated with paper flowers for the occasion.

This celebration, which revives the troubadours who once sang the language of Oc in all the courts of Europe, is the festival of the language of Oc. There are shows, parades of traditional groups with authentic costumes and musical instruments and craft demonstrations.

The first Félibrée, inspired by Frédéric Mistral and the Félibrige, was held in 1903 in Mareuil-sur-Belle and is today attended by thousands of spectators.

8th-20th July Nontron, Lanouaille, Thiviers, Chalais, Jumilhac-le-Grand, Miallet This event is a mixture of concerts and gatherings, cinema and music, photography and literature, all based around the central theme of the guitar.

Main Festival events: Adults 12€ per evening; Under 13s & students 5€.

Fringe events: Workshops and young persons concert FREE For more information tel 05 53 52 55 43 or visit www.guitaresvertes.fr

New Orleans jazz festival with a programme of 16 concerts across the department.

For more information:

tel 05 53 53 66 11 or visit

www.mnop-festival.com The Romans are coming to Vesunna! From the 12th to the 14th July, the VIII Legion of Augusta will be setting up camp beside the museum and Roman ruins at the site to the south of Périgueux. But don’t worry, they come in peace to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of the museum.

The legionnaires, part of a group of re-enactment enthusiasts from right across the country, will give visitors an idea of what local life would have been like in Roman days, including demonstrations of the weapons, armour, tools, living accommodation and food of the day.

There are also a number of other events and activities planned across the weekend, based around daily life in Roman times. There will be costume workshops, and face painting for children, as well

as an open-air showing of Ben Hur on the Saturday evening.

The weekend will also see the opening of a new exhibition entitled “Quoi de neuf chez les Pétrucores?” The Pétrucores is the name of the tribe of Gauls that lived in the region before the Roman conquest. The exhibition will look back at archaeological discoveries at the site during the last 10 years, including first-hand experiences of the archaeologists and will run until March 2014.

Finally, excavation workshops will be held for children every afternoon, as well as guided tours of the ruins for adults.

For more information visit www.perigueux-vesunna.fr

22 ♦ WHAT’S ON

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013

Battle of castillon July 19, 20, 26, 27 August 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16

Spectacular sound and light show commemorating the last great battle of the Hundred Years War, when France took back Aquitaine from the English in 1453.

Performed on a natural arena encompassing 17 acres, within firing range of the original battle ground, 800 volunteers, including 500 actors and 50 horseback riders, re-enact the Battle of Castillon.

For two hours, spectators are captivated by battle sequences with stunts, special effects and explosives. The spectacle also depicts everyday life of the Middle Ages, including rural scenes set in a farm or an inn or by the well, the grape harvest, shooting practice and market day.

“The Battle of Castillon” has become one of the most popular cultural events in Aquitaine and has attracted more than 700,000 spectators since its inception. It is performed, as the producer Eric Le Collen says, “With the precision of the cinema, the sensitivity of the theatre and the dimension of the opera”.

The show takes place at the foot of the Château Castegens. Belvès-de-Castillon is 3 minutes from Castillon-la Bataille, on the Gironde/Dordogne border. The performance begins at 10:30pm and lasts for two hours with a 20-minute interval – it is recommended that you arrive one hour before the start. An open-air restaurant offers dinner from 7:30pm (light refreshments and drinks are also available on site and picnics are allowed).

For more information and tickets: Tel 05 57 40 14 53 or visit www.batailledecastillon.com Tickets: Adults €22; 13-17 year olds €15; 5-12 year olds €9; FREE for Under 5’s

Sarlat Theatre Festival 20th July-5th August

Montignac Festival 22nd-28th July

The Sarlat Theatre Festival is one of the city’s great institutions.

Since 1952 it has animated the ancient stones of the city during the summer. It is the oldest festival of its type after Avignon, the first in Aquitaine and one of the most well known throughout France.

All the performances take place in the open air, against the magical background of the medieval city.

For more information tel 05 53 31 10 83 or visit www.festival-theatre-sarlat.com

Rencontres Musicales Irlandaises 21st-27th July

Irish Festival of Culture with workshops promoting Irish music and dance and opportunities for cultural exchanges.

Includes ceilidhs and an introductory session in hurling with a match between France v. Ireland.

For more information tel 05 53 90 58 92 or visit www.rencontresmusicalesirlandaisesdetocane.fr

At the end of July each year, Montignac is host to a world folklore and dance festival. This 33rd edition invites performers from Northern Cyprus, Colombia, France, Macedonia, Poland, Senegal, Spain, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Venezuela.

For more information tel 05 53 50 14 00 or visit www.festivaldemontignac.assoo.org

WHAT’S ON ♦ 23

JULY 2013 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu

Incredibly Incroyable Theatre/Stand-Up Comedy by & with Bertrand Brossard 26th July - 21h30 Cour du château d’Eymet

Stand-up comedy in English for the French and in French for the English!

Bertrand Bossard, Parisian actor turned English comic, mixes visual humour and Anglo-French stereotypes into comic-trash mime. ‘Incredibly Incroyable!’ is a story told by more than 60 characters. Bossard uses words, imitation, his talent as a clown, and theatre to spin the public in his extraordinary web of comedy.

For more information tel 06 85 50 63 53 or visit http://voixdudropt.blogspot.fr/

Meyrals 27th-28th July

Festival des épouvantails

15th edition of this annual scarecrow competition. Anyone can enter - locals, tourists, children - there are several categories and prizes.

The day ends with a meal served on the church square, followed by a magnificent fireworks display.

Scarecrows will remain on show to be admired throughout the summer.

For more information tel 05 53 31 13 56 or visit http://epoufest.com

Monday

Market Days

Beynac Le Fleix Les Eyzies Ste-Alvère

Tuesday

This year’s Musical Summer Festival offers 20 unfortgettable performances across the Périgord Pourpre in chateaux, abbeys & country houses.

Tel: 05 53 74 30 94 or visit www.festivalbergerac.com

GOT AN EVENT FOR THE BUGLE...? notices24@thebugle.eu

Beaumont du Périgord Bergerac Brantôme Cénac-et-Saint-Julien Lanouaille Le Bugue Mareuil Neuvic Ribérac Salignac Eyvigues Trémolat Villefranche-de-Lonchat

Wednesday

Bergerac Hautefort Jumilhac-le-Grand La Tour Blanche Montpon-Ménestérol Montignac Périgueux Piégut Pluviers Razac Sarlat Siorac-en-Périgord Ste-Nathalène (26/06 – 28/08) Vélines

EASY

Thursday

Domme Excideuil Eymet La Coquille Lalinde Monpazier St Astier St-Julien-de-Lampon Terrasson

Friday Bergerac Brantôme Cubjac Le Buisson Ribérac Sarlat Sigoulés Vergt

Saturday

Agonac Beaumont du Périgord Belvès Bergerac Lalinde La Roche Chalais Le Bugue Montignac Mussidan Neuvic Nontron Périgueux Razac

MEDIUM

Sarlat St Aulaye Thiviers Verteillac Villefranche du Périgord

Sunday

Angoisse (03/07/0-011/09) Bergerac Calviac (15/06 – 31/08) Couze St Front Daglan Issigeac Jumilhac-le-Grand (03/07/ 28/08) Limeuil (30/06 - 25/08) Pontours Pressignac-Vicq Rouffignac Sarlat Sorges St Cyprien St Génies St Pardoux la Rivière

HARD

-

24 ♦ WHAT’S ON

www.thebugle.eu ○ THE BUGLE ○ JULY 2013