As of the first of January, you name it, and it’s up

For a start, the weather was enough to induce some degree of SAD in even the most annoyingly cheerful and, once again, I found myself wondering why Mme Masstairmann and I didn’t just up sticks here in Dinan and move south down to, I don’t know, Corsica, say.

But my Breton wife soon reminded me that there’s more to life than sunshine. The cost of living and property prices on the ‘Island of Beauty’ are soaring.

They’re national champions for the number of people living on or below the baguette-line, and for the number of seriously wealthy who don’t pay so much as one red eurocent in tax, not even the VAT on their armour-plated Mercs.

And the balmy Mediterranean nights are often lit up by gunfire and bomb attacks : ‘une nuit bleue’, they call this and it causes many a ‘nuit blanche’ or sleepless one, too. No wonder the majority of Corsicans describe themselves as ‘tired’ and the island also tops the national suicide table. Maybe Mme M’s right after all, eh.

So what’s new for us here in grey, rainy mainland France as of the first of January 2013, then? Well, you name it and it’s up: first class stamps from 60 centimes to 63 and second class from 57 to 58, gas by 2.4%, electricity 2.5% and income tax by 2% for most people.

A book of ten tickets on the metro will now set you back euros 13.30 but don’t yell Taxi! too soon because their fares rose by 2.6%, too. I suppose you could limit the damage by stopping in but TV licences are up six euros to 131.

On the work front, more and more big companies like Renault and Peugeot are only hobbling along, wondering how they can cut costs and lay off staff. A lot of household names are going into receivership, like Virgin Megastore, and the situation’s no better regionally or locally. A poultry-processing plant in central Brittany is making a thousand workers redundant, most of them middle-aged women with families and mortgages who’ve never worked anywhere else and are unqualified to do anything else, even if there were any other jobs going, and there aren’t.

A big Breton estate agency chain has just thrown in the towel and this morning’s paper carried the news that rural Dinan is to become a gendarmerie zone. That shook me, but not as much as the 50 officers at our police station on the main market square, because that was the first they’d heard of it, too. And that’s after we lost the Palais de Justice to St Malo, not to mention an army barracks here, or a secondary school there.

On the roads, drivers in a hurry will now have to keep an eye out not just for the nation’s 4,250 regular speed cameras, but also the new sectional ones that measure your average speed over certain distances.

They’re designed to catch anyone ‘crushing the mushroom’ to make up for lost time after slowing down through the initial check, a reference to the days when the accelerator pedals on some French cars did indeed sprout up out of the floor like the edible fungus.

Then there are the new hand-held speed-camera ‘pistols’ in unmarked squad cars going with the flow, and temporary cameras around road works. One of those flashed 8,000 unwitting speedsters a day last week on the 110 kph Nantes-Rennes expressway, most of whom hadn’t spotted the one, single 90 kph temporary limit sign. Oh! And they’re installing more and more traffic-light cameras to catch anyone unwise enough to ‘griller un rouge’, too.

But the law making it obligatory for motorists to carry their own breathalysers has been shelved, though. That was introduced last spring but we were told that gendarmes would only smack our hands until the autumn if we were stopped without one. There’d be no fines, something some ferry operators forgot to mention to their passengers last summer.

Then consumer organisations discovered that a lot of the two-euro disposable ones were unreliable, anyway. That could lead to a driver ‘playing the Breton bagpipes’ and the crystals giving him the thumbs up even if he was actually over the limit.

Mind you, we have had the odd ray of sunshine here and there. Our triple-play access to television, internet and telephone with free landline calls to 64 countries stayed unchanged at 29.90 a month. Oh! And the national monthly minimum salary for a full-time job – weekly cash wages are illegal here – also went up by an index-linked 0.3% to 1,429.97 euros. That’s another three centimes an hour, would you believe, or a shade under five euros a month, so keep buying the lottery tickets, eh.

And we’ve also had the usual timeless scenes from the everyday life of country folk to cheer us up, too. Like the 58-year-old chap in Normandy who opened his mac and flashed his, er, tackle at this young couple, only they were CID officers and ran him in for ‘exhibition sexuelle’.

Or the tourist in the southern Breton resort of Larmor-Plage who got out of his car at the Pointe des Blagueurs – Jokers’ Point, and I’m not making this up – to take a quick snap of his car in front of the pretty little port. But he forgot the hand-brake, so his shot is now presumably entitled My Car in the Port, which makes it a much more interesting photo all round really, eh.

Then there was the cow that fell out of a horse-van on the motorway down near Rennes. But it was only when he got back to his farm in Manche county – the bit of France that you can see from your north coast – that the driver realised anything was up. The cow, miraculously, was unhurt and then wandered along the road, causing traffic to veer and swerve in a lively fashion.

Mme Masstairmann and I had a bit of a chuckle at the UK horseburger scandal, too, first because someone once told us that virtually all the steak sold on Frence’s high-roads and bye-roads at quick-bite, steak-frites stops comes from animals that once whinnied rather than mooed. And then because Brittany is actually one of Europe’s leading producers of horsemeat, funnily enough, despite the fact that the Bretons themselves share your revulsion at the very idea.

Talking of the countryside, two Breton trees have been reminding us that, whatever our own earthly ups and downs, we humans are only passing through on the briefest of visits.

The yew in the churchyard just down the road from Dinan in Saint-Maudez near Broons has just received its official ‘plaque d’arbre remarquable’ because it’s reckoned to be at least 1,000 years old, making the old lady one of the most ancient in France. Yes! It’s a female tree, with arils or red fleshy cups around her seeds. (Actually, curse me for a dullard or a townie or both if you will, but I didn’t know there were male and female trees, and I had to look ‘arils’ up, too. Honestly! The things I do for you.)

The oak tree at Bégard near Guingamp is only a youthful hundred or so, but it’s representing Brittany in France’s Tree of the Year competition and is currently the favourite ahead of a Corsican olive tree. Well, it is growing out of the roof of an even more venerable granite dovecot, you see, and you can even vote for it, too, if you like, at www.arbredelannee.com.

They don’t know how lucky they were to survive the reign of Monsieur Sarkozy, though, because he’s the kind of president who’d have cut one of them down, then climbed up on the stump to make a speech about saving the environment.

Kenavo!