luxurious living

Luxurious living.

There is something very civilised about living in rural Brittany. A place that makes the pace of life in rural Pembrokeshire seem a bit frantic.

Even with Sterling being worth about as much as a couple of sheets of andrex the cost of living here is still right down at the bottom of the bottom line.

You can also get proper white wine for making moules. Today we cooked our moule in Gros Plant Nantais, Gros should be the hint, this is a white of such violent dry acidity you could probably pour it in the car battery, in fact at €1.50 a bottle it’s cheaper than battery acid.

In a gurning competition it would be considered doping, take a generous gobfull of this stuff and the resultant involuntary grimace would guarantee a placing….

Not everything in Brittany though is the nadir of civilisation; driving being a notable exception, the average Breton places their brains in a bucket before taking the wheel. Well maybe even the word “driving” is pushing the limits of credibility.

They launch cars at each other, except for the truck drivers who need treating with extreme caution especially after lunch!

The cost of lunch has gone up a little, about 50 cents on last year but you can still get a decent four course meal for about 8 pounds “vin compris”. That’s where the trouble all starts, the truckers lunch is also “vin compris” so after 2 pm the average trucker is going to be flying 38 tons of artic bathed in the comfortable glow of a decent meal with courage and joie de vivre derived from the best part of a bottle of cheap Bordeaux.

Three sheets to the wind, trousered, call it what you will,, the result is 16 wheels formation flying at you at an indecent pace and sometimes they manage to stay on their own side of the road too!

The drinking and driving battle might be largely won in the UK, but combat has barely been joined over here. That said the gendarmes take no prisoners, fall foul of one of their mobile roadblocks where everyone gets to blow in the bag, and you are banned on the spot if the light flashes the wrong colour.

Of course it’s not so bad really, the IVECO is Italian and therefore designed for the cut and thrust of manic motoring. It does not really do motorways but the sort of rural roads you get round here suit it to a T. On supersoft suspension it bounces and lurches it’s way along but the wheels always stay connected to the floor. The brakes, product of a land of tailgating simply pin it to the road with an iron hand and kill velocity with ABS driven efficiency.

The fly in the ointment is the position of the driving seat. Or rather the passenger seat. Management, not known for her cautious style of driving, well OK maybe wheel turning is more apposite. Now, normally all is OK, but over here she is sitting an easy metre to my left this places her in the heart of the action but with no control at all. When that truck steams through the bend she is perfectly placed to see the potential for disaster, but the wheel that she automatically yanks at is not there and the brake pedal she stamps is a flat plate of steel.

Of course, worst of all when I pull out to overtake and realise there is a line of cars coming the other way, she will have known this for several seconds already and what’s more they are fully in her line of collision err vision.

All in all we have witnessed various responses, handfuls of seat clenched, feet braced against the dashboard and windscreen, face screwed up, eyes closed and “Nggggaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!” said, there are also periods of peace, where I glance across and realise she has her eyes firmly closed as if expecting to die in the very next instant.

This all makes me suspect that she does not always enjoy being driven. Funny though, she rarely offers to drive herself; her usual response to stress in Pembrokeshire. Maybe even her considerable courage fails her.

It’s still a very civilised place though, we took the tribe out for lunch: a meal for nine and change from €90, yes and it was “vin compris”.