Love a Happy Ending Lifestyle Magazine August 2013 | Page 57

VILLAGE LIFE IN FRANCE

Playing French Cricket With Le Grand Crew
If you score fifty in cricket, one
can generally expect a ripple of
applause from polite English
gentlemen, looking up from
their warm beer. When you
score fifty as a woman, the
gentlemen neither applaud nor
look up. Typically, they stare
even deeper into their beer with
a kind of mournful affection.
When I was young I thought
that middle-age spread was a sandwich filling used on Saga cruises. Well, these days it’s
the whole sandwich with full fat salted butter and a lifetime of lust and pleasure securely built
in to my vertically challenged body. If I were still a poet I could write a true version of “The
Waist-Land”. I could no longer put off the knowledge that it was time to leave the crease and
take off some padding.
I am soooo lucky to spend a fair bit of my life in a small town in Charente-Maritime. No
matter how I much I resist, the cunning native trap of bread, brie and brioche gets me every
time. Increasingly in France, I am not alone. The old image of the chic weightless French
maid has somewhat slipped south these days. Waistlines are probably the only thing
growing in the French economy. Zee ‘amburgers (with or without horse meat) are very much
established as part of the younger French lifestyle. However, my contemporary sisters still
wave the tricolour of slim cool elegance. Agonisingly, this is apparently achieved on a diet of
foie gras, fromage and the odd Cognac digestif. How can this be?

Saint Savinien Sur Charente, France