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The characteristic sounds of France change over time.  For decades, the quality of telephone service was so poor that they used to say it took two years to get a telephone, then two hours each time to get a dialling tone.  When I came to France first in 1966, my host family had no telephone; neither did any of the people we visited.  One went to the Post Office to make a call: the counter clerk set up the call for you, and then sent you to a cubicle to speak to your correspondent.  In much the same way as African countries have leapfrogged fixed telecommunications networks and gone straight to mobile, France pretty much by-passed the slow Strowger exchanges that constituted close to 100% of the UK telephone network, and went straight to the fast electro-mechanical Crossbar type of exchange, and the countryside is liberally strewn with microwave towers, which quickly created a trunk network for them to talk to each other over.  So France never had much copper in the trunk network.  In one way, however, the French PTT resembled GPO Telephones: there was one telephone handset to be had, and the bells all sounded the same.  Rather tinny, but unmistakeably urgent.  I bought one for a couple of Euros from our delightful Post Office counter clerk Jean-Luc when he’d set up a stall outside his house on one of the summer brocante days.  (Judging by the number of handsets he was flogging, I guess he must have swept up all the handsets when they put in a new PBX at the Post Office.)  So I have a telephone with metal bells and a dial.  It’s a pity my register at the exchange doesn’t recognise the old loop-disconnect pulse signalling, but I can take incoming calls, and it emits that tinny ringing that used to be a characteristic sound of France.

Another disappearing sound of France is that of the flat-twin air-cooled motor car engine.  These high-revving unburstable little engines used to provide the motive power for much of rural France, mostly in the Citroën family, but also in the stylish – and fast – Panhards.  Monsieur Poudou, our local beekeeper, used to park his 2CV at the end of our street when he came into town, and his was one of the last of the little thrummers around.  A neighbour has, however, recently bought himself a beat-up Dyane, so until it thrums its last, we have some relief from the now universal diesel noises.  Brings a smile to the face.

A recurrent sound of modern France is me swearing about problems of internet access.  Did all the usual tricks – reboot PCs and router, switch the filter, check and correct router settings.  I’m not certain my blood pressure can stand another round of calls to France Telecom, so maybe I’ll just have to do without the internet for the next 9 days.  Or so I was starting to think.  We got our network password from Frogtel with remarkably little trouble over the telephone – I just had to give details of the bank that pays our monthly sub for ADSL service.  But when I tried to reconfigure the router, guess what?  Internet Explorer cannot connect to this site.  At this point we thought ‘it has to be the router’.  Off we went to the prefecture town, returning with a nice new Belkin router in a pretty box that said ‘easy instant connection to the internet’ or some such which.  It wasn’t till we’d stripped the cellophane off the box and opened it up that we discovered that we needed a separate modem as well. 

A few more tries with the original wireless router, then we were in the car, back to said prefecture town, having decided to get a router from Frogtel.  Good job it wasn’t raining: you have to queue down the street to see the triage nurse, as it were, and he then takes a note of what you want on a high-tech pad of scrap paper, and tells you to go and wait in a corner.  Well, half an hour later, we emerged with the router, after a nice chat about old times at Frogtel with one of the clerks thereof.  Think, though: when did you last see a BT shop that you could walk into and transact with?  Next port of call, E. Leclerc, from whom we’d bought the misleadingly packaged router earlier.  All explained to receptionist 1, who sent me to receptionist 2 to get an ‘avoir’ (credit note).  Goes without saying that she send me back to receptionist 1, who...  By the time I was at deuce in the ping-pong match between receptionists, which gets a bit bruising when you’re the ball, I started to get assertive.  Can I use this in any E. Leclerc?  No, this shop only.  Not even at your petrol station?  No: if it’s a credit for a purchase in the shop, it can only be redeemed in the shop.  All in tones that put me, the customer, firmly in the wrong.  Well, sez I, that’s no good to me: I’m not here very often (laying on the foreign accent even more thickly): can’t I have a refund?  A phone call to a Higher Power, and authority was finally given for a cash refund.  From another desk, of course.  Well, once all that was out of the way, and my wallet was rather fatter than when we first left home (they plainly couldn’t be arsed to do the admin for a Visa card refund), off we jolly well set on our second ride home. 

Only to face exactly the same frustrations as we’d had with the old router.  Cutting a long and hypertensive story short, I set up the new device upstairs, and it works with the laptop.  Which we could probably have done with the original router.  Paciência.  If I feel strong tomorrow, I’ll have a further crack at hooking up the desk computer.  But the chances are that it’s a fault with the telephone socket which, after all, spent a while under water in 1999.

The weather is mild, but damp, so we have kept the fire burning since we got here.  It’s doing pretty well, but I think we’ll have to go and buy some more wood, our reserve stock and a first car load being much depleted after just five days.  We quite like this errand: you weigh the car before and after filling it yourself with firewood, paying for the difference.  Not cheap, however: but then, nothing is these days in France.