Shpot the differensh, Moneypenny

After the Scottish independence ‘No’ vote on Thursday, that’s my best Sean Connery accent. Take a look at the two pictures shown below. Here’s the first one, showing the front of my Kia.

And here’s the second showing the back.

Differences not too hard to spot, eh? Every French ‘département’ has a code and old-style number plates had them incorporated within the vehicle registrations themselves. So from before I first started coming to France up until quite recently, cars from Paris used to have registrations ending in 75, those from the Charente 16 and so on. But as in the UK, the old-style numbers eventually began to run out and a new format had to be devised. This was done, but in the process the automatic indication of département was lost, because it consisted of two letters followed by three numbers followed by two more letters.

Anywhere else but France, this probably would not have presented too much of a problem, but here it touched a nerve. It turned out that French drivers liked to display their départements on their number plates, so a compromise was worked out whereby drivers were given the option of displaying not only their département on their new number plates but also the region of which it is a part, by way of a flag-style motif on the right of their plates counterbalancing the ‘F’ for France that appears on the left under the multi-starred EU flag.

Unlike in England, before a vehicle with old-style number plates changes hands, it has to be re-registered with a new-style number and this is what happened with my Kia Sportage. So when I acquired it, it had plates that ended in 09 for the Ariège because the previous owner lived there in the commune of Verniolle, which is in the greater region Midi-Pyrénées. So when I bought it, it had new-style plates with ’09’ and ‘Midi-Pyrénées’ on the right of them. There’s no need to change this nowadays when you buy a vehicle from outside your region but as an indication of how entrenched attitudes are here, here’s a little story.

During last week I went up to the ‘poubelles’ to dispose of some rubbish that included… ahem… quite a few empty beer bottles. As it happened, there was an elderly gent there who was also disposing of a few himself and as we were chucking our bottles into the waste glass container, I made a comment that ‘this was evidently the end of the summer holidays’. He picked up on this and asked if I was up on holiday from the Ariège, having spotted the Kia’s registration. I replied that no, this was merely where I had bought the car from and he grumpily said that in that case, I should change the number. Apart from showing that not everyone in France is full of sweetness and light, it shows just how ingrained this number plate thing is.

Well, I had to buy a third plate for my trailer, so I thought that I might as well go the whole hog and buy matching new ones for the Kia too. They arrived today so after sorting out the trailer, I thought I might as well finish the job off and replace the ones on the vehicle as well.

So that should keep France’s Victor Meldrew happy if I bump into him again up at the poubelles. The new plates now show ‘Aquitaine’ and ’24’ for the département of Dordogne and while I was at it, I thought that I might also see if the old roof bars that I had for the Astra, which were supposed to be ‘universal’, actually are. And surprise, surprise, they fitted very nicely, so at the end of the day, everyone was happy. Result!