{"id":12286,"date":"2016-11-11T13:52:47","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T13:52:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=12286"},"modified":"2016-11-11T13:52:47","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T13:52:47","slug":"quintessentially-french","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/quintessentially-french\/","title":{"rendered":"Quintessentially French"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In this part of the world, the minor rural roads are so narrow that when two vehicles travelling in opposite directions have to pass each other, we are quite used to putting two wheels onto the often quite bumpy adjoining grass verge as we do so. Unfortunately, a couple of days ago I stupidly managed to drive off the edge of the road unintentionally during which I managed to hit something rather hard and put my front suspension out.<\/p>\n

The Kia is therefore now languishing in the garage until Monday as today is a ‘jour f\u00e9ri\u00e9’ (public holiday) and without it I’d have been totally stuck. My pal Victor, who’s still in hospital following his accident back in the summer, came to the rescue and when I left it there I picked up his beautifully restored Citro\u00ebn 2CV which I’ll be using while mine is being sorted. Luckily I established beforehand that it’s not mandatory to wear a beret or have a pencil moustache while driving it, although both do help immensely of course.<\/p>\n

Because I have neither, the little tinker wouldn’t let me start it this morning and it took me quite a while, while all the time receiving all sorts of contradictory advice about pulling out and pushing in the choke by phone from Victor’s hospital bed (figuratively speaking). It turned out that the trick is to release the starter key at just the right moment, not to hang onto it and keep spinning the engine, and if you do that it then coughs into life as though it’s just finished enjoying its first Gauloise and black coffee of the day in the quintessential French way. Luckily though, it can’t spit.<\/p>\n

I then just managed to get to the Carrefour Contact in Rouffignac before they closed as much of the journey is uphill and whizzing along at top speed is purely relative at 80 kmh. But in any case, due to the Duckling’s suspension, the wisdom of old age tells you that at any higher speed, you’d be putting your life on the line, especially if there are any bends of any significance along the route.<\/p>\n

Mind you, it’s great fun so long as you don’t want or need to get anywhere quickly, although Victor tells me that he drove it all the way to Southern Spain and back. He isn’t as considerate or understanding towards it as I am though, and said that he had to stop every now and again to allow the exhaust, that at times was glowing red hot, to cool down. On the other hand, he has been known to be somewhat prone to exaggeration \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I came home on the top road around the back of Plazac and with the Autumn colours, the sun on the Limousin cows chewing the cud in the adjoining fields, the old local stone houses with their characteristic bi-sloping roofs and the Deuche’s little air-cooled engine chugging away up front, I could almost have been driving along in the ‘France ancienne’ of 50 years ago that we all remember so fondly and is the reason why so many of we oldies are all living here now. Absolutely lovely.<\/p>\n

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When I drove out of the Carrefour car park, an elderly chap was puffing and blowing riding his bike up the sloping entrance to do a spot of shopping before the store closed for the day. Now he did<\/em> have a beret and pencil moustache and you could tell he was the real thing because he had a wooden chateau bottled wine box with one side removed strapped to his handlebars as a kind of luggage pannier. Such panache, and we smiled at each other as we passed. If I stay long enough in France, I hope that I acquire effortless style like that \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this part of the world, the minor rural roads are so narrow that when two vehicles travelling in opposite directions have to pass each other, we are quite used to putting two wheels onto the often quite bumpy adjoining grass verge as we do so. Unfortunately, a couple of days ago I stupidly managed … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12286"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12291,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12286\/revisions\/12291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}