Driving in France
Our house is on a small hill, overlooking our field below, down to the road about 150 metres away at the bottom of the field. It is a quiet road - a few cars, an occasional tractor, a school bus and so on. Very tranquil.
This morning, in a terrible stroke of bad luck, a car going down the hill met the school bus coming the other way, head on. The bus went into the ditch and the car went under the bus.
The bus driver escaped with reasonably light injuries (although he lost a finger so he perhaps won’t be able to carry on driving) and the one school child on the bus escaped injury although he is in hospital in shock. The driver of the car was killed - a young lady apparently, although we don’t know who.
It’s almost unreal something like that happening at the end of your garden in the middle of nowhere. Even more surreal perhaps, the police, fire service, ambulance etc took away the vehicles and casualties and now we are left with a quiet road, as always, as if nothing happened. It’s quite disturbing to think that you can be killed so quickly and suddenly, and barely leave a trace where it happened.
As a slightly curious coincidence, it was only yesterday I started adding an article about Driving in France to the site in which I said that, although the French have a reputation for driving too close and too fast, I had never really seen any accidents. Bad timing, coincidence, whatever. Be warned! A quiet road can be as perilous as a motorway if you aren’t careful.
Anyway that is all a bit depressing and not why you’re here so I’ll tell you about the only other incident we’ve ever had on our bit of road, which is more entertaining.
About four years ago a lorry carrying a load of dried sweetcorn grains was driving along and somehow managed to spill the entire load down the hill outside our entrance, and the road for about 50 metres in each direction was an inch thick in dried corn. If you can’t picture it, it’s a bit like dried peas, or marbles perhaps. And made it completely impossible to drive on the road.
It took two days for enough of the corn to be cleared away that the road could be safely reopened and we could leave the house. The only person celebrating was our neighbour, an elderly french farmer, who filled more sacks than you can imagine with enough chicken food to last for years.
And we still have the only road verges in Lot-et-Garonne where sweetcorn springs up at the edge of the road instead of dandelions or nettles.
