the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

Having been over in France recently, one obvious factor was the cost of being there. Our food bills at the supermarkets were 25% or so more than in the UK and petrol prices were 20-25p per litre more than back home, even allowing for the exchange rates.

When we mentioned this to one of the locals, who had asked if we enjoying our holiday, he blamed us, or the UK. You left the EU, you don’t pay any money in now so they take it from us. That and a left-wing government is what he thought.

We were staying in a very rural part of France where there are a lot of British people who have set up home (had we realised that we would have gone somewhere else), but one of the obvious things as we drove around were the number of boarded up shops. So many of the villages, and small towns, were almost derelict in their centres.

Now, we have similar issues here, in that shopping habits have changed and our High Streets are dying, but I have not seen anything like the general level of decay that we found in France. It has been thirty or so years since I was last in that country, a long time, and I do know how things have changed here in the UK and in the USA, where I have spent much time since my last French adventures.

The world is changing all of the time and that is inevitable, but I don’t like the way that things have gone. There was a time when I would have been happy to move to France, but then we discovered the USA and would have been happier to have moved there. Circumstances prevented the latter, even though we owned property there, but there came a time when we were glad to get out, and we, currently, don’t even want to go to the US to visit.

But France still felt comfortable for us. We have enough of the language to get by as tourists, and we enjoy the people. It saddens us to see how things have, seemingly, gone downhill for them in so many ways. The EU was not good for the UK and I am glad that we are rid of it, but France was a prime mover and I had thought that they would have been still thriving in that environment. It seems not.

We are planning to go back to France, maybe later this year and/or in 2025 and wonder what we will find in different parts to those that we saw this year.