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35 more of Peregrine's brilliant articles on France
You’ve been dithering about this year’s holiday. Understandably, what with the
financial world in meltdown and terrible uncertainty hanging over Cristiano
Ronaldo’s future. Now, though, it’s decision time. Do you stay in Britain or
not?
Let me do two things: (a) give you the long-range weather forecast. “We’re
certainly not expecting a particularly dry summer,” said a jolly Met Office
chap last week. “It is expected to be wetter than average.” And (b) suggest
France.
For a start, it’s not far. It involves no long-haul flights, jabs against
disgusting diseases or being treated as terrorists by fat-bottomed customs
officers. It has everything in one country: beaches, sun, mountains,
forests, lakes, culture, wine, proper villages and the world’s best-looking
presidential wife.
And, despite the plunging pound, it remains affordable. Not cheap – some of
the prices below are a little eyewatering – but reasonable value for the
standards involved.
Recently, I stayed in a decent three-star double room for £55 a night and had
a very acceptable five-course lunch, with ample wine, for £30. The taxi back
wasn’t overpriced, either. If I could remember exactly how much after all
the wine, I’d tell you.
Here’s our guide to what we reckon to be the key French regions for summer
2008. All prices are for high season.
ALSACE
So, you come down from a glorious walk or drive, high in the Vosges hills. At
once, you are enveloped in a village warm with half-timbered houses, summer
flowers and a rooted air of open, epic domesticity. There may be a festival
on, in which case apple-cheeked matrons will urge you towards beer, sausages
and large fruit tarts. An equally fruity band will be playing close by. It
will feel like a homecoming.
And this is only one village. There are dozens of others along the loveliest
wine route in Europe, and everywhere else, too. Many (Riquewihr,
Kaysersberg) are, essentially, pageants waiting to happen.
From a harrowing history – Alsace is where the Latin and German worlds
collide, often – the region has drawn a substantial sense of itself,
Germanic in rigour, French in anarchic gaiety, alsacien in the appeal
of the final mix. Strasbourg is, for instance, the most civilised big city
in France. Stroll from bookshops to wood-panelled bierstubs via perhaps
France’s greatest cathedral – the place has good-living intelligence in its
DNA.
Beyond, the village-speckled plain rises to hills and forest, perched castles
and mountain meadows whose cows favour us with munster cheese. Storks are
ubiquitous. In the Jurassic south, folk eat fried carp with their fingers.
