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  • Le jour où mon ombre m'a parlé

    Le jour où mon ombre m'a parlé
    2025/04/17

    Vivre dans un climat tempéré tend à éliminer les excuses pour quitter l’appartement et faire de l’exercice en raison du temps médiocre. Depuis que j’ai déménagé à Nice, j’essaie de profiter du climat agréable pour faire plus de marche aérobique—mes « marches rapides, » comme je les appelle parfois en sortant de chez moi. Le meilleur itinéraire que j’ai trouvé pour cela est de monter la Colline du Château depuis le port de Nice, puis de redescendre du côté opposé, pour arriver au pied de la Tour Bellanda, une ancienne tour défensive devenue aujourd’hui un site touristique prisé, offrant depuis son sommet des vues splendides sur la ville, le Port et la Baie des Anges.

    J’ai fait cette promenade de nombreuses fois, en m’arrêtant souvent dans le parc au sommet de la colline pour boire un peu d’eau ou même un café avant de redescendre. Du printemps à l’automne, mon itinéraire de retour me conduit généralement de la Tour Bellanda à travers la Vieille Ville, en empruntant la rue Droite, puis en traversant la Promenade du Paillon (un parc aménagé sur la rivière couverte du Paillon), en direction de notre appartement, situé dans le quartier de Carabacel.

    Cet itinéraire permet d’éviter le Cours Saleya, un quartier souvent encombré, aménagé autour de l'ancien Marché aux Fleurs de Nice, dont les nombreux étals de fleurs, nourriture, boutiques, cafés et restaurants attirent une foule immense de touristes pendant une grande partie de l’année. Un matin ensoleillé de fin de printemps, cependant, j’ai remarqué qu’il y avait relativement peu de monde—il devait être encore assez tôt—et j’ai traversé le marché, le trottoir devant moi dégagé et le soleil dans mon dos.

    C’est alors que mon ombre m’a parlé.

    J’ai baissé les yeux et j’ai remarqué, distraitement, le mouvement d’une ombre—quelqu’un qui marchait avec une démarche que je ne reconnaissais pas. En l’observant, j’ai lentement réalisé que c’était moi, c’était ma propre ombre—et pourtant elle semblait étrangère, à part, distincte, inconnue. Je ne l’ai pas reconnue même après avoir réalisé qu’il s’agissait de mon propre reflet ombragé. C’était la silhouette sombre d’un homme âgé, dont la démarche trahissait une douleur ou une blessure, ou peut-être simplement le prix naturel du vieillissement. Je me suis arrêté et j’ai réfléchi un instant, comme si j’essayais d’accepter que mes observations étaient réelles, puis j’ai repris ma route, incapable de détacher mon regard de l’ombre qui me précédait. La malaise de ses mouvements persistait, même lorsque j’essayais d’en modifier.

    Il y a des façons de l’expliquer, je suppose : des blessures à la hanche après un accident de vélo, l’usure corporelle ordinaire qui survient après plus de sept décennies de vie. Mais le manque initial de reconnaissance, suivi de la prise de conscience qui m’est venue lorsque mon ombre m’a parlé, était déconcertant. Ce sentiment persiste depuis.

    Je ne sais pas ce qui est le plus inquiétant : la conscience de moi-même qui m’est venue dans un murmure, ce matin ensoleillé, ou le fait que c’était une ombre qui détenait plus de savoir que moi.

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    5 分
  • The day my shadow spoke to me

    The day my shadow spoke to me
    2025/04/10

    Living in a temperate climate tends to erase excuses to get out and exercise because of bad weather. Since moving to Nice I’ve tried to take advantage of the pleasant climate to do more aerobic walking—my “power walks,” as I sometimes say when heading out the door. The best route I’ve found for that is to ascend the Colline du Château (Castle Hill) from Nice Port, then descend from the opposite side, emerging at the base of La Tour Bellanda, an old defensive tower that is now a favourite tourist site, offering from its apex splendid views of the city, the port and the bay.

    I’ve made this walk many times, often pausing in the park atop the Colline for some water or even a coffee before descending. From late Spring through Autumn my route homeward generally takes me from the Tour Bellanda through the Vieille Ville (Old City) along the rue Droite, crossing the Promenade du Paillon (a parkland built over the covered Paillon River), heading to our home in the Carabacel neighbourhood.

    This route avoids the often congested Cours Saleya, an area built around the old Nice flower market whose numerous food stalls, shops, cafés and restaurants attract vast crowds of tourists during much of the year. On one sunny late Spring morning, however, I noted that there were relatively few people around—it must have been quite early—and I walked through the market area, the pavement ahead of me clear and the sun at my back.

    It was then that my shadow spoke to me.

    I glanced down in front of me and noticed, distractedly, the movement of a shadow, someone walking with a gait I did not recognise. As I observed I slowly realised that it was me, it was my own shadow—and yet it seemed a stranger, apart and distinct, unfamiliar. I did not recognise it even after I realised it was my own shadowy reflection. It was the dark silhouette of an older man whose gait betrayed pain or injury, or perhaps simply the natural toll of ageing. I stopped and thought for a moment, as if trying to accept that my observations were real, then continued on, unable to look anywhere other than at the shadow that preceded me. Its awkwardness persisted, even when I tried to change it.

    There are ways to explain it, I suppose—injuries to a hip from a bicycle accident, the ordinary corporeal wear and tear that comes from surpassing seven decades of life. But the initial lack of recognition, then the awareness that came when my shadow spoke to me, was discomfiting. The feeling has lingered since.

    I do not know what is more uncomfortable, the self-awareness that came to me in a whisper on that sunny morning, or that it was a shadow that bore greater knowledge than I.



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    4 分
  • A French service for streamlining bureaucratic processes - really!

    A French service for streamlining bureaucratic processes - really!
    2025/03/27

    It’s one of those lasting stereotypes of life in France—coping with French bureaucracy. French residents and citizens complain about it, and it’s a commonplace among writers in the why-not-move-to-France cottage industry.

    But the Administration française actually provides an online tool to make one of the routine nuisances of managing bureaucratic tasks easier: changing one’s address, whether moving within the country, or moving to a location beyond its borders. It’s called the Changement d'adresse en ligne, or simply the “Online Change of Address” service.

    The online tool allows one to change one’s address (and in many cases one’s phone number and/or email address) with a number of public- and private-sector services:

    * energy suppliers (EDF, Engie, ENERCOOP);

    * France Travail (the French national employment bureau);

    * social security agencies: health insurance (including CPAM, the national health insurance provider), family allowance and retirement funds;

    * Service des Impôts (French tax authority);

    * the SIV, the service responsible for motor vehicle registration.

    The service is available to all bona fide residents of France, not just French citizens.

    To use the service you’ll need to login using either your local credentials for ServicePublic.fr or the FranceConnect authentication service. The site will then guide you through the process, consisting of verifying personal information, submitting details on changes to be made, identifying the services where you wish the changes to be made, indicating the date the changes go into effect, and finally a page that verifies all changes indicated prior to submission.

    Then you’re done!

    There might be those who assert that the invention of a service to mitigate time spent on bureaucratic functions is really just a testimonial to the oppressiveness of French bureaucracy. But the next time, as a French resident, you move and lurch from one corporate or government website to another to change your address or contact details, pause for a moment and think about how it might not have to be that way. It seems that somebody in the Administration française had that thought, too.

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    3 分
  • Reflections on Bureaucracy and Daily Life in France

    Reflections on Bureaucracy and Daily Life in France
    2025/03/20
    A few decades ago while working in Massachusetts, I had an employee who was an Italian citizen, but a permanent resident of the United States. In fact, he was born in Italy to Italian parents who already lived in the U.S., and he had lived almost his entire life in America. It was his personal choice to not become an American citizen. He therefore had to make periodic visits to the immigration office to renew his residency and work permits—and everyone in the office heard in detail about the bureaucratic nightmare that confronted him on these occasions—an undignified combination of complexity and dysfunction.Moving to Ireland from the U.S. my family got a taste of similar bureaucratic processes: obtaining green cards, annual visits to the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) to renew our visas, and all of the other issues that involve some kind of public service in the country. These included getting a PPS number (Personal Public Service number—the Irish equivalent of a Social Security number), applying for a Drugs Payment Scheme (DPS) card, etc. We even had to take driving lessons and pass a rigorous driving test to obtain driving licences (I failed my first road test). Then of course there were annual interactions with the tax authority, the social welfare office, and more.Visas and work permits aside, these are mostly normal things that have counterparts in the U.S.—it’s just that in the U.S. they come at you over the course of time and aren’t compressed into a relatively short transitional period. The biggest nuisance we faced as newcomers in Ireland was the full day it would take each year to renew our visas—sometimes it took three hours of queuing outside just to enter the building. And it got more expensive every year. We were naturalised as citizens after five years and one of the advantages thereafter was not having to make the dreaded annual trip to the GNIB. Apart from this we found the bureaucratic systems in Ireland to be, if anything, simpler and easier to negotiate than their U.S. equivalents. Being citizens of an E.U. country also made our eventual transition to living in France in retirement easier than it would have been otherwise.France has an undeniable reputation for having a demanding bureaucracy. Indeed, it is sometimes identified as the country that defined the modern bureaucratic state. French people embrace the stereotype and sometimes complain resignedly about it. Many expatriate commentators and consultants in the ever-growing move-to-France cottage industry also highlight this as both a necessary hurdle in moving to France from outside the European Union, and as a way of life thereafter.But I’m happy to to say that, to me, the hype about oppressive French bureaucracy hasn’t lived up to its reputation, at least not for us.I admit: part of this is because as a citizen of Ireland and therefore of the European Union we enjoy freedom of movement within the E.U.—we do not require special permission to live and work in France, so no need for visas or a carte de séjour. We do not plan to operate a business. We also qualify for the benefits of the national health insurance system, the Assurance Maladie, by simply transferring our health benefits in Ireland to France, accomplished by completing a standardised E.U. form (Form S1). Other than this our transition involved a minimum of government bureaucracy—all that comes to mind is the process of exchanging our Irish drivers licences for French ones.Bureaucracy also exists in the private sector, of course, and settling in France involves managing a range of things that, again, have their American counterparts. In our case these involved leases, insurance policies (including our “top-up” insurance or mutuelles to cover the share of medical expenses not paid by the national health insurance framework—the Assurance Maladie), setting up contracts for utilities and phone service, etc.The only truly difficult issue in this domain is the much-discussed challenge of obtaining a bank account. International banks are obligated to report to the IRS on the bank holdings of U.S. citizens (thanks to FATCA) and on this basis private banks often refuse to open accounts for American citizens. (Think of this as a situation where public-sector American bureaucracy gets layered upon private-sector French bureaucracy.) Once you have identified a bank willing to accept you as a customer, the bank will also require of you a full disclosure of your income and assets. This invariably takes the uninitiated by surprise. (Some are also surprised that getting a loan from a bank can be nearly impossible without income sourced in France or a contrat de travail à durée indéterminée, or CDI.)So yes, there are a number of bureaucratic processes to attend to when one transitions to France from another country. We did not find the transition any more challenging than moving to Ireland, other than the bank account issue (admitting ...
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    17 分
  • A musician's perspective on language learning

    A musician's perspective on language learning
    2025/03/13
    When I first began to work with computing technology—I needed a database to manage a combination of bibliographical and encoded musical information—I became acquainted with two consultants at my employer’s computing centre, one of whom was a musician. It was in this context that I first heard the assertion that “musicians make good programmers,” and indeed I came to understand over the years that this was something of a stereotype, at least in the years before ca. 2000.Being a musician myself I was intrigued by the concept, and in fact became somewhat immersed in development of the technical infrastructure that my project required. At a certain point I began to articulate an explanation of why musicians might take naturally to computer programming:Musicians, by practicing, are accustomed to working alone, relentlessly performing repetitive tasks, seeking to create coherence and meaning across non-verbal micro- and macro-structures, striving for perfection.In other words, we acquire technical mastery by breaking things down musically into their smallest logical components, repeating and refining these until they become fluent, then joining them with what precedes or follows to shape meaningful phrases, ultimately to build tension, expectation, resolution, and a sense of overall meaning and wholeness.One of the values I see to musical training is that one learns, through practicing techniques and skills, an approach that transposes well to learning and understanding things in both quantitative and verbal arts, such as mathematics and language. It also simply develops the ability to sustain attention for long periods of time. Language learning seems to me to have a particular kinship with music insofar as it requires listening to build understanding, as well as to enable the ability to create or recreate sounds; it requires sensitivity to the nuances of the temporal flow of sound—rhythm and meter—to shape comprehensible phrases and sentences; and it strives for the ability to detect and mimic the melodic shape of spoken language—the rise and fall of pitch in spoken language that lends it intellectual or emotional expression.Indeed I have always been fascinated with language acquisition and actively transpose approaches from musical learning and practice to language learning. How does this work?In effect, I’ve adopted an approach to learning languages—currently focusing on improving my fluency in French—that looks very much like how a musician approaches mastery of their instrument or a piece of music. A key part of this is a daily practice routine. I spend a part of almost every day in language study—sometimes no more than ten minutes if circumstances demand, but often an hour or more. While I might begin a musical practice session with exercises to limber up the muscles used while playing—scales, arpeggios, other études—I often start my language learning simply by reading aloud from the French newspapers I subscribe to. There might be new vocabulary, or a turn of phrase I have to linger on to fully discern its meaning, and these can interrupt the flow—if I am not understanding something’s meaning, I cannot read aloud in a meaningful way either. So I’ll pause, acquire understanding, then repeat so that the spoken language feels natural. I might also then make notes about vocabulary or word usage for future study.Frequently these days the newspaper offers audio versions of its articles, sometimes read by the author. There will be times when I listen to these as well. And on other days I will also record myself reading these same pieces aloud, then listen and compare (I’ve a basic recording setup I use to create voiceovers for my Substack essays). Again, this feels much like the experience of learning to perform a piece of music, recording it, then reviewing the recording—you always hear things differently during playback, and frequently things just don’t sound the way you thought. Sometimes it is quite painful, sometimes rewarding. I think of this as my cobbled-together “language lab” experience.Some language teachers frown on the old tradition of studying vocabulary lists, but it’s still part of my practice routine. Over the course of time my lists consist less of individual words than idioms, expressions and common phrases, which I find more challenging to master. It’s in this context that I find the old music practice techniques kick in. Let’s say, for example, I’m trying to master an idiom, like “être au ras des pâquerettes” (literally, “to be at the level of the daisies,” i.e., to be at a low intellectual level). I’d first take “être au ras de” (which might be used by itself in some other context), then join it up with “des pâquerettes” to build the idiom—and then someday I’ll be able to reel it off spontaneously, to everyone’s astonishment (“Il reste toujours au ras des pâquerettes!”). Or let’s take a phrase like ...
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    7 分
  • An approach to adapting linguistically in France

    An approach to adapting linguistically in France
    2025/02/26
    If you’re a relative newcomer to France, have a basic knowledge of French and want to gain fluency in informal daily conversation, there are many possibilities that do not involve a computer or mobile phone screen. Some of these opportunities are sponsored by associations.Although I already had a good foundational knowledge of French when moving to Nice, Côte d’Azur at the end of 2021, our first months comprised a coming to consciousness of the French I had never learned, that is, the things that aren’t taught in your average American French classes. Some examples: the language used in official documents required to transfer our citizen’s rights from Ireland to France; the processes for exchanging drivers licences; all the fine print when opening bank accounts and insurance policies; understanding lease agreements; registering with the national healthcare system; and all the other démarches administratives (administrative procedures).As these administrative processes fell into place, however, another linguistic weakness made itself known that was partially based in language knowledge, and partially in culture and attitude: ordinary everyday conversation and small talk.It’s easy enough to gain fluency in the kinds of transactions that are part of everyday life—interactions with staff at the market, bakery, or at the till in a supermarket; buying necessities at the hardware store; making an appointment on the telephone. I say these are easy because they are repetitive and involve a limited vocabulary—every transaction becomes a brief language drill. (Just make sure you can tell the time of day and know numbers well enough to easily recognise them!) But find yourself in a conversation with someone unexpectedly—a friendly person at a bus stop or discussing the weather with a neighbour—and the arbitrary excursion into small-talk can become tricky quickly.I had had a strategy for upgrading my abilities in French well before taking up residence in France—radio, television, newspaper subscriptions, youtube videos (a nice feature is being able to slow the tempo down and repeat when needed), language apps, even Alliance Française classes online. But none of these is a substitute for actually conversing with French people. We were new in town, and had no local friends or personal contacts. What to do ?France, like other European countries, has many associations, ranging from informal groups of people with common interests to large entities with legal obligations. I happened upon the Maison des Associations at Place Garibaldi, Nice, whose exterior bulletin board has notices advertising many local associations—several of which focused on language learning. I followed up with one of them and learned that, by becoming a paid member (€30 annually) , I would be eligible to participate in a range of activities sponsored by the group, including a weekly informal gathering at a café to exchange French and English language conversations, as well as a weekly atelier or “advanced French workshop” that has a more literary inclination.Once I’d become a member of the association I joined the conversation group at one of its Tuesday morning gatherings at a café. The timing of the meeting should have tipped me off to this being a group of seniors and retirees, and so it was, and it is a friendly and welcoming group at that. There were no formal introductions, I simply introduced myself to those seated closest to me. It became apparent quickly that I was one of a small handful of native English speakers present.Formally the “rule” was that conversation would be undertaken for one hour in French, and for one hour in English. The first order of business is choosing which language to start with. On my first meeting with this group we began with English, but it quickly migrated back to French. The person seated next to me explained that most of the people who attend have done so for years and that it is now more of a social gathering than a structured learning experience. Others also explained that there had previously been a near balance of French and English speakers, but the majority of British attendees disappeared once Brexit took hold. All the better for me, since my personal goal was to gain better fluency in French day-to-day conversation, and most of the conversation takes place in French.The members of this association are diverse and attend the Tuesday morning meeting as mood and possibility allow. It’s like a small-talk language immersion programme. Topics arise spontaneously and change as quickly as they appear. Sometimes the topic is obscure to someone who is not a long-time resident of France or Nice, which means learning some new tidbit about the culture, geography or local politics and politicians, for example. And everyone is curious linguistically—so interrupting a chat to ask that an unfamiliar word be explained can lead to an entirely new topic of conversation.For me, ...
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    11 分
  • Getting involved with French community life - Associations

    Getting involved with French community life - Associations
    2025/02/13

    There is a large and growing cottage industry catering to people moving internationally, particularly from the U.S. to France. These range from individuals and couples who have moved in the past couple years and are now offering how-to advice on social media, to corporate relocation firms that can handle or assist with many of the logistics and administrative paperwork involved. Some of these services offer advice on getting settled and building a new network of acquaintances, but few speak about the potential role of French Associations.



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    5 分
  • Why Nice (France)?

    Why Nice (France)?
    2025/02/06

    A question I hear frequently these days is, "Why did you choose Nice for retirement?” I hear it from residents of Nice most frequently (who probably can already guess some of the answers), but from others as well—including some Substack readers.

    There are many reasons why we chose to move from Dublin, Ireland to Nice, France when retiring at the end of 2021. It was partly from familiarity—we had made several trips to Nice and enjoyed two Christmas holidays there as a family. We appreciated the mild December weather (and the reprieve from Dublin’s often damp, grey winters) and simply being there. But choosing a place to live is different from just choosing a holiday destination, and we took the process seriously. ...

    Read the full text of this essay on Substack.



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    12 分