Chancer

Always very lucky.   Not heading towards a festive season so you're (just for you!) Dickens jibe is wasted.   No suggestion that this (not) banque is stealing from me, just incompetent and uncommunicative,  especially  face to face.  

You need to precise what gaiter you are talking about, steering rack, track rod end, CV joint, shock absorber etc etc.   All are to keep dust and contaminants out and the lubricant in, grease in all but the latter where it would be oïl but should not be visible.

Crikey, that must pong [:(]   The local town who my taxes pay for via the communauté des communes gets 2 collections a week.   Just been into La Banque Postale, it went word for word as I wrote, I must start betting on the horses.

My rant is French banques, yes all of them probably, I am on my 3rd now and will have to find a 4th, every one either steals my money or loses it or pays it into someone elses account probably a family member.   I was with the same bank in the UK since the age of 16 and never had a single problem, begrudgingly had to close the account as I was no longer using it, had a Nationwide Flex account since the age of 24 and still using it, never any problems, 2 different Lloyds business accounts never ever a penny went astray.   The Credit agricole were offended that i insisted on paying in my monthly cash takings over the counter and outraged that I suggested that they counted in on the counter where we could both see it and not hidden underneath, they finally insisted that I had to use use the borne automatique, it was completely secure, the cash counting was recorded by CCTV etc, all lies, on my second deposit using the borne they stole a €50 note, told me it was impossible, I had made the mistake etc, true we all will make a mistake one day but I hadn't with cash in 45 years, easy said I lets look at the CCTV recording at which point they said the banque had no cameras despite the lobby being filled with them.   Then a couple of weeks later my statement showed €500 being deducted, just shrugged shoulders in the branch, they did not know what it was and did not care, expected me to go away like anyone else, after insistence and a 3 week wait I found that a cheque that I had paid in was allegedly not in my name except I had a photocopy of it, then all sorts of cover ups, I spoke to my tenant and his banque had paid out on the cheque, the money had been paid into someone elses account, they tried saying that I hadn't paid it in but they had initially creditted it to my account, took them another month to recredit me with my funds.   So a change to La Banque Postale and they are an equally useless shower of sh1te, never anyone at the guichet, they are always outside smoking or selling someone a mobile phone contract, they dont know anything anyway and have no authority, I have to phone my conseilleur who never answers or responds to messages, to see her I have to go in and ask for a meeting which they will try their hardest to say they cannot arrange, I have to call her, I can see her shadow in her office so insist they speak to her at which point they can suddenly arrange a RDV in quinze jours.   Then I discovered that I could do all that I needed at my village La Poste where the new staff are very serviable, paid in 3 cheques 7th totalling €1625 on the 7th of this month, took 2 weeks for the deposit to show on my account at which point it was backdated to the 12th, trouble was it was for only €1100 which corresponds to 2 of the cheques, no letter or anything to say that one has bounced, a cash deposit paid in on the 9th also took 2 weeks to show on my account, my balance showing during that time was €1600 less than the balance printed on the reciept they gave me for the cash deposit.   I gave my village La Poste a try this morning but as expected they could not help me, they said that La Banque Postale in town would not either, tellingly it was a would not (wan to be bothered) rather than a could not and that I should ring Lille direct on 3639, tried that and was on hold listening to musack for 30 minutes at 15cts per minute.   So having gone through 2 "proper" banque I am now with a bank that is not a banque, that takes 2 weeks to credit any deposits, that loses cheques and/or does not communicate when there is a problem with one, who wont help you in person and who wont answer their phones and I have to pay them for the priveledge, I might as well go with an on line banque but for the impossibility of paying in cash and having no faith in sending cheques to them, if they are capable of losing cheques that a branch has already given a reciept for what hope do I have they would treat the ones I send in as anything than an another annoying piece of paper to throw in the bin.   That reminds me, at 18 I had a National Girobank account for my weekend and evening car repair business, I posted them hundreds of cheques over several years without a single hitch.   Its going to have to be cash under the mattress, credit card payments or virements from now on.

Only 3 collections a year? [:-))]

Tofu in Lidl?   We have a Lidl hypermarket, never seen a bigger one but no tofu, brocolli occasionally, about the only things that I always buy that I can be sure they will have are bananas (more expensive than anywhere else) apples although often not the bi-colores, and pears, often they have no oranges at all, pineapple and mango 50% of the time, sweet potatoes maybe 25% of the time.   Its a one stop shop but I have to choose from what is there for some fresh stuff.   Nearest Leader Price is 40km away, the wrong side of Arras.

Vegan friend is a Parisien that lives and works in Lille so she can usually find what she wants and in Bio also but the price tags on what she brings with her make my eyes water. But at least it is available there and she can also eat out.   You cannot even find a vegetarian dish in town let alone vegan, the restauranteurs give the same look as I get when I ask for an alcohol free beer, or failing that a coffee in a bar.  

Fresh Ginger, local supermarket!!!!! I would give at best a 50% chance of finding either peppers or broccoli but not both and they would certainly be pre-rotted for my convenience. Dave 21478 can take the credit for coining that phrase.   A few years ago I was going to cooking classes with a group of people hosted at Amiens by a retired chef, the deal was that he would buy all the ingrédients as even all the others who lived in the metropole were likely to come up short, each week he would tell us what the next weeks recipé would be, - probablement because he could not count on finding the ingrédients and may have to switch recipés.   We did some great dishes but I became wholeheartedly sick with spending up to a week travelling to Amiens, Arras, St Quentin etc to try and buy what to me are basic fresh ingrédients to make them later on, Ginger was one that I could rarely find.   I still have the tub of dried coriandre that you gave me all those years ago, only once since then have I found it fresh and that was at the arab market.   My father was from Sunderland, Croydon must have been like another planet to him back in 1930.

I agree that you dont need loads of fancy veg or even bean sprouts but when so little is available beans sprouts alone would lift things, I have a couple of pre-prepared Aldi UK ones in the fridge but they wont last till tuesday, one has no bean shoots but apart from the carrots and brocolli no way would I find Edamame beans, red onion, spring greens, chinese leaf. The onions I see occasionally but I would spend a couple of hours going round all the shops with no success, even the broccolli would be a Lucky find.   Looking at the other one I would come up short on the bean shoots, water chestnuts, chinese leaf and the mange tout Rodney!   Now that I eat properly and have regained my taste/palate I find food just does not need overpowering salt laden sauces, certainly not a fresh veg stir fry, I would put soy sauce and mushroom ketchup out as condiments for those who do crave it but wont spoil (for me) the dish by using them.

Well done Betty, delighted to have been proved wrong again!

Excellent!   A year is too long to wait!

Dont hold your breath for a Professional and as for one near you, - fat chance!   Used as we are in the UK that wherever there is a need/demand someone enterprising will offer a service and that it will quickly spread, be it chips away for the car, home oven or carpet cleaning, graffiti removal, alloy wheel refurbishment you name it we were spoilt for choice and could choose between several local offerings, that just doesn't happen in France perhaps with the exception of a couple of services within Paris and its a great shame.   To give you just one example, the chips-away car bodywork home repair service, more specifically paintless dent removal and even more specifically hailstone damage repairs, there is a huge market for this in France yet no-one is doing it, I have an enterprising Italian guy stays with me, he speaks no French yet he comes here 3 months at a time all year long returning for a fortnight between stints year and is booked solid 6 days a week throughout that time, he stays every night in a hôtel like mine and that cost is naturally passed onto the garages and insurers that use his services but they are still quids in.   He covers the whole of France and told me that working in my area he was something like 1500kms from his base, the guys in the UK never have to travel more than 10 miles to a job so they cover 314 square miles and there will be several of them sharing that territory, the Italian guy has 248000 square miles all to himself [:-))]   Definitely look for a repair kit!

What types?

My dad, a carpenter nailed a piece of wood to the leg of his bench and said "son, you can bang any nails you like into that but nowhere else!" of course it soon resembled a hedgehog and i moved on to other more challenging woods like oak and exotic hardwoods, I had seen him doing secret nailing and knew that if I used lost head brads and a nail punch there was little chance of him detecting my practice sessions.   In his retirement right up to the day he died he would still damage his saw or planes on an old piece of wood and phone me up to tear me a new rear end [:(] I inherited his planes and sash cramps, nothing else I didnt take any of his wood stock because I use machinery and it could be fatal revisiting the same piece of wood although poetic justice.

The quote that your father probably used was the same as my father when he sermonised me "a bad craftsman always blames his tools"   I still blame my tools and always think of him, I sympathise with you because you only have the choice of the cheque book or the brushes to blame as I cant see yoy blaming a French artisan[:)]   Do you know that I have been using the same broom for 35 years!

Even ignoring that most witnesses seem to have said the barrier was down even those who say it was up said that the bus stopped on the crossing, that is the most telling thing.   Horrific as it is to see the bus cut in half those who survived owe their lives to that.

ALBOF, I'm sure you have seen it all and you certainly do talk a good job but nothing that you have ever written has moved me one iota from my conviction that you have, as the Swedes would say " a fingertip growing out of the palm of your hand".   You only have to see a man hold a hammer for a split second to know everything about him, the Hollywood fairy tale is that Harrison Ford was spotted as a set carpenter and given an acting role, in one film he was supposedly nailing rafters to a ridge pole with several other homesteaders, it was obvious that all their toolboxes contained was a credit card and the Yellow Pages, the sales director at the company where I was Engineering manager used to boast exactly that, no fool though, I have had many millionaire customers exactly like him.   Someone observant and involved on multiple sites will learn far more than I ever did by doing the job and observing those around me, and to be fair ALBOF you have never ever claimed to have walked the walk, only (tongue in cheek) to know everything [:D]

Sadly things have not evolved in the soon to be 13 years that I have been here, I still have to travel a minimum of 40km to either Arras, Amiens or St Quentin for fresh herbs, or indeed any herb other than herbes de provence and a multitude of other things and in each case take pot luck that the one shop that does "occasionally" stock them might have some on their shelves that day, in the UK I have a choice of maybe 10 within a couple of miles, granted not in my village although even the Londis there will often have them.

Breaking all the rules about buying voluminous and/or heavy materials as locally as possible I brought over all the insulation for my mega-build and all of the fire rated placo from the UK.   The insulation was on grounds of cost, it was subsidised and I started buying at £5 per roll ending up at 99p per roll, I had a huge feck off van trailer and would load it to the gills, I actually brought over twice the insulation that I needed and sold the extra on LeBoncoin which paid for my ferry crossings, I also brough back Makita Cordless drills to sell and eventually the buyers were giving me lists of stuff that they wanted, hey ALBOF I was the original UK shopping delivery company [:D]   The fire rated plasterboard was €34 per sheet at the time and nobody even stocked it even though its supposed to be used in most buildings, it had to be ordered = the usual parlaver of pay 100% up front and then wait months listening to lies until they would finally have enough orders to get free delivery to them, thats the sort of stuff that the CWGC wont put up with, the fire rated placo in the UK was €4.99 a sheet from Selco, I think that I brought over around 80 sheets in total, I saved over €2000 and when I looked closely at the markings on the plasterboard it was made in France!!   ALBOF knows a lot about renovation in France, he must do because he talks a good job [:D] Clever guy to have achieved all that he has with a toolbox containing only a cheque book and two paint brushes [:P]

There is an Anglo-French organisation that has been doing building work, rénovations and maintenance since their inception 100 years ago, as integrated as you can get, jobs there are reserved for French and British nationals if they are decendents of WW1 combattants (I'm sure someone will correct that), in any case they have been doing their thing from mowing grass to constructing all the monuments (including the Thiepval mémorial where were hosts to 10,000 people on the 1st July this year) for long enough to know where to buy their materials, what companys and artisans to employ etc, I'm sure even ALBOF would agree.   Visit any of their chantiers and you will not see a single French artisan, vehicle or French sourced building material, the vans and workteams gardeners excepted are pretty much 100% Belgian, the site huts and portaloos are rented from the UK, all the materials come from the UK or Belgium even sand, gravel, ballast, cement etc, you will see it all there in tonne bags emblazoned with the name of the UK or Belgian company.   During the commémorations everything came from the UK, all the marquees, the seating, the stands, the toilets, they even brought over water tanks and took away all the waste in honeycarts back to the UK, they did this because whilst there was water and sewage on site there was no way they were going to risk the event not going ahead at 7am 1st July because of some hold up or another, they have had 100 years of  having their hands burned and are wised up.   Same story regarding the sand, cement, ballast etc, during the tight years these were the only materials that I sourced locally, the weight and volume make it abject stupidity to bring them in from another country yet the CWG do exactly that, 100 years of having guys on site to do their jobs and no materials to work with.

Just back from the UK and I enjoyed several meals with stir fried veggies Aldi have some good value ones and some decent ones that are often short dated 50% off, none of them keep for long so the ones I brought back will soon be gone.   I would like to cook one for my vegan friend next week, I dont mind preparing the veg but have never seen fresh bean sprouts on sale in France, only tinned ones, can you buy them anywhere?

[quote user="Saucedecochon"]Looks like yer missing a lot mate. Brain cells, manners and humility being a few, reading and comprehension looks a bit poor as well as geography. Can't you go bother someone else if theres FA on TV?[/quote]   It matters not a jot to me where you buy your materials, I have been on both extremes over the years usually exchanger rate driven, used French materials in the UK and vice versa, loadsa vice versa [:D]   But all I wanted to say was 10 out of 10 for the put down, even ALBF will begrudgingly agree with me on that!   10/10 for the generous offer as well.   10/10 f

There is only one that I  cross regularly and I always slow to a virtual halt and look both ways as well Wooly, its a minor road and the left turn just before it is now a stop so I am not travelling fast but even in the other direction I stop, not defying anyone but its human nature to sneak a peak unless you are a smartphone user crossing the road.   There are a few PàD's locally that because they are an acute angle I have to take my priorité blind whilst muttering Inshallah.   I havn't looked at the détails of the crossing but what often happens is that in traffic a long vehicle like a bus will cross before he has enough length ahead for a safe exit, the traffic stops and a tragedy occurs.   Iknow if I were in charge of Young passengers I would look both ways and ahead to make sure the exit was clear.   Another possibility is the old "un train peut en cacher un autre", the "en" always seems malplaced in that phrase.

If you ask them for one they will comply, I got mine many years back, cant recall what for but it still has its uses as above, he asked me what date I wanted putting on it, the previous Maire that is, the current one would not pi55 on me if I were on fire. 

Ignore all the internet lawyers interprétations of legal residence, go to the CPAM with a justicatif de domicile, the best being an attestation from the mairie showing the date you were resident from, an utility bill just in case but the previous should suffice, an RIB for your bank account your passport if it makes you feel better but not needed and they will welcome you with open arms into the PUMA system, no questions or interrogations into legal residence or anything else, job done and will take all of 2 minutes.   Dont worry yourself about all the other speculation which whilst it may have some foundation was never applied even before PUMA, its such a shame that you should have moved away in 2007 because of at best well meaning bad advice.   Time to make up for it now!