Noisette

I'm truly happy for you both 😊 If I survive the wait for diagnosis and treatment, I'll be happy for myself, too 🤣

I think you're confounding the results of Covid and the long-standing potential crisis in the health service, @menthe. The Government have known for decades that there would be a shortage of MTs, given their average ages and the unwillingness of newly-qualified ones to leave the cities. To be fair, the Gov did try various incentives to prevent a major crisis but it simply didn't work. They also made a grave mistake when they reduced the number of student doctors training....an ongoing error, apparently. Probably a prime example of the division and incomprehension between Paris and the rest of France. On a local level, the Press are regularly highlighting the problem and heads of Conseils Départementaux do seem to pressing for measures to be taken en urgence. Will the Gov listen?

I'm feeling rich today! Got my very first pension payment. Despite the DWPs best efforts in ensuring that I pegged it before getting a sniff, I'm still alive and will do everything in my power to ensure that I live to be 120 😂 This is why it's so important to have access to good healthcare!

Thank you very much for that 🥰

What really concerns me, and has done ever since we moved here, is the emergency aspect. When Marmande was a good, fully-functioning hospital, it was a 15 minute SAMU dash to urgences which back then was fully staffed all year round. Now, depending on the time of year, it would be a 45 minute dash to Villeneuve or Agen which in a lot of scenarios would simply be too late. I know that when your number's up it's up, but quand même 🤣 I can certainly sympathise with folks who downsize to live in a town or city, although I don't think I could bear to be 'urban' again....

Ah...I never accept cookies. Too fattening 😁 Although it's getting increasingly difficult to refuse them without being invited to subscribe. I used to love the Marmiton website but they chose to commercialise it 🤐

Hi menthe, I'm glad to hear that all went well for your OH. I did suspect that there is more urgency applied to cancer/possible cancer patients, with time being of the essence. To a certain extent, here in Lot and Garonne, the problems are seasonal or at least they're exacerbated by lack of doctors and staff during the summer months. But.....my recent experience includes having to wait three weeks just for the result of the initial dépistage. Never known that before, even in August. I'm not knocking the actual treatment or procedures, just saying that the timescales for diagnosis are vastly different now to what they were even 5 years ago. It's also noticeable that it's a problem related to size of town or city. That's obvious as we've been told for the last 15 years that small villages are simply unable to recruit new MTs who don't want to work in la France profonde. Apparently, the other levels of staff don't even want to work in the larger towns either. There's a sliding timescale in operation...e.g. Marmande = large town = 6 month wait, Agen = préfecture = 2 month wait and although I haven't checked it out yet, I suspect Bordeaux = city = instant and quite possibly non-conventioné. Fine if you can get to a city and have a decent mutuelle! No doubt that there are steps that can be taken to try to soften the blow. Beg an MT in a multi-doctor pôle to take one on, exaggerate pain levels, just turn up at Urgences before things can turn serious.....but it's so sad to see what access to healthcare has become.

Both links behind a paywall, Norman 😐 Recent personal experience suggests that it's in meltdown, though. Six months wait for a scanner? Four months wait to see a specialist? The local one-man-band MTs no longer even try to find a remplaçant when they swan off on holiday for a month. It's a slightly better picture in the pôles de santé where at least the other doctors try to cover for absence. Admission to local Urgences only via SAMU or MT recommendation and always the threat of complete closure during the holidays and fêtes. It's truly dire and according to my MT the government, far from revising their policy of reducing generalist student numbers, are introducing measures to make it even more difficult to qualify 🙄 You'd think that the French government might have taken a glance across the Channel and seen how NOT to run a health service by simply chucking money at it, but apparently not....

What has definitely disappeared, and not involuntarily, is the solidarity of the French people. The rulers have been adept in the 'divide and rule' principle with the help of the press and media. The gilets jaunes movement was a classic example of that. A lot of ordinary people had very real and justified grievances which, I feel, struck a chord with many more. Enter the voyous and casseurs (and we'll never know whether they were just opportunistic low-lives or a more sinister result of the Government's determination to discredit the movement), get the media to stir things up and bingo!. At least 'bingo!' for the Government. Do you think the general attitude is becoming more and more 'Thatcherite' for want of a better word? We're encouraged in a frenzy of selfish, protectionist consumerism and sod everyone else. Sooo sad.

I'm remembering the overall impression that I got as an ado in UK, so hardly scientific, 😁 I didn't get to live here until 2007 and I certainly don't think that anyone gets a true 'feel' for a country and it's politics until they live there, and even then many don't care and don't get involved. Since I've been here, I have experienced life on the sharp end of agricultural poverty and heard lots of first-hand accounts of friends' childhoods and adolescences. Maybe they and I are all victims of rose-coloured spectacle syndrome, but I don't think so. Even in the 17 years I've been here, I'd say that France is simply not the country I knew when I arrived. As for things being better.....that was a joke, right? 🤨 As an aside, thanks for the link you put on a while ago for 'Le Champ Dolent'. That really struck a chord! My maraicher friends didn't know of it, so it was a wonderful bit of nostalgia for them, albeit a bit 'dark'.

It depends what you mean by 'change'. If they're 'old-fashioned', perhaps it's a nostalgia for the France of the 60's and 70's when this was a country run for it's people, where it was good to live, where the average citizen wasn't bled dry to feed the greed of the upper 10%, voir upper 1%. Agreed there's a tendency to call for reform and then oppose the reforms proposed, but that might just be because each proposal leaves Joe public a bit worse off each time?

Hmmmm...given France's method of selecting government, I'd say the electorate did what it's done for decades now and voted 'tactically'. Rather pathetic, really, because they end up with nothing more than same old same old and perhaps the smug feeling that they've been rather clever (wrong!). I'm sure you're right about the discontent, but I would have said that it was widely, sympathetically supported the first time around until the (possibly greased) Press and media managed to discredit the movement. Would it work the second time around? Who knows....but I'm proud to be living in a country where at least some of the population make their feelings known, despite a loaded electoral system. Apathy doesn't (yet) rule OK.

Interesting to read the first two comments. May I ask what you base your verdicts on? Press and media opinions? Historical evidence? Personally I'll be waiting to see how he actually performs the job before condemning 🙄

A friend and I finally got around to fishing for the crayfish that live in the agrilac near my garden, last weekend. Previous experience had shown that the best bait is a dead ragondin. There used to be hundreds of écrevisse. Not having a ragondin to hand, Eric tried dog biscuits 😁 We caught two 😂 As luck would have it, I caught a ragondin last Monday, so tried again....zilch! The lac is too shallow now and needs dredging out. The herons that live in the overhanging poplars might also be picking off any that do remain. Ah well, back to Leclerc prawns ....😋

Oh no radiators here, we opted for geothermal which is not bad, but when all's said and done, an electrically-powered heat pump and hot-water tank. If the HC/HP tariff was genuinely loaded in the customer's favour, it's a good system, but now they're tinkering with everything to maximise profits and taxes, and accommodate their own agenda for input and output, we just can't win 😐

Don't know what a disdash is, but here a salwar kameez is a Godsend. White cotton baggy trousers and loose, full-sleeved tunic top. Mozzie and horsefly-proof. Only replaced by a paréo round the pool 😎

The biggest casse-tête is how to stock 'free' summer energy for re-use when it's most required, in winter. It's something that I've been puzzling over for 17 years! Do you realise the size of the batteries that would be required? 🤣

I did and we were within a hair's breadth of signing up when I got wind of these changes. I don't know if putting a link to a forum is acceptable here, but if it is, I'd strongly recommend this one....https://forum-photovoltaique.fr/search.php?search_id=active_topics&sid=d1b7ef0cfc85ff5cd778b2ac24e8cdcf It's not the most user-friendly due to the sheer size and scope of the subject, but for accurate advice, it's unbeatable!

It's a nice idea, ALBF, but much more difficult than you'd think. For a start, you simply have to rely on the grid for those times when PV isn't producing *. You also have to have a sort of 'safety valve' for your surplus production when it is! That's where Enedis and EDF come in, as most installations are connected up to an existing Linky which manages the incoming and outgoing automatically. Unless you are an extremely well-qualified electrician, or know one who can set up your system independently, it's a non-starter . *The idea behind the virtual battery schemes was that you stock your surplus, via a third party, on the grid and draw on it when it's needed, but it's proving to be more complex than first thought. Too many imponderables...

So they didn't foresee that a combination of grants and the necessity for households to reduce soaring bills would produce the, supposedly, desired effect of prompting 100,000s of people to invest in PV? Of the three major companies providing a virtual battery storage service, one is in (real) meltdown and the other two are struggling to cope with demand. Not that they were a solution to the problem as they are just a middleman and the 'excess' input ended up in the grid anyway. It's a novel idea, but why aren't EDF actively investing in some form of storage rather than just manipulating home production? Solar at least is anything but pointless as the volume of injection proves, but wouldn't it be wonderful if, just for once, they applied themselves to genuine, forward-thinking management of the resource, rather than making obscene amounts of money on behalf of shareholders and government.

Well it's certainly knocked on the head our project to install solar panels. We'd carefully worked out that the 6 hours overnight HC took care of a chunk of electricity consumed by the PAC heating in winter while the 2 hours at midday were useful for cooking. The auto-consommation from the PV panels would have taken care of what are currently our two biggest consumers in summer..the pool and watering pumps. I find it utterly disgraceful that EDF and the government in cahoots can manipulate users in this way, and also slyly reduce the number of HC to six. PV panels really only benefit a household during the day and for part of the year, whereas these changes will impact customers all year round. I wonder how much of the decision has to do with the fact that the government are losing out on the taxes slapped onto bills, as well as TVA. What a bloody country this is becoming!

Well in my part of Real France views are polarised. On the one hand you've got the rag-bag of 'French'...nearly all 2nd or 3rd generation descendants of Spanish and Italian immigrants, who vote RN as a matter of principle. Then there are the 'stupid' Brits who are vociferously horrified by the apparent popularity of the extreme right but mostly can't vote here anyway. Should you care to acquire some facts, towns like Tonneins, Agen and Marmande have quite high proportions of, respectively, N. Africans and Portugese (tabac and building industries), N. Africans (agriculture) and in Marmande I'm not sure what they do but there are a lot of them. Just as in UK 30 years ago, the latest addition to the mix are Eastern europeans. Quite what all that has to do with French nationality escapes me, but at least you got a response to the wind-up 😂

😂

No, but let's return to your original question, it's more interesting 😁 Surely the big question is why you want/wanted to take French nationality in the first place? Was it purely to advance your career prospects? To commit to France, the French and a future life here? To make the bureaucracy easier? (Forget that !). I can vouch for it not changing much, at least in my case. As soon as I open my mouth, the accent labels me 'anglaise', however fluent I am. The UK is responsible for my pension and healthcare and always will be, so I'm regarded as a 'migrante permanente' by the French system. A French passport enables me to move more freely around the world, especially the French-speaking bits of it. I haven't yet tested out the theory of it helping with a move to French territory and how that pans out with aforementioned pension/healthcare provision. It doesn't appear to have changed by one jot how I'm regarded by friends, acquaintances and bureaucrats. If you really do still want to do it, then best get a move on. I suspect it will be less straightforward if/when the RN get in to power.