Yesterday the clients arrived. It took some of them a very long time as conditions on the roads were fairly severe. After a period of dry cold weather, snow fell again on Friday across France. According to my copy of ‘Le Dauphiné’, given free with my shopping on Saturday, 31 ‘départements’ issued condition ‘orange’ weather warnings and the Savoie was not the worst affected. I detected a note of regret in the report as when in Yorkshire we used to be outdone occasionally by Essex for blizzard conditions and traffic horrors on the roads. Saturday was not a good day to cross France from Brittany, the Paris basin or even Lyon, never mind Britain or the Netherlands. Everyone sets off on the same day here, trying to second guess other drivers by leaving at dawn or the night before. This leads to what the paper described as ‘perturbations’ which means enormous queues on snowblown roads and journeys lasting 17 hours and more. These heroic efforts finally paid off as car after carload reached the Résidence in Champagny. In some cases the car itself did not arrive. The last five kilometres of the road were too much for two 75s from Paris, big saloons with no snow chains, abandoned three bends below the village, unable to reach their destination. One was still there this morning. ‘’Ooh look papa, a tourist in a field’’ called out a child.
Once arrived and standing in Reception, these weary people, some so tired that they can hardly speak, stand holding out their accommodation vouchers waiting for keys, door codes, bus times, ski passes and extra linen for the sofa bed, when all they want is to get to their warm apartment and shut the door. But then the true phenomenon occurs. These same exhausted drivers, instead of falling into a chair, transform instantly into ‘clients’. Back they come to Reception to say that there is a speck of dried toothpaste in the bottom of one toothmug in the bathroom of their flat; that there is a small spoon missing from the cutlery drawer; that there is a scratch on the frying pan or that a light bulb has gone out. Perhaps we should offer a ‘Spot the missing spoon’ prize each week and have the cleaning ladies dance in, waving sparklers, suggests my friend. And this after spending a day and a half on the road. Not bad. The resilience of the long distance traveller.
I meanwhile had spent four hours putting sheets into apartments and making up beds because the linen team hadn’t turned up, in the company of my new housekeeper colleague Marie-Francoise, from St Briac-sur-mer in Brittany, a poor girl with no knowledge of winter in the mountains. She hasn’t even bought herself a woolly hat yet. We dashed around opening up apartments, checking to see that they were ready for occupancy and closing them again. My favourite incident is finding a room with a little card on the table saying ‘Your room has been cleaned by Wasila’. Beside the card was an ashtray with two cigarette ends stubbed out in it and a squashed coke can. Cleaning teams can refuse to clean an apartment if it is too dirty, they will happily leave a spider’s web dangling from the ceiling since this area is not included in the cleaning zone and they are not keen on emptying light fittings of the dead summer flies.
After the complaints come the disasters. At eight pm I was summoned to B33 where a Dutch lady and her daughter stood in the dark having fused the entire apartment by flooding the ceramic hob while cooking frozen crinkle-cut carrots she had brought with her. Not surprising then that the next morning the clients are slow to emerge, sleepily collecting bread orders and straggling towards the free bus with their ski boots half undone.
This is the time for the first question; Will it snow? Here is a chance to show how much of a mountain person you are and satisfy the client at the same time. Level 1 answer is to shrug and point, indicating the board where the forecast is pinned up each morning, but this is not very imaginative nor is it very ‘4 star’ and in any case since the forecast is based on recordings taken at Bourg Saint Maurice, on the other side of the mountain it is not always very accurate. However it does suggest what to expect for the day ahead, whereas the English version which we receive each evening enables guests to find out what the weather has been that day. In case they missed it I suppose. At a higher level, say level three you might refer to the radio or the website of ‘météo France’ for a more authoritative view, mentioning avalanche risks, wind speed and snowpack stability and more ‘perturbations’ which in this context would be snow, wind and very low temperatures causing damage and bodily discomfort. You might talk about suitable protective clothing and skin cream. While this is possibly accurate, how much more pleased the client will be to learn some local lore, for example that last year being a year of 13 moons, the following year is likely to have more than usual snowfall; that it doesn’t usually snow at the new moon but if it does snow it is likely to snow a lot; that the weather comes up from the Lyon direction and often sticks at the turn in the valley near Albertville; that the Almanack, which serves as a reference for my neighbours in the village, Claude and Gabi and is taken very seriously, shows that this waning moon will presage heavier falls than the next waxing moon. My friend with the small dog never takes her geraniums in until the temperature drops to minus five as instructed by the Almanack for instance. Then there are my friend’s knees which ache the night before it snows. The client by this time may almost be backing away, like the wedding guest caught by the ancient mariner, but when he recovers he will be so pleased to have the ‘real macoy’ when he rejoins his family. He’ll probably talk about it for the rest of the day.
This morning I set off for work after a fall of snow in the night, along snowy roads to Bozel, feeling a lot more confident now with my four brand new snow tyres. When my phone rang and Marie-Francoise asked my help in getting her up the hill from Bozel I didn’t hesitate in turning around, making sure no one saw me of course for fear they should think I couldn’t make it, for I’m no tourist, then sped up the road round all the bends with no trouble at all. I expect I sound pretty smug. But then it’s just that I’m a mountain person. Well, beginning to be. The tourist is still in the field.
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copyright Julia Austen 2015