National celebrity

Here's our lovely neighbour L being interviewed by the national TF1 TV channel for the midday news. Our village was at the forefront of a fight to preserve small rural post offices a few years ago. Remarkably, we still have our post office while other villages this size have "agencies" that are open fewer hours and don't offer a full range of services.

At the beginning of this year, La Poste caved in sufficiently to select us plus a few other villages (also involved in the campaign, funnily enough) for an "experiment". Instead of someone coming from the main post office five mornings a week to open the post office, and someone else delivering the post on a round covering several villages, our post lady now runs the post office in the morning, then does her round on her bicycle, then comes back and opens the office for another hour after lunch. Everyone's happy: Nadine the factrice gets a varied, full-time job, with plenty of contact with people, and we get a better service, with an office open longer hours. It was a nice little report, featuring many of our neighbours. "What a lovely lady," one of the camera crew whispered to me, as L told the interviewer the story of her life, and she and Nadine did a bise for the camera :)

If you're in France you should be able to see the report on the TF1 website, by watching today's 1 o'clock news, about 22 minutes in.