During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Sarah Palin, no slouch when it comes to mauling the language, used the phrase “like putting lipstick on a pig”. It’s a rhetorical expression that means making superficial changes-- or just calling something-- by a positive term to disguise its negative qualities.
Oblivious to irony in all its forms, Ms. Palin didn’t notice that in using the term she drew attention to her own lipstick-ed self and her lack of experience. After all she quit being Governor of Alaska for “the good of Alaska” and didn’t even get the irony of that either. But I’ll give her credit for bringing back the lovely old expression of "putting lipstick on a pig.”
This year for Christmas our present to ourselves was buying a house. As I wrote earlier about house hunting in France you’ve got to do a lot of research work on your own. Then armed with information you find a realtor to show you properties. And for all our research we spent a lot of time traipsing around the French countryside with various realtors (estate agents to our British friends, agent immobiliers here in France). In the course of our journeys we discovered that when it came to putting lipstick on a pig no one is better at it than a realtor. (note: I've changed all the realtors names for my own protection.)
Let me begin with Célèste is a realtor originally from Paris who moved south to live in her husband’s village. She tells us that at first she thought all the villages were very far apart but now she sees they are not. And it is no wonder she feels this way as because she tells us this as she roars down a narrow country road at about 130 kilometers per hour. She’s in a hurry to show us a house in a 1000 year old hill town and despite it being 30 kilometers from her office we indeed are there in no time at all. Having astonishingly arrived safely we park in front of the Mairie and we walk several hundred meters until Célèste stops in front of a small door fitted into a blank wall and rummages through her purse for keys,
as she cheerily say, “We’re here!”
By this time we’d already seen a number of “village houses.” Most seemed to have been remodeled by hobbits at the end of the dark ages and occupied over the centuries by a succession of village widows and their sons, the village idiots. But even by those standards this place was a surprise.
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| A Roman foundation |
“This is the original Roman foundation.”
Okay but my idea of a Roman buildings is perhaps more along the lines of those sexy steam baths in a Fellini movie. Célèste leads us up the stairs and we arrive in what appears to be both the bathroom and the kitchen. I use these terms in a loosely descriptive way because we have come into a space about six meters square with a low wall in its middle. The stairs let out on the “bathroom” side of the wall and the “kitchen” is on the other.
The bathroom has a stone floor with a drain and a shower head that is rather loosely attached to the wall. Next to it is a toilet placed just out of range of the shower spray. Two steps around the shower is the kitchen which is the size of a closet. It is equipped with a two burner electric stove, a half refrigerator and a sink. Over the sink is a round water tank the size of a 2 liter Coca Cola bottle. I ask Célèste what is it.
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| The front door of a village house. |
in her apartment in Paris,” she says, “But this one is much newer.”
“Does it heat all the water for the whole house?” I ask.
“Of course, “she replies, “and it runs on propane gas. Didn’t you see the tank in the basement? It will fuel the heater for weeks and when it’s empty you just take the tank to the Tabac and get another one.”
Our next realtor is Chuck the Chopper. I call him that because in every house he visited he’d immediately start banging on the walls and saying,
“Great, you can make the place better by knocking down this wall and that one too and maybe that other also.”
Seems he's never met a wall he didn't want to rip down.
He showed us one house that had last been painted in the late 1940s. It looked and felt like one of those gray tenement apartments on New York’s Lower East Side, the kind that turn up in old gangster movies. Compared to many other places though this one wasn’t that bad but it did have one major problem. After looking around the place for awhile I realized I hadn’t seen a bathroom. So I asked Chuck where one was. “Through the French doors at the end of the hall,” he replied.
This was hopeful, but when walked through the doors I found myself outside the house on a narrow rooftop terrace. From behind me I heard Chuck say, “The shower and the toilet are to your left. Quite unique isn’t it.”
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| The dryer is the outdoors. |
When he saw me grimace he added, “If you want to, it would be easy to knock down the bedroom wall so you can walk directly out to the terrace to use the toilet.”
The next house he showed us had a very special feature; a bathtub. Few village houses we had seen had had bathtubs. The problem though was that the bathtub was in the basement in the house's garage/ laundry room. Always upbeat Chuck said, “A lot of privacy for bathing with this setup isn’t there? You can even keep an eye on the laundry as you bath.”
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| Narrow street are walkers not cars |
Next we met Jean-Pierre a native of the Herault and proud to be an immobilier. He is also proud to tell us that every house he sells is one that had been owned by someone he has gone to school with or knows personally from his village. These are good friends and he tells us with good friends there is no negotiation of prices. He sells for friends at very fair prices. Of course, the prices he quotes us are way too high for the houses we see; yet he seems unperturbed. Returning from one visit I asked him how just how many houses he has sold in the last year he replied perkily“One.”
But he does have one property he wants to show us where the price is negotiable. It was owned by an English “artist and photographer” and winking at us he says , "You know how it is with the English."
Well we don't but he takes us to a house on a busy street in the middle of a large town. Entering the doorway we once again found ourselves climbing up an ancient spiral stone stairs in semi-darkness. After two long treacherous flights the staircase opened into a small musty room.
“This is the salon,” Jean-Pierre says as he begins to search for the light switches. It was a stiflingly hot tiny space with no visible windows. On one side of the salon is another stairway that continues up to the next floor and the opposite side a bathroom. A bathroom that was to say the least rather unique.
It seems that the English artist in a fit of a creative inspiration had built the bathroom's wall out of used Badoit, Perrier and Evian bottles. He had meticulously filled each plastic bottle with colored water and then randomly laid several hundred on their sides in a stack of decorative tiles.
Jean-Pierre finally reached around behind me and flipped on a light switch. As the lights came on the water filled bottles lit up glowing in a thousand subtle colors. They lit up the salon like a 70s disco and they lit up the bathroom interior which could be seen clearly through the bottles.
Jean-Pierre stepped back and sighed with pleasure at the sight.
“Imagine dining with friends in the salon and when someone uses the toilet they won't miss a moment of the conversation. This is really something special.”
Yes, it was a superb case of putting lipstick on a pig!
