ARSE BLOWING

EXCERPT FROM EUROTRIPPING ©JR DAESCHNER

For the most part, modern France seems to take itself far too seriously to celebrate the sort of national idiosyncrasies exalted by Britain, Spain and even Germany.

Aside from local festivals devoted to salt, goat's meat and visceral etcetera, France is all but devoid of outlandish traditions.

However, one of the rare exceptions to la règle survives in the southwest, a target of English invaders ever since the days of Richard the Lionhearted right up to the modern era of Nigel the Houseminded.

Carnival in the town of Nontron has a name so risibly rude that it's guaranteed to raise a titter or Gallic gasp from Parisians and other northerners (or maybe it's just my friends).

One English guidebook that really ought to know better translates La Fête des Soufflaculs as 'The Festival of the Whistle-Arses'-which really would be something to see. And perhaps the confusion is understandable: thanks to the Spanish influence in the area, it was the south of France that produced the famous nineteenth-century Franco-Catalonian performer known as Le Petomane, or 'The Fartiste', whose bottom could burp in bass, tenor and baritone-and even play songs on the flute.

Not for nothing does the south boast what must be the world's only Gourmet Prune Museum, plus a one-hundred-kilometre Prune Route.

In truth, though, there's no polite way to put this: the Soufflaculs are nothing but 'Arse-Blowers'.

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