Making the Bridge

I have been very busy this weekend – making a bridge. Though you won’t be able to see any physical evidence of this bridge….

France has plenty of public holidays and a quick flick through the calendar will reveal 11 of them. Not bad going, but then you realise that one is Easter Sunday. Then (unlike the UK) you find out that they are taken on the day itself, so if it falls at a weekend it is not transferred to the nearest weekday.
Spring is a good time for holidays and May normally has 4 days of holidays and is normally considered to be the start of the summer wind down with the thought that if a project isn’t finished by the end of April, you haven’t got a chance of it being completed in May.

This year however is a bad year for public holidays in France. For a start both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day fall on a Sunday. Then, shock horror, there were no weekdays off in May!!!! This was due to a devastating combination of the 1st (May day) and the 8th (VE day) both being on a Sunday and the really late Easter that pushed Ascension and Pentecost into June.

Which brings us to the French tradition to Faire Le Pont. The literal translation is to make a bridge. If a public Holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, then traditionally people take a days holiday on the Monday or the Friday to make a bridge to the weekend.

So this weekend was the second weekday holiday of the year and the first in which it was possible to make a bridge and most people seem to have taken that opportunity. The crèche was closed for the long weekend and though a few of the parents made pointed comments along the line of ‘Enjoy your long weekend.’ most of them were also taking time off work.
I was on the closing shift and a couple of parents were late picking up their children and said that the roads in the town were gridlocked with everyone leaving.

So I have enjoyed a long weekend and noted the fact that there are plenty of parking spaces available on the streets. Back to work on Monday. And before anyone from the UK goes on about the French having lots of public holidays, please remember that back at the end of April we had to put with you all gloating about your two 4 day weekends in a row.