“Jamais sans mon département”

One of the games almost anyone who has travelled long distances by road in France has played is spotting the departmental number at the end of French number plates. Each French “département” – the county, maybe in English – has a number, allocated alphabetically from 01 for Ain (where we happen to live) to 95 for the Val-d’Oise – and traditionally the last two numbers of the car’s number plate is the number of the department – our 17 year old Golf sports 01, but when we bought it, it had a number plate 59 (as we then lived in the Departement du Nord). What better way of passing the time on a long journey by trying to guess if 46 is the Departement of Lot or Lot-et Garonne, for example. Anyway, in the name of efficiency, the government is planning to replace the traditional number plate with a national number plate which would belong to the car “for life”. I’m pleased to say that there is already a citizens’ action group, “Jamais sans mon département” (Never without my department) which is mobilising against the proposal and has attracted cross-party support from the Communists to the ruling conservative UMP party, and now has its own Facebook page.

About the autor :

My name is Jane Stranz. I was born and brought up in Britain and am an ordained minister of the United Reformed Church, which is a small non-conformist church. For over 10 years I worked as a minister in local parishes of the Eglise Réformée de France in Dunkerque, Chambéry and Ferney-Voltaire. Since July 2002 I’ve been working at the World Council of Churches as the English language translator and coordinator of the language service. I’m married to Stephen Brown a journalist who works at Ecumenical News International and has recently finished his doctorate on the churches in former East Germany and the movement that led to the fall of the Berlin wall. I live in France and each day go over the border just 500 metres away into Switzerland to work. Since 1999 I’ve been living with multiple sclerosis, sounds rather noble but really means I just live in denial and inject interferon b three times a week and count myself very lucky to live in a country with a great health care system.