Cross Channel Values

It is 11.00 on a Friday morning and I am in the Sainsbury booze store in Calais. I'm looking for value - some gin for instance, a few bottles of wine. But there are no bargains, nothing at all tempts me to purchase. The car park is empty, there are no other customers.

Visitors to France hoping to pick up shopping bargains are out of luck at the moment. With the euro trading at near parity to the pound it is difficult to spend time in Europe nowadays without feeling the financial pinch. Everything costs so much more than a couple of years ago - specially food and drink.

On a visit to the Wine Society premises at Montreuil a few weeks ago the story was the same. It was early evening and we were only the second customers of the day (Wine Society gin at around 9 euros a litre still tempts me); the previous Tuesday they had had no customers at all.

A clothes shop in Le Touquet was having a clearance sale "everything must go - huge reductions". Indeed many of the shelves were empty and there was a pleasant enough shirt on display. How much after the 75% discount? Sixty five euros. Ouch!

A (very) small beer was four euros, a pint of guinness was six euros. Expensive rounds.

But it is not just monetary values that seem to be hurting at the moment. Restaurants in the North of France are serving up really poor food and still charging exorbitant prices. We visited a brasserie at St Valery-sur-Somme, packed with French people, and serving up poor quality food all round. Our bill was the best part of £100 for four for which we got a couple of bowls of moules marinieres (each served with a mean portion of sad looking chips), a ficelle picarde (ham and cheese pancake) which was distinctly meagre, and a small plate of seafood (prawns, whelks and six oysters - no crab or lobster). We drank (or at least I drank) half a bottle of Muscadet. There was a bottle of Evian and one other small beer. No starters, no desserts - the French table adjoining ours left their puddings they were so bad - £100 and the oysters are still rumbling two days later.

That lunch was not an isolated incident. On our last trip to France an expensive meal at Chez Perard, a famous seafood restaurant in Le Touquet, was so awful that I felt obliged to write a review on "Trip Advisor"; and, at another Le Touquet restaurant, my steak was simply inedible (not to mention it being served mysteriously with tartare sauce).

No wonder the Channel Tunnel is doing so little business, and that Speedferries went bust. But sad, too.