Time To Hang Up The Trammel

Congratulations to Missy and the Surfer Dude, who will finally move into a new flat in überchic South Norwood this Friday - the Lovebirds finally get to change nest ! OK, so they're renting, but at least they'll be able to put the frustration of two expensive fallen-through-at-the-last-minute failed purchases behind them. Plus it looks like they might have climbed off the property ladder at just the right moment.

I guess I won't be around to enjoy the flat-warming party, but I hope that in my absence the Lovebirds will give a nod to Francophone tradition and celebrate accordingly by hanging up the trammel.

Now, I have to make not one, but two shameful admissions here :

1. Until this evening, I had no idea what the French expression pendaison de crémaillère (the equivalent of a house- or flat-warming party) literally meant, other than that it involved hanging something up.
2. When I looked up the word crémaillère and found that it meant trammel, I still did not know what the French expression meant.

The Free Dictionary offers the following six possible definitions for the word trammel :

1. A shackle used to teach a horse to amble.
2. Something that restricts activity, expression, or progress; a restraint.
3. A vertically set fishing net of three layers, consisting of a finely meshed net between two nets of coarse mesh.
4. An instrument for describing ellipses.
5. An instrument for gauging and adjusting parts of a machine; a tram.
6. An arrangement of links and a hook in a fireplace for raising and lowering a kettle.

Common sense clearly ruled out options 1, 2 and 3. And call me unromantic, but it seemed to me improbable that an instrument for adjusting tram-parts would play a central part in any house-warming tradition, so option 5 was immediately dismissed too. As for option 4, France may be derided by our American friends (though not, of course, Our American Cousins) as a nation of effete intellectuals, but something in my gut told me that even there it was unlikely that for centuries proud new house-owners had been celebrating their new status by hanging up instruments for drawing ellipses. No, it looked like option 6 was the one. But, gnarled old sceptic that I am, I needed confirmation. 

Sure enough, according to cuisine.tv, the tradition involves hanging something up in the fireplace, as the trammel, it transpires, was one of the few objects actually left behind when people moved house :

La crémaillère est l’un des rares objets que, par tradition, on laissait dans la cheminée lorsqu’on abandonnait sa demeure. Aujourd’hui encore, « pendre la crémaillère » reste la symbolique de la prise de possession d’un nouveau foyer…

Thus, putting the arrangement of links and hook back together in the fireplace in order to be able to boil the kettle over the fire was the symbolic gesture with which one asserted one's occupancy of a dwelling.

Incidentally, this explanation confirms definitively that we are dealing with a French tradition and not a Swiss one. Anyone who has moved into a new house or apartment in Switzerland will know that nothing is left by the previous occupants : not only do they take lightbulbs, but they take the light fittings too (leaving bare wires hanging from the ceilings), and I've even heard of people taking doorhandles and unscrewing the toilet-paper-holders from the bathroom walls.

Anyway, the PO sends his félicitations to the Lovebirds and wishes them much happiness in their new home.