The long way home.

This could be a lengthy one so brace yourself.  Well in fact, if this bit hasn't been edited out, it is.

One of our trips to the house last year saw one of my wife's longest serving friends (Penniless solicitor: PS) come over to visit us for the last 4 days (Thursday to Sunday) of a 2 week stay.

Our aim for the 2 weeks was integration with the local community and to this end we had arranged a little "Apero" evening, inviting our neighbours by knocking on doors and speaking at them in our best French.

The Apero was to be held on the Friday and we were as scared as kittens.  We had no idea how many would turn up, each invitee had been asked to "invite anyone you think of who might want to come".  This led to a bit of panic buying in the wine and glasses departments and at the time of writing we still have far too many glasses.

The evening was pretty much a success, about 25 locals turned up (Including about 10 ex-pats but the rest were French locals) and we managed to communicate fairly well and keep all of the glasses topped up.  Other than a small groping incident the night passed off without a hitch but somehow wife (Against her own rule of not entertaining the night before we drive home) managed to invite Grumpy Welshman (GW) and his better half over for dinner the following evening. This was the first link in a chain of events that will be family lore for many years to come.

The following evening, after we had got dinner sorted, we received an invitation from GW to come over to his for a pre-dinner drink.  It was a bit close to little one's bedtime to take advantage of it so, very graciously, wife offered to let PS and I go as long as we were sure to be home by 7.30 given our impending early start and 12 hour drive.

Armed with 45 minutes, we set off on foot for GW's house and had barely managed 60 yards when a van parked in front of us pulled away turned left and removed a large chunk of trim from it's side cutting a corner a bit too fine. The driver, either unaware or unbothered simply drove away!  Several neighbours came out to see what the noise was so we smiled, practiced our best Gallic shrugs at the little bit of van on the side of the road and headed off once more.

After another 20 yards a rotund Frenchman (with a nickname derived from his father's job at the water board, we'll call him WB) we recognised from the Apero evening came running out of his garage and insisted we came in to see the work he was doing on his house.  We explained we that we needed to get to GW's house but he simply explained: GW, "he's my brother" as if that settled any and all argument!  "And so it begins" were PS's prophetic words at just that moment.  A full tour ensued complete with much appreciation of wall finishings, window trim, flooring, electrical installation and understanding of the costs involved, not to mention a considerable amount of boasting that it had all been done outside of the tax system!

We finally got back down to his garage and were about to bid our farewells when he produced a half bottle of whisky with a hairy Scotsman on the front and 3 disposable plastic cups.  Something of a movie style dream sequence followed with WB, who spoke no English, teaching me (A Welshman from the valleys) words in Welsh while we all downed neat whiskey.  GW had clearly been coaching him for this moment for years.  By the time we got underway, WB in tow, it must have been 7.20 and we had managed 80 yards.  Further drinks at GW's meant we didn't arrive home until 8.15.

This didn't go down well with wife who had been dealing with the little one who didn't want to go to bed and trying to keep dinner edible.  This was entirely fair on her part however I still couldn't see any way around the delay without being rude to our new acquaintances!  Much drinking was done for the next few hours and I think we staggered to bed well past midnight with a 6am start and 12 hour drive home the next day.

To say we were in poor condition to commence the drive home would have been an understatement, three hangovers and a loud baby in a car at 7am on the autoroute, mixed in with a bit of leftover tension from the night before was not ideal.  We had to give up and stop at the first services for coffee and a bit of a group hug (Or the British equivalent, a sensible chat around a table).  This cleared the air and our heads somewhat and we got back underway having wasted about an hour.  Now behind schedule and struggling to catch our ferry from Calais, we pushed on as fast as we dared for 6 hours and with the port just 20km away were squeaking in on time to catch our boat.

At this point the petrol light in the car came on along with a warning that we had just 45km of fuel left.  Wife was asleep in the back of the car and after confirming the remaining distance with PS who had the map I said "Let’s risk it".  These are the words that wife woke up to asking "risk WHAT?".  I started to explain but before I could finish we had run out of petrol.  So now we are on a service road near the autoroute with a baby, it's foggy, cold and occasionally drizzling.  Having jogged the half km to the nearest SOS phone to find that it didn't work I came back and following the instructions on the SOS booth dialled 112 on our mobile.  My mistake was to ask if anyone spoke English because they just hung up!  Another 10 attempts later we finally managed to explain our situation to someone and get a rescue vehicle on it's way to us, perhaps from Paris as it only took 2 hours to arrive.

On arrival he tipped 2 litres of petrol in the car, stuck out his hand and said 185 Euros please, when questioned about this he shrugged, said "c'est Dimanche" and threatened to call the police.  We paid the man leaving us a combined wealth of 1 Euro, and headed off once more.

Arriving at the port we were told that we needed to go to the ticket office to pay to change our ferry crossing, a mere 87 Euros.  When I explained that this was more than the original return crossing cost the lady behind the counter cheerily said "I know", she followed this up by saying we were now too late for the next crossing and would have to wait another 2 and a half hours. "Merci" I said with as little real meaning as I could manage.

The waiting hall consists of a huge room filled with 5 or six vending machines.  Having not eaten since breakfast we decided to spend our Euro a single packet of crisps to share between 3 of us.  Never has a crisp tasted so good and collectively we were almost weeping with joy when I held up the little one to look into the packet and said "look crisps!".  Showing a previously undiscovered talent for comic timing she promptly threw up straight into the packet.  We really did cry with laughter.

Cultural handgrenade.

There were plenty of warnings from locals, expats, internet forums etc. Always make sure you employ local craftsmen to work on the house if you want to be accepted by the French speaking community, they told us.  This turned out to be true but not for reasons you might expect.

Late last year I spent a few weeks at the house (yes, totally ignoring warnings but a 3 month waiting list for an outrageously expensive artisan wasn't an option) with a friend/builder who was to help me build a bathroom at the house.  Building rather than fitting is the correct term here as we had to knock through to the barn and construct the walls, floor, ceiling etc.

All well and good, although knocking doorways through 3 foot thick stone walls was never going to be straightforward and so it proved.  The walls are held together with a combination of mud, gravity and light footsteps and comprise of two outer layers of meaty boulders filled with vast quantities of little stones, chaff and walnut shells. An interesting take on cavity wall insulation I presume.

During the course of these few weeks my builder managed to upset or offend pretty much every contact or friend we made since we bought the house. I have now heard 5 or 6 different plans of how the local residents plan to dispose of him from burial under patios to magic tricks gone horribly wrong. It seems no fate is bad enough and frankly, given that half of what he did is falling apart, I'm considering joining the queue!

Ultimately some good has come from the whole thing because the community seem to be pulling together in their mutual dislike of our Rhinestone Builder and no blame has been attached to us.

Hard to pick the moral out of that one but the cliché is easy, all's well that ends well.

Actually buying a house in France!

Perhaps this should have been my first post but maybe I've been trying to forget the wholr tortuous process. Seriously it really does seem to take forever.  Considering we were first time buyers, buying a house with no chain, I'd have to say that 8 months between agreeing the price and actually owning the house is a little excessive.  It only took Henry V 6 months to take Rouen by siege (Although 5 months of that could have been taken up by trying to work out the road system!).


For the entirity of this process we had only the most tenuious grasp on exactly what was happening.  I won't bore you with details but I do feel the need to say that between my wife and I we had to provide nearly 1000 signatures!  That's one each for every piece of paper in the contract (twice as there was an ammendment) and every page of the surveyors report!


Ultimately what we have is, or at least will be, amazing.  There are 2 houses around a courtyard-garden and an enormous barn space that we have no idea what to do with but will provide sumptuous accomodation for Monti (Our little 1972 Fiat 500), not that he requires much in the way of space.   All this for less than the cost of our 3 bed semi in provincial England.

How did we get here?

So it came to pass that after a couple of holidays in remote European villages. We decided we would like to move to France.

Long story short, we bought a house last year are now just a month out from moving in, our house in the UK having sold to the only bidder. This means we have reached the point of no return.

It might be considered a rash decision for all of us: me, my wife, our 18 month old baby girl with premature terrible twos and a cat with a closed door complex but decision made so here we go!

Anyway, so much has happened just owning the house in France and popping over when we can to try to decorate, repair or build bits of it that I'm just going to throw in random topics for my first few entries. This should (I make it sound like there's a plan!) get the background sorted before I do anything chronological. That said if it's happening now I'll let you know.