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.

Mountain bike trials.

It's been quite a while since my last update but frankly nothing's happened! We’re still waiting for the house to sell and the move to happen. Best guess; it's still a few weeks away but in the mean time this little tit-bit...

One of our trips to France last year coincided with a mountain bike trial taking place in our village. It's quite a big deal apparently, a national level event where riders race over an insanely dangerous course which passed by the front of our house.

On the day we were visiting Grumpy Welshman (5 mins walk across the village) and, when the little one got tired, we made our way home to put her to bed.  Arriving at our house we found the way cordoned off and various neighbours chatting with course marshals in the road.  Retired Farmer from next door insisted that we hang on as the riders were due past in 5 minutes.

After 20 minutes of waiting and desperately trying to keep the little one happy we found that the only way she would calm down was to be put down on the road where she could play with stones and in the mud.  Wife came up with the genius idea of getting everyone a glass of wine which left us in the bizarre situation of sharing wine in a country road with strange Frenchmen and the baby sitting down playing on the tarmac and occasionally attempting to crawl off into the path of passing mountain bikes!

Standard day in village life I guess! :)

Welcome to the village.

One of my early trips to the houses was a week of intensive cleaning and painting of the little house.  I came on my own without knowing anyone in the village and with rather a single minded objective that would never withstand events in the village!

On about my third afternoon 3 gentleman approached the house and introduced themselves as the retired farmer from next door, "Local Service" (See below) and a grumpy Welshman (GW) who could do some translating for me (My French is probably better that school boy but not a lot) especially for Local Service (LS) as he speaks a local Patois which is barely French.

It was explained to me that as a welcome to the village I was to be taken into Retired Farmer's (RF) cellar. Once safely ensconced there I was thankfully served alcohol and none of the other things which came to mind. Drinks (Given this was mid-afternoon) included with wine (2 bottles), pineau (Eau de vie and grape juice) and some rocket fuel made from blackthorn shoots.

During my stay I was shown RF's collection of corkscrews and given a crash course on the local patois the LS regularly saying incomprehensible things followed by "Traduction!" as instruction for GW to translate. This game was fine and perfectly normal until he grabbed a topless calendar and proclaimed loudly "titties traduction!". There are after all many similarities between the English and French languages.

After this bewildering afternoon we emerged blinking into the sunshine and all piled into LS's car (Yes I know but still!) and drove about 200 meters to LS's house where he insisted that we start on the Pastis. GW had bailed by this stage and I was left to fend for myself for 40 minutes of stuttering French/Patois and sign language.

After I'd staggered back I have to confess I didn't get any more painting done.