Well we’ve been in France full-time for a whole year now, we had the anniversary of our final move here just last week so it seemed a good time to take stock and think about the positives (there are lots if them), the negatives (there are only a few), things we’re glad we’ve achieved and things still to be done.
Weather
I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative, according to the locals this is the worst summer many can remember, not as hot as usual and a lot wetter. However it is certainly a big improvement on the weather in the UK this summer and for the last few summers we had there. As the temperature has stayed mostly in the 20s we haven’t had many problems sleeping as it cools down nicely at night. We also had a freezing week in early February that caused us loads of burst pipes and a sudden late frost in April that killed off my early plantings in the veggie plot.
Things I miss about the UK
- People - I miss going to school to collect Tommy and hearing about his day, we both miss popping over to see Jennie and Ian on Sundays and sometimes going to the Chinese restaurant. There don’t seem to be many Chinese restaurants in this part of France but one has opened this very month in Pons so we will be giving it a go very soon. We miss all our family, friends in general and some especially close friends and our maths and English students in particular.
- I miss shops being open at lunch time, I can’t believe how even quite big stores shut up shop for 2 hours at 12 noon – if you’re still in there with your shopping trolley they just switch the lights out on you! It is slowly improving as most big supermarkets don’t tend to shut at lunchtime anymore and some of the mega stores like IKEA don’t. However one chain just got fined thousands for daring to open on a Sunday! I miss going to the chip shop for fish or pudding and chips on the days you just don’t feel like cooking but really can’t be bothered to go out for a formal meal, I also miss M&S dine in for £10 meals.
Things I don’t miss
- The awful traffic on the roads, it’s amazing how soon you get used to be able to drive to the supermarket that is 7 miles away in less than 10 minutes. On most of our journeys we do not encounter traffic lights or traffic jams.
- Paying through the nose every time you need to park your car somewhere, here there are loads of parking spaces even at popular tourist destinations and it is mostly free, and even when you do pay in big towns or cities it is only a fraction of the cost you get charged in the UK. In Jonzac we’ve got a blue badge that we put in our car window with the time we arrived (like UK disabled badges) and just park in the centre of the town for free.
- The negative attitudes in all the UK press, the French simply do not have such negative press about themselves or their institutions. I couldn’t believe the stick the media gave Barclays the other week, it’s as if the country is on a self destruct course with all its big institutions, do they want everything to be foreign owned?
Progress on the house and garden
I used to get frustrated that nothing progressed as rapidly as I wanted it to, I think it’s the project manager in me, however I’m slowly learning that sometimes it is better to take time over renovations as I’ve changed my mind about a number of things whereas if I’d rushed in and got them done it would have been quite difficult to justify re-doing them. In that respect the fact that the sale of our flat took as long as it did meant we didn’t really have the cash to throw at jobs so forced us to step back and think more which has led to useful adjustments.
However I still struggle with the fact that everything takes twice as long as it used to, when we go to Castorama (French B&Q) it’s a whole day gone. We have to make many trips to the DIY shops and even popping to the local ones takes several hours out of your day and you can’t go between 12 and 2 p.m.
Many people thought it was strange that we had a swimming pool built as a number one priority before we did bigger jobs on the house. We are still very happy that we did that first as the whole pool area has settled down from the earthworks involved in time for summer and we and visitors have found it a fantastic facility on the many hot and sunny days that we have had.
We also concentrated on renovating the apartment before our main house as it was in such a bad way that it really needed fixing as a high priority. It now looks wonderful and if we ever end up needing extra income we believe it would be very easy to rent out. It has already been used by several of our guests and it brings home to us and them the advantages of having some space of your own when visiting.
One of the things we have done that puzzles people is that we’ve reduced the number of bedrooms we’ve got – we started with 6 and we now have 4. However the bedrooms in the house are very spacious, the one in the flat is less so but then guests get a whole flat. We’ve still got the dark pink bathroom but that is due to go in September or October when we start getting the en-suites installed.
We’ve planted about 300 trees and shrubs, and though not all have survived enough of them have to make a difference. We now have an orchard in the making and a 100 metre hedge of laurels down one of our boundaries. We had a massive tree fall into our garden from a neighbour during a bad storm last November it was so heavy it embedded itself several feet into the ground. However the neighbour whose tree it was had it removed in March and we then worked with him to clear up the mess it left behind.
French red tape
France is notorious for its red tape and rightly so, they do like their ‘dossiers’. Our first challenge was getting into the health system; we were given all sorts of warnings about the difficulties involved but in the end we put together all the items listed on the appropriate website, popped into the office in Saintes, waited 10 minutes to see someone and left 10 minutes later with it all done. Our ‘Carte Vitales’ (vital documents to access the French healthcare system) arrived a few weeks later. Getting our cars re-registered was somewhat more challenging but we managed it one wet afternoon last November. We were both really sad to give up our personalised number plates as we’d had them for 10 years. We’ve now gone through our first French tax return which we paid someone to help us with and we’ve recently completed our hopefully final UK tax return but you can’t do it on-line in France, you have to print off paper copies, complete them and post them to HMRC!
Still to do
We still haven’t got our chickens, though we did the course before we left the UK and we have a place for them and know where to buy them from but various factors keep getting in the way of actually buying them. We do get visiting chickens from next door as they are very free range around here.
New Friends
We’ve made many new friends and have a busy social life, we’re also in touch with many old friends and have already had a number of visitors to stay even though the house is not completed yet but we do have very comfortable guest bedrooms. Our new friends are a mix of English-speaking and some French. We keep going to all the local events so I think all the locals know who we are by now. We’ve been welcomed and appear to have been accepted by the locals which is good; even the farmers give us a wave as they pass by on their various tractors.
French language
It’s hard to judge how much our language skills have improved, it’s like anything really, the more you learn the more you realise that there is still more to learn. I think the big problem is all the language courses want you to follow a structured approach but when you need to be able to do something like buy a sit-on lawn mower or get someone in to empty the fosse etc., it doesn’t fit within the structure so my approach to learning is very organic rather than structured.
French neighbours
Our immediate neighbours are lovely, the daughter speaks French to us slowly and clearly and throws in a bit of English if she thinks we’ve lost the plot, her elderly mother just talks at us rapidly and hopes we’ll understand something. I did understand her the other week when she was asking about us converting our outbuildings into gites and she was very relieved when I said we weren’t. Apparently many French people take it for granted that as soon as Brits buy a place with lots of outbuildings that their plan is to create as many gites as possible and let them out to tourists! We are going against the grain by actually demolishing some of our buildings rather than converting them. I have discovered you can have too many buildings and too much land.
Aperos
A rather strange continental tradition – you get invited around to someone’s house for an aperitif and a few little snacks, usually about 5.30 p.m. then at about 7.30 p.m. and definitely no later then 8 p.m. you take your leave and go home and make your own dinner! Of course if you haven’t prepared it before hand you end up having dinner at about 10 p.m.
New business
Although we have retired several times already and I really thought this would be our last retirement, Rhys volunteered us for a new business opportunity. We now take in French students for anything from 2 days to 2 weeks and talk to them, and get them to talk to us, in English to improve their spoken English. I have to feed them typically English food for lunch and dinner, we have had 4 so far and they have all confessed after a few days that they expected the food to be terrible and couldn’t believe that I gave them food that not only could they eat but that they actually enjoyed. One student even rang his father to tell him how much he enjoyed my cooking especially the desserts! Another told me I was a ‘Cordon Bleu’ cook.
Sorry this is so big – feels like an annual appraisal, but I guess that’s sort-of what it is!
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