Our fourth summer here draws to a close

We sailed through the three-year critical point in July and are still enjoying being here, and intend to continue as long as possible. Summer has been hectic, with a combination of several visitors – very welcome – a lot of work restarted on the house following Rhys’ indisposition earlier in the year, and some rather mixed weather.

The weather is cooling off a bit now – mostly upper twenties °C this week with the odd excursion into the low thirties, and down to minimums of 13 to 15 °C at night, so still usually a good bit warmer than the UK. The pool has been mid twenties °C for a couple of weeks – cooler but still comfortably swimmable.  We’ve had much more rain than is usual here this summer – the stream is still flowing and the grass is still green and growing – both rare in August, but it’s usually been very warm and our guests have been happy with it.

Visitors

We’ve managed to catch up with most of our family this year, with two great visits from Sam, Mike and Elizabeth, two lovely visits from Jennie, Ian and Dylan and a very welcome one from David, Lynne and Charlie. 

Charlie with David and Lynne on the beach

Dylan in our pool with Jennie and Ian

Unfortunately (for us, not them!) Peter, Lianne, Jack and Tommy spent their holiday this year on a spectacular trip to Florida so couldn’t fit us in and although Rhys went over and saw them, Jeanne hasn’t been able to as yet.  Maybe one direction or the other later in the year. 

We’ve also had Rhys’ sister Claire with George to visit earlier and Jeanne’s cousin Clive with Kitty.  Her sister Christine with Jay are booked for later this month and another cousin, Lynne with Tony, are also due to arrive in a couple of weeks.  And a few friends have been staying – some of whom we hadn’t seen in quite a long time – Karen, Martin and Jean, and George and Audrey. As you’ll have gathered we love having guests and whilst we have no intention of turning the place into a B & B, we’ve plenty more capacity.  At the same time it’s great to go over to the UK or the other side of France to see family and other friends as well, but we are not able to do much travelling ourselves this year for various reasons.

Renovations

The house has benefited from attention to some of the walls – Rhys has been pointing sections of the old stonework and to do so, learning about preserving old buildings, as this is, so working with lime instead of cement.  The results so far this summer are looking good but there is plenty more to do. 

First section of back wall completed

New window fitted

Pointing still to do

Hopefully next week will see the last big section of the back of the house finished, and perhaps some more rendering done on the unsightly exposed block walls. 

It’s difficult to keep up with day to day stuff, like cutting two acres of grass regularly, when trying to get one-off jobs done.  We had two people round to look at doing our drive for us but neither has come up with a price or start date so we’re still waiting for that to get done, but otherwise we’ve just a long list of smaller jobs now, though we have just had a few tons of sand and gravel delivered for some of them.  Rhys also needs to finish connecting up the new storage heaters before it gets really cold, but this means doing a major rearrangement to the consumer unit and some more of the wiring so needs a few days of concentrated effort when no guests are here.

Animals

Dusty (the cat) is coming up for her first birthday and is pretty well full size, and although she still eats well she usually seems less desperately hungry all the time – hopefully this is only because she’s stopping growing rather than a reflection of all the wildlife she catches outside.  We’ve seen her with mice, voles, shrews, birds, lizards, a snake and various insects.  You don’t want to know what she does with them.

Our chickens are continuing much the same. The new pullets have mostly been laying well but one laid a slightly faulty egg with only half a hard shell but two yolks the other day – it still tasted good though!  One of the bantams, Beryl, the Belgian, died at the end of July and the others haven’t laid any eggs at all for several weeks.  Two of the three left of them have had problems. Lily, a Pekin, was the most serious – we thought she was dying a couple of weeks ago as she got a severe infection, became very listless and dopey and was getting bullied and pecked at by the newer hens.  We made and moved her into a quarantine pen in the back garden and put Yvette, the other Pekin, in with her as she’d been broody for a couple of months and we couldn’t get her out of it, even trying the cold water dips that had been suggested, but unsuccessfully.  The absence of nest boxes in the temporary pen may have done the trick though.  We now have to consider moving them back in with the stronger birds or keeping them separate.  Wendy, the Wyandotte, seems to have gained a new lease of life joining in with the new hens very actively.

Produce

We’ve had bumper crops from the potager and nearly everything is coming to an end now, though we still have sweetcorn, peppers and lots of second crop raspberries to pick.  We’ve had two pears from the one pear tree – very nice, and three of the apple trees are bearing plenty of rather small apples.

The grape vines are about ready for picking and we’ll probably do that next week.  A couple of the old vines are dying and it will be a while before the new ones do anything useful, but we should get a good crop anyway this year. We’ll see what it amounts to and then decide whether just to turn it all into grape juice or make some wine with it.  

Health

Rhys was due to start another phase of his treatment but is set to decline it as he’s getting better anyway – with remarkably low blood test scores – and the side effects of the treatment are still extremely uncomfortable.  Slightly risky but hopefully the new diet will do as much or more than the treatment, but without the side effects.  It’s been nice to have so many people say to him how well he’s looking, and he does feel much better than before the original treatment started, though still not 100% yet. 

Jeanne has to go into hospital for a couple of days in October for a small procedure but will be uncomfortable herself for a few weeks afterwards and unable to travel so we won’t be up to much for a while.  Rhys has been finding out so much about cancer and natural ways of treating and preventing it, mostly through nutrition, that he’s started to write a book on it as well as follow the information he’s learned.  It won’t be a quick project though – maybe by the end of winter?  (Don’t ask which winter!)

France and French

We’ve continued exploring the lovely area in which we live, trying to take a day out once a week to check out somewhere new, and we’ve enjoyed taking guests to some of the places we’ve found and indeed finding new places with them.  Ile de Ré and Ile d’Oleron have both had recent visits, and we’ve explored beaches along the coast, local towns and cities, cognac and wine producers, and joined in various activities with other English and French people including a dinner club, a wine tasting course and some drama events and most recently a monthly aperos club, though they are trying to get us into the monthly quiz night at our local café bar.  

Our French language is still coming along and we get by quite well now, and when we hear newer British visitors eg. in restaurants, we can really tell how well we’ve improved.  We rarely need to speak any English in restaurants or shops now, but doctors, hospitals and some specialist merchants can be a different matter, though Jeanne is really getting on top of almost all of them as well. 

We’re still here !

Well we’ve just had the third anniversary of our move here which apparently is a critical one. A number of people told us when we first moved out here that those who are not going to make it give up and return to the UK within or around 3 years. We love it out here and can’t imagine living anywhere else, the lifestyle is wonderful and we love our house and we have loads of lovely friends in the area and good neighbours.  Obviously we still miss family but we try to see them as often as we can. 

Rhys went to the UK for grandson Dylan’s first birthday; he is staggered how much he’s come on since we saw him in April but obviously children do change so quickly at his age. This picture is of big Charlie and little Dylan together for Dylan's birthday celebration.

Jeanne stayed home to water the plants and look after the cat and the chickens. It’s easy enough to get a neighbour to look after the chickens but it is too much of an imposition to get people watering the garden for us, this makes winter an easier option for a holiday as we could put Dusty in a cattery - or maybe a house-sitter is the best solution when we want to go away together anytime. We’re open to offers!

Dusty the cat

Dusty continues to thrive and has probably become a little less adventurous. She no longer tries to go out late at night and happily settles in between 8 and 10 pm.  Nor does she seem to wander off and get lost as she did. A few weeks ago she came back smelling to high heaven, she appeared to have rolled in some farmer’s fish fertiliser and we had to shower her to get it off!

Chickens

Our new pullets have been laying well and we are mostly getting 5 eggs a day from them plus the occasional ones from the bantams. It’s actually quite difficult to use up 3 dozen eggs a week so we have been giving some away to various friends, then we hit a spell where production went down and some days we only got 1 egg! However we are now back up to at least 5 a day.  We gave them all coloured leg-bands so we could tell them apart and now I think we should name them after their bands, hence Blanche for white, Vera for green (vert), Jeanne for yellow (jaune), Violet for purple and Cyan for the pale blue. However on the days when they don’t all lay we haven’t got a clue which one has missed out. The eggs are delicious though, so visitors are in for a treat.

One of the chickens (Blanche) developed a problem with her foot, it became swollen and we understand it’s called Bumblefoot. We watched a YouTube video and read up on how to treat it and it looked horrendous involving scalpels etc. You can’t really take chooks to the vet here as they’d think you were off your head as the vet costs 40 euros each time and a new chicken is only 9 euros, the usual solution to these mishaps here is to dispatch the chicken; our next door neighbour offered to do it for us. However I did go to the vet’s to enquire and they recommended an antibiotic that I put in their drinking water for 5 days. We also bathed her foot every day with antiseptic solution and applying Savlon. After a few days the swelling underneath reduced but it became swollen on top like a boil, so we lanced it.  When it looked like it needed doing again a few days later we lanced it again but then we could feel a mobile lump of something so we cut her skin with sterilised nail scissors, removed the lump and dressed the wound with surgical tape. Blanche has now stopped limping and the swelling as gone, I think we can add ‘chicken surgery’ to our CVs now!  She’s still laying despite the trauma.

Sadly one of our elderly bantams (Beryl the Belgian) appears to have gone blind in one eye. Other than that she seems OK and is eating and drinking, at least one of the other bantams stays with her to look after her during the day and she usually roosts close to Lily resting under Lily’s wing at night.  It’s quite touching really as all our books say if a chicken starts failing the others will pick on her but this has not been the case so far.

Renovations

We have been pressing on with our gradually decreasing list of jobs; we had someone round to quote for doing our drive which is our last major piece of work that we need outside help for but we’re unlikely to get it done now before this Autumn as everything shuts down in France in August.

We bought some modern English storage heaters to replace the ancient electric heaters that came with the house. We know so many people here with full gas (in a tank not mains gas) or oil central heating who find it incredibly expensive so impossible to run that we decided (after advice and demo from Doug Ibbs of the Grand Designs Creuse House fame) that supplementing our wood burning stoves with a few strategic storage heaters on cheap night-rate electricity will give us sufficient warmth for the few weeks it’s really cold in winter and be a better long term solution than gas or oil. Rhys is busy installing them at the moment and they look good, nothing like storage heaters used to be like.

Produce

Our orchard is starting to settle in but is not very productive yet though we got 3 apricots which were delicious but not enough to do anything else with. We should get some apples and pears later in the year as there are a fair few small ones on the trees at the moment. We are likely to get a bumper crop of grapes this year as the vines are looking very heavy with fruit. We’ve had loads of plums – over 10 kg – off the first plum tree and more to come off the second and I’ve made some new jam. I’ve also made apricot (with bought apricots), redcurrant and blackcurrant (home grown) jams even if I say so myself they do taste much nicer than shop bought ones, delicious with a warm croissant for breakfast. The gooseberries, which are red here, not green, only gave us enough for one dessert but again were delicious, the same with the raspberries and strawberries - not enough to make anything sizeable yet but good to eat in small quantities. We’re currently eating tomatoes, peas, beans (broad and haricot) and courgettes from the veggie plot and have got potatoes, onions, beetroot, sweetcorn and carrots well on the way but I don’t think we’re ever going to make the fully ‘self-sufficient’ grade. I suppose if we ever got desperate we could live on egg and chips or Spanish omelettes for a few weeks!

We’ve had some very hot weather - into the upper thirties C - but also a lot of rain, so we end up with a proliferation of weeds and we spend hours weeding, so now we know why so many of the local farms and vineyards dose everything with ‘Roundup’. We’ve had to follow suit on non-cultivated areas like the drive as we just can’t hand weed everything but we do stick to hand weeding around the fruit and vegetables as we’re trying to be as organic as possible.

June Update - a bit late - sorry!

Visits

Our stream of visitors continues, with two bookings for the summer and one more possibility so far, but still plenty of room and time to fill.  Anyone who fancies a working holiday would be especially welcome!  The weather has been hot for the last few weeks but we had over an inch of rain in the last 24 hours – very welcome to us for the veggie garden and, no doubt, for the local farmers. But it’s sure to settle down to the customary hot and dry summer weather – we’re in the second sunniest part of France here.  We have made a visit to friends in the Dordogne for a couple of days’ break – that was very nice.  

Our animals

Dusty (the cat) continues to grow and thrive, though she’s had a couple of frights very late at night that got her running in with great speed and a little blood. She doesn’t like to go out in the dark now.  She’s becoming very defensive of ‘her’ territory, chasing off other local cats quite vigorously. We took her with us on our Dordogne visit rather than put her in a cattery.  It seemed to work quite well and she is less unhappy in the travel box than she was now – it’s not only for trips to the vets with painful consequences!

The bantams have run their laying down to an average of one egg a week between the lot of them, but even that is good going.  But the new browns are up to speed and we’re usually getting four or five eggs a day from them, and delicious they are too.

The house and garden

We’ve been making progress with a few of the smaller jobs on the to-do list, and several that were not on it.  We got the interiors for a long (4 metres) wardrobe run a couple of weeks ago and have installed all that, and are just waiting for the doors to come in to install them.  We’ve spent a lot of time on the potager – the veggie garden – and now have six rows of potatoes growing very well, french and broad beans and tomatoes just starting to crop, courgettes another couple of days, sweetcorn a few more weeks, etc.  We’ve cropped all the blackcurrants and redcurrants and Jeanne’s made jam from them, and we’re taking raspberries most days. So quite a successful year so far despite the early rain and the recent heat.  Elsewhere in the garden the grape vines have never looked so full – we’re in for a bumper crop and may have to make more wine with them (oh dear !) Similarly the two plum trees are bearing fairly well and one of them is just starting to ripen its fruit. Even more jam coming up, I suspect.  Our developing orchard has two apple trees bearing fruit and looking healthy, one pear and one apricot, which I don’t think is a bad rate considering the difficult land there. We’ll get some more fruit trees for it this winter. 

May update

Visitors

We had a lovely visit from Jennie, Ian and Dylan in March, followed by visits in April from Clive and Kitty first then Samantha, Mike and Elizabeth, and most recently Jeanne’s ex-Barclays friend Karen. Lots of trips out and welcome help on the garden, and the weather was mostly fine and warm for all of them.  Brilliant really for so early in the year. The pool is up and running and both Kitty and Elizabeth swam in it. We have more visitors booked in but plenty of time and space for even more.  There is a gap of a few weeks now but we’re looking forward to our next booked visitors in June so our number one priority for now is the French tax forms!  Everyone has to do them here, a bit like the UK's self-assessment but not as straightforward.

Our ever-growing menagerie

Dusty (the cat) now weighs 3.4 kg and she’s eating like a horse!  She now ‘goes’ outside so the litter tray is not being much used, which is a great step forward.  In the event we didn’t have to do anything specially to train her to do this, she just gradually started ‘going’ on the garden, and she’s very fastidious about covering up the evidence.  However she’s also getting much more adventurous and disappears for hours at a time now, returning for meals, of course.  She got up on the roof (how?) the other evening and couldn’t find her way down so a little rescue operation was needed.  Often she will shin all the way up the walnut tree in seconds and get herself down quite safely, though she generally lands in the chicken run, to the hens’ consternation!

Our four bantam chickens are still soldiering on despite their great (for hens) age! They moulted in the winter but now have splendid new coats and look ready for the show ring. Here’s a little beauty parade:

To our great surprise the bantams are laying again, though not very frequently. Their eggs are, of course, very small – about a third the size of a normal medium egg so it takes a lot to make breakfast scrambled eggs, but they’re good as there is a much smaller proportion of white in each egg and relatively big, tasty yolks. 

We have also bought five new full size pullets which we’ve had for almost a week and have had just one smallish egg from them so far. Makes it a very expensive egg!  Here are the new ones:

The two groups (hardly ‘flocks’) are just being mixed so they are sharing the big hen-house and the whole run area.  The two groups are still getting used to each other so there’s a little bit of fuss at times.  I plan to re-fence the old chicken field for them so they’ll have lots more space to rummage about.

We’re getting a bit tired (surprise surprise!) of cutting our two acres of grass, although most of our guests like to take a turn, but the cost of the petrol is mounting up as well so we’re thinking about getting some sheep, or maybe taking in a rescue pony or some other grazing animal, but are having to give that some serious thought as we know it would tie us up much more firmly than we are already, and we feel we need to keep as much flexibility as we can.

Jobs done and to do

The big jobs in the house are all completed, though we have a long list of small finishing-off tasks to do, but we got diverted a bit from them by Rhys’ treatment and preparation for and the arrival of the new chickens.   We’ve made good progress on the work outside, just about managing to keep the grass mown while doing all the other jobs.  Lots of vegetables sown / planted in the potager, including potatoes, onions, sweet corn, tomatoes, melons, broad beans, peas, peppers, lettuces and a couple of goji berry bushes.  The fruit bushes we planted last year are starting to crop and we’ve had a few crops of tasty rhubarb already.  Jeanne has worked wonders on the ruins of the old barn and there is now the first plantable area there in what will become a formal garden eventually.  The only thing we need a contractor for now is the drive, which needs a new surface.

Rhys’ health

Rhys’ radiotherapy treatment has finished now, thank goodness, so he now has to get over the side-effects, which is happening gradually. He’s getting back into the anti-cancer diet to try to fend off the possibility of any recurrences. It has left us full of admiration for the French health service which has been fantastic. One of the smaller advantages is that you never have to pay for the parking at the hospital and the health service is even supposed to refund us the mileage for driving ourselves there every day !

Diary Update February 2014

Visitors

We’re delighted to have a number of visitors already firmly booked in for this year, in March, April, May and June and more possibilities yet to finalise. However this still leaves plenty of room all year especially in the main summer period. The two guest bedrooms in the house are completed each with its own bath- or shower-room, plus the apartment is available as well.

Our cat

Dusty - Isabelle continues to grow bigger and more adventurous every day. She’s going outdoors several times each day for increasingly longer times and she’s keen to extend her times out, but she doesn’t seem to have got the idea about toilet – she sometimes dashes back into the house to use her litter tray rather than going while she’s outside.  Not sure how we’ll train her to do that. We had her sterilised last week and are due to take her back to the vet’s tomorrow, but she’s already removed the huge and very sticky plaster and most of the stitches herself. She particularly enjoys roaming about the top floor of the hangar and we had our hearts in our mouths when she climbed right up to the top of the roof beams, and had some difficulty getting back down again.  Her main indoor home is in the former kitchen that we’ve done up as an office / spare room and we’ll fit a cat-flap to one of the outside doors shortly.

The seasons

The weather’s been milder but much wetter than usual so far this year, so we haven’t got much done outside despite Jeanne’ sterling efforts on the old grange, but that leaves plenty to do for working visitors when, hopefully, it dries up a bit. The signs are promising (touch wood!) with several warm sunny days recently and we heard from friends that the cranes are already flying north from Spain to Scandinavia – we usually get a few flocks over us, making a terrific din, but we’ve not heard them yet. The French say that as soon as the cranes fly north, winter is over.

The house

We have now finished the ‘bureau’, converted from the old kitchen, and installed all the office stuff in there as well as it becoming the cat’s night-time home.  Also in the house, Rhys finished installing the ‘hotte’ – the extractor fan – in the kitchen over the range, and he’s nearly finished a new linen cupboard on the landing – we found a set of oak double doors, floor to ceiling, at one of the bricos at a substantial reduction and they are installed now – just a bit of finishing off to do there.

TROC

This being an old traditional French style house we came to the conclusion we needed some old traditional French style furniture to set various rooms off now they are complete. We were pointed towards TROC which is a chain of second-hand furniture stores with some quite brilliant pieces amongst some amazing junk. We took our first delivery last week which is a magnificent Louis XV bookcase which we got at a bargain price. Most of the locals move into much smaller houses these days which cannot accommodate these wonderful old pieces which is why they sell them. However we were surprised by what some people will buy, there was a fairly dreadful set of furniture in dark green laminate that had a sold sticker on it. We can’t wait to take our visitors to see our local store!!

Rhys’ health.

We think that pretty much everyone knows now that Rhys was diagnosed with prostate cancer over a year ago and has been receiving treatment for several months. His treatment moved into a new phase this month. He’s been having radiation therapy for the last three weeks, which will run for a couple of months with a short break in the middle. Hopefully that together with the hormone therapy he’s been on since last May will sort it. Thank you to everyone who has sent supportive messages. We’re trying to be positive about it all and are experimenting with some well researched new approaches to nutrition to reduce or eliminate the possibility of it spreading or recurring. Lots of turmeric and green tea, even more fruit and veg and less red meat and dairy etc.  Since this happened Rhys is astonished to find out that almost everyone of similar age he’s in touch with either has the same condition actively or had a very close scare. It’s an epidemic.  He found it a bit depressing that almost all his birthday cards from the UK were postmarked with an advert for Prostate Cancer UK. Unfortunately the side effects from the radiation have forced a compromise on the anti-cancer diet but, in a silver lining, we have enjoyed having a few more steaks etc.  

Happy New Year

Doesn't time fly by?  We've had an eventful few weeks since our last update.

Dylan's Christening

We were delighted to be able to go to Dylan's Christening on 1st December. It was held at the parish church in Uppermill where Jennie and Ian got married, and afterwards a reception at a nearby hotel.  Jennie and Ian had invited lots of family and friends so it was great to be able to catch up a little with so many people we've not seen for ages - too many to list - as well as closer family we see as often as possible. Here are a few pictures:

At the font in church 

At the hotel

Charlie engrossed with a game 

Aunty Kath having a cuddle

Christmas and New Year

We returned to the UK again at Christmas, first a quick visit to my mother in Swanage, who is still going strong, though not quite as strong as when we took her home there in summer. Then up to Manchester to see Jennie, Ian and Dylan again; Peter, Lianne, Jack and Tommy - great meal out at Chiquitos in Ashton UL; Dorothy; and Jeanne's sister Christine with Jay, Charlotte and Francisco - and another meal out. Charlotte and Francisco had just flown in from Dubai, where the temperature was in the 40s centigrade, so Charlotte was frozen despite being well wrapped up.

On the Monday we drove down to David, Lynne and Charlie's to spend a few days over Christmas with them. Dorothy came down with us, Jennie, Ian and Dylan came down the next day and Lynne's mum and dad - Dareen and John, and her brother Duncan, his wife Andrea and their daughters Rebecca and Sophie were all with us for Christmas day, Christmas dinner and stayed over. David and Lynne definitely need their big house at such times. Lynne did brilliantly with the Christmas dinner and Jeanne and Dorothy made three dozen mince pies which disappeared very quickly. We took a few bottles of our own wine over, as well as some 'proper' stuff, to help lubricate proceedings. Overall it was a great Christmas - one of the best we've had. Many thanks to everyone who made it so.

We returned home Friday / Saturday 27/28th, only to go off again on Monday 30th to stay with friends in the Creuse for a gala New Year event. A very pleasant and peaceful few days.

Our new Moggy

4th January is Jeanne's birthday and this year her present to herself was une chaton - a kitten - said by the owners to be about 4 months old, a month ago. They called her Papuche, pretty much the equivalent of Kitty in French, but we decided she'd have to be a British cat with a British - or at least international - name, so we settled on Dusty (after Miss Springfield, and her coat is a rather dusty tabby / colour mix). However we took her to the vet yesterday and he told us her race is European (no surprise there) and her 'robe' - her coat markings & colour - is "Isabelle tortil tabby". So, we thought, perhaps we should have gone for Isabelle / Issy/ Izzy for her. Anyway the vet also said she was only about 3½ months old now, judging by her teeth, so it's too early to have her spayed, tattooed or chipped, so she just had her first vaccinations. She now has a veterinary 'dossier' - the French love their dossiers.  Here are a couple of pictures of her.

She knows how to relax !

 

That's all for now. Resolution to keep up better this year!

Work, Wood and French Taxes

Work

We have been working really hard for several weeks now and accomplished quite a lot but we hardly seem to have made a dent in our ‘to do’ list. Sometimes I feel like adding things to the list that we’ve done just so we can cross them off and get a sense of achievement. The biggest job we’ve done is sorting out the drive which I have to say looked like a builder’s yard! When I say drive then I don’t really mean just the drive, the entrance to the property is quite short and narrow (about 30 metres by 4 metres) but what we refer to as the drive is the gravelled area in front of the house which is quite big (about 60 metres by 12) and it’s that area that we’ve been clearing. Firstly we (mostly I) moved 15 pallets of roof slates, more than 3,000, to one area and stacked them getting rid of all the broken ones by taking trailers full of them to the commune tip. We had several heaps of wood, some were from the fallen tree from our neighbours, now cut into logs for the fire and stacked in an outbuilding – the hangar – to dry out, the smaller bits have been cut into kindling, the remaining wood was timbers from our half demolished barn and joists from the old floor in the living room. Now all sorted and either taken to the tip, stacked or cut into firewood. The result is we can now get a quote to re-gravel the drive area next spring, a real step forward.

Rhys decided that to move forward with converting the old kitchen to an office/spare room we first needed to sort out one of the outbuildings – the cellier. So we sealed and levelled the floor in there and re-built several cupboards that came from the house itself and hey presto we now have a really good storage/work room. Now all we have to do is move everything currently residing in the old kitchen into this store room, whilst trying to organise it well enough to be able to find everything that goes in there when we need it.

Rhys has also been trying his hand at the lime mortar pointing required for these old stone houses. The going rate is about 50 euros per square metre to have it done professionally, and we’ve got acres of it.  He’s getting good at it, as well as doing the walls in the cellier for practice he’s been doing the walls in our salon and they look fantastic. In the meantime I’ve been putting vitrifier (a sort of varnish) on the new skirting boards in the hallway and am ready to do the ones in the salon. After that there is only the beam to tidy up and the salon is complet.

The other job I’ve been doing is sorting out the garden borders outside which are now weeded, tidied and covered with a lot of sawdust and bark from cutting all the wood, and some more bulbs planted in them ready for spring.  I can’t do anything with the vegetable plot as it is too wet to walk on. We’ve had so much rain this autumn. I’ve started stacking the stone from the barn as well with plans to get the walled garden under way by next year.

If there is anybody out there who fancies coming over to lend a hand they would be most welcome – we have a self-contained apartment and two very nice guest rooms for visitors!!

Wood and Heating

As already mentioned we’ve got loads of extra wood from the fallen tree and the barn demolition, plus what we had left from last year and what we bought this year but our wood is all hidden from view, although it is beautifully stacked in another outbuilding – one of the maisons de cochon. One of the strange things I’ve noticed about living on the continent is what I can only describe as ‘Wood Pile Envy’. Whenever we go out and we see someone else’s wood pile you get comments about it such as ‘gosh what a big wood pile he’s got’, sometimes even including ‘his (wood pile) is bigger than mine’. This is not just my husband all my female friends here say that their husbands make exactly the same comments. I’ve even started noticing and commenting myself on the size of people’s wood piles now, I think I’m losing the plot! How many years of wood do you need to store?

Following on from wood for fires is heating. For the first time in 40 years we are living without central heating and I don’t miss it at all. We have wood burning stoves in the 2 main downstairs rooms and they are surprisingly hot and efficient, we have a few ultra-efficient heat exchangers (in the kitchen, the apartment and our bedroom) and the bathrooms have electric under-floor heating and radiators and we really are very comfortable, and reasonably ‘green’.

This leads on to losing our winter fuel allowance – apparently the UK government has decided that France is warmer than the UK but Italy which is further south isn’t! This is a result of the fact that to do the calculations the UK government fiddled the figures to include the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands to work out the average temperature. Strangely they don’t include UK Caribbean islands to work out the UK average! The EU is challenging them on this proposal but there’s even a rumour they’ll tax it as well.

French Taxes

The French tax year, sensibly in my view, runs from January to December and all the taxes become due in the last quarter of the year which does make life expensive from October to December. Ours has completely gone to pot. Due to an error on the part of our tax specialist the demands for our Income tax (due in September) and the first half of our council tax (Taxe Fonciere) went to Bristol.  Don’t ask me why. The local tax office re-printed the Taxe Fonciere and we paid it by its due date of 15^th October. However the head office said they’d have to recalculate the Income tax, I spent 2 hours at the Hotel des Impots (the tax office) in Saintes and they said we’d get the bill in November. Our tax specialist spoke to them this week as we hadn’t heard anything and apparently they’ve lost all the paperwork so the latest is that we have to re-submit it all again but now we have to pay it in January! In the meantime our Taxe d’Habitation (the other half of our council tax) which was payable in November last year has now turned up but is payable in December this year. I’m getting very confused and somewhat nervous. Just to add to the fun everyone’s home insurance appears to become due on January 1^st and we also had both our car insurances to renew on November 1^st. It really is an expensive time of year here.

However, we do seem to be coping, we’ve got a long way with the house and land, we’re improving our French little by little and we’re enjoying a social life. We attend a wine tasting ‘class’ monthly and we’re off to the theatre next week.

Wine, Walnuts and Broody Chickens

Wine

Well it’s that time of year here in France and the vendange (grape harvest) is in full swing all around us. Our own grapes were few in number this year and not a great harvest but the commercial vineyards don’t look a lot better.  I made all ours into grape juice which is delicious but there's only 4 litres of it.

However I got fed up with looking at the wine we made 2 years ago which was still in its large containers in my utility room so I thought we should taste it and make a decision on its future. Much to my surprise it actually tastes very good, a light red in colour, rather like a posh Clairet and a little on the sweet side but very drinkable. Instead of pouring it away we decided to bottle it. It took several hours to clean and sterilise the bottles but we ended up with 53 bottles all nicely corked and sealed. We then designed a label, with help from granddaughter Elizabeth and the whole thing looks very professional.

We’ve now attended 2 sessions of a wine tasting course at a friend’s B&B about 35 minutes away, really interesting tasting six different wines from the same area – we did the Loire this month and liked the Saumur fizz best – and you get supper thrown in, 2 courses with wine, for 15 euros each, it’s a bargain and good company too.

Still on the subject of wine we went to Bordeaux airport on Thursday only to discover my daughter’s flight had been cancelled due to a French Air Traffic Controllers strike. Whilst trying to make alternative arrangements I got talking to a young French lady who was flying to a wedding in Switzerland, she hadn’t realised that she couldn’t take liquids in her hand luggage and was told to get rid of the special bottle of wine she’s bought for the happy couple. She was so distressed I agreed to buy the wine off her and gave her the 30 euros she said it cost. We were all a bit sceptical about its value but since we got home we’ve Googled it and the cheapest we can find a bottle of the same wine & vintage is 32 euros so I’ve still got faith in human nature.

Walnuts

We appear to have a bumper crop of walnuts yet again but have absolutely no idea what to do with them. We still have loads left from last years harvest so I’ve made no attempt to collect this year’s harvest they just crunch underfoot every time I walk over them. Anyone with any useful suggestion for loads of walnuts please let me know as I’d be very grateful.

Broody chicken

One of our elderly chickens decided to 'go broody' about a month ago. The fact that she’s 9 years old, hasn’t laid an egg for I don’t know how long and we don’t have a cockerel hasn’t stooped Yvette from sitting in the nesting box day and night in the expectation of some chicks appearing! I’d chuck her out of the chicken house each morning to force her to eat and drink but the only time she showed any enthusiasm was went I went back a few hours later to open the door and she’d run all the way across the pen and dive back onto her nesting box. However suddenly the other day she came out of the chicken coop voluntarily and seems to have got over her broodiness despite the fact no chicks have appeared; maybe she just got bored. We’ve had a total of about 15 eggs from one or more of the others, though they stopped when Yvette went broody.

Renovations 

We’re down to the smaller jobs now – a never ending list that seems to grow longer no matter how many jobs we do. The local carpenter turned up this week and fitted oak skirting boards in our hallway and salon, fantastic job, he was here from 8.30 a.m. until 7.30 p.m. 

I’m trying to strip the wallpaper from our original kitchen, goodness only knows what they stuck it on with as getting it off brings plaster off the wall at the same time as the paper! It was certainly meant to last.

Chickens !

This week we've collected out first hens, given to us by a friend who is moving away from the area and can't take them with her. They are 9 year old show-variety bantams and have lived in the same chicken-house and run for the last 7 years, so moving them at all was going to be a big shock to them. To make matters worse they're not used to being handled and our first job was to catch them and put them all together in a box for the ride home to our home, all in a temperature of about 29°C (84°F) so they were all a bit stressed. However we got them home safely and moved them into their new hen-house, that I converted from an old dog-kennel that the previous owners of our house had used.  

Here they are just after they arrived. Clockwise from the front, they are Geraldine, a Poland; Yvette, a Buff Pekin; Lily, a White Pekin; Wendy, a Buff-Laced Wyandotte, and Beryl, a Belgian. We were advised to leave them in their new house over the first night, to let them settle and get used to their 'home' surroundings, hence the grain and water in the house with them. The perches are so low because these hens are so small and old. We let them out into their new run on Monday morning and they've been exploring and having a good scratch about. On Monday evening they had to be ushered back into the house for the night, but yesterday and today they went in by themselves just before twilight.

Tonight when I went out to close up the hen house I found that one of them had laid an egg during the day!  I know that's what hens are supposed to do, but these hens are the human equivalent of 90 years old.   In this picture the egg on the left is a standard medium free-range egg from the local supermarket, and the one on the right is our surprise egg from one of our chickens. I don't think it's going to make much of a breakfast on its own though. As it's a white egg it's most likely from Geraldine, possibly from Beryl, though we don't know exactly what sort of Belgian she is and many bantams eggs are white or near-white. Pekins' are cream/white so probably not them. And it's definitely not from Wendy, as Wyandotte's eggs should be brown.

Two Year Update

It’s been just over two years that we’ve lived here in France, so time for another review.

The house

Building work is almost at an end ( hooray !) and we’ve been putting in finishing touches all over the place. 

We now have a fully functioning new salon / sitting room with log burner to keep it warm in winter in a new stone fireplace, and although it’s a big room, we’re very comfortable using it. It makes the house feel more balanced and complete as well.  The hallway is complete apart from the skirting boards which Monsieur Jolly – the brother of the staircase maker  – is making for us at present. It has a nice little cloakroom and of course the new oak staircase. The old living room is now the formal dining room and the old elm staircase sold very quickly. The old kitchen has also been dismantled and just awaits redecoration, now that the new kitchen is working. It’s great having it at the back of the house overlooking the garden and pool. Upstairs the landing has just been finished – new landing floor and skirtings, the new main bathroom is completed, the en-suite in the master bedroom is done and we’ve nearly finished the one in the main guest bedroom, which should be done this week.

Outside

The garden and the rest of the land continue to demand a lot of time and effort.  Jeanne has planted potatoes, onions, sweet-corn, peas and beans, strawberries, tomatoes, courgettes, melons etc. in the potager, to go with the permanent stuff there. The borders are full of new bedding plants and the perennials have been in full bloom for a few weeks. The lavenders are full of humming-bird hawk-moths.  All but one of the fruit trees we planted are doing well and most have a few fruit on them. The old fruit trees are also cropping; this year the cherries have done well but the two plums have a only a couple of fruit, possibly because of their heavy crops last year.  Jeanne has made jam from the cherries (and it’s delicious, especially the jars with a little cognac in with it).   Our new trees are mostly coming on quite well and this year we have about fifteen oak saplings which we are growing on to plant out – thanks to our friends Audrey and George who gave us acorns and some little saplings. We’re spending a lot of time watering our veggies, and fortunately our well shows no sign of running dry.

The site of the old barn is becoming a little overgrown and badly needs some time spent on it to turn it into a proper garden, and we’re hoping to do that later this summer. It does show, though, that the mortar that was between the old stones the barn was built of is little more than soil, and will support plant growth.

Meanwhile the pool has been getting plenty of use, almost every day in the current weather, at or above 30°C for a few weeks now.

People

Rhys’ mother has been staying with us since the end of November and has recovered her health and strength a lot while she’s been here.  She wanted to return to Swanage, however, and we arranged for that to happen in early July.  

Before then we had friends from the US staying and we’ve some more visitors coming later on in the year, but we’ve still got diary space for more visitors this summer.

Here are our friends Phil and Carole, on the left, together with Rhys' mother, in the middle, and us outside our front door at the end of June.

Whilst in the UK, we went 'up north' to see family and friends, We were right on time for the arrival of  Dylan - Jennie and Ian's new baby. We were delighted to be able to see the newly enlarged family several times during the week. Here is Dylan at just a few days old.





We had a day with David. Lynne and Charlie on the way north, spent time with Peter, Lianne, Jack and Tommy duringn the week, iincluding a fun day out in Blackpool with Peter, Jack and Tommy. Here is Tommy driving Jack on one of the rides at the Pleasure Beach.

We’ve very much enjoyed seeing several sets of friends we have made here in France, some very local and others a little further away, both at our own home and at theirs. 

Finally, we plan to take on some geriatric chickens in a few weeks time. We went to visit them last weekend and here they are - all show varieties somewhat past their laying days. 

That's all for now. More soon.

More visitors - not all wild!

A few more recent sightings:

These chickens belong to our next door neighbours, but seem to like foraging in our garden.

At our neighbours on the other side, this splendid cockerel would, no doubt, like to get amongst them!

Rather more genuinely wild, both of these visitors turned up yesterday (24th March): We think the owl is a Long Eared Owl, though the "ears" are just feathers, not ears. This was in the early afternoon in the middle of our land.

This toad had taken a swim in our pool but we took it down to the stream.

Progress on the house

A couple of  major points of progress, with pictures this time.  The main part of the fireplace is now installed, courtesy of our local artisan stone fireplace specialist. Here it is:

The shield in the centre recognises the name of the house - Chez Bouclier (Shield House) and the motif on it is a slightly ambiguous design mixing the French symbol of Fleur de Lys and the English symbol of the Prince of Wales feathers. Whether anyone in years to come will recognise all of that and its present relevance may be doubtful but I think its fun. 

A log burner stove is due to be installed in the fireplace soon and we will have a matching top built for it later, to make it a truly grand statement. Once the stove is installed we will have the floor tiles laid and this will make the room close to habitable. We're not likely to light a fire in the new stove and fireplace until the autumn as it takes several weeks for the stone to dry out properly and by then we shouldn't need a fire lit.

Our other main progress is in the kitchen, where one half incorporating the cooker is nearly finished. Here it is:

There is the extractor hood to install in the over-mantle and just a few bits of finishing off to do to this side. On the other side, the sink, dishwasher, fridges and base units are all installed but we are waiting for two dresser cupboards to arrive to enable all the wall units to be fitted.

The builders are still going (fairly) strong, so we now have a reshaped main bedroom with en-suite almost completed - again just waiting for some bits to arrive. We bought the new flooring for the bedroom today and hope to be in it within two weeks. Then the old main bathroom can be altered to get the new staircase into the landing from the hall below, and then we want a break from builders work while we catch up.

Update - late January

Another busy spell - builders hacking bits out of the house and more slowly putting other bits back together and we've been out shopping for stuff to keep them going.

The builders opened up the chimney from what will be the new salon / sejour, to the sky, which gave us a nice surprise as it appears to be in remarkably good condition and just needs a flue liner inserted and then resealing. Unfortunately we've had a lot of rain and its been pretty chilly so not ideal to have such efficient 'ventilation' just at the moment.  They've also opened up two holes in the back wall of the house to take drains from the new en-suite out into the chai, further increasing the ventilation. Just what we could do with!  They've taken down the built-in wardrobes in the two rooms that will become the master suite and the ceiling didn't fall down, so more good news.  We nipped out (merely a 5 hour trip!) to Leroy Merlin in Bordeaux yesterday to buy new doors for the rooms - remarkably good value and they'll paint well - plus an electric heating mat for the floor which we're hoping will not need too much use, and some new light fittings for the new kitchen.

Speaking of which, the granite worktops are now in place and look terrific. They're a nice blue-ish tint that contrasts well with the cupboards. The kitchen supplier came back last week as well with most of the missing bits and I fitted and plumbed in the sink and dishwasher (having already completed the electrics) so we're using it as the proper kitchen now, although the wall cupboards have yet to be fitted. The old kitchen has become the bureau and storeroom for tools and materials.

The hall now has new wall linings all round and three quarters of a ceiling, and all the electrics in, and the salon has two new wall linings and a new floor, just waiting to dry out sufficiently to lay tiles. But the tiles have to wait until the stone mason has installed the new fireplace - at least the hearth - in the next week or two.

So its all good progress but we need to source new floor covering for upstairs, keep the builder on track finishing off what can be finished and catching up on some of the details that have slipped, before laying the floor tiles downstairs, finishing the flue and chimney, doing the en-suite and opening up the hall ceiling / landing floor ready for the staircase builder to make final measurements and get cracking. Then we'll have a staircase for sale ... and so it goes on.

My mother seems to be settling down well, putting on a bit of weight and really storming ahead with her correspondence and phone calls! Our carer, Andrea, has taken her out for a few walks and drives into Jonzac as well as us taking her out more often ourselves. We took her out to dinner on Thursday to the Hotel de Bordeaux in Pons on Thursday and we all enjoyed a nice meal there. She even went to the hairdressers in Jarnac Champagne this week. (Dentist and chiropodist to follow in the next week or two!)

We're getting through our firewood at a considerable rate this year - the wet weather makes if feel colder than it really is, and we need to keep the house warmer than we'd usually do, for my mother - we can't just leave her in her warm apartment all the time.

New Year Update

Gosh, what a long time since we updated this!  A lot has happened, so here’s a summary (though its still a bit long!).

We’ve had a mostly grey and wet autumn and winter so far, with occasional beautiful bright days, but looking on the bright side we’ve had very few sub-zero nights and no snow (so far) and there are some signs of spring in the air as many plants are sprouting.  Rhys pruned the grape vines today.

Although the builders returned later than planned, mid-November instead of October, the house has made significant progress. What used to be the dining room is well on the way to becoming a super kitchen. The base units are in and once a local artisan stone fabricator turns up this week with the new granite work surfaces then the rest of the units can be fitted. The room no longer has a ceiling that looks like it might fall on your head mid-meal!  It also has new patio doors that are twice the width of the old ones so they let in lots of light and give a great view of the garden and pool.

The hallway is now back to being a proper entrance hall and no longer contains granny’s ‘wonderful’ dark blue bathroom.  A local craftsman, Philippe Jolly, is making us a new oak staircase and Rhys has been busy doing the re-wiring with our builders fixing the floor, walls and ceiling.

The salon is starting to take shape and the same local artisan who is doing the kitchen work surfaces is making us a stone fireplace to give the room a focal point and a source of heat as we’ll be installing a wood-burning stove in there. We are busy trying to scrape blue and green paint off the original stone window surrounds; it is a mystery to us what possessed people to put thick layers of gloss paint on the beautiful pale stone.  We need to change the wood burning stove in the other room as well because apparently the type we have there became obsolete and was condemned in 1993! However, according to the stone chap, the fireplace itself is quite modern as it’s only about 100 years old!

We’ve had a number of jobs done outside as well so our hangar, cellier and pigsties no longer flood when it rains, which is a bonus, due to a new concrete floor and proper drains to take any rain to a soakaway. Our half-demolished barn is still only half demolished as we’ve not had the time or the weather to complete it but we’re sure we’ll get there before too long.

We still seem to be of great interest to the locals as cars slow down to take a good look at what is going on (we’re surprised there hasn’t been a accident yet!) and we seem to get local groups of walkers who blatantly stand at the fence pointing out things to each other, but our French is not quite up to challenging them yet.

One of our neighbours, a cousin of the chap from whom we bought the house, told us that it was actually built in 1856. We have no idea how he can be that accurate but it fits with what our stone artisan has told us – he guessed at just before 1860 to 1870 when the phylloxera plague wiped out most French grape vines and destroyed a lot of wealth here.

We still haven't got chickens of our own but the ones from next door are regular visitors and the red squirrels have been very busy in the garden this year, so we’re expecting oak and walnut trees to spring up all over the place as they keep planting nuts and acorns.

Rhys’ mum now lives with us in our apartment; she came out here on November 25^th and because she has quite poor health we are much more frequent visitors to the doctors than we have been before so we know lots more about the French health system than we did. So far it’s very good and she’s impressed. Hopefully we won’t have to test it too far ourselves for a while.

The village now benefits from a new boulangerie, where they seem to be very busy with customers coming from many of the surrounding villages, and we hope they'll be successful. The restaurant/bar/café has also re-opened and it also serves as a shop for basic supplies, and we hope these people can make a go of it, unlike the previous 2 proprietors.

We had lots of visitors last year and are hoping for many more this year. We’ve made many new friends here but very much want to maintain our old friendships and have family and friends to visit especially as we’re no longer able to get about as much as we’d like due to Rhys’ mum not being able to be left to fend for herself for long.

We'll try not to leave it so long till the next update.

Autumn Update

Harvest Time

I’ve been busy harvesting the last of our crops and so are the local farmers. The Vendange (grape harvest) started last week which is much later than last year and I understand that this year’s crop is not good; what effect that will have on this years Cognac production (and prices) remains to be seen. Our grapevines were much less productive this year, about a quarter of last year’s yield and lots of undersized grapes. I’ve made most of ours into grape juice as we still have wine to bottle from last years grapes.

The walnuts are now falling off the tree and again not as many as last year and lots of black ones, probably just as well as we still have some left from last year.

Most of the veggies are now finished but we did well with tomatoes, onions, peppers, sweetcorn and carrots. Not a brilliant yield from the potatoes, peas and green beans but OK and 3 melons from our melon plant. The weather was all wrong this year, a late cold snap in April, then a lot of rain but then no rain at all from the middle of July until the end of September. The farmers’ cereal harvest was in early July – very much sooner than Britain – but the sunflowers were late and the sweetcorn even later, and there are some fields of both still not done.

The Business

We gave up taking in French students after suffering a really bad experience with an older student which is a shame as the young students were great. This last one had so many issues that we ended up counting down the hours until she left and I was so traumatised we cancelled the rest of out bookings! However the agency got in touch the other day to see if we were available for half term, I’m not sure which bit of “we’re not doing this again” they didn’t understand.

Demolition

Most of the barn is now down to garden wall height and we are keeping two of the walls as we are going to make it into a walled garden. We had a 6-day bonfire burning a lot of rotten and worm-eaten wood. We want to re-use the good stone but we’ve still got a lot of rubble to take to the tip so we decided to buy a trailer to do this. However this is where you get into French bureaucracy, if you buy a large trailer (ie. over 500 kgs capacity) then it has to have its own registration document (carte gris), it’s own number plate and its own insurance. If you have a French driving licence you also have to go and take a special driving test.  Needless to say we’re having a 500kg trailer. I went to the Mercedes garage in Cognac to ask the price of having a tow bar fitted and they quoted me 1,600 euros! I’m going to a local garage where they will fit a genuine Mercedes tow bar for just over 600 euros.

We’ve also just demolished the old blue bathroom on the ground floor, behind the hall.  The hall looks much bigger and brighter now, and putting the staircase into it looks even more the right thing to do. A lot more rubble to take to the tip though! Then we need the builder to get to work on it.

Wood burning stoves

We had a cheminée firm in to give us a quote for a new fireplace and wood burning stove in our new salon, and while he was here we got him to look at our existing wood burner in the other room.  He told us that what we’ve got was condemned in 1993!  However we had the chimney from it swept and the ramonage guy didn’t seem bothered, and gave us the necessary insurance certificate to prove it had been done.

We’re waiting for the log man to turn up with this year’s new supply of logs, all oak this time.  We’ve already got about a year’s supply but you’re supposed to have at least 3 years supply in, no idea why it just seems to be the done thing. I rang up to see when the delivery was scheduled for and all the told me was “after the 10th”. Firewood comes in ‘steres’, which is one cubic metre when the wood is a metre long, we have ours in half metre lengths so that it will fit in the fire and apparently when it’s been cut in half a stere is no longer a cubic metre but is a bit less.

Demolition !

I've made a start on demolishing the old grange in front of the house. It was in a bad state structurally with the roof beams rotten and worm-eaten, the roof tiles all cracked and broken, and now I've started on the walls, I can see there is little strength in them other than the inertia of a lot of old stone walls half a metre thick standing there for a couple of hundred years - No effective mortar in them and a 4-inch wide crack right through from floor to roof in one corner.

I'm trying to do the job slowly and safely (!) and I want to re-use the lovely old stone elsewhere on the property. We had to ask for permission as we're only a couple of hundred metres from an historic monument but it came through in record time.

Here's what it looks like after a day's work. Nice how much its opening up the view from the front of the house. The old wall junction at the right-hand end is still full height and then there was the roof itself (which I had our builder take off for me).

Another hot sunny morning

Procrastinating when I should be painting the last set of shutters from the front of the house - here it is this morning (spot the missing shutters). Temperature currently 32 deg C (90 deg F).

Flowers everywhere

We came home from the Dordogne to find the flowers have arrived on our hibiscus tree in the back garden (its about 9 feet / nearly 3 meters high) 

and in the sunflower field opposite the house - I tried to get a photo of the house in the morning but the flowers are so tall that even from a ladder it looks like the house is drowning in a sea of sunflowers.

We've been here a whole year - so time for a review!

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!