Bonne année everyone. After our last long-overdue catch-up, something a bit more up to date and, hopefully, interesting, if still a bit long - sorry!

Our family continues in good health and thriving, fortunately, after last year’s trauma. We are probably the weak ones at present, as our age continues to gradually take its toll and we are less fit and healthy than we used to be. However, we still manage our essential moving, though a little more slowly than hitherto. Our Monday walking group is a bit short of participants at this time of year but a core handful of us keep it up.

We found it interesting last year to find, by way of one of my cousins, Anita, a couple of ‘new’ family members in the USA, with their own growing families, as a result of DNA ancestry testing. My (Rhys’) family has a well-travelled history with origins in Wales and the USA on my father’s side, Derbyshire, Spain, the low countries, and the USA and Canada along the way on my mother’s. Time to get my own DNA done, perhaps. Jeanne also has widely scattered forebears so we’re planning to see what comes out of our respective DNA. More surprises expected!

On our summer holiday this year we drove to Barcelona for a cruise around the western Mediterranean, which I mentioned last time, but we stopped off in Navarre in northern Spain on the way, first visiting Sanguesa, where one of my ancestors, Sebastian, was born about 1550. We found there a lively town on the eve of their week-long fiesta, full of lovely people having fun with music and dancing in the streets. Then on to Fustiana, where another one of my ancestors, Joanna, was born about 1558 and she married Sebastian there in 1579. They moved to what was then the Spanish Netherlands – we don’t know exactly why but it may have been religious persecution with the inquisition going on in Spain, or he may have been posted there if he was in the Spanish army. Unfortunately, we hadn’t done enough pre-trip research to find records resources or to get into the church at Fustiana, but we may well have another trip before long. Also it’s not provably certain that the connections and dates are all true, as so much time has elapsed, but there is a very large family community descended from these two, many of whom have been studying the family history longer and more thoroughly than us, so there’s a good chance it is correct.   

We stayed in a couple of Paradores in northern Spain whilst there. These are amazing ancient Spanish castles converted into good hotels with lots of history, and well worth visiting. So we’ll no doubt use them again.

I had kicked off a higher pace of work on the old walls through the autumn, bringing the end of the present phase into sight. I’ve been getting through bags and bags of chaux – lime for mortar – and trailers-full of sand, but have only about a foot of height to go over the biggest 10 metre-long wall still to do. Unfortunately, the weather collapsed with weeks of rain through autumn into winter, followed now by severe cold and frost. Lime needs to be about 15°C to set properly and once the wall is high enough it needs roofing in the local style, and the outside rendering. Never ending…

After our difficulties getting someone to do heavier garden work we eventually found a local French chap who came to do the 100metre long laurel hedge that was getting out of hand; he and his partner completed the work in about 4½ hours (not three days as previously quoted for by a Brit) very well and tidily, taking away the debris, all at a very reasonable cost. We often feel that we (and other Brits here in general) are targets for rip-off pricing for work by other Brit tradespeople and a small minority of French ones, so it is worth the effort of seeking out good locals who are happy to work for sensible prices. We and others have suffered quite a bit from this, even from Brits who live close by. However, we’re very happy with our new-found French one and have asked him to come back later this month to cut down a decaying Ash tree. Since we’ve planted around a hundred new trees and two hundred shrubs and hedge plants we’re still very ‘green’.  

On the subject of ‘green’ we bought our firewood supply for our log burners for the winter in the autumn. Now that we don’t get the winter fuel allowance from the UK anymore, which used to pay for each winter’s supply, we have bought cheaper wood in the form of off-cuts from French sawmills that are suppliers to cognac barrel-makers. This is beautiful oak wood – much of it almost too good to burn, really – but only half the price of wood from the usual wood-fuel suppliers and it burns really well, hotter and with less ash and virtually no smoke. In France tree plantations are managed well and wood counts as a ‘green’ fuel as woods and forests are replanted continuously, so there are even tax breaks for installing modern high-efficiency wood burners, as ours are. The forests are important to France's economy and if people burning it and  wine and spirit makers did not need it all in vast quantities the forests would likely lose their protection. 

Our potager is now mostly bare, with all the summer’s fruit and vegetables harvested and stored and only some cabbages, sprouts and broccoli left whilst most of it has been rotavated for the winter. Most of the apple trees produced small crops this year, as we kept better on top of the irrigation, and a couple of pears from our first pear tree, but our first ever crop of apricots were ready while we were away and disappeared, to our great disappointment. Our fig tree has produced a great crop this year – its first proper big crop – and Jeanne made fig jam with it.

The hens re-started laying, eventually. We’ve been researching why they’ve been off lay for so long, and it seems to be a combination of a long period of very hot weather in late summer coupled with too little fresh water while we were away on a couple of occasions during that time. Apparently it can take them many months to come back into full production. 

We’re delighted that our family of miniature sheep (‘Moutons d’Ouessant’) are thriving as well, though they’re not denuding their field of grass by any means. So we probably need a few more and intended to rent a ‘whole’ ram to give our ewes some lambs rather than buy more. Our ram was castré before we got him so as not to be mating with his own offspring. Two of the ewes are his daughters, the other two are the mother of the two young ones and her sister.

Unlike the UK government, the French seem to have been well organised for some time for whatever happens due to the Brexit farce tragedy, and we have pretty clear information from the French government about what we’ll have to do, whichever potential outcome eventually actually happens. We know from them that we have the right of permanent residence and they will give us the appropriate documents to prove it in due course, following our application last April and a likely further application in due course. At present, however, we have no such documentation as Britain has moved the goal posts so often that our département now won’t do anything until it finally gets settled, most likely a 'hard' exit in December this year. The end of this month seems unlikely to make any difference to anyone. (Except many British businesses, who will see the way to collapse and bankruptcy opening up for them, as even the government has admitted!)

A great many people with second homes here who stay for far more than three months every year will lose the right to do so, becoming limited to a three-month maximum stay unless they get long stay visas, and new arrivals will find it much more difficult to live and particularly to work here. And we’ll all have to pay more for our health care. The French and the rest of Europe are very brassed-off with the UK government for a myriad of reasons, not least the staggering costs that have been forced upon them all, the perfidy of the UK government and the reduction of Europe’s status in the world, and security. They are fortunately, however, much more tolerant and understanding of us – the people affected who are resident in their countries – and want us to stay. 

However, in the meantime we’ve been continuing life as normal here, with a different Christmas break this time. We went to Maastricht the weekend before Christmas for André Rieu’s 'Christmas at Home' concert in the exhibition centre (MECC) there, followed by a few days in Amboise, on the banks of the Loire, over Christmas itself. We had a great time at the concert and the associated events that were put on with it. We stayed at the Kruisherenhotel in Maastricht, a former abbey, amazingly converted and where we had a welcome lunch, then a tour of André Rieu's studio, where the orchestra rehearses and all the videos and CDs are produced, then off to the MECC for a gala dinner followed by the concert itself, and back to the hotel well after midnight. Tiring but well worth it. Our few days in Amboise were much quieter, but we visited a couple of the local chateaux. One, Le Chateau du Clos Luce, was Leonardo da Vinci’s home during the last three years of his life, with a park with lots of models of his inventions, the other, , a royal chateau spanning the Cher river nearby. 

Anyway, back to reality and trying to keep warm and keep up with the daily demands of this new year. We hope all our readers have a good year and that we’ll see many of you as possible.  

Best wishes all.

2018/9 Catch-up

This is a catch-up blog covering from August 2018 to Summer 2019. Not too much detail but hopefully interesting to those of you who don’t catch up with us as much as you and we might have liked.

Our daughter-in-law, Lianne, was taken ill early in the year with what appeared to be a flu-like virus that got into her heart and caused her heart to fail. Once the medics worked out what was happening she was admitted to Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham and had a heart transplant in March. A great shock to all the family. Lianne has recovered very well and is back home but continuing to be monitored by the hospital's heart team, who seem to be well on the boil picking up issues that come up. We had some trips over as a result and as a family we were all very grateful for and delighted with the positive support and prayers of so many friends and more distant family, as well, of course, for the wonderful treatment she received at the QE.

We managed to tack on a visit to attend an André Rieu concert in Maastricht n the way back from the UK on one of our trips. So pleased with it we plan to go again later in the year. 

I joined the local archery club in Pons and have been enjoying getting back into something I did donkeys’ years ago when I was fitter, but now my progress feels depressingly slow and I am the only anglais in the club, so its social aspect is not as good as I’d like. I had to buy a new bow and all the kit in spring as the basic club equipment was holding me back, but I can practice at home now as well as at the club. Getting quite reasonable scores now, but not quite competition standard yet!

Work on our house continued at a much slower pace than previously, largely because we have completed most of the big jobs and some of the longer term work is subject to the weather, and it has often been too hot and dry, or too wet, or too cold to work with lime mortar on the old walls. However, spring and summer brought some opportunities for progress which we were able to take, but we’ve found it difficult to get local tradesmen to actually carry out work that they agreed to do. So we’ve had an ever-growing hedge that one local bod promised to top last October, still not done after a year of promises, and another person told us it would take three days and sacked the job when we queried why. (He had told us he and his partner would do it from the back of their pick-up truck driving along the straight row of 100 meters. Sounded to me like a half-day job!) So I may have to buy a long-handled motor hedge cutter and do it myself, though we’re still trying to find someone to do it for us as it’s a bit too strenuous for me now. 

Some jobs got completed though. We at last had a new front door installed and a new door and window in the apartment, so we are 100% double glazed now. The dining room ceiling has been done with insulation and plasterboard between the beams, so looks a lot better and reduces noise transmission. And we had the stone feature chimney-breast in the salon completed by the original mason, so it’s looking good.

We’ve had more trips away. After last winter’s calamitous trip to the UK we tried a holiday in Italy for the New Year, and went to St Vincent in the Aosta Valley. Good hotel, great little town (with some great restaurants that we enjoyed using) but no snow. In fact people were sunbathing at the hotel in mid 20s °C. Heading back to France there was a lot of snow the other side of the Mt Blanc tunnel, but not much use to us! However we had a different calamity on that holiday when our car broke down and we were left fighting Mercedes for six months afterwards before they admitted their fault and paid up. 

But other trips were more successful, fortunately. We had been failing to agree on a main holiday destination for this year since we decided to cancel our originally planned trip to the USA and Caribbean when Lianne became ill. A friend had told us about a cruise she’d just returned from so we though perhaps we’d try that, and so we took our very first cruise from Barcelona around the western Mediterranean for a week. We went to Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, Messina and Valletta and back to Barcelona, and enjoyed the whole thing overall, and would do it again. But we also learned a lot and would do any repeat a little differently.

Our potager has, with mostly Jeanne’s labour, continued to provide us with great crops of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, courgettes, squash, melons, berry fruits, and various other things, even better this year, and our hens were continuing to give us lots of eggs up to the beginning of July when we went off for a UK trip. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet got back up to volume yet, but we’re hopeful they’ll recover soon. We bought a few more hens to augment our little flock as some of them are reaching end of life stage and we like to have them, even though they’re a bit tying. But we’ve also bought a small flock of sheep to reduce the amount of grass-cutting we have to do. We’ll need some rain to grow the grass to give them plenty to eat, but we’re nowhere near needing to give them hay yet. We had the vet come to check them out and he said we’ll probably need twice as many as the five we’ve got so far. 

The weather was cool and wet early this year but very hot and dry right through summer, and broke with the solstice, so we’ve had a period of wet weeks. However, the ground needs it, and the cooler temperatures will be more amenable to getting things done, between showers! 

Locally, our village café-bar and the boulangerie continue to be an asset to the village. The old agri-silo round the corner from us has been demolished, removing a huge eyesore, and the land may be used to build some houses in due course.

We went to a meeting at the department Prefecture to apply for our Cartes de Sejour, or residence permits, taking a stack of evidence to prove our right to residence here in the event of Britain leaving the EU and us becoming no longer EU citizens. Hopefully this will give us a little protection from the most important of the bad effects of Brexit. It won’t cover everything though, so we wait to see what we will have to accept to remain here, but much of it is still undecided – not by France, but by Britain. 

Hopefully next update will not be so long coming. Best wishes everyone.

Summer 2018 - A busy few months

Since our last blog at the end of last year, a lot has happened. Firstly my mother, Edna, died on Boxing Day at her care home in Swanage. We were already in the UK for Christmas and New Year with our family and extended our stay to register her death, arrange and carry out her cremation in Poole.  Lots of administration to sort out but we got all the preliminaries done, though Jeanne was seriously ill around the time Mother died. Jeanne recovered quickly with the help of antibiotics but I took several weeks to get over a less serious infection. Poor Dusty, our cat, had to stay far longer in the cattery than ever before but seems to have forgiven us now. Our chickens had been boarded out with friends (Thanks, Peter & Anna) so were fine.

We had to take more trips to the UK through the first few months of the year, and right up to July, primarily to sort out administrative things about Mother’s estate, but took the opportunities to see some family and friends. We held an interment of mother’s ashes at the family grave in Sale in April and it was nice to see family members there.  The admin still rumbles on, though we are managing it remotely at the moment, so have been able to catch up on friends and family at and around our home, together with several more jobs on the house. We’ve had a huge stone wall in the hangar repointed by a French maçon, an old pig-house modified to become our firewood store, and various smaller tasks. I've got back to work on the demolished grange, rebuilding walls and shaping it up. However, it was a wet spring with several warm spells, so the grass on our land was growing too fast for us to keep on top of with all the trips away, and we ended up scything it and having it baled for hay. We got 90 bales off it and I just managed to get them under cover minutes before the most serious hail-storm we’ve ever seen. Many of the cars in the surrounding area were complety peppered by hailstones between golf-ball and tennis-ball size, but we were lucky and had just a couple of holes in one of the gutters.  We’ve sold a few hay-bales already as the very hot summer has meant a lot of farmers and people with ponies, goats and hens have had to feed hay to their animals through summer as much of the grazing had died in the dry heat. I expect it will command a premium price by winter. 

 

We did manage to get to some screenings of operas and ballets through the spring at our local cinemas and I’m looking forward to the new season starting soon. In the meantime we’ve been able to get to a screening of Elvis’s 1968 ‘comeback’ concert, an Andre Rieu concert from Maastricht, and the latest Mamma Mia film. We’ve also managed a great holiday in Sicily, some exercise with a walking group that we belong to, lots of work on the potager so vast amounts of potatoes, tomatoes, onions and various other veges. And, of course, we’re still getting lovely eggs from our free-range hens. 

The weather continued to be very variable – the longest, hottest, prolonged spell of good weather we’ve experienced here, with a few less thunderstorms than most summers but a few really spectacular, damaging ones. However it’s still good overall and very acceptable. It's cooled down a bit in the last week or two so managing to get some more building /renovating work done outside, in the gap before it becomes too cold for working with lime mortar!

Locally, our café-bar changed hands and reopens its café this week after a few modifications. They're  putting fish and chips on for their British customers on Friday evenings and have installed a pizza oven. Not exactly fine dining but still a useful facility for the village, as is the boulangerie, which continues to thrive. Our XIIth century village church was renovated late last year and is now looking much improved. A gospel group held a concert there a few weeks ago and that had the church completely packed for possibly the first time for decades. The number of Brits in our village / commune has about doubled in the last year,which has both bad and good effects. We didn't come to France to live in Little England, but it's nice to have a few more English-speakers about, though we're doing well with our French neighbours. Several of the expats here are part timers and it remains to be seen what effect Brexit will have on their freedom to come and go as they currently please. Also, however, we need to register as 'permanent' residents in case Brexit actually happens without an acceptable deal, which would have an adverse impact on us and other immigrants as well as part time expats.However we'll worry about that if/when we need to!

Winter's here.

The year is drawing towards its close already. Just Christmas to fit in first, which we’re looking forward to as an opportunity to see more of our family and friends. Although we accept that we’re well into winter, the weather has been a little worse than usual, with some hard frosts, rain and gales. However, we’ve suffered no damage, touch wood, and have managed to progress a few jobs around the house. Rhys even got our ethernet network up and running. (Cat 6 / gigabit ethernet, for those that are interested!) Turned out to be simpler than expected in the end which is fortunate as our WiFi is not very good - it can't get through all the thick stone walls. However we've also had to commission some outside help for building works that are too big for us to DIY.  The harvest from our veggie garden is pretty much all gone with just fruit and vegetables still in the freezer or as conserves in jars, that we’re making the most of.

The new pool cover is earning its keep, keeping the water much cleaner than before and maintaining the temperature higher too – not that we’ll be using in in December!  Overall the garden has suffered a bit from the weather, with the hens' field and the potager rather muddy from the rain, though oddly we've still not had enough rain to fill the stream at the bottom of the garden.

Jeanne enjoyed a trip to the UK in October and since then we’ve been planning our next joint trip, but the cost and difficulty of doing these trips is becoming very stretching. However, we’ll keep going while we can. One or two more distant friends have invited us to go stay with them, which we’d very much like to take up, and hope to do so before we get too decrepit. 

Rhys’ mother had to change care homes suddenly as the one she was in couldn’t “meet her needs” any longer and we had her moved to one which seems to be better able to cope, and she seems to be happier there, although it’s hard to tell.

The Brexit fracas continues to loom over us, with ever more appalling ineptitude and incompetence on both sides being displayed, and not a little outrageous incitement in some quarters of the media. Citizens’ rights are one of the items close to our hearts and the blatantly false words from both sides are extremely worrying. However, our native neighbours continue to be welcoming and supportive and we continue to be very happy here.

We enjoyed a few more visits from friends from the UK and hope to see them again before long, and have starting to take bookings for next year for more visitors here. We decided not to make having visitors here a professional activity, so we still invite friends (and family, of course) to stay without charge. Let us know if you’d like to come over to stay with us and and explore our beautiful region.  Dusty, our cat, continues to thrive though she is getting a bit overweight, and the hens are continuing to give us lovely eggs in plentiful numbers.

Merry Christmas everyone, and a Happy New Year.