Amidst the excitement about Monsieur P.’s new job, it didn’t sink in that he was going to be a long way away. It’ll be tough, even though we’ve had to cope with weekly commuting before. The only jobs in Thanet are in hair dressing, taxi services and dog walking, or with a large pharmaceuticals company where Monsieur P. has already applied and been turned down.
Monsier P. has looked into the French job market, but adverts tend to insist on perfect French. They do that to keep the Arab immigrants out, is my theory. Unemployment levels over there are frightening, 23% among young people. Many go for years without a job. Monsieur P. is willing to pick grapes, he says, but since he has an expensive family to maintain, I don’t think that’s realistic. I work from home as a research analyst. The flexibility is great, but the pay won’t buy us a plot with a vue degageé.
To keep the momentum, I’ve been working on some research. Yesterday evening I covered a wall of my office with a map of the South of France, printed off from multimap.com in twenty small squares and pieced together very neatly with sticky tape. It took me three hours and I really enjoyed it, seeing bits of France coming together. I coloured in little bits of paper and wrote the names of the departments and the numbers and stuck them on with Blutack Then I positioned them very carefully in the wilderness of the Pyrenees and the Massiv des Maures so that they didn’t cover up particularly interesting places like Perpignan and Nice, or any of my favourite villages like Cogolin, where we stayed for two nights during our honeymoon in 1999 in the Hotel Coque d’Or. I thought the name was a bit naughty at the time, but my French wasn’t very good.
Today was the day when I should have kicked off my new research project (not the one on my wall, but one that I get paid to do). Instead, I went through the time tables for all the airlines that fly into the major airports in the South of France and made miniature yellow cardboard cut-outs and stuck them on the map. Budget airline flights are often in the middle of the day, which is no good for a weekly commuter. That leaves us with Girona (for Perpignan), Marseille (for lots of great places) or Nice.
After lunch, I went on the AA website and worked out how long it would take to drive from these airports to everywhere I could think of where we might want to live, and wrote down the distances and drive times on my map in red pen. Then I surfed the property sites and cut and pasted pictures and prices of plots of land onto my map as well, which is now starting to look impressive. Monsieur P. is not so impressed. He’s come over all corporate and efficient since he got his new job and he thinks I should do mine too. He’s right of course, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear it. Anyway, my map looks pretty good.