Possibly doing a bit of househunting this week. Seems utterly masochistic as we’ve only been in the present house a month and a bit, and I hate moving (does anyone actually enjoy it?), but we’ve been thinking…..
We’re not going to need much money each year to continue living in the Ariege, but we’re probably going to need a bit more than what we stand to make from our fledgling B&B business. Squidge made £1500 the other day gambling on the football, but that’s not exactly going to be a consistent income stream - I guess. So, we’re going to investigate the option of buying a second house and living in that whilst letting out the current one as a gite (shouldn’t be long before it’s finished, hahaha!!!). If and when we ever finish doing up the second one, we can then choose which one to live in and which one to let, or live in one in the summer and one in the winter. Given that our househunting budget will be rather amusing, I would imagine that the one we’re in now will be the winter one, since it has walls and a roof, whereas the new one, if it falls within our price bracket, probably wouldn’t.
So that’s the idea. We’re viewing one on Tuesday in a blummin’ nice valley a few kilometres south towards Spain and the Guzet Neige ski resort. We drove through it a few weeks ago and it was on fire, so it’ll be nice and warm there, which is a palpable bonus when you’re without walls and roof.
Meanwhile, here chez nous, our neighbour very kindly lent us some of her land at the foot of the village last week, after we’d dropped strategic hints that we were on the lookout for a veg patch. It’s a good sized plot, about twice the size of my dad’s old one at Foley Street, although that’s probably not a particularly helpful yardstick for very, very, very nearly all of you.
We gave her a small posy of flowers in return, which seemed a remarkably good deal, with the promise that she would get to taste the first spud to emerge out of the earth.
We’ve therefore been spending half an hour or so each day digging up the turf and creating the plot, in between DIY jobs, and occasionally getting caught in showers. Most of the village overlooks the plot, and I get a distinct Jean de Florette type feeling when we are digging in the rain, with the villagers peeping at us, chuckling at the fact that they’ve given the mad, wet English a plot no-one else wanted because it’s at the foot of the village where everyone’s, erm, fertilizer ends up. All I’d need to complete the paranoiac fantasy would be a hunchback, and with all the digging I’m not far off. But even if it is going to get smelly in the summer, it has possibly the best view one could wish of any allotment, better perhaps than the view of Foley Street Trading Estate my father enjoyed for years from his own patch.
It was Mardi Gras here on Tuesday. The several villages which make up our commune were all en fete, to one degree or another. St Pierre saw the goats herded ceremonially through the village, clearly delighting in the noise of the fireworks launched around them by the loveable local children, who were sporting an array of unfathomably alien takes on the fancy dress theme - the children that is, rather than the goats, who came as they were. Our local druid guy looked on, inscrutably, gaiters glistening, boots polished, ZZ Top beard twitching in the breeze, and further up the road was an utter, utter loony - indescribable - possibly been taking goat tranquiliser, clinging desperately to a wall, entirely unnecessarily given that his feet were placed on the ground, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood to contemplate the benefit of safe havens such as ‘the ground’.
There was a very minor event in Boussan as well, featuring a handful of the local feral kids and a man in full drag, who spoke with the sort of high pitched voice Hollywood reserves only for the naughtiest of serial killers, guiding them around door to door asking for sweets. It was all hallucinatory pagan freakery - genuinely disturbing rather than celebratory. Can’t wait for next year. Must get the goat tranqilisers in.
Joining us for the Mardi Gras nut-fest were Squidge’s parents, who have spent the week here. They were able to employ cunning parenty DIY tricks, the like of which we know nothing about, to further bring the house into line with basic levels of health and safety. Much of the tricky jobs have now been done, and the stuff that’s left isn’t too intimidating, and is also the sort of thing that can transform the look of a bedroom from shell to swanky in an afternoon, so perhaps we’ll have a paying guest or two by Easter after all.
That’s all for now, more very soon, told you it would be more regular now - stay tuned!!
A bientot.
Well - where to start?
Firstly, apologies for the blog absence of late - purely down to being very busy. We’ve moved, and I’ve been waiting for my Freebox, and I’ve been bashing things in, and stuff….
We’ve been at our new house for a month and a bit now, and every day of that month and a bit has been filled with dust, crashes, swearing, tentative construction, satisfaction, bewilderment, wonderment, dawning realisation, bafflement and outdoor darts, all played out to a backdrop of impending poverty, which, as a legitimate worry, mountain life has a way of airbrushing out. The mountains seem to have that way with all worries, seemingly.
Our house is tucked in hard against a mountain which rises abruptly up to loads and loads of metres of altitude straight out of the back door. To the front, we look out onto what, judging by its width, is presumably the whole of the Ariegeois section of the Pyrenees, marking the boundary with Spain, and whose peaks make our back garden mountain look like a geological embarrassment. I’m sure width was never that wide in England.
So, it’s generally kind of uppish, but by way of illustrating that we’re not completely cut off from western civilisation, and indeed cordon bleu cooking, there is a McDonalds ‘restaurant’ (their word) within 20ish minutes drive of us. To paraphrase what the tourism people say about Andalucia, Aude, and Argentina, but probably not Aldershot, we can ski in the morning and enjoy a Big Mac Meal ™ in the afternoon. What could be better?
Actually, does Aldershot boast a dry ski slope thing?
We live on what I suppose could be loosely described as our village’s High Street, in that it’s the only thoroughfare, although after about 50m of leaving the village to the east, it hits a wall of rock and subsequently ceases to exist, which presumably means that it’s not a thoroughfare at all, more of a thoroughdeadend. We therefore only ever see village traffic pass our window, which consists entirely of imaginative variations on the model internal combustion engine; thus we get to witness the real life Wacky Races every day: Peugeot Man/Woman, Tractor Man I, Tractor Man II, Madame Cigarette, Genevieve I, Genevieve II, and the ubiquitous Janneau, our next door neighbour. I’m still waiting for a Gallic Ant Hill Mob to pass (so many Gallic Beverly Hillbillies pass every day it’s boring). One in every two birds in the air is unrecognisable and weird-looking, and the one that isn’t is invariably a buzzard or a kite. The village cats and dogs are very, very hard, and we don’t mess with them.
We’ve set up an account with Roger, the farmer in the next village, whereby we saunter down there every other morning and scoop a litre of milk out of his big metal vat thing, and pay him a few euros a month for the privilege. The milk is straight from the cows’ nether regions, unpasteurised and scrummy, and the walk down and back sets you up admirably for a hearty day’s swearing at wood, metal, plaster and cement, so it’s a good arrangement all round.
I really don’t know how to order all this stuff…um…..
Janneau, our aforementioned next door neighbour, is a really nice man. 75 years old this May, he helps me put the unbelievably large volume of crap we’ve sledge hammered out of the house into the Land Rover every few days, ready to go to the dump, for which I’m tempted to get a loyalty card, if such a thing exists.
Credit Agricole are being singularly obstructive in allowing me to transfer my account from Vendee to Ariege; in fact that particular bureaucratic battle is still ongoing, but I get the impression that that won’t come as much of a surprise to a lot of Living France Forum folk….
Other than the CA frustrations, the much-feared wall of bureaucracy I’d been told was waiting for us hasn’t really materialised. Thanks to the advice I’ve read, printed off and memorised from the forum, we’ve been able to breeze through most of the red tape, and I suspect that the more research you do, the less the bureaucracy gets you down (very loosely paraphrasing Gary Player now, who possibly played golf in Andalucia, Aude and Argentina at some point, but probably not Aldershot - small world, paraphrasing). So, consequently, the Land Rover had French plaques in no time, EDF/GDF was a gas (haha, ooooh no no), and Credit Agricole bent over backwards to help me (Ok, they didn’t. At all).
As I type, the house is a total building site, the plumber is in the middle of plumbing in two new bathrooms, and Squidge’s parents are arriving tomorrow evening. You’ll forgive me, therefore, if I stop now and help out, promising to return to the cushy refuge of the blog sometime this week, when things may have resolved themselves to the extent that I can structure the rest of the story a bit more coherently.
A bientot.