Life as an Eminent(?) Immigrant
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.