Life as an Imminent Emigrant

Cheltenham Festival

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:16:00 GMT

Excitement reigns chez us, as this week sees the return of the annual Cheltenham Festival. Although the town has a reputation in some quarters for stuffiness and snobbery, it does, at least for three (and now, I think, for four) days a year, let its blue-rinse hair down and admit THE IRISH, for a bacchanalian festival of gambling, partying and drinking.

Now personally, I barely touch a drop, although Squidgie enjoys a sniff of the barmaid’s apron every now and again, but the Festival has a way of bringing the most abstemious to the bar, the most Methodist to the bookies, and the most miserable to a state of joyousness. It is an indescribably celebratory week, and although it is of crucial fiscal importance to the town, the atmosphere of sheer optimistic happiness pervading every bar, restaurant and turf accountant transcends any thought of commercial gain.

So, anyway, with Festival week just around the corner, this led us last week to think of how we could recreate this seemingly unique atmosphere, here in the Ariege. After pondering the yawning cultural gap between Ladbrokes and a PMU bar, we devised a plan. Rather than cajole the steadfastly stuck-in-their-ways punters of the Café des Sports to adopt the imperial odds system, we thought we’d do it all at home.

What we’re going to do is print off the runners and riders for each race each day, and blue tack them to the walls of the living room. Then we’ll invite all the old men from the commune to stand around aimlessly looking at the listings, occasionally noting something down with a stubby little pen, and encourage them to puff on their portable bonfires. Hopefully, the whole effect will loosely approximate to that of a bookies in Cheltenham. All it will lack is a forlorn, twitching oddball from the Forest of Dean sitting in the corner, rueing his bad luck, although the goat tranquilliser fella from Mardi Gras could do as a like-for-like replacement. Once the portable bonfires have created the necessary fog, we’ll stride in and make our selections - Cheltenham-en-Ariege.

Right, I’m off to find a race radio commentary site on the internet…..

A bientot.

Mardi Gras!!

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:27:00 GMT

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.

Life as an Eminent(?) Immigrant

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:14:00 GMT

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.

Yule (b)Log

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 15:14:00 GMT

An exciting week: our B&B website has finally gone live, we’ve been Christmas shopping, and I’ve added yet more documentation to my burgeoning carte grise dossier.

Having received encouragement from our IT consultant up in Normandy, we decided to unleash www.lepicvert.com onto an unsuspecting global village, such that we are now inviting anyone with a computer to come and stay with us in a house we’re not yet living in (obviously they don’t have to bring a computer, I suppose I mean anyone with Internet access). However, we have kind of made it clear on the site that we’ll only be taking bookings once we’ve moved in, spruced the place up a bit, and registered with all the appropriate official bodies, so it’s not too dodgy, and anyway if we get arrested I’ll sing like a canary and bring the devil-may-care IT consultant down with me.

The last few days have seen some lovely clear weather here on the Vendée/Deux Sevres border, with the loveliness tempered somewhat, well completely, by a wind bitter enough to rip the hairs off your chest. It seems to be coming from a northerly direction, and I seem to remember that that usually means trouble. The plummeting temperatures have severely tested the new electronic notice board recently erected in our ‘downtown’ area, as the Americans would have it (ie in our case the bit next to the church). Vegas-style proclamations welcoming people to the village, and scrolling messages rather redundantly explaining that the reader is looking at the village’s new notice board, are underlined by the stark announcement that the temperature is a somewhat un-Nevadan -2; and that’s without that windchill factor thing that the weathermen always darkly refer to. With no sign of wind-abatement in the offing, I’ll now monitor it to see how low it’s programmed to go.

However, despite the weather, I donned my balaclava helmet and went for a walk the other day and saw, dead in a verge, what I’ve subsequently been told was a coypu. At the time, I felt quite sad that this unusual-looking creature had apparently met such a violent death on the road to L’Absie, but then I read that since they were somewhat short-sightedly introduced to Europe in the middle of the last century, they’ve made life hellish for many of our good, honest Euro-mammals by ruining habitats and, erm, some other naturalistically complex concepts like that. On reflection, I also thought that he must have been pretty dozy to get himself run over on the L’Absie road, whose volume of traffic isn’t exactly at M25 levels, and all feelings of sadness evaporated, to be replaced by feelings of hypothermia. Half-frozen, I returned chez nous for claret and sympathy.

Yesterday, we went Christmas shopping in the megametrolopolopolis that is Fonteney le Comte. I was anticipating the Dante’s Inferno scenario one tends to get in every English town centre/out of town centre/rural shopping hellhole the wrong side of November, but the gigantic Hyper U seemed to house just one Vendéen shopper to every hectare of its apparently excessive floorspace.

Glorifying in this capaciousness, I pushed my chariot up and down the aisles with gay abandon, throwing vaguely appropriate gifts in as and when (only joking, My Family), and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, we were through the checkout and I didn’t feel like killing anyone. Result.

As mentioned, the carte grise dossier grows apace, the latest addition being the quittus fiscale. A few days prior to the Christmas shopping expedition, we battled through the fog sitting obstinately over the Vendée river on our way to Fontenay. The Office du Tourisme (Syndicat d’Initiative in old money) gave us directions to the Hotel des Impots, and off we went to speak proper French.

After a little trepidation and consequent trembling hands (fortunately I was able to pass that off as weather-induced), I passed the fonctionnaire our various official papers, and after a delightful conversation about engine sizes, we were sent packing with a nice new certificate and, wonder of wonders, a complimentary word on our linguistic skills! All we need now is our controle technique thing, and we’ll have a dossier fit for a carte grise.

January 4^th is the fateful day for the controle technique - I’m fully expecting the Land Rover to ruin my life yet again, but he has been going pretty well of late, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of his electrical innards are currently hanging out as part of some multiple-fixing project of Squidge’s. I was halfway to the supermarket today when I looked in the rearview mirror to see the naked bulb of the central rear brake light mechanism dangling against the rear window, with its casing, screws and washers dribbling around in the boot below. Luckily, the gendarmes were all too busy checking up on fraudulent B&B businesses at the time, leaving me free to dangle.

That’s about it for now. I’d just like to wish all my blog readers (and I’m assured by James Admin that there are more than none) a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and a lovely 2007.

Oh, I should just say to all you France-based folk that I’ve got one or two ‘Mark’s Blog 2007’ calendars of scandalously poor quality for sale. Obviously, I can’t come door to door with them, so perhaps if you just send your cheques to Living France, payable to me, we can post them out to you (just leave the amount space blank).

A bientot…

A French Conversation

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 11:40:00 GMT

Big storm last night, couldn’t sleep, got me thinking about a chat I had yesterday with a real live Frenchman.

I was out taking my daily constitutional, and he emerged from a waterlogged field, wearing regulation bleus de travail and wellies, said something unintelligibly guttural to me and we shook hands. He was clearly a perceptive fellow as I was something like two seconds into my introductory sentence when he realised I was English.

Now I’m enjoying the steep linguistic learning curve I’m on at the moment, and I really like trying out my French on French people, but bizarre as it sounds, we haven’t had much chance to do so recently because the weather’s been too rough to venture out, so we end up speaking nonsensical English to each other, and I find myself typing ‘All work and no play, makes Mark a dull boy’ over and over again, and then pursuing Squidge through the house with an axe. However, I digress…

The language thing. I’ve existed in a comfort zone of holiday French for a long time now, confident in my ability to ask for beer, wine, food and accommodation, and then to thank people for providing me with beer, wine, food and accommodation. It got to the stage where I was affording myself the luxury of experimenting with a broad Inspector Clusoe accent for that authentic flavour, an accent I was complimented on by a waiter in Carnac once, incidentally.

But now that we’ve decided to live in France, rather than just take holidays here, everything’s changed and the comfort zone has disappeared. The words for beer, wine, food and accommodation have necessarily been replaced by those for wheel wrench, rawl plug, planning permission and edible dormouse (glis glis). The accent experimentation has gone as I concentrate solely on blurting out all the new vocabulary and verbs, and attempting correct structures. Where previously I only needed to tense everything presently, I now have to talk about things that have happened, and things that are going to happen, if I’m to sound vaguely intelligible.

So anyway, this conversation…

We shook hands and started chatting in the lane. The lanes round my way are used almost exclusively by mangey dogs and aggressive geese, so as long as we each kept a wary eye out for the odd goose, we were in no danger, certainly not from motor cars. It was clear that the Frenchman was in no hurry to go anywhere, having either become bored with checking waterlogged fields, or having checked his last field of the day, and my time isn’t exactly at a premium at the moment, so we lingered….

My new friend, let’s call him Jean-Francois, asked where I was from in England, whether I liked France etc. I told him that we had just bought a house in the Ariege, and would be moving there in a few weeks time, and that part of our employment plan was to run a chambres d’hotes business. JF considered this foolish, bordering on contemptible, but conceded that perhaps with the additional winter season in the mountains it could be just about feasible.

He then asked whether I would apply for French citizenship in order to involve myself fully in the democratic process. I said probably not, hadn’t really thought about it, didn’t know whether Segolene Royale was ‘a good thing’, or whether Sarky would be ‘a bad thing’, but he didn’t hear me mention Sarky. The very mention of Royale sent him recoiling across the lane grimacing. ‘An actress’, ‘bad for ecology’ he asserted. This reference to ecology wasn’t as bafflingly random as it might appear. He’d asked me earlier what I did as a job in England, and I said ‘ecologique’, which is what, a few weeks ago, the YTS boy at Credit Agricole told me I had done as a job in England, once he’d recovered from the shock of the realisation that I was taking approximately a 100% pay cut to come and live and work in his country. I noticed JF’s interest perk up considerably when I added that I had been involved in giving grants to farmers….!

There was then a mildly awkward little lull, and a bit of foot shuffling, so given that we were discussing politicians I blurted out that I considered that Margaret Thatcher had been bad for people who worked in the power stations. I hadn’t meant people who work in power stations, I had probably meant miners though I can’t be sure, but the sentence appeared perfectly formed in my mind before I opened my mouth - an opportunity too good to waste. This seems to be where I’m at on the learning curve. If something comes to me, and my brain reckons it might be grammatically acceptable, I say it, regardless of context or relevance.

So we’d covered politics, accurately and comprehensively, and at this point I announced to him, I know not why and apropos of nothing, that I like buzzards. Again, it just drifted into my head so I said it. He understandably wondered if I’d used the correct word, and if I really meant buzzards, but after a bit of a mime from me (miming the movement of a buzzard in the middle of the countryside wasn’t something I’d ever done in England), he realised I meant what I’d said.

Astutely sensing that the English way of conversing was to lurch uncertainly from one unrelated topic to another, he then asked me if I’d ever been to Puy de Fou. I said no, he told me it was formidable, and we finally stuttered to a halt, shook hands and parted.

A thoroughly enjoyable quarter of an hour. As I walked home, a buzzard flew overhead, eee’ing to its mate perching in a tree in the next field, presumably asking if it had ever been to Puy de Fou. And then the rain returned….

A bientot

Living France

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:32:00 GMT

Hello again, mes amies!

Well we’ve been here for a month or so now (I don’t know exactly how long it’s been because I’ve gone all vague and non-Anglo Saxon with regard to timekeeping since a) settling south of La Manche, and b) not working in an office five days a week (ok, ok, sitting in an office five days a week)

However, that’s not to say I’ve been dozing in a hammock all day every day. When I last left you, dear reader, we’d just got back from a highly successful househunting trip in the lovely Ariege department in the middle of the Pyrenees. Since then, we’ve been getting used to the more everyday issues of life in a new country.

A few weeks ago, the compromis de vente arrived for our signatures. Armed with our doorstop dictionary, we went through the document and annexes line by line until we were more or less reassured that by signing everything as instructed we weren’t about to become yet another burnt-fingered couple in a Channel 4 documentary. Before finally putting pen to paper, I phoned Kevin, our smashing estate agent, with just a few queries - I questioned, for instance, why the ‘virtually safe from earthquakes’ box on the form was ticked rather than the considerably more reassuring ‘utterly safe from earthquakes’ one, but apparently that’s normal. The other questions were satisfactorily answered, and so we signed. It was all surprisingly and pleasingly straightforward, including the French legalese which populated the compromis.

The next task was to open a bank account. We poked around in the barn for a form of transport to get into town, emerging with an odd pair of velos: a rusty orange one with white tyres suitable for pre-teenage girls, and a rusty ladies mountain bike. After a brief overhaul, they were deemed roadworthy and off we went, The Squidge striking an elegant pose on the pre-teen machine, and me looking macho on the ladies mountain bike.

Thus, seemingly several hours later, we arrived on our bikes at the front door of Credit Agricole, looking rather sophisticated and wealthy(!), an image presumably somehow lost in visual translation, as, within seconds of our arrival, the YTS boy was nominated to look after our financial affairs. It transpired that we were to be Emmanuel’s first ever clients, and after all parties recovered from their initial apprehensions (him clearly mentally questioning our fiscal standing as he looked over our shoulders and out of the window at our trusty steeds locked up outside, and us wondering whether he knew what he was doing), everything, as usual, turned out fine.

After a brief and awkward silence as Emmanuel worked out whether I really meant our projected income for next year would be that low, or whether I’d got the French numbers wrong and had amusingly come up with something insanely unsustainable (I hadn’t), we shook hands and left with a lovely plastic ring binder for our subsequent bank statements, and a stylish chequebook holder (blissfully free of those dangerous cheques). Talking of which, how civilised to be asked at one point ‘How would you like your chequebook to open, from the left or upwards?’. After my projected income admission earlier, I wouldn’t be surprised if it arrives next week padlocked shut, actually.

We did talk at one point about going for the Britline English language account, but then forgot and went for the standard Credit Agricole account, which I think is actually a good thing as it will force us to speak French rather than English each time we need to do some banking - very good project management tool, forgetfulness.

So, with another two months to go until we move south, we’ll need to ensure that we’ve got all our paperwork ready for health, tax, utilities etc etc etc, and ‘upload’ the B&B website, which we’re finishing off this week. I say ‘upload’ - I have no idea if that’s the right term or not - Squidge takes care of these new-fangled modern things.

We’ve also got those couple of months to continue grappling with the language, before we thrust ourselves headlong into trying to make a living. We’ve given up on Creepy Michel recently in favour of France-Culture on the radio. They have three hour debates each afternoon about homosexuals and Cezanne (separately….I think), and some of it is starting to make sense.

More VERY soon!

A bientot, Mark

On The Road - Chapter 3

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:58:00 GMT

It was at this point that serendipity stepped in. We arrived at lunchtime, and in idling round the now familiar streets of what we both agreed was a town far prettier than its description in various esteemed publications suggests, we happened upon an immo we hadn’t yet visited. We entered, described what we were after, and our budget, to Kevin, and he whisked us off to a maison mitoyenne in a village 20km or so south of St Girons, at 800+ metres of altitude, undoubtedly rural but one of five or six more-or-less vibrant hamlets on the same hillside.

Although the house had little in common with what we’d originally had in mind, it had long since become clear that we’d have to cut our cloth rather more frugally than we had originally hoped. It was, however, a very striking house with an attractive, tall, shuttered frontage, three levels, a layout naturally lending itself to our chambre d’hote plan, a good state of repair requiring barely more than a lick of paint, enough room in the small garden at the back for a vegetable patch and a useful tumbledown lean-to beyond the garden, to be converted into a multi-purpose workshop.

It was also very reasonably priced. Initially, it hadn’t sold, so Kevin had advised the Paris-based vendor to reduce the price fractionally, but apparently there is a French tendency to ignore such advice in the event of an initial failure to sell, and to go down to a pre-ordained base figure, seemingly unrelated to any market value, and it was at this price that we were offered the house. We saw no reason at all to question this unusual but entirely civilised practice, effortlessly embracing another cultural difference, as is our cosmopolitan, model modern European way.

The village itself, although tiny, boasts a higgledy-piggledy rough beauty the equal of many of the Lot and Dordogne honey pots, rambling on up the hillside, culminating in a huge old mansion where the village stops and the forested mountain backdrop to the north starts. Looking south from the house, the top bedroom overlooks the Spanish frontier, and the highest Ariegeois peaks. It is all perfectly beautiful, the upland effect completed by the constant sound of cowbells in the pasture below the village. I certainly can’t do it justice here.

We descended back to St Girons, as the sun set from a perfect blue sky, in unspoken agreement that this was a definite possible. Half an hour later, we left Kevin, promising to return to him with a decision the next morning, and so we did. We then left town, set for Luchon, Bagneres-de-Bigorre, Arreau, and the Haute Pyrenees, leaving our hearts in ‘our’ village, no longer able to focus practically on tramping from immo to immo in these towns, but nevertheless enjoying the scenery (and stealing a look at the Daily Express in a presse in Luchon to sadly discover a 2-1 defeat to the mighty Grimsby Town).

And that’s it really. All tolled, we spent a night in Payrac, three nights in St Girons, two in Tarascon on a campsite next to the Ariege, and one in Arreau in Haute Pyrenees. It was from here that we surprisingly managed to complete the journey back home all in one day, via Tarbes, Pau, Dax and Bordeaux, with a minor navigational glitch in Niort as tiredness set in, darkness fell, and signpost dyslexia took hold.

We therefore spent seven nights sleeping in the back of the Land Rover, and it was going to be eight until, upon reaching Bordeaux in good time on the journey back, we thought we may as well press on home, a decision vindicated by our relatively civilised 9pm arrival back in St Pierre, and the lovely feeling of crawling at last into a proper bed.

Since our return, we’ve been busy doing jobs around the house, designing websites and generally bracing ourselves for winter, and now with the arrival of broadband we can rejoin the 21^st Century, which may or may not be a welcome development. We’re also working on what to holler at Carcassonne, Toulouse, Mirepoix and St Girons markets in order to best promote Squidge’s oil paintings to rich English people with impeccably good taste in fine art.

Finally, apropos of nothing, could someone tell me what niche Ecomarche fills in the Intermarche empire? After countless trips to France, and having discussed it at length across the campfire on this last trip (yes we are that interesting), we’re still none the wiser. It’s not economique, being if anything more expensive than Intermarche, and it doesn’t seem to offer anything different from its big brother, so what is it?

The first person to give the correct answer, ie one met with general consensus rather than the usual Living France forum scenario of having twenty ‘definitive’ and definitively different answers, wins a night out with Charlie the Tyre Expert.

Next blog entry to follow very much sooner than this one, now that we have the technology again, with some garbled nonsense on what it’s like to actually live full time in L’hexagone for the first time.

A bientot, Mark

On The Road - Chapter 2

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:56:00 GMT

Next day, after another surprisingly luxurious night’s sleep in the back of the car (we were blessed all week with balmy weather, night and day), we started work on the househunting, departing the campsite, parking in town and searching out ‘AriegeImmo’ in time for our 10am appointment. We spent the rest of the morning with Nicky, who took us out into the mountains to look at two houses, one at the very end of the very last hamlet on a very remote lane off the main road running through the Val de Bellongue, west of St Girons, the other down in the valley itself. Neither were what we wanted; the first was a pretty house, indescribably well located in terms of its beautiful surroundings, if not its accessibility (although not as beautifully located, or indeed inaccessible, as a later one), but in need of a total overhaul inside. The selling price alone was over our budget, so when factoring in the cost of renovation, it was far too expensive, and even if we’d been able to afford it, it wasn’t quite right.

The second was huge: six bedrooms, three storeys, enough land to hide a horse (who appeared from his hiding place rather too promptly for comfort as we were wandering round the grounds) and a view from the balcony to surpass that of the first house. But again, it was expensive, bordering on derelict, and clearly not ‘the one’.

We ended the day with another immo, who was this time French, which allowed all parties to practice their French/English where appropriate whilst he drove us to the third house (prompting a mercenary Squidge to realise the possibility of a cheap touring holiday courtesy of a series of immos and their cars, on the pretence of searching for a house). By the time we arrived, it was 6pm, we were at 1000 metres, and the sun was setting over Mont Valier, one of the highest peaks in the Ariege, but nevertheless seemingly in the back garden. The proximity of the house to the highest peaks, the soaring raptors and proper wilderness, as well as its ample size, totally renovated state, impressive frontage and affordable price tag, was utterly seductive, to the extent that we temporarily overlooked the fact that it had no road access (3-4 minute walk from a barely metalled lane), and that no-one else lived within 200 metres of its altitude full time, with the rest of the hamlet consisting solely of maisons secondaires, visited in summer by the city dwellers of Toulouse. It sounds ludicrous now, but it was so stunningly beautiful that we suspended all logic and practicality and temporarily looked upon it favourably as a possibility.

Luckily, over an ironically sobering glass of wine that evening, we figured out why it was so cheap, and the next morning politely told Jean the immo that it was trop haut, at least for a couple of English mountain-living virgins.

So, three seen, none worth offering on, and next day we chugged over two high passes in an ever more dependable Land Rover, who was finally coming into his own on terrain he seemed to revel in, climbing up to 1500m like an ‘assisted’ cyclist, via Seix and Aulus-les-Bains, heading east to Tarascon-sur-Ariege. Having driven through mist, then fog, then steady drizzle, then summer sunshine, then fog worse than the previous fog, or indeed any fog ever delivered from above in the history of fog, and then sunshine again as we came out of the high mountains, we were welcomed into the Val de Vicdessos by a golden eagle chasing something soon-to-perish, flying maybe three to five metres above and in front of our windscreen, its shadow vivid on the tarmac below.

At that point, I forgot about the househunting and was delightedly distracted by the experience for the rest of the day, a state I was able to sustain into the next day, as that next day was Sunday, which would be as likely to see an open immobilier as the city of Manchester would be to see a United supporter. In other words, we had a free day, which we used to read and research in the sun next to the Ariege river, before taking a break from our hitherto exclusively bread, cheese and water diet (and ok a drop of that sobering wine) by treating ourselves to a pizza from a bizarre shed outlet in the Super U car park - high rolling indeed.

Next day, back to work. Tarascon boasts two immobiliers, each within a few doors of the other. We visited both, and by 10am had shrewdly come out of the second without securing a viewing of anything in the area from either. Unfortunately, the town’s relative proximity to Toulouse, and the improvement of the road south of Foix, had recently driven prices up, signalling something of a disparity between the market and our budget.

Thus, having scheduled the day for viewings, we had no reason to stay, and therefore returned to St Girons, with a view to using it as an overnight stopping off point before fruitlessly leaving Ariege and starting the Haute Pyrenees leg of the hunt.

On The Road - Chapter 1

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 09:52:00 GMT

Jack Kerouac eat your heart out.

We’ve been back in the Vendee for a few weeks now after our househunting trip down in the mountains, but I haven’t been able to post this blog entry as soon as intended as we’ve been waiting for the broadband man to sort us out, so apologies for the delay.

To do things a little backwards by summarising at the start, we’ve found a house and had an offer accepted on it, we’ve signed the compromis, and we’re now counting the weeks until we’re invited back down to sign the acte, which should be sometime early next year, so good news indeed, as long as we can figure out how to get snow chains on our hired removal van. Anyway, this is how it all happened….

We’d packed a good deal of celebrating into our last week at work, and had a lovely time with Squidge’s family the following weekend. But by the time we’d driven to St Pierre from St Malo on the following Monday, we were totally shattered, all the while struggling with a full Land Rover, thinking that it would let us down at any moment (at least I thought that).

Squidge’s momentous falling-off-the-veggie-bandwagon, which we’d planned for ages for the ferry, with her choosing the entrecote from the menu, was undoubtedly fun and interesting, as we both anticipated the outcome of each mouthful, but the lustre of the occasion may have been dulled somewhat by our tiredness. To date, incidentally, she doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects from her return to a carnivorous diet.

So all in all, it was a bit stressful, and in hindsight we probably tried to do too much in too short a period of time, but we got here safe and sound and unloaded a very grateful Landy, after which we had a whole day to unpack, take stock, and REST!

However, once again, after an all too brief break, but this time unladen other than with bedding, we headed south, taking lunch on the first day just north of Bellac. The first night was slightly complicated by the fact that, not long after parking at our initial campsite next to the Dordogne in Souillac, and just as we were about to open a bottle, we were told we couldn’t stay there as it was closed for winter. Fortunately, I’d already managed to take a shower (lovely warm water for a closed campsite), so although it was an inconvenience I felt relatively refreshed as we upped sticks and travelled the short distance south to Payrac in a downpour, where, after seeking advice from its friendly, if incomprehensibly heavily-patoised boulanger, we found a small campsite run by a Dutch couple, and settled in the back of the motor for the night under our blankets, amid the trees under a clearing sky.

The next morning, we planned to lunch somewhere just north of Toulouse, as part of what we thought would be a nice easy day, arriving in St Girons at 4ish. This confident assertion was predicated on a growing confidence in the reliability of our lovely Land Rover, and thus we left the campsite, with me actually settling back into the driving seat rather than being hunched over the steering wheel gripping it in readiness for one of any number of perceived imminent motoring disasters.

And then, a whole eight kilometres down the road to Cahors, we heard what sounded like a helicopter approaching and flying very low right over us, but of course it wasn’t - it was a flapping, flipping punctured front pneu.

OK, we thought, a minor inconvenience that won’t cost us any money, we’ll just jack the boy up, fetch the spanner and socket set from the back, replace the wheel and get a new tyre when we get back to the Vendee. However, having searched among the various layers of bedding, it became apparent that the spanner and socket set was back at the farmhouse, and as warm and cosy as our bedding was, it was entirely useless at removing the nuts from our stricken wheel.

It was at this point that our luck changed, and held, for the rest of the day. A couple of those orange local authority vehicles were crawling along the other side of the road, seemingly assessing whether the hedges needed trimming or not. Having realised that we were in le merde to an extent, I flagged them down without really knowing how they could help, but they stopped, listened to our predicament and sympathetically nodded and hmm’ed when they could easily have laughed out loud at our stupidity. Then, after they’d each enthusiastically, manfully and, in one case womanfully, had a bash at removing the wheel with their singularly inappropriate hedge-styling equipment, the senior hedge-height assessor leapt into his van and drove off to the local garage to fetch the mechanic.

After a convoluted and slightly surreal passing-the-time-while-waiting-for-the-mechanic conversation about McDonalds vs French cuisine, Northampton, English beer and the engine size of the Land Rover with the residual hedge assessors (one of whom spoke the same impenetrable Midi-langue as the boulanger), a BMW screeched to a halt next to us. Ah, the mechanic, we thought, although we were surprised by the mode of transport. But no, it was Charlie (name changed to protect the bumptious), an Englishman abroad, scarily keen to help his countryman and woman, especially as he had crossed Australia in a Land Rover a few years back, replacing something like 857 tyres in the process. Confused by Charlie’s arrival and the developing situation, the hedge assessors departed, slowly, down the road, replaced in moments by the mechanic, who was equally nonplussed by Charlie’s role in the whole scenario, especially when l’anglais leapt underneath Landy and alongside the mechanic as he jacked it up, bellowing at us from his prone position about the benefits of inflatable jacks.

After a while, as Charlie, the car and the baffled-yet-heroically-stoic mechanic consummated their ménage a trois, the flat was replaced with the spare, and we drove off to the garage for a new inner tube in convoy: us and Landy, the mechanic in his little Suzuki, and Charlie, bringing up the rear in his BMW, anxious to impart advice upon arrival at the garage, and keen to keep a close eye on the shifty Frenchies, lest we were ripped off, poor young innocents that we were.

This soap opera was acted out over the course of the morning, so that on arrival at the garage, all work stopped for midday and lunch. The mechanic sloped off home, Charlie, with a screech of tyres, departed, ironically for the Pyrenees and Pau, and we were left with two hours to kill in the middle of nowhere.

But by 2.30pm, we were back on the road, five hours delayed, several euros lighter, but undoubtedly richer for the experience, and after a blissfully uneventful remainder of the day, we arrived in St Girons well before dusk.

We're off!

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:12:00 GMT

OK, this is it. We're off to Portsmouth via North Hampshire (tonight) and then somewhere in Surrey on Saturday (don't really know whether Ashtead is north, south, east or west of that county but it's Squidgy's family leaving do so the dog-legged diversion does have some logic to it).

I'll post something more in-depth as soon as we're broadbanded, which in itself is very Catch 22, because how am I going to get us broadbanded when I have no access to the broadbandy bit of the forum? Hey?

Where's Cassis when you need him?

OK, speak soon as a proper Frenchy-type person. Crikey this all feels pretty weird right now....

A bientot

Unlucky 13

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:00:00 GMT

Well, you asked for it, you've got it - more blog.

Having just looked at the calendar, today's date, the 18th September 2006 seems very, very close indeed to the 1st October 2006, the date on which our ferry leaves the white cliffs of, er, Portsmouth, and plonks us in a country where people eat sparrows whole.

The excitement is at such heightened levels now that coming into work on this Monday morning was no trouble at all. If I hadn't cycled in, I would have skipped. There is now just one more Monday morning to go! Unbelievable. There have been times when this point did really seem impossibly far away, and that despite the fact that we were planning for this one event, it wasn't real; something would come along to rob us of our goal.

Tiny remnants of that feeling remain, I suppose, and are causing me to proceed at all times with caution. I stand at deserted roadsides for several hours before crossing, conscious of the fact that Squidge will be really annoyed if I get run over and ruin everything. I avoid involving myself in tackles when playing football (spiteful team-mates may question quite how this represents a behavioural change), I don't dare risk eating a sparrow just for assimilation's sake, whole or otherwise, in case it has bird flu, and I would buy and wear a cotton wool suit if one were available. But still, there are 13 days left - something will happen. Uh-oh, unlucky 13; that's it then, that something is bound to happen today. I'd better leave work early and lock myself in a darkened room.

Research last week consisted of collecting gardening tips (primarily veg growing), goat maintenance (apparently they don't like rain - why do they seem to like it in the mountains then eh?) and steps we can take to maximise the environmentally aware aspect of our not-yet-even-fledgling B&B business, thus appealing to the green pound (does that term exist?!) and also encouraging us to be smug, self-satisfied, eco-evangelical Swampy-like hosts. Irresistible huh?

Cassis has given me lots of excellent advice on what to call our website to maximise its profile/pulling power too, despite seemingly having to do battle with my inability to respond to his emails.

On the minus side, I haven't spent as much time with Michel Thomas as I should have, primarily because he was starting to do my head in. "Je vais, I'm on my way, to taking a hammer to the CD player". Must try harder.

Househunting is proceeding fitfully. Some immobiliers have responded to my emails, but the majority haven't. All of those who did respond recommended that we give them a ring before arriving in their particular town or village to set up an appointment. All of this seems to be more or less in line with others' experiences, so I'll just get the map back out on Wednesday evening, plan the itinerary a little more precisely, or as precisely as the inevitable accompanying G&T will allow, and give those who responded a ring. I'm rather hoping that we'll simply see an a vendre sign on the roadside which leads us to the perfect place, thus avoiding immo fees and optimistic valuations, but that could be wishful thinking.

Finally, thanks for your recent comments. It's great that some of you are following the blog. I may ask James if I can continue with it after the title becomes obsolete, reporting on how things are going post-move. It'll be a few weeks before we're set up on-line though as we'll be away househunting initially, so please don't desert me if nothing appears for a few weeks! I'll certainly be posting something next week just before we leave anyway.

Oh, did I mention that I'm really, really excited?

A bientot,

Mark

English Food Box

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 13:01:00 GMT

Goodness me these blog entries are getting to be almost weekly! Hope the quantity isn't diminishing the undoubted quality too much (haha)! This week, the aforementioned English Food Box was bought. This is what it comprises so far (with two English cheeses to be added a few days before we move to France):

Coconut milk x 3
Baked beans x 4
Tinned ravioli x 2
Corned beef x 2
Old Speckled Hen x 8
Salad cream
Brown sauce
Worcestershire sauce
English mustard
Curry powder x 2
Soy sauce
Curry paste x 3
Cornflakes
Bran Flakes
Chilli sauce
Earl Grey teabags

Now, obviously I'll mostly be cooking the finest French provincial Lizzy David-inspired nosh, but there is always a time and a place in life, or at least in my life, for a corned beef and tomato sandwich, which tastes all the better in a French baguette, so I make no apologies.....

On the subject of food, Squidge (partner-in-emigration) is planning to revoke her long-held vegetarian beliefs when she becomes a French resident, an occasion to be marked by her eating a ceremonial steak on the final ferry crossing. Whether or not this bold move back to the sins of the flesh will see her laid up in bed, stomach unable to cope, when we're supposed to be househunting is open to debate, but her mind is made up. The thought of eating omelette nature et frites at every restaurant she ever uses from now on was too much to bear.

(Hmmm, I wonder if I'll get a few stray Googlers reading the blog by placing phrases like 'sins of the flesh' and 'laid up in bed' next to each other......)

However, despite this carnivorous trend, veg is set to play a significant part in our new life. We've been trying to find out what, if anything, will come up in our patch in the Vendée over winter if we plant it in the first few days of October. We've got seeds of a type/breed/strain (?!) of radish whose packet reassuringly proclaims that they'll spring up from December onwards. As I'm sure is apparent, I know nothing about this sort of thing, but I've never seen radishes growing anywhere in winter, so I'm sceptical. My father, who is certainly not new to any of this, scoffed at the very notion, giving us a look of horror, disbelief and disdain. Well, they're going in - and we'll see who's right! If I'm not in a position to serve him home grown radishes with his Christmas dinner when he and my mother come to stay in December, I'll get some flown in at vast expense and just fib. I also hope he won't notice when his 'turkey' has a suspiciously corned beefy quality to it.

Not much else to report at the moment really. Excitement is growing with an unbelievable 38 DAYS TO GO, and as Cassis found just before his move to France (in a comment he made further down), I'm finding that more and more of my time between Monday and Friday is spent doing things I'm not paid to do! This afternoon, I'm going to email about 20 immobiliers across the Pyrenees - I'm not sure whether it's best to book appointments with them or just turn up, but hopefully by giving them a bit of notice they can respond one way or the other, if they respond at all!

I can't remember if I mentioned this previously, but we got a set of Michel Thomas CDs via the Daily Express a while ago, and I've been going through them. I think they're helping, but I've had to decide whether to unlearn quite a bit of what I already know and start again from scratch using his structures, or adopt a mixture of the two. I know nothing about the science behind his techniques, but what I've deduced is that he's using sentence structures which are perhaps easier to learn, and possibly correlate more closely to English ones, but have a tendency to sound a little clumsy, and not as elegant as the French I've picked up from school and from French people themselves. Having said that, he does offer up several invaluable tips and shortcuts, if one can ignore the fact that he sounds a little creepy, almost as creepy as the sycophantic pair of students he's addressing.

Otherwise, we're just counting the days, having exhausted Cheltenham Blockbuster's rather thin selection of French films.

More soon.....

A bientot

Cosmo's guide to the French language

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:31:00 GMT

I've been working my way through back issues of French Cosmopolitan magazine this week, in an effort to improve my language skills. I don't know if you've noticed, but in many of the petrol station shops off the autoroutes they sell packs of three old Cosmos for about one euro, and my partner-in-emigration (hereafter to be referred to as Squidge, for that is her name, sort of) seems to snap them up each time we fill up with gazole. Consequently, we now have lots of them scattered around our cottage in England. They are excellent for learning unusual abbreviations and slang, but I do wonder whether knowing all the linguistic tips for capturing and holding on to my dream man will be as useful as knowing the word for plasterboard, for instance.

In addition to the swathes of Cosmos, we also have a number of post-it notes stuck to the walls around the cottage, in strategic places where we often cast our eyes, such as around the bathroom mirror. That sounds a bit narcissistic, but you know, it is a wall you spend more time facing than you might think! So each morning and evening, we gaze upon a wall of yellow, upon which are scrawled black marker translations of words like 'wave', 'rock' and, er, 'dwarf' (these were considered important by Squidge; I suspect she may be taking drugs), and after a few days, you do become familiar with the French words.

Last night, over a gin and tonic or two, we got the map out and plotted our October househunting route across the Pyrenees from Rennes les Bains to Cauterets. The realisation that we could conceivably be putting an offer in on a place within two months was hugely exciting, and for once I felt none of the usual accompanying trepidation. For the first time, after a year or more of distractedly looking at houses to get a feel for prices, we are now looking at houses we could realistically be making offers on in the very near future. Where once, when things were merely theoretical, I was looking at heaps of rubble proclaiming them to be full of potential, I'm now, after realising the imminence of it all, looking at new-builds thinking, 'hmm, less likely to saw my legs off in this one'.

Since deciding to embark on this whole project, I've read numerous magazine articles in which people give the reasons for their emigration. It's odd, but the driving force for many, possibly even the majority, seems to be a negative one. There is just the teeniest bit of smugness about those insightful British emigrées who have seen 'the writing on the wall' and jumped ship, suggesting that Britain is doomed and that France or wherever is a faultless nirvana. Which writing? High unemployment? Nope. Prohibitive business start-up charges? Nope. An unfashionable language? Nope. Excruciating Europop? Nope (well, ok, occassionally). Britain is an absolutely brilliant place to live (seemingly much better than Poland, at least!), and I'll miss lots of things about it, but in my case I wanted to do what we're doing simply for the challenge and the adventure. And ok, the cheap booze. And proper mountains.

If the price I have to pay is to look at myself in the shaving mirror each morning reciting the French word for dwarf (le nain, by the way, but you knew that), so be it.

Right, I'm off to get a proper-sized birth certificate.

A bientot.

Phew what a SCORCHER!!!

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:09:00 GMT

Well, the heat is stifling, the streams running off the hills around my house have become muddy trickles, siestas are getting more drawn out and my longing for warmth when shivering in the Vendée in March seems like part of a perverse previous existence on another planet far, far away. And I haven't even left England for the new life in France thing yet.

Not a great deal to report this week, really. We've got about 60 days left, and I'm starting to think that I should have done, and be doing, far more than I am, because at the moment my research is diligent in terms of the hours I spend on it, but not particularly structured. As with everything, I tend to flit between things that interest me rather than focusing on one subject, dull or otherwise, getting to grips with it and then moving on to the next thing on the list. But it really is only research that's outstanding since, as previously reported, 90% of our stuff is in a barn at the farmhouse, so perhaps things aren't so bad.

I'm also fearing that I'll be overtaken by a feeling of being utterly overwhelmed when we wake up on our first morning as French residents. I mean, where do you start? There is so much that we need to do that simply can't be done before we get to France. Taking bite-sized chunks out of the Jupiter-sized whole, washed down with regular glugs of wine, sounds like the way forward, but it would be interesting to find out how others experienced their 'first day'.

My language learning seems to be progressing (waiting for some Michel Thomas CDs to arrive courtesy of the Daily Express), matters relating to tax, health, property etc etc seem to be gradually sinking in and making sense, and I've now accepted that we shall be spending the rest of our days in utter penury, working every hour God sends in chambre/table d'hote servitude to inconsiderate Americans and, even worse apparently, the dreaded Belgians, only to give everything away to Jean-Pierre the Taxman and crippling cotisations. But never mind, the quality of life is so much better, that's what they always say - but who are 'they'? People who go through life avoiding holidaying Belgians? Masochists? Alcoholics, for whom the price of a bottle of vin de table represents a fuzzy nirvana? Lovers of tasteless pinafores? I can't wait.

A bientot, Mark (lying in a pool of cheap red wine in my favourite floral print pinny, in baking Gloucestershire)

Reality Check

mark.jones@countryside.gov.uk — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:13:00 GMT

This week, I've fallen back down to Earth with a bump. This week, all thoughts of swooping swallows, rolling hills and Derek the buzzard have been consigned, albeit temporarily, to the dustbin of 'Escape To The Sun' whimsy. This week, I've been finding out about forms. This week, I've encountered more e-numbers, E101, E104, E106, E121, E205 E305 et al, than a group of children on a school trip to a Sunny Delight factory, but finally, by jove, I think I've got it.

The whole process was, in hindsight, made more complex than perhaps it might have been by me taking advice from Helena Frith-Powell. That's not to say that the advice was poor, merely inappropriate to me personally. In her book 'More French Please, We're British', HFP recommends bombarding the DWP in Newcastle with requests for as many forms as you can lay your hands on. I therefore spent the early part of the week doing so, only to be met with confusion on the part of the long-suffering DWP staff, who failed to see the relevance in me applying for an E121 30+ years early. I could have argued that there's nothing wrong with thinking ahead, especially when planning an emigration, but I fear the lilting Geordie tones on the other end of the phone may have morphed into something altogether more menacing.

Time to reassess.

Having thought this through, and perceived a slight disparity in lifestyles and concomitant costs of living between HFP's and my own, I can only assume that several of the E forms she applied for related to swimming pool, au pair and hand maiden allowances, and as such could safely be crossed off my wish list, or at least my realism list.

So finally, and with the usual hand-holding from the usual saintly suspects on the Living France forum, I distilled my requirement down to ONE form, or more precisely a form to apply for a certificate, namely CA3916, to acquire E104. The wording of the form suggests that I'll have to wait for my final pay slip before applying, so I'm assuming I'll end up filling it out in France and posting it back, before getting the much-prized certificate posted back to me, but it's progress, nonetheless.

So, one week, one form. My manipulation of this Kafkaesque living-nightmare is going to have to get both more efficient and more Machiavellian before I take on the assumed masters, French public servants, although I fear I may be fighting a losing battle there.

Another research strand this week: website creation and Internet marketing. Once again, thanks to detailed advice from the LF forum community, I feel relatively well-armed with tips on the best routes to take in building an effective marketing tool for each of our proposed businesses online. And once again, I'm relieved to be doing all of this now, well ahead of our nominal dates of registration with the C de C and/or C de M. When we finally buy our Pyrénéan retreat, I'll probably do something dopey like build an extension without getting planning permission*, but, for the moment, careful and timely preparation is proving to be a source of constant reassurance.

Perhaps now I'll allow myself a weekend break, returning to more whimsical research relating to pain, vin et campagne, before a fresh assault on something hideously convoluted next Monday morning - verb conjugation perhaps.

Allez les bleus!

A bientot x

*just kidding!