Life in the country

Spent quite a tiring day driving a tractor up and down the field using the wrong tool (a "Canadienne") to try and prepare the ground for some maize we want to plant this spring for next winter's animal food; with a bit of sand filter work, hole digging and tree felling thrown in for good measure; and a short pause for a fairly healthy lunch in the sun.

But that's not why I'm putting keys to screen. It's because...

Just after lunch, I went to a nearby garage to buy some red diesel for the tractor. It's not a garage I go to much - perhaps twice in three years. I filled the jerry can, told the guy the price (it's one of those old-fashioned whirring dial things) and offered my debit card. Oh no, he says. Cash or cheque only.

Ah, says I. I'll have to go to the cash machine. Shall I leave the car?

No, he says. Take the car.

OK, I say. I'll be back in a few minutes.

And I was.

I'd make a rubbish criminal.

A farewell to Bob

Bob moved on to pastures new today, but not before leaving permanent marks all over écovallée, many of which will never be seen. I've got to say, he's a very handy guy to have around. Because it's true. Look:


Here, Bob's hands are applying lime mortar on top of Isochanvre - a carbon-positive, hemp-based insulation product we used to block up a gaping hole under the bathroom window. My mistake. (Note to people ordering windows over the phone in France: They always give the height before the width in this country. Even if you say, '115 centimentres side to side' just to confirm. Don't say I didn't tell you.)

As with all Bob's work - and now his time with us - it was beautifully finished.

Trading post

This office isn’t like the others I’ve worked in.

Instead of extra-shot lattes, almond croissants and airborne viruses, my colleagues bring in things like eggs from their own chickens, rabbits (dead or alive, for table or children), ducks, turkeys, sausages, an impressive variety of fruits and veggies, and an almost constant supply of meat-free kitchen scraps for our pigs.

I've got to say I prefer it this way.

Once. Twice. Three times a maybe.

I thought you'd want to know how Daniel the builder's getting on with persuading our neighbour to sell us her land (so we can build an access road the fire service will approve, so the mayor can give the go ahead, so we can apply for planning permission and get the eversoslightly different ball rolling that might - just might - have a chance of being approved in time for...).

It's very French.

(All of this was reported to me third hand. I'll paraphrase to save virtual ink.)

First, Daniel phoned the neighbour and asked if she'd be interested in selling the land.

'Non,' she said. She was very emphatic. The French often are.

'Can I phone you back?' he asked. (In French. Clearly.)

'Yes,' she said.

A week later, he phoned back. A lengthy conversation. Was she interested?

'Not really. It's been in the family for years.'

'Can I phone you back?'

'Yes.'

The third conversation (two more than we would have made) went along the lines of:

'Are you interested?'

'Well... I'll have to talk to the rest of the family... Find out how much we'd want for it... Can you call back after August 15th?'

'Yes,' he said.

Gotta love the French. (Especially when you have one of them on your side.)

Daylight non-robbery

I went into the wine shop down the road last night, walked up to the counter (careful not to let Boy touch any of the Expensive Things) and waited for someone to realise we were there.

We waited for a few more minutes.

Then a few more. It's not unusual for the owner to be round the corner filling up someone's car with wine, or having a chat with someone outside the nearest coffee shop.

Eventually, I turned towards the door at the back of the shop and said (loudly): "Bonsoir!"

Then, after a moment or two more, slunk out of the shop, empty handed, a little guilty that I had looked in the corners for the non-existent CCTV cameras.

On riding

French riding lessons differ from English ones in two ways.

First, the content:

You have to find your horse...

Collect it...

Using reasonable force...

Where necessary...

Take it to the stables...

Clean it...

Sit on it...

Play tag with it...

Spin on it...

And stand on it...


The second difference is the price:

For two hours of horse contact, including one hour of riding - nine euros, twenty. Remarkable.

The English-speaking accountant

(It’s market day today and an eclectic mix of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s is being piped around town through these:



Speakers where you’d expect to find CCTV cameras – if you were English – I’ve yet to see a CCTV camera in this country.)

Next on the list of People To See was an accountant. Or Expert Comptable, as they say in these parts.

I went to the nearest one, on the other side of our lounge wall, and announced our Englishness. That’s fine, the receptionist said smilingly – he speaks English. Come back in half an hour.

We came back, armed with questions about income tax, social security tax, offsetting set-up costs, rates for yurts, expenses, definitions of gîtes versus chambres d’hôte.

“Hello,” he said.

I still don’t know if this is the full extent of his English. But after we explained, in French, what we are going to do, he picked up the phone and spoke to a French-speaking English accountant, and arranged for a meeting in a couple of weeks. (I can see a pattern here...)

In a typically generous gesture, when told about our continued lack of Interweb access, he invited us to use a spare office whenever we want. It has a computer, phone – all that early 20th Century workplace stuff. And once again, we came away wondering at the superbness of small town French life.

(Muzak included.)

Winning and losing at the shops

Our local supermarket is called the Petit Casino.

I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because you put your money in and win whatever you want. Or maybe because, when it comes to being open, they’re a pretty safe bet. I’d say you can shop there from 7.00 or 7.30 until 12.00 or 12.30 and 2.30 or 3.00 until 7.00 or 7.30. Four days out of seven.

It’s the other shops that are a bit of a gamble.

What you expect to be grown-up shops (technology, insurance and the like) may be open from 10.00 to 12.00 or 12.30. Then 3.00 until 7.00. But there’s an equal chance you’ll find a note on the door saying: “Closed all day for a meeting” or “Closed Monday morning”. Or “Closed Wednesday”.

If those hours fit with when you’re in town (which for us, is only 50 metres away), or you don’t actually want to buy anything, it’s charming. Enlightened. Almost Spanish.

But sometimes you really need something...

If you’re about my age (I just turned 40. Excellent, thanks for asking – discovered a very good restaurant about 70 metres away and why a bottle of Pécharmant can be well worth opening), you’ll remember Sunday afternoons before the shops were open. This was when there was nothing on all three channels of TV.

For children, it taught the meaning of boredom. For parents, I suspect, preparedness. I suspect this because, on Sunday, we ran out of nappies.

As you’ll know from an earlier post, boy has been taking antibiotics. And as you’ll probably know from smoking-related chest infections, antibiotics can have an explosive effect on the digestive system.

Now, normally, this would not be a problem for us. Like many people, we’ve used the same set of re-usable nappies (Mother-Ease – highly recommended) for both children. Saved bags of cash and even more in landfill. But because we spent Sunday morning traipsing round three markets in search of gems with which to decorate our guest yurts (no joy – nearly bought a metal garden table and three chairs for 80 euros – should have laughed when invited to pay 200 for a 70s table worth ten times less than that – and would have had kittens in the stunningly beautiful town of Issigeac, but our litter tray is still in storage), we forgot.

So I spent much of Sunday afternoon driving round looking for an open supermarket, pharmacy, garage – anything – listening to an insane re-interpretation of Beatles hits on a French classical music station. We ended up making do with a single nappy discovered in the back of the car, before winning a whole new packet in the Petit Casino the following morning.

While in Issigeac, we saw a possible guest bed in an antique shop. Wise to the ways of French shops (or so I thought – this was minutes before the Great Nappy Famine), I asked the owner if he was open this week.

That would be ridiculous, he told me. Then he gave me his mobile phone number on the back of a business card and asked me to make an appointment.

Complete Bastide

(Prestartum: This post was written two days ago, and the last two posts before that. And I meant to post them all yesterday, but we spent too long at the water park – domage. We're getting the Interweb at home soon...)

I know I’ve posted today already, but it’s been a while and the kids are asleep.

We love this house.

It’s not only a few hundred yards (metres) from our land, so we can (and have) start (ed) working on it, it’s also a very few metres (yards) from the wine shop (two and a half euros for one and a half litres of very drinkable Bergerac), two butchers, two supermarkets, a square with two cafés, the launderette, pizza place and every other convenience a 13th Century Bastide town can offer.

My morning routine, instead of ablute, scoot, commute, is ask what the family wants for breakfast, walk (aware that I am still some weeks or months from strolling) the few dozen paces for ingredients and return, with a warm and bagged baguette, in almost no time.

If you’re reading this on Monday (and I have to wait until the afternoon to post it), you may want to think badly of me.

But wait.

Wait until I tell you it’s stopped raining. And today it was too hot to do much except lie in the hammock in the back yard and read a copy of yesterday’s Guardian.

So feel free to call me any name under the sun.

(Addendum: It's raining today. But that stormy light rain you only get when it's been - and will probably continue to be - seriously hot.)

A useful book of numbers

I don’t know why, but the Dordogne phone book was lying open on the rug yesterday and I couldn’t help noticing, at the top of the listings for each village, a section called “Numéros d’urgence”, with fire, police, medical and gas listed separately.

Then I realised what I was looking at: a book with villages listed separately! I looked up the village we’re going to live in (it only has a few hundred people) and, in seconds, had the names and numbers of all our neighbours. How useful is that?!

When did you last see a phone listing for someone even on your street? We get these tomes dropped on our doorsteps in England every year and how often do we use them? The people we probably want to speak to are ex-directory. How many trees could we save by stopping that waste of resources?

Almost immediately, I realised something else. The emergency numbers are all different. Far from being an inconvenience, this would save valuable seconds when seconds are the only things that matter. How many more lives would be saved if you didn’t have to wait for the operator to ask which service you require?

I’m beginning to think that the UK government should start looking across the Channel for ideas rather than the Atlantic.

The fall of commune-ism

Leaving Brighton was not as relaxed as we wanted. Even though there were four days between the movers moving most of our stuff and the rest of it heading for the ferry with us, we ended up running frantically from house to car, desperately trying to find places for yet more final bits and pieces (I blame the pieces – it’s hard not to), before finally waving goodbye.

Forty-five minutes later than planned.

True, we spent more of that last day chatting than we could have. But they were worthwhile chats with worthy people. Like Alphamum, who took a heroic amount of stuff (obviously) off our hands. And Yurt Professional Matt, who saved us a trip to Portslade with electrical things the ordinary charity shops won’t take. And all the fabulous friends and neighbours from our fantastic street, who helped turn around a stupidly heavy trailer, threw presents at the kids, waved us off in the rain, and even shut the door I left open. (Thanks Kristiaan.)

On the A27, drizzle turned to deluge, and I was more than relieved that Clare had spent ages wrapping the roofwheel on the roof (where else?) in all manner of plastic. Slowly, the stress of packing up began to wash away, and we started looking forward to our new life in the sun.

Which didn’t start as we drove south from St Malo (a brilliant way to come, by the way – highly recommended).

Or even when we arrived in the Dordogne (apart from a few hours in which we put up the yurt).

About that.

You remember my Really Rather Brilliant Idea about turning three grand a month of your Strange Earth Pounds into nothing? Clare researched and found an organic farm half an hour from our land. It had a compost toilet, a reed bed grey water system – all that fun stuff. She told them we be staying for a few months and we had our own yurt. She was told no problem. Come any time. This seemed a little too relaxed for our liking, so she checked again. We’re a family. We’ll be staying quite a while.

No problem. Come any time.

We came on Wednesday afternoon, in our new-used Scenic, dragging a new-used trailer, fresh from a night in an Alistair Sawday B&B, to find a hand-painted transit van with a family of eight, assorted caravans and home-made homes.

Instead of a functioning reed bed system, we saw what looked like an open ditch leading to a partially fenced pond. The compost toilet felt like the floorboards would give way at any moment. The cats and dogs were jumping with fleas. And dinner wasn’t served until after dark. Not ideal for a young family.

During my last week working in London, I joked that we were going to live on a hippy commune. I just assumed I was exaggerating.

The people, as any non-Daily Mail reader would already suspect, were lovely. Warm, welcoming, friendly, helpful. I quickly picked up my expression of the week: “Ce n’est pas grave” (pron: c’est pas grave). It means “No problem” – I use it every day. But the environment, to us cosseted city folk, felt fantastically unsafe.

Yes, we’re going to create those same elements on our land. But we’re going to do it Carefully. Beautifully. Safely.

It seems we’ve become too middle aged (and Middle Classed) to be hippies. To coin a phrase, we were a bit freaked out.

What led to the fall of commune-ism, however, was the Wrong Kind of Rain. Not rain that crept in around the door, where we could use our towels as sandbags. But rain that dripped from many of the 40 roof poles. Inside. Our waterproof canvas turned out not to be so waterproof. And the only way to fix it was to take the yurt down. Which we were not going to do... in the rain.

You’ll remember (or discover) from an earlier posting that Clare’s Brilliant Idea was to rent a place near our land while we were waiting for planning permission to come through. It suddenly seemed even more brilliant.

So the next day, we drove through the rain to Lalinde and, with the help of another branch of our estate agent, Orpi, performed a miracle.

It went like this:

Orpi: It’s you!

Us: Hi.

[Many kisses and much happiness]

Us: We’re living in a field. It’s raining inside. We need to rent a house. Two or three bedrooms. Preferably with a garage.

Orpi: There’s not much. [Pause] Apart from this one.

[90 seconds’ walk later]

Us: It’s perfect.

I’m sitting in the corner of a downstairs that’s bigger than our old house. It has three bedrooms and a garage around the corner. It costs 600 euros a month. It’s raining, but only on the outside. Here’s a picture:



The hot water doesn’t work. Ce n’est pas grave. A new boiler’s arriving in the morning.

Rain

This is the one thing that has characterised the last many days (currently wrestling with a keyboard where half the keys are in the wrong place - "q" where "a" normally is - must be hell for touch typists). Rain on the way to Portsmouth. Rain on the way through France. Rain today. But, as some people will not be surprised to know, we managed to stop the rain for long enough to put up the yurt in a field near Le Bugue.

Too much to say right now. Just wanted to say that nous sommes arrivées.

Will write at greqter length - qnd with pictures (see?) - when there's a moment's peace. And probably on an English keyboard...

Proper pool rules

Not, as you might expect, instructions on what to do if the white and black balls both go down off the break, but something I think you Need To Know About Swimming In France.

Last October, in desperate need of a swim and with all the water parks closed for the season, we drove to Bergerac. (It's a seriously beautiful place with at least one Ramsay-esque restaurant and several big-nosed statues in quiet, tree-lined squares, but that's not important right now.)

We found the public pool, parked and paid.

Boys going one way and girls the other, I retrieved my towel and swimming shorts from The Bag and picked up one of those metal clothes-hanger-cum-shoe-basket affairs I haven't seen since the 70s.

Then I noticed the look of undisguised horror on the faces of the people behind the counter.

They pointed at me and spoke in rapid French. The gist of which was: You can't swim.

As it happens, I can swim. Not fast, but well. I also have a card that gives me permission to sink, with a tank of air strapped to my back, anywhere in the world, no questions asked.

"C'est pas propre," they were saying. Which I translated literally.

Seeing my lack of understanding, they pointed repeatedly at the poster on the wall.

There, in black and white for all the world to see, were many illustrations you would expect to see in any public pool. And two that you would not: a pair of shorts with a cross next to them, and a pair of trunks with a tick.

I stood, speechless, holding my shorts.

Fortunately, the French, as you will have read, are not backward in coming forward to help, and after a few moments' frantic activity, a pair of trunks was produced the like of which I also haven't seen since the 70s.

They were handed to me, with a triumphant: "Ça. C'est propre."

You have been warned.

Reality without the cameras

In February, we flew down to the Dordogne to sign the papers and take possession of the land proper.

We were met at Bergerac by the couple we sat next to in the restaurant in October. They drove us back to their gîte, which we were staying in for free, invited us the 30 or so metres to their home for an apératif, then insisted on cooking us dinner every night that week.

Pretty much all of which flew in the face of the French reputation for being arrogant, aloof, and many things besides.

Over dinner, in poor French, they listened to our Big Green Idea and concerns about gaining planning permission. They said it's a great project. We should just waltz up to the local Maire, tell him what we had in mind, and see what he said.

So we did.

The Maire was in a meeting at the time, with a harassed-looking group of people, and looked like he needed a change of scene. These are the two scenes that followed.

INT. THE MAIRIE - DAY

He: (WALKING UP, CHEERY) What can I do for you?

We: (NOT WALTZING - NERVOUS AS HELL - THIS WAS OUR FUTURE AT STAKE) Um. We're buying this land on Wednesday and we wanted to show you an idea for an exciting and sustainable project.

He: Sure, I'll have a look.

Me: (OPENING BATTERED CARDBOARD FOLDER TO REVEAL TWO BOOKS ON YURTS , SOME PHOTOS AND VARIOUS PIECES OF PAPER) Er...

He: (WALKING AWAY, DISMISSIVE) Non! C'est impossible!

CUT TO:

EXT. THE BAR OVER THE ROAD - MOMENTS LATER

Clare, oddly convinced that everything will be alright, looks reassuringly at Alex.

Alex stares dejectedly at the head of his beer. Then looks across the road at the Mairie. He notices the number on the wall next to the door.

13

Over dinner that night, we review the day's events. Martin immediately calls his brother, who speaks a little English and agrees to come round the following morning.

Martin's brother likes our plans. After a heated debate, we decide that the Maire just needs something to sign and resolve to employ an architect. In the yellow pages, we find an architect in the Maire's village. We call. One of the partners speaks fluent English. He tells us one of the other partners is the third mayor. In the same village.

And...

He's an environmental building specialist.

Just after signing the papers to buy the land, we meet the architect. Our fantastic estate agent , Nicolas, comes along (Martin's brother had also offered - by now, we're overwhelmed by offers of help). The architect loves the Idea. He phones the Maire and tells him it's exactly what the area needs.

The Maire agrees.

Then Nicolas drives us back to his home for dinner, and to meet his family, and enough animals to open a children's farm.

I would show you, but we didn't have a camera.

Know your French

Now, the French have had some fairly bad press over the years. But our experience has been nothing short of fantastic.

FLASHBACK - OCTOBER 2006 - MONTAGE OF SHOTS

Not only did we meet the world's most excellent estate agent...

But complete strangers were incredibly polite - greeting you in the street with a "Bonjour Monsieur" "Bonjour Madame" or less obviously "Bonjour Monsieur-dame"...

Or saying "Bonjour" to everyone in a restaurant or café before ordering a drink...

Or being outrageously generous...

Like the time we went into a restaurant just after signing the papers to buy the land in Lalinde. A local couple, Josette and Martin, sat down at the next table. After spending the meal talking to them in our limited-but-improving French, they offered us the use of their own gite in a nearby village completely free of charge. Which we took them up on, as you'll see.

No doubt, it helps to read the odd book on French cultural differences. Like one that explained how to behave in a café. It goes something like this: Find a café that appeals to you and sit at a table. Face the street, so you can watch the world go by as you enjoy your coffee. And do not try to catch the eye of the waiter. They know you are there and may be offended if you think otherwise. When ordering, use "Monsieur" after your "S'il vous plait"s and "Merci"s for politeness and... that's it.

If you didn't know this "rule", walking into a café, sitting down with your back to the place and ignoring the waiter might seem rude. But it's quite the opposite.