CU Danny

Got a phone call from Daniel this morning.

You remember Daniel. He’s the guy who gave us a hand when the Planning Department refused our old application.

I write ‘gave us a hand’. What I really mean is: ‘submitted an efficient, effective, astonishingly detailed attack on the Planning Department’s refusal to give us the CU (Certificat d’Urbanisme) we so clearly deserved’.

He’s also the guy who’s been giving us a hand with our new property purchase.

I write ‘giving us a hand’. What I really mean is: ‘single-handedly persuaded a reluctant neighbour to sell us their small, ugly building on an adjoining piece of land that would allow us to circumvent the previous planning refusal (the Daniel-written rebuttal for which is currently celebrating its first birthday at the tribunal in Bordeaux), before submitting a CU application to make the small, ugly building bigger and more beautiful, bizarrely enabling us to live next door to it in our yurts, while having up to 20 guests (actually, we’re only going to have around 12 tops) in yurts where we originally intended – an astonishingly detailed application that has proven to be both efficient and effective’.

Because Daniel’s phone call this morning was to tell us that our new CU has been approved. (APPROVED!) The evidence is apparently in the post (and not just this one).

The first fight is over. Me and Her Outdoors have so much tension draining from us, we feel like amoeba. Albeit amoeba with a bluddie good excuse to drink Champagne and with a huge amount of work in front of us.

But enough about us.

What Daniel is going to do now is give us a hand with our Permis de Construire.

I say ‘give us a hand’. What I really mean is: ‘submit a dossier detailing exactly what we’re going to do to the small, ugly building – which Planning cannot apparently refuse – for which we can expect an answer in about a month – after which we can start doing what we were expecting to do a year and a half ago.

That's almost not the point. This is: I recently learned Daniel’s surname. I won’t spell it for you, but I’ll tell you how it’s pronounced: “La Man”. It’s not only significant in the United Statesian sense (“Who da man? Dan da man”), but as you may remember from school, the French word pronounced “Man” means “hand”.

If you’ve been following this blog for a long while, you may also remember that we found our land a few hundred metres (yards) from a place pronounced “La Land”.

Which is why I’m now interested in meeting the following people: “La Horse Cart”, “La Plough” and “La Free Solar Panel”.