News | Chez Le Moulin

Getting to know you

Alexandra — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:25:25 +0000

Getting to Know you, the Aroma Fremeire

Our neighbour Claude is not your typical French Farmer for one reason only. He’s actually rather dapper and doesn’t quite smell right. Not for him the usual odour of stale cigarette, old cow, slightly ripe farmer with a sprinkling of something unidentifiable… But in other respects he is rather typical. He didn’t want to be a farmer, but who else would take on the family acres. The countryside has been sadly lacking in farmers wives and we have a number of rather elderly gentlemen, including Claude, who never married because all the young girls saw a better life coming over the horizon and left. As Claude never really wanted to be a farmer he gave the farm up at the earliest opportunity, when at 65yrs old he qualified for his state pension. He rented out his fields and took up his new occupation. Sitting. Yes just sitting; outside his small farm house and watching the world go by. The only issue with this is that where Claude lives about 600m from us no one really goes by. The only thing to see is the odd English couple in the valley. We therefore feel a duty to keep him fully entertained with our madcap building and gardening schemes.

So how do you make new friends in a whole new country with a different language and culture. So many times I’ve heard the middle-class bray of ‘of course we don’t really mix with the expats, all our friends are French’ and ‘where we live there aren’t many English’. These are lies, put about by some slightly deluded idealist expats, just my opinion of course. There are English people all over France, rather a lot of them and Dutch, German, Portuguese, Australian, and ‘Parisians’: and thats just in our village, yep really people do seem to get about. We thought we’d moved to the back end of nowhere. Rural France, as in, far, far, far from everything, no buses, not many cars and just a sprinkling of amusing natives.….the expats just crept up on us, knocking on the door, in the butchers, at the Fete in the village and then the whole on line advice thing exploded. We really could live here and never learn the language, many people seem to get by amazingly well without ever learning a to conjugate a single french verb. Bien fait, thats the french way of saying well done, but on its own its sarcastic rather than complimentary. They all meant to learn French, many tired to learn and some succeed , but not many. Its quite reassuring, not just me thats still has difficulty then.

One day at about week three there was a knock on the door, A visitor! wahoo, our door bell did work! It was one of our expat neighbours Guy, he lives just up the hill from us with his husband Andrew. He heard we were here and had just popped in to say hello and see if we were ok, how nice was that! It was great to see him and he gave us some invaluable advice about making friends and getting to know people. So we invited them for dinner. Feeding people is a great way of making friends.

Guy told us more about the extensive expat community. The one we never knew existed. Most importantly, to be careful what you say about any expat people you meet, everyone knows everyone, it’s like a club, or a village. We certainly didn’t want to go alienating anyone this early in our adventure. Living in the middle of nowhere you need people you can call on when things get tough, when you need some help with a task and everyone has a skill or advice to offer. He told us we would meet people you would never have come into contact with in the UK, it’s so true. From people that knit their own yogurt, to a retired LSD chemist and a renowned artists and it’s amazing the people attracted to the not so simple life. We arrived with the natural wariness of people coming from southern England, where if its not tied down and alarmed anything will get nicked, to a house that hadn’t been locked in 20 years. We are just beginning to relax.

Both Kris and Guy had told us to stop and speak to the neighbours, say hello and get to know them, they are very curious to see what’s happening and they would love to speak to you. They will not knock on your door and say hello. You need to ask them for help if you need it, but if you do they will be so happy to see you, flattered you asked and very happy to come to your aid. Just one more cultural difference to get to grips with. We have embraced this and made some great friends. So early on in our residency I made jam. Quite a lot, as we have orchards and that means fruit. I thought the friendly thing to do would be take some to Claude. My french being, poor verging on dreadful, I knew it would be a difficult encounter. I dually plucked up the courage and marched up the hill. I knocked on the door and out came my lovely neighbour all smiles. I managed to make my self understood, with lots of Ça va, Ça va and held out my gift. Claude declined the gift, but explained that he can’t eat jam because he’s diabetic. His local accent is very strong and five years on I can still only make out one word in three. I skipped home because I’d managed my first conversation with him and I’d made a new friend. I stop, when I’m passing, to say hello if he’s there and we have a conversation about gardening and chickens and the cats. I still understand only a small amount but each time I pick out a few more words. It’s thanks to these conversations and the odd little gifts of eggs, when his chickens had been eaten by the fox that I’m sure have lead to the friendly reception we get from the other older farmers whom we see about.

On one of my early trips into town, probably sorting the insurance, I popped in to the butcher to buy some lamb chops for tea. There was a bit of a queue and when it was my turn I used my very best French. The butcher just looked at me, nothing, I tried again, I think he quacked, it’s the accent ‘quoi’ What? and then the lady behind me repeated what I thought I had just said, he appeared enlightened and chops were duly weighed and handed over.

A slight change of accent can change the whole meaning of something you say, many times I thought that people were being difficult and not making any effort to understand. Now I realise that the slight errors can render a whole sentence unintelligible. Above and below, ci-dessus et ci-dessous, more and less, plus and plus …just whether or not you pronounce the ’s’ and I’m hot, je suis chaud, well you may think you are but you probably mean j’ai chaud rather than I’m sexy! These are the simple ones, everyone talks about, I’ve made many many errors with some amusing or embarrassing consequence, I never meant to talk about his willy it was the christmas tree ‘sapin’ not ‘ça pin’ i wanted to light up!

My rescuer in the butchers then asked me, in french if I was English, and when I confirmed that I was told me she came from Gloucestershire and was Gay. This was my introduction to our next nearest English neighbour Vanessa, who had me in stitches and proved to be another invaluable source of information. She gave me her email address on the spot and lives just up the other side of our valley. One thing I learnt from this encounter is how much I’d missed a good belly laugh. Honestly trying humour in a second language is the final barrier to integration, I’m definitely not there yet, so when I’m desperate for a laugh I pop over and see Vanessa.

We decided for a rather dull couple, who tend not be be that sociable, we should get out and about and meet people. David is very polite and considerate, he’d rather say nothing than upset some one, so generally he says very little and I fill every silence by talking far too much, so it’s better I stay home and you don’t have to listen to me prattling on. But, for our first year we went to every fete, village meals and accepted all invitations; I’m sure we’d have gone to the opening of a barn door it it had been advertised. This way we met lots of people, French, English, young, old and the very useful.

Getting into the social fabric of the vIllage has been a key element in settling into the area. At the beginning of August some one put a leaflet in the post box inviting subscription to the annual village walk, followed by a meal. In the spirit of all the advice we had had, I phoned the mobile number on the paper and had an interesting conversation but I seemed to have got myself on the list. So we set off for the appointed rendezvous at 08.30 am and did a lovely walk with the mayor, his wife, Kris, Steve and various other villagers. Returning to the, salle de fête for an aperitif, we were joined by more neighbours and helped Coco, the mayors wife setting out tables in the car park under the trees.

Bread and bowls of Crisps were distributed and as people arrived, they claimed their places by setting out knives forks plates and glasses they had brought with them. This communal eating is definitely a feature of village life. Bringing your own knives and forks saves anyone washing up. Wine was produced and melon and ham and cooked chickens from the supermarket rotisserie, apparently to go with the crisps. Then slices of cheese served onto the same plate followed up by slices of apple pie. And plenty more wine. A very convivial setting, we felt. By late afternoon we were very content and slightly drunk. Then out came the eau du vie. Michel (the mayor) told us to watch out, as an elderly gentleman produced a bottle of eau du vie wrapped in a large white cloth. Jean’s special eau du vie contains a ‘serpant’ yes really a snake, we avoided that one with lots of laughter. We rolled home feeling truly part of the village.

We had only been here five weeks when we disappeared for a month; so we felt like maybe we’d be seen as some fly by night Jonny foreigners with not a serious intention of staying or being part of the community. Settling into a new life can be a bit daunting and being accepted can take years so we though maybe we should have a house warming.

To enable us to converse with our guests we decided we’d better get started on some French lessons. We found a local French teacher and had our first few lessons before the party. We eventually had about four years of classes with Emilie. We were not the best students, something must have rubbed off, but now we have move on to exploring online learning, watching a bit of French TV and talking to our neighbours or rather listening rather than conversing. David speaks excellent Bricolage french, he knows all the bits of his tractor, plumbing connections and two pronunciations for cement depending how local to us the supplier is. The local accent is thicker than treacle, I’d equate it with Gordie; the older gentlemen rest their chins on their chests and then sort of quack, we nod in what we think is the appropriate place and then later have a discussion about what we think they may have said. I manage the banking, doctors appointments and guest bookings, admin french. There are now many words we use more in French than English, I tell my self its progress that sometimes it’s remembering the English for something thats difficult. We aren’t being pretentious, honest, but we never kept bees in the UK, or chickens for that mater, or had a tractor, digger or trailer for our car.

We though we’d throw our party in that dull bit that’s winter but its not quite Christmas. The 6th December fell on a Saturday, St Nicholas day perfect. I can decorate for Christmas. We invited the neighbours, Claude and the two elderly sisters, who live just up from up the hill. They do knicker Semaphore with their washing. As I drive past I often see the biggest knickers in the world hang on the line in their open barn beside the road. The tiniest ladies and the biggest knickers I ever saw. We invited Alene who was another farming matriarch and keeper of sheep. We made a list, the Mayor and his wife, Jean, of the snake in his eau de vie, Jean Paul, who had been the Mayor, was the dustbin man and was to be the Mayor again. We invited Brian and Marianne whom we had stayed with during our house search, and Yonnel and Christoff who supplied much of our garden equipment. We invited our expat neighbours and French neighbours and hoped someone would come.

The house is big, and at this point we had only the furniture we’d brought with us. Not enough to make it feel cosy. So I decided to fill up some of the space with Christmas trees. We had loads of fairy lights and piles of decorations. So where do you get Christmas trees in France at the end of November, beginning of December? I hadn’t see any. Odd I thought, nearly December, all the shops should be brimming with Christmas trees, but no. Not one. Not real, not artificial. Nothing.

Of course I didn’t realise that Christmas wasn’t a big thing here….really nothing like the Uk. There’s decorations in the supermarket for a couple of weeks in December, but not the volume of glitzy toot you find in the Uk. No crackers, they don’t do crackers, not much on the way of christmasy cards, they don’t do those much either. Christmas is different. Dinner in is on Christmas Eve. Presents are done then too. Traditionally people went to midnight mass, then being Catholic you couldn’t eat before Mass so they ate Christmas dinner when they got home at 1am. This tradition has mostly disappeared and dinner is now eaten during the evening. Christmas day is a more grown up affair, they eat oysters and drink Champagne. Well if you stuffed a five course meal with turkey and chocolate logs and lots of wine, in the early hours of the morning not much room for anything but hair of the dog. I think Champagne is the French equivalent of alka seltzer .

I learnt later that trees will suddenly appear about ten days before Christmas and if you’re lucky you might get one. This first year I wasn’t in on the secret so I reverted the facebook. There’s a site for English speakers in our area. So I asked and up popped an advert for Kingdom Vegetal. A garden centre not too far away from us, owned by a couple of Brits and they were having, of all things a Christmas Faire, with mulled wine and mince pies….yes mince pies. As soon as someone mentioned mince pies I realised I missed them. So I dragged David along to one of those Expat gatherings in search of trees. Success, and while we were there we chatted to Gary about trees. It turns out trees are his thing, we like trees, we really do love trees so this was going to be very handy. They’d been here quite a while and they lived in a mill. Always useful to know another mill owner. So we bought two Christmas trees and sent them an invitation to our housewarming.

The one thing about this bit of France is that in winter it can be a bit chilly. F’Freezing not to put to fine a point on it. We may be a long way south, but its continental weather and there are some mountains not too far away. These big old houses can be a bit cold too. Which explains why the French have been building lots of small modern bungalows like a rash of lego houses everywhere. So we came up with a plan. Hospitality usually involves food and drink. That and good company and I’m happy. So our plan was greet people in the gite, there were big double doors there at the time and the front part had a tiled floor. So we dragged in the garden table and set up a drinks station. We brought in the garden chairs to dump coats on. There was mulled wine, beer and a choice of wine boxes, and juices and water.

We stuck a couple of heaters in the dinning room to warm it up and set up the big dinning table to feed people bowls of chilli, bread, and things to put on the chilli. And I made a selection of Cakes and set up a table with them all displayed. A help yourself, hot wine and hot food to help keep our guests warm in the big chilly mill. We put the log burner on in the living room and an electric heater. The log burner didn’t really seem to warm the room up, unless you sat really close. It’s a big room with high ceilings. It works well now but took us a couple of years to resolve.

Guest started to arrive and we welcomed them at the door. We started to encourage them in with a glass of mulled wine. Our french neighbours came in and were lovely and seemed so happy to have been asked. They brought us gifts of wine and armagnac and plants. Then they sat down in the freezing cold gite and chatted to their friends, as we greeted more guests and pointed them in the direction of the dinning room. It was so chilly by the door in the gite and seemed a bit odd that people were staying there, so I sought advice, how to get them in the warm and maybe nearer the food. Another school day for us. French guests will enter your home to the point to which they are specifically invited, another cultural difference. So we asked if they would like a tour of the house, this worked a treat. Most hadn’t been inside the house since at least 1976 and were delighted to share stories of working at the mill. The french eat their main meal at lunch time but I’d made a very mild chilli and even managed to entice most of our older friends to try some food. Serving yourself is another thing that doesn’t come naturally, certainly the older generation wait to be served. It seems that with a little encouragement most people can be entice to eat cake though.

In all about 50 people came to the house warming, We are working up to a repeat performance, slowly, we know a lot more people now, but the house has changed quite a bit. We worked out how to keep warm for starters. The house warming gave us a great opportunity to get to know the neighbours better and maybe its time to push the boat out and do it all again. A sort of Bollocks Brexit we’re staying party. But then Covid put pay to that…maybe we will wait til year 10….

So what’s our advise on making friends and building a new life in France?

Many people tell us we are very well integrated after such a short time. We really are not that sociable, so if we can do it anyone can. We didn’t leave our natural mistrust and suspicions at the boarder as we came in, but slowly we are beginning to unbend just a little. Not everyone will like you, there are people here who don’t like the ‘English” thats basically any one not French they don’t differentiate between Belgian Dutch German and English, but we are better than Parisians. The thing is we haven’t met them. They tend not to like anyone much, so they wouldn’t come to village events anyway. Did you ever live anywhere where everyone liked you?

Go to village events. All of them, don’t worry if you don’t eat some of the food on the menu, sometimes a veggie option can be ordered when you book. If you are vegan you can even take your own food. About four times a year our village has a meal together, organised by one group or another. The village Fete, in June, the walk in August, Le St Martin on 11th of November, which is a meal for the whole village and all the retired people get it free, that was most of the village when we arrived. Then theres the Mayors reception and Gallette du Roi in January, when we all drink quite a lot and the mayor addresses the village saying a few words about the departed, welcoming the new residents and toasting the baby’s born and we eat the special cake with fave ( a bean, which is usually a tooth breaking plastic toy). The chasse (hunt) have their dinner of many courses of venison and wild boar in about March. These are all advertised by a scrap of paper being deposited in the post box and a requirement to bring your ’couverts’ that it plates, cutlery and a wine glass. You may find it a bit difficult if you are at all fussy about the quality of the wine you drink, but they are very typically French events, very sociable and part of village life. We go and sit with our friends and chat in our terrible French and generally have a great sense of well being as a result, maybe brought on by the quantity of alcohol consumed. We know our neighbours and they know us.

2. Join in There are a few quirky village associations in Samouillan.

Firstly the Affouarge. This is the village wood cutting. Most villages and towns in France have some communal woodland. This is managed by the forestry commission and the Mairie. In many villages the management of this is now given over to a business who pay the village a small fee. but in our village a group of, mostly men, cut wood and manage the woodland. They wield chain saws at dead trees and cut paths all winter, then chop them into logs for firewood. Each affouargiste gets a share of the firewood. They then pay the tax on the wood, at about 14€ a metre square. As opposed to the local price of about 60€ to buy. The wood is collected, matured and delivered by the team. If some people don’t want their whole allocation it is sold and the profit goes to an association in the village. David joined the team the first year, and after a hard mornings work they stop for his weekly french lesson or Aperitif as others call it, beer or Riccard and putting the world to rights.

The Committee du Fete– every village and town has one, none have enough volunteers so you could join and get involved in village life. It’s a bit like a village fete committee in the Uk but in many villages they run lots of events and it’s worth joining to get to know the people in the village.

Other groups _ There are school associations and quilting circles and village hall exercise classes all to be joined. If there is something you like doing there is probably a group for it. unlike the Uk here they have an open day to subscribe so you can go, in September on a Saturday and see what you fancy joining. Its a bit like Freshers week. Someone in your Mairee will be able to point you in the right direction. Walking and cycling groups are favourites here.

In our village we have ‘Tous en Sam another social group. Our village fete committee only do what they are set up for, so other events and a small voluntary bar are run by this separate association. In my first year here I was ‘invited’ , or coerced into taking on the role of treasurer. The association has in the last couple of years built a small bar, run on Friday nights in summer to add to the ambiance of the village pétanque games and then this has expanded to making meals four times in season, moules frites, saucisse frites, and the like. I make the desserts for these meals too. On average about 50 people come, which is a lot in a village of only 130 people. Profits from the association are used for the benefit of the village. We bought a couple of replacement windows for the church, built the bar and have set aside some money for a new door for the church so its a very effective fund raising scheme. On nights when we don’t have a meal take away food trucks come, with pizza or chicken.

Facebook – Oh yes, there are English speakers groups for all kinds of things, bee keepers in France, English Speakers in the Haute Garrone cycling if you want to you can find anything. Getting your driving license exchange or your car registered there are Facebook groups to join for all those difficult admin jobs.

Le Moulin and other animals

Alexandra — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 20:53:22 +0000

While working hard at my career I had a very wonderful child minder. Nikki lived next-door, she and her sister in law kept pigs in the woods at the back of her parents house. Nikki was often to be see covered in mud, mug of coffee in one hand, shitty wellies, moving things that smell a bit unsavoury around. They had an elderly chicken, numerous dogs and an extended family, which often included my boys. I had a designer kitchen, lots of suits, Gucci sun glasses and zoomed about in my BMW mini. In January 2016, six months after our move to France, I found myself, at 6am one morning, in my jim-jams, wellies and dressing gown, with an old coat on top, breathing icicles and feeding three rather ugly pigs, ten ducks and six cats. I sent Nikki a text message. ‘When did I turn into you?’….this wasn’t how I’d envisioned my life, but I was loving it!

We had arrived at Le Moulin on 25th July 2015. Our movers had contacted us and asked, if they arrived on our moving date, could they leave the articulated lorry, its driver and his mate here for the weekend. A bit odd we thought, surely its usual to unpack as fast as possible and zoom off once the biscuits run out. Lesson one on life in France, the last weekend of July is change over, the French take their holidays the last two weeks of July or the first two weeks of August. It seems quite rigid to us Brits but its how things are done. We arrived at exactly that moment. It’s the busiest weekend on the roads in France, therefore the sensible French ease the congestion by banning lorries on the major routes. We were so please to get all our stuff so quickly that we said yes. Nathan and his Romanian driver were our first guests. They unpacked our furniture, and joined us for BBQs and drank our beer. They slept in the Cab and used the shower in the gite, and the perfect guests to ease us in.

Things had changed a bit since our last visit. The house sitters had been gone over a month and everything was growing, like crazy, no grass had been cut for some time. Then there was a disturbing smell in the kitchen. Oh yes and having peered into the animal feed bins stocks were running a bit low. Enough food had been left for two weeks, not quite enough to last until Monday. Urgent supplies needed and who knows the French for pig food and what do they actually eat?

Our vendors had left the keys and care of of the menagerie, with Kris, who was here to meet us with some basic instruction on feeding the pigs, ducks and cats. It turned out that Kris would be a fountain of knowledge, as he had owned the mill prior to our vendors and sold it to them ten years earlier. Sadly Kris had kept sheep not pigs, pig food was not his specialist subject.

On the plus side the power was working, we seemed to have hot water and amazingly wifi. We found and unpacked the BBQ, and set about cleaning and clearing and making a bed. We rushed from room to room opening windows and trying to decide which room we would sleep in. There were a lot of rooms, 11 that had each at different times been bedrooms….or maybe 12. We had bought a few supplies on route to the house, so as evening fell we lit the barbi, drank some beer with the moving guys and looked at the stars, and fell into bed!

We were woken by tapping on the window at about 6 am. As we were on the second floor, the only airconditioned room, we thought it was a bit odd, looked out….nothing. Back to bed, then an unholy row of quacking and splashing started up. Clearly the ducks were awake. Day two had arrived and it was obviously time to get up and feed the zoo. It was already very warm outside. That tapping on the window was odd though, took us some time to catch the window tapper that regularly woke us up. Grey wagtails, they are very pretty, but bird brains…they see their reflection and try to fight off the rival. Our front windows take a bit of a hammering and lot of cleaning in spring. If you hear a tapping this could be it. It was hot, for us it was very hot, 37 degrees. Nathan one of the removal guys offered to cut the grass, with the rickety ride on mower, he even worked out how to get it going, more beer was definitely going to be needed. We made a long list of essential items and set off to the supermarket. Not the nearest but the biggest in the area, probably the biggest I’d ever been in, all new and shiny with a fantastic view of the mountains from the car park. It’s full of everything you could possibly need and a lot of things you didn’t know you wanted until you saw them. We have bought some truly amazing things there since. Like our teak garden table with built in lazy-susan that seats ten. We bought the whole shop. Plenty of wine would be required to get us through the next few days and that smell in the kitchen wasn’t getting any better, a house with ten toilets needs a lot of loo cleaner too. But pig food seemed to be beyond us…no idea where to get that, what happens if you don’t feed pigs?

When we exchanged contracts on the house the plan was that the house sitters would be staying until we moved in. That didn’t work out and in the end Kris had been popping by daily to feed the animals, nothing else had been done for a few weeks. So on our second day, Saturday, after the somewhat unsuccessful pig food search I contacted Sarah, the house sitter, for help. She pointed us in the direction of the farm coop in Boulogne-sur Gesse and gave us the names of the said ugly pigs ( Rosie, Pebbles and Whilbur) two female neutered Vietnamese pot bellied pigs and one neutered male potbellied/wild boar cross, complete with tusks. The bad news was that the pig food supplier wasn’t open on Mondays. We raided the orchard for fruit to eke out the pig nuts and hoped they would appreciated the new diet wasn’t our fault.

Sarah also supplied a list of names for the cats, so we could stop calling them the smelly one, the grumpy one, the stripy one, and the black one etc. I don’t like cats much, especially not in the house. I can’t be the only person who doesn’t really like cats….I mean I don’t put them in dustbins but, they smell of cat, they poo in the veg patch, and given half a chance they nick food. I don’t want them in the kitchen and definitely not on my work tops. No one likes cat hair in their croissants. I haven’t yet seen a successful method of keeping cats off work tops and I have have explored all possible methods, the only fool proof solution is no cats. Luckily it appeared that the cats lived outside in the barn. Except if you opened a door or left a window open, even a window on the second floor, blasted things can climb. Sunday passed in more cleaning unpacking and exploring. We found a staircase we didn’t know existed hidden in a cupboard. We had a walk around the land and congratulated ourselves on how great it was to be here. The guys borrowed our bikes and headed off in search of cigarettes and bar. They were somewhat more successful in their quest than we had been in some of ours and on their return joined us for a farewell barbecue . After copious quantities of beer, life was looking good. The stars seemed to have multiplied on our route south and we spent some time tracking satellites across the milky way before wending our weary and slightly inebriated way to bed.

Monday, before we were up the lads had disappeared off the drive, taking their monster sized lorry with them. We were on our own, fantastic. Time to get to grips with life Chez Le Moulin.

Monday, don’t you love Monday. Top of my list was sorting the utilities, getting them put into our names, transferring the telephone and WiFi over and finding out where buy a fridge. A big fridge and a cooker and a lawnmower and a few more things for jungle management. So I started, l looked through the paperwork, turned it up the other way, tried the phone. Usual thing, plenty of options all in French and you can’t tell a recorded message to speak slowly. I was going to need help. That smell in the kitchen was really bad.

After my unsuccessful phone calls I went out to address the issue of house insurance. We had already decided it was easiest to continue with the same company as the previous owner. ` I’d been in touch by email and we had come to an arrangement that the new insurance would start when we moved in. I only had a couple of emails, no documents and I hadn’t paid anything. What would happened if we burnt the place down, or flooded ….I like to cross the T’s and dot the i”s on these things. So I gathered together everything I thought could possibly need and few more things I’d been warned I might need and drove into town. While I was out David set about tackling the smell, in the kitchen.

I parked in the centre of town. It was about 10.30 on Monday morning, I though there should have been a bit of bustle about the place, but everything was shut, Fermé, no one visible on the street. It was one of those deserted French towns you drive through, dust blowing up the main road. The hotel in the main street had a sign ‘Fermé Jusqu’a le 14 Âout. Yep even the hotel was shut for their annual holiday. Right in the middle of the tourist season.

It turns out it was still the weekend. How was I supposed to know? It was a secret no one had told me. Everyone is open on Saturday morning when the market is on and then at 12.30ish, everything shuts. The weekend commences and nothing opens again until at least 3pm Monday. Some businesses including the insurance office are not open at all until Tuesday. I returned home a bit disheartened and ready to go back again the next day

When I got home David told me his sorry tale. He had sniffed, not too deeply, to find out where the smell was coming from and then having removed several spotlight fittings in the kitchen ceiling, removed a .dead rat. It had eaten through a lighting cable and electrocuted its self. It must have happened a couple of weeks before we arrived, the telltale bulb wasn’t working.… David can work miracles, he had it sorted before I came home, but he did turn a bit green. We would need to set some traps. All those blood cats were not doing their job! It’s a watermill of course there would be wildlife and there was bound to be rats, country rats are not town rats, but rats in the kitchen was not doing it for me. At the end of the day we were tired, the rat, the paperwork, the overwhelming sense that it was all too difficult. Monday was a day for tears and tantrums and wanting to chuck it all in and go home.

Luckily into all this stepped Kris, he came down to check up on us, from his house in the village. He gave me some advise on how to sort some of the paperwork; slowly and with the aid of our estate agent. And, best of all, invited us for dinner on Tuesday night. Things started to look up, our lovely hosts, Kris and his husband Steve fed us and watered us and introduced us to their friends. In fact they made the whole process of moving and settling so much easier.

I spent most of August in the jungle. At some point an acre in front of the house had been a vegetable garden. A fortune had been spent making raised beds, with mole proof fabric underneath and miles of plastic weed proofing between the beds and over the empty beds. Sadly it seems the gardener had lost interest quite a long time before we arrived. Three beds of strawberries had gone wild, miles of irrigation pipe didn’t appear to work. Hundreds of roofing tiles and metal pins were all liberally dispersed everywhere. I found a plastic pond with lilies and a pond pump that wasn’t connected, making a great mossie nest. The cast iron pétrin (dough Bowl) from the boulangerie was half buried in the middle. It is now by the entrance to our drive planted with roses and bulbs. Everything was a couple of feet deep in SAS ( Super Agricultural Shitstorm) weeds. The type that grow through weed suppressant plastic sheeting, welding it to dried out soil and require super human effort to move. By the middle of the month we had amassed an enormous bonfire pile, enough canal tiles to reroof half the house, a bucket full of metal pegs and a pile of plastic sheeting that might require its own dump. I hoped it could be recycled because there seemed to be enough to wrap a small planet.

A ride on mower was clearly not going to be sufficient, we need a tractor. The list of equipment was growing, we still needed mower and something to cut the weeds and trees and brambles, that were distributed throughout all the streams ditches and other areas that might be garden. Something, more robust than a strimmer and a large trailer to haul all the toot to the de-shitery ( The french for the Dump is Decheterie…self explanatory how it go its expat name). By day David worked out how things worked, mended things and looked for tools he needed to mend things and cleared out toot. We had the obligatory barn that had been left full of Toot. By night, he researched tractors, lawn mowers and other vital equipment. Five years on, nothing much has changed. There are an endless supply of things that need fixing, chopping, painting and building. To go with them there are endless lessons to learn on you tube, endless items to research and never enough hours in the day. Luckily I know just the man for the job.

I never wanted to ‘go home’, but I spent a lot of time that first summer telling myself that in five years I will look back and wonder what I was worried about with all the language issues and paperwork. I was pretty sure I’d be speaking French like a native and have managed to buy a fridge. I did achieve one of these thanks to LG, but nobody had bargained on BREXIT and Covid to move the goal posts and even the french don’t speak French, they eat half the words and squish them together and I’ve learned to accept that I will never be fluent….not even close, but I do know some words you dont learn in school…..

So this is our advice for those of you interested in a move to France. We are always happy to answer your questions:

France is a modern country and most things are now on line. Many are much easier to use than you imagine. They will require all your documents though so if you can have them saved as PDF and then you can keep using them without scanning every time. When doing anything official always take a copy of your passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate and an electricity bill, and a copy of the house purchase contract, ( just the front sheet with your name and the address on it.) You are bound to be ask for one or all or a mixture of these and you will need what ever you didn’t bring. If there are two of you take both your documents.
Your name remains the same from birth, so if you change it by marriage you will still have your maiden/ birth name on all your official documents. The French have one document that everything is recorded on and is updated throughout your life, birth, marriage, divorces and name changes so when they apply for something they need a certificate thats recent. . They still have some difficulty with our system of certificates for everything so you may be asked for your most recent birth certificate. Don’t worry the ancient one will be fine. …
Don’t despair if you think you can’t make yourself understood. I don’t think it’s true that the French are happy you are making the effort, I think we like to believe that they are happy for us to strangle their language. Mostly they just want to be able to communicate. Don’t be surprised if having spoken to someone in French they continue to speak to you in French, always, even though your language skills are not great. Then, later you hear them talking in excellent English to someone else., this could be the same day, the following week or even years later. I thought this was because my French was getting better, but actually it appears that its just them helping you out, good manners if you like. Of course some people will hear your accent and automatically switch to English. Keep practising, if only so you can give delivery drivers directions on the phone. There are some great Apps too like Duo Lingo and you tube videos like Commeunefrancais. I also thought people should make a little more effort to understand what I was saying, in the Uk we can be quite forgiving about slip ups but the more i learn the more I realise how a very slight intonation can change a whole meaning, so what I thought was OK just sounded bizarre, but don’t give up.
Check out opening times before setting off on a long trek to find the store you wanted to go to is shut. Seriously, big business close down for a weeks annual holiday when you least expect. As do your favourite restaurants. Many of the out of town mega stores still shut for lunch and often all day on Monday. Bank holidays are not always on Monday. They are generally related to religious holidays . Strange in such a secular state. If the bank holiday is Tuesday or Thursday many people and even business, take the middle day off and have a four day weekend. Online yellow pages are frequently kept up to date with whether somewhere is open. If you’re not sure ring them.
The post, Your post will only be delivered if your name is on the box. I tried changing this at the post office, but couldn’t. This meant lying in wait for the post lady and waving her down. She didn’t have the form on her…but the next day appeared with a new label with our names on and we got all the missing post, it wasn’t much. The post lady became an invaluable source of information too. Also Post in some rural areas isn’t delivered every day. As in the UK post offices are closing and deliveries being centralised. So you may find your post is a little slow.

Why Are We Here and Who’s Idea Was It Anyway?

Alexandra — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 11:56:18 +0000

If you visit us here at ChezLeMoulin and you are unwise enough to ask me how we came to be at the mill, your ears will be bleeding and Churchill the dogs head would have dropped off long before I come up for air….So to save you the pain it’s all here, and you can switch off anytime you like, no one will be any the wiser. Get yourself a glass of wine…

I hate sand in my nickers, my hair, I hate it in sandwiches or my suitcase. I don’t really like the stuff and with kids there’s more than enough sand in a sand pit. So when we needed a holiday for two kids and two adults with busy jobs in the grand metropolis of London and no sand we looked for something different. After we bought our first decent car and had a couple of less than successful holidays in Devon and Cornwall ( trips to hospital, dogs eating prize chickens, etc) we decided we should head south. The sun, the wine and tranquility. It was the 90’s and ChezNous’ brochure was the place to find your holiday rental in France. I scoured the pages and eventually found the perfect converted barn. We headed for the Dordogne, a gîte, a pool, cheese, wine, French bread, collecting glow worms and we were sold. Two weeks later, with a car full of wine, sun tans and memories we headed home thinking, – running a few gîtes, we could do that! And then we thought maybe we should test it again, just to make sure and so we did, then again and strangely enough again. We did it with the kids, we did it with friends, big groups, small groups, multi-generational groups. Each time it grew, from we could, to we should, to we will, when we retire.

The kids said, you can’t leave us, we love you, we want to live with you forever..but they were little. I told them when we retire you’ll be 18 and 20, you will be desperate to get rid of us….and they were. They saw free holidays and as much beer and wine as they could drink. They packed up left home and got married. Ok they were 22 and 24 by the time we moved but it took us a while to retire and get going.

At the end of 2014 my husband finally agreed to pack in his job. We accidentally sold our UK home and moved into a tiny cottage we had bought to let out. We had a clear plan for 2015: decide where in France we wanted to settle. That was it.

We booked two long trips to our Canadian holiday home, another tale if you ever have the time. February and September accounted for. March set aside, for our youngest son’s wedding in Kent. Then I booked a month in a gite near the Pyrenees, for the whole of April 2015. It was a region we had only spent a short time in and thought we should explore a bit more. We love mountains and of course there’s very little sand, lovely walks, skiing and the views. We’d done the tour de Mont Blanc and crossed the alps on the motor bike and cruised both sides of the Pyrenees but our visits to the South West of France really had been fleeting.

I’d read the books on running gîtes and researched on how to buy in France. We’d been to a place in the sun live and the Leggets open evening at our local estate agents. We even found a French tutor to improve our 1970’s school French. So I knew I didn’t know anything and we couldn’t speak the language. Perfectly prepared to settle in France!

Before we left on what we thought was the first of serval scouting missions, we thought maybe we needed a bit of structure to our trip. We didn’t want to fanny about saying ‘what should we do today’. We were on a mission to decide if this was a possible option for the rest of our lives. We search for houses on line, found estate agents and booked some viewings. We set a budget at what we thought we could afford to spend, to buy a house, including any renovation work, money to live on for the first year and a contingency budget…we’d been planning a long time and this was our hard earned retirement fund. We had an idea of exactly what we wanted. A house, 3 or 4 bedrooms, liveable not a complete wreck, a bit of stone, some beams, a bit of land, maybe an acre or two and something we could turn into a gite. You know the sort of thing, escape to the sun, beautiful farmhouse with a barn or outbuilding.

On the 1st April 2015: we headed off, full of the joys of spring, literally. For a whole month in France we decided to take everything, car, motorbike, bicycles. The gite we’d booked was in a tiny hamlet. Little were we to know, our hosts Brian and Marianne had made a similar trip three years earlier from just down the road. We were greeted enthusiastically by Monty the dog, an amazing view of the Pyrenees and temperatures that stayed around 25 degrees for the whole month.

On Day two, off we set to look at our first property. It was perfect, honestly amazing. But maybe not quite the right location, too close to the road, so we looked at another; almost perfect but the English owners had done some poor quality renovation so we looked at another. Perfect, except that the view of the mountains was slightly spoilt by a row of pylons. One week turned into two. The more we saw, the more we chatted to Brian, Marianne and Monty the dog, and several estate agents, the more we thought this was the place. We took a day off and took the bike to Spain for Lunch. This was, definitely, the life. We talked and talked, probably more than we had ever talked to each other. Usually it’s me that talks and David that doesn’t listen. At our son’s wedding he said, during his speech , that it was the longest he’d been able to talk without being interrupted…cruel but probably true. We stuck pins in maps to show what we’d looked at and where we’d been but the perfect house was not slapping us in the face. We’d been spoilt. Brian and Marianne had got there first and bought the only perfect house.

So then we thought, let’s go back to the dream. The Dordogne circa about 1996. Beautiful scenery, stone houses, large derelict barns to renovate. Kayaking down the river. Off we set to find out if our 1990’s dream would match up with 2015 reality. Known as little England, it lived up to its reputation. The property was beautiful, but much more expensive than Midi-Pyrenees, the estate agents were snooty….yep definitely a bit snooty (that’s a very middle class word, rather old fashioned and therefore all the more suitable) and the nail in the coffin was lunch. Pretty village, nice lunch but the loud posh voiced English….’garçon’ was the final nail in the dream coffin. We didn’t fit. It wasn’t for us, we felt more at home in the quieter more rural Midi-Pyrenees and we headed back South.

Our estate agents were beginning to despair of us actually buying a house. They had shown us everything on the books that vaguely matched our criteria. We had seen complete wrecks, village houses with tiny gardens, a massive chateau with the village football team playing on their flood lit field. We accepted that we needed to be flexible. We wouldn’t find perfect. Valerie, one of these agents convinced us to look at Le Moulin. We had dismissed it, far too much land and way, way, over budget, but she said it’s a buyers’ market and there’s always a deal to be done. We knew that trick, we didn’t buy the chateau, the one we could have poured pots more money into, way more than we could afford, without making a visible difference. We really couldn’t manage that much land. I’m not an animal person, I didn’t want goats, donkeys, horses or pigs. Maybe a we’d have a dog or two and a few chickens. But really it was a small holding not a garden. Eventually we did cave in and went to have a look and we liked it a lot. It was still far too big though. We needed a rethink.

I am the queen of a nice spread sheet. I like a plan, if it’s colour coded even better. I did one for our Disney holiday. Every hour of every day accounted for, restaurants booked, trips to meet Piglet and Pooh, and Mickey and Minnie. So, yes I did a spread sheet. This would help narrow our search. Three weeks and sixty property viewings, it was time to make a much-needed short list. We reviewed our favourite properties, we listed our priorities and gave each house a score out of ten against each criterion. I added up the scores and there we were. Six properties, each with a nick name that help us remember it, Pylons made the list, Polynot ( not poly tunnels but the remains of goose housing) , Pilot, yes the owner was a pilot ….and Le Moulin. We arranged second viewings for the top six.

The list went down to three. We really couldn’t decide, each had its own advantages, so we considered our position. We were heading home soon but we thought, ‘we will be back’! If we don’t buy one of these, something else will turn up… So, we came up with a plan. Property really wasn’t selling fast and we knew that all the properties on the short list need a lot of work, but we liked them all enough to buy them.

We worked out how much we thought we needed to spend on each to achieve what we wanted, putting in pools, upgrading electrics, digging drainage….and we ignored the asking prices. We put in an offer for the first property, it was rejected and we upped the offer. Still no bite, so we moved onto the next, same thing. We could have upped our offers but we had three properties on our short list and a strategy. So we put in an offer for the mill, number three mainly because it wasn’t getting any smaller. The offer was way below the asking price, we loved the property but it was just too big, too much land. It was the one property we both liked best, but it was going to be expensive to achieve what we wanted. Our first offer was rejected. We decided to make another offer, but first we did a third visit.

Mark and Sarah were the house sitters, looking after the property. They had done an amazing job of making it look good and they gave us wine and cheese and sold us the dream. A mill is a daunting task, every day is a school day, how the water flows, floods and droughts. The house came with six cats, three pigs and ten ducks and more rooms than we could count, four stair cases and ten toilets. But it had a working kitchen, hot running water and WiFi. So we wrote a letter to the owners, explaining our position. That we knew we needed to buy expensive land management equipment, put in a pool and upgrade bathrooms and make the gite work. We explained we would only make this one last offer, because that’s what we were willing to pay. And then we went home to the tiny cottage. Exausted but prepare to return to a slightly different location and do it all again later in the year.

We went walking, saw the kids and went to the pub for lunch, planned our trip to Canada and though a bit about where to start the next search. Two weeks later In the middle of a field in Kent on our way to the pub my phone rang. ‘Hello this is France calling, we have the results of the French vote!’ I was leaping around the field. We had our French dream! It really was happening. At the beginning of June we signed the contract and on the 25th July we visited the Notary to complete. We were met at the house by Kris, who’d owned the house ten years earlier and had been feeding the animals and by our furniture movers and we were here.

So this is our advice for those of you interested in a move to France. We are always happy to answer your questions:

1. Have enough funds to buy the property, to do it up and to live on for at least a year. If you are starting a business, it will take you this long to get it going. This is really the number one.

2. Getting building work done in France is like anywhere else, it’s all about who you know. Builders are much more expensive here, so if you think you know roughly what the cost of something will be forget it, it will be twice the price. Once a builder has done some very expensive work for you the next time it will be more reasonable. Good builders are busy, but go with recommendations and look at work they have done. Choose a small job, not a whole renovation project. Get your ‘devis,’ (quote), don’t forget to send it back signed and with the deposit. Once a builder has completed a small job, you will know if you are compatible. We have used local French builders when we needed builders. They have become our friends and French tutors. Don’t think it’s easier to use an English builder, they tend to use English products and these are not necessarily the best thing for French buildings. Methods are very different. There are some good English builders here but there are some absolute horror stories.

3. ‘Fosse Septique’ is the standard system of drainage (yes poo) read about it and understand how it works. Basic rule, if you didn’t eat it don’t flush it. Don’t be worried about having to put in a new system, it’s very common with old properties but allow for the cost. The rule is if you have a system that works don’t change it. There is lots of information on-line about how to do this, there are lots of people that can advise. We’ve done it, Dick Strawbridge- escape to the Chateau did it, everyone is doing it.

4. Sort out your French bank account. We use Credit Agricole Britline – they are the English-speaking branch and Okay. Not brilliant but Okay and the online site is all in French. You need to understand French banking. It’s very different, credit cards are expensive, they have annual fees. Banking charges are high. Cash withdrawal and card monthly spending limits are low, so you can easily reach your limit and get your card refused even though you have a big pile of money in the account. Cheques are still used widely, you can use cheques to pay for big things without incurring massive charges. Writing a cheque with insufficient funds to cover it is illegal.

5. Make friends. You will need them, here you don’t have the same network you had in the UK. You need advisors and confidants. We thought we were moving somewhere there weren’t many English people. We had the idea that with full emersion we’d be speaking French like natives in no time. We were wrong. We have made many great English-speaking friends, and German, Dutch, Australian, Lesbian, Gay, refugees and even some French. We need them! Don’t come with the attitude I don’t want to meet expats, we’re not all bad.

6. You can get by with very little French, some expats never do learn French. But, we still say learn the language, learn some French, any French is better than none. I’m still having lessons, after five years I’m not fluent by any means but I speak on the phone, talk to the doctor and chat to my neighbours a bit. Our neighbours don’t speak English, they have strong local accents , it’s like French people trying to understand a Geordie. We both did French at school. That was very, very far in the past and neither of us paid attention, we were never going to need it. After many years of holidays, I could confidently order beer, wine, ice cream and buy bread. That was about it. So about five years before the big move I started French evening classes, then I did a two-week full immersion course in Annecy, and we had a holiday home in Quebec. Then, before we moved, we had a French Tutor. After all that my french was probably O’level grade E. Never give up. Every day is a school day.

Useful pages

English Speakers in the Haute Garrone: Facebook you can ask anything, some one will Know, there are similar groups all over France.
Ask mother in France ~Facebook and Web page Nikki McCather is the author of ‘ What Have we got Toulouse’. Useful advise for people moving with children, She arrived with two School age children and pregnant with their forth and went on to a fifth have her last baby here. She’s done starting businesses, the school run, university applications and a whole multitude of medical emergencies.
The Local France, and Connexion France, Both English news sites that require subscription to read their full articles.
Comme une Francaise Facebook and web page, and You Tube French language , helps with all those little confusing phrases where you thought you were saying one thing but what you said means something totally different! I find this really helpful my husband finds it far too fast.