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.
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