I always thought I would leave London at some point and for that reason I had already started to try and learn Spanish. London is definitely not a city to grow old in. I was only equipped with the most meagre of French from my school days which at this point will have been 30 years ago. So off I trot to City Lit to ascertain what class would best suit me. I knew I wasn't a complete beginner or very advanced and said as much to the French Tutor I met there. Her response was to say 'well let's speak french now then, tell me about your summer holiday'. I gulped, bit the bullet and mangled what is supposed to be a beautiful european tongue. I got my tenses wrong and ummed and ahhed through a wincing few minutes. She took my bon mots on the chin and elegantly gave me the name of a class I should join. It must have been the aural equivalent of watching a shire horse attempt a flawless dressage routine.
I joined the class with some trepidation but as there were varying degrees of confidence and knowledge I found I wasn't that bad after all. A lot of my school french did resurface and held me in good stead. Our teacher was just brilliant. She was patient, encouraging and never judgmental. It was three hours every Tuesday with at least a page of written homework every week which thoroughly plunged my brain into gallic exercise. The trouble with not having the spongebob brain of youth is that I find I need to have my sentence ready rather than trusting to making mistakes and engaging in a richly gorgeous flow of banter. But I also think that once we are living there and the flooding therapy begins, there will be no more safety nets and hopefully I will absorb a lot more. In the meantime I have to keep it simmering away like a good pot au feu.
The most important thing for me, and it will be frustrating at first, is being able to be creative and funny in French. I try, but some things don't readily translate from English in French and can seem rather dull and literal in their mundane adaptation rather than the dazzling wit I want them to appear to be. But perserverance is all, which is exactly the same word in French, but with accents.
Saturday 22 November 2008
Monday 10 November 2008
2. the station
We had a date for the big move but nowhere to move to. Where should we go? How should we do it? Should we follow the general advice and rent first in whatever area took our fancy before committing ourselves to a property? It was April 2007.
Our friend Andrew and his father, generously allowed us to use their house in the Lot that summer. Using it as a base we decided to explore the Albigeois, an area east of Toulouse.
It had everything we needed: close to Spain, to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, half an hour away to Toulouse airport, with its own micro-climate and a picture-perfect village nearby perched high up on a rock amidst the clouds, it was just right.
Back in London Fox carried on scouring the net for houses. He would keep an eye on properties, which had its price reduced, tracking those we liked on different websites, while I checked crime rates, local taxes, areas affected by termites and floodplains. The wall of our lounge looked like one of the HQ of a military operation. We had a map of the Midi-Pyrenees pinned to the wall with coloured pins marking the houses that caught our interest.
By the time we were ready to go back to France the following summer to start our viewings we had developed an unhealthy obsession with an unlikely house: an old train station built in the second half of the 19th century (see above). It was big, needed a lot of work and was nowhere near the Albigeois, or even the Midi-Pyrenees.
But luckily it was a stone throw away from our friends Dave and Cathy, in the Poitou-Charentes. While I tracked down the notaire dealing with the sale in an attempt to avoid paying the agency fees, Cathy and Dave played detectives and scoured the area in search of the station. Within days we had the address and phone number of the owners and all their neighbours, had made an appointment through the notaire in two weeks time and had additional pictures our friends took from the window of their car.
The thing was, we didn't think we could wait that long to view it and the notaire was on holiday til then. So I called the owners and made an appointment directly with them for the end of the week. And when the notaire called to postponed the viewing for a couple of days we thought we'd better come clean and save on introductory fee. I told her I needed to talk to Fox and that I would call her back. I waited for a bit before doing so: not to worry I then said, we arranged a viewing directly with the owners, we'll keep you posted if we decide to go ahead. Her shock should have been enough of a warning but we were too excited to notice.
Our friend Andrew and his father, generously allowed us to use their house in the Lot that summer. Using it as a base we decided to explore the Albigeois, an area east of Toulouse.
It had everything we needed: close to Spain, to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, half an hour away to Toulouse airport, with its own micro-climate and a picture-perfect village nearby perched high up on a rock amidst the clouds, it was just right.
Back in London Fox carried on scouring the net for houses. He would keep an eye on properties, which had its price reduced, tracking those we liked on different websites, while I checked crime rates, local taxes, areas affected by termites and floodplains. The wall of our lounge looked like one of the HQ of a military operation. We had a map of the Midi-Pyrenees pinned to the wall with coloured pins marking the houses that caught our interest.
But luckily it was a stone throw away from our friends Dave and Cathy, in the Poitou-Charentes. While I tracked down the notaire dealing with the sale in an attempt to avoid paying the agency fees, Cathy and Dave played detectives and scoured the area in search of the station. Within days we had the address and phone number of the owners and all their neighbours, had made an appointment through the notaire in two weeks time and had additional pictures our friends took from the window of their car.
The thing was, we didn't think we could wait that long to view it and the notaire was on holiday til then. So I called the owners and made an appointment directly with them for the end of the week. And when the notaire called to postponed the viewing for a couple of days we thought we'd better come clean and save on introductory fee. I told her I needed to talk to Fox and that I would call her back. I waited for a bit before doing so: not to worry I then said, we arranged a viewing directly with the owners, we'll keep you posted if we decide to go ahead. Her shock should have been enough of a warning but we were too excited to notice.
Saturday 8 November 2008
1. taking the plunge
I never thought I would come back to live in France, mainly because I remembered all too well how quickly I had packed my bags and fled to London a decade ago and also because although my husband and I were no longer in our 20’s or going out on the gay scene, in my mind rural France and gay men didn’t mix. Besides, mummy dearest was still living there and nothing short of the English Channel could guarantee my safety and sanity.
Then, over a year ago, we went to visit a couple of friends who did just that with their two children. They traded crazy London for a small town in the Poitou, and felt the better for it. Gone were the crippling mortgage, the long working hours and the stress, welcomed were the time with the kids, the cheap quality food and wine and the beautiful house paid in full. In was work to live, out was live to work.
After a tour of the house, the grounds and two bottles of wine we were sold on the idea. It didn't take much convincing mind you. We thought about our full-time and part-time jobs we both had, our tiny flat, our constant commute, the incompatibility of our time-off, my frustration of not doing more photography and his not spending more time at his studio painting, our craving for personal space (see commute)... I could picture us, strolling down our massive garden in the morning to feed the chickens and collect the freshly laid eggs before picking our lunch straight from the vegetable garden, spending our evenings reading and drinking wine by a crackling fire, entertaining friends from England around a big farm table in the kitchen… then with the morning and a slight hangover, and hard on the heels of the initial enthusiasm for the dream came the very real question: could we really do it?
We came back to Britain and thought about what it would actually mean to leave London and settle in rural France. We weighed the pros and cons of such a move, what we would gain and what we would have to sacrifice. The obvious concern was what a rural community would make of a couple of gay men setting up home amongst them. Then there were the questions of making a living, of leaving our friends and Fox’s parents behind, of Fox learning a whole new language.
We quickly realised how unsatisfied we both were with our city life and how much the positives of such a move outweighed its negatives. In the end it was surprisingly easy to decide.
Nonetheless I put three conditions to the move: that we have access to English television channels (French TV is appallingly bad, with the exception of the Franco-German station Arte), that we live at a safe distance from my hometown, and that our house be sufficiently secluded to allow me to stand stark naked on our door steps without risking arrest.
Fox enrolled on a French course and the date for our big move was set to the summer 2009. We were taking the plunge.
Then, over a year ago, we went to visit a couple of friends who did just that with their two children. They traded crazy London for a small town in the Poitou, and felt the better for it. Gone were the crippling mortgage, the long working hours and the stress, welcomed were the time with the kids, the cheap quality food and wine and the beautiful house paid in full. In was work to live, out was live to work.
After a tour of the house, the grounds and two bottles of wine we were sold on the idea. It didn't take much convincing mind you. We thought about our full-time and part-time jobs we both had, our tiny flat, our constant commute, the incompatibility of our time-off, my frustration of not doing more photography and his not spending more time at his studio painting, our craving for personal space (see commute)... I could picture us, strolling down our massive garden in the morning to feed the chickens and collect the freshly laid eggs before picking our lunch straight from the vegetable garden, spending our evenings reading and drinking wine by a crackling fire, entertaining friends from England around a big farm table in the kitchen… then with the morning and a slight hangover, and hard on the heels of the initial enthusiasm for the dream came the very real question: could we really do it?
We came back to Britain and thought about what it would actually mean to leave London and settle in rural France. We weighed the pros and cons of such a move, what we would gain and what we would have to sacrifice. The obvious concern was what a rural community would make of a couple of gay men setting up home amongst them. Then there were the questions of making a living, of leaving our friends and Fox’s parents behind, of Fox learning a whole new language.
We quickly realised how unsatisfied we both were with our city life and how much the positives of such a move outweighed its negatives. In the end it was surprisingly easy to decide.
Nonetheless I put three conditions to the move: that we have access to English television channels (French TV is appallingly bad, with the exception of the Franco-German station Arte), that we live at a safe distance from my hometown, and that our house be sufficiently secluded to allow me to stand stark naked on our door steps without risking arrest.
Fox enrolled on a French course and the date for our big move was set to the summer 2009. We were taking the plunge.
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