Life In 79

Anna wants a new dishwasher. I’d rather wash-up by hand, I like washing by hand, it’s simple. A dishwasher is something else to break down, then there’s the loading and the unloading, the food that always sticks; the washing tablet that fails to come out of its little door. Part of the reason we moved to France was for a simpler, more laid back life. A sort of Catherine Cookson existence, working in the field during the day, eating a chunk of cheese and bread from a piece of gingham cloth. In the evening we’d sit around the fire, I’d be quaffing wine from a pewter tankard and Anna would be doing some needle point, or singing. On Sundays we’d go for a picnic in our hay wain or help our French neighbours erect a barn. After a day of tilling the earth did Jean de Florette start unloading the dishwasher? No! After being caught in the rain, when it eventually arrived, did he tumble-dry his jerkin? No! When he wanted to know the weather, did he reach for his iPad or boot up his computer? No,...

I t is nearly a year since Anna and Stephen Shaw upped sticks, moved to France and took over the running of ‘The Deux-Sèvres Monthly’ magazine. Never having done anything like this before, it was less of a learning curve, more of a vertical line. But what had they been doing before they decided to shake their lives up like so many before them? This is their story. “ Where are you from?”  Asked Anna the young Aberdonian drama student. “ Oh you won’t have heard of it. I’m from a small town near Watford called Rickmansworth”.  Replied Stephen, another young drama student. “ I worked as a nanny in Rickmansworth, before coming to drama school. It was the worst year of my life.” And so it was the two drama students first met. Little did they know, thirty three years, two children, several houses and one ageing Labrador later, they would be moving to rural France to start the next chapter of their life. After graduating from Mountview Theatre School in Crouch End, North London with d...