Life In 79

At  the end of the weekly shop, with all the provisions packed and paid for we always hear ‘bonne journée’ followed by a cheery ‘au revoir’ from the French cashier. We enthusiastically reciprocate and leave the shop knowing that everything is good with the world. And this seems to be the case across the board, whichever supermarket we're in, Hyper U, Leclerc, Carrefour or Lidl. In a British supermarket, you might receive a 'bye', 'see ya' or just a grunt as you manhandle your trolley out of the shop. And yet on the road the French become a different creature altogether. As you pull over to let the oncoming car pass, is there a wave, nod, lift of the finger in acknowledgement of your generous act? Nothing! They drive past as if you're not even there. 'Well, don't say thank you'. The British, on the other hand, when behind the wheel love to nod, wink, wave or flash the lights at any opportunity. If you are driving down a country lane in France and meet...

My watch broke recently so for the past few weeks I have been timeless. My daily routine has been dictated by two things, daylight and hunger. When the sun comes up so do I, when it starts getting dark, I’m ready for bed, similar to a bird, except I don’t start singing first thing. The second, my stomach. When I feel a mild hunger pang, I think ‘nearly lunch’ probably about 12.15, a more prolonged pang 12.30, ‘I’m starving’ one o’clock. The same applies for tea.   When I was a teacher back in the UK, my whole working day was dictated by old father time. Up at at 6.30, in the car 7.25 (avoid the 7.30 rush), first lesson starts 8.45, etc. Maybe a couple of hours in the evening that were my own, but the rest tick tock.  Since moving to France our whole routine has had to change, shops close for two hours in the middle of the day, eating later in the evening, post offices that are rarely open, no DIY shops open on a Sunday. The year is more prominantly divided in two – the long ho...

On the journey back from the UK Anna had been working her way through a family pack of Skittles when she yelped, as a large section of one of her back teeth broke off (the offending tooth had been threatening to jump ship for quite a while). It was time for our first visit to a French dentist...being a supportive husband I went with her.   The nearest dentist we were able to register with was in Loudun, which is quite a way from where we live. To lighten the mood I offered to stop off for a packet of Skittles, but received a withering look.  Anna told me that Loudun is the dental capital of western France having three surgeries she could have gone with. We had heard stories about French dentsits, but the practice was very modern and all the staff welcoming. After ten minutes in the waiting room she perked up when the dentist appeared, a young man with film star good looks. Anna had google translated some key phrases ‘my tooth fell out’, ‘it is very painful’, ‘how much will thi...

Spring! Ahh! A time of renewal, rebirth, out with the old in with the new...a time when we get a rush of blood to the head and start cleaning projects, which at any other time of the year would be dismissed out of hand. I recently returned to the UK on what is becoming an annual pilgrimage to participate in the mother of all spring cleans. My father lives just off the M25, junction 17 (Maple Cross), you may have heard it mentioned on numerous traffic reports. It has been our family home for forty years and in that time my mother and father never threw anything out. The house is full of ‘stuff’.  Since the death of my mum two years ago, dad has been thinking about downsizing and so we have family get togethers not where we sit down, eat and drink too much, no, we order a skip and have a mass clearance of a selected room or rooms in his house. Last year it was the attic (two skips), this year it was the cellar, garage and kitchen (one skip). We found jars at the back of some of his c...

I am an animal lover. I feel bad when I run over a grasshopper with the lawn mower. But we had a ‘flock’, ‘flight’ or ‘kit’ of pigeons (call them what you will), thirty of them living   in   our barn.   The barn was empty (we don’t have a combine harvester or any such farm machinery to put in it), so we asked a friend if they would like to keep their motorhome in it, which they did. The amount of ‘guano’ that thirty birds produce is staggering and after 48 hours in our barn the pristine motorhome was no longer...pristine. Time for the pigeons to find another home! As the barn doesn’t have a door I tootled off to the garden centre and bought some netting, which I stretched across the entrance (tying some old CDs to it, so they would see there was something there).  This worked. The pigeons spent the next few days on the barn roof looking disgruntled. I felt sorry for them, but what can you do? They then got the upper hand in this strategic game of one-upmanship by nes...

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...