Manc in France

The End

2009-09-21T19:45:00.008+02:00

This is my last blog posting for MancinFrance. It's almost eight o'clock on our last day and we're exhausted after days of packing and cleaning. Still we managed a final walk to the lake and lunch on the terrace in the sun. In the first posting - back in freezing January, I asked why we were here - [appropriately existentially n'est ce pas?] and so now I suppose, is the time to see if I've discovered any kind of answer. The best I can come up with is that I wanted to change - not too much, but a bit, to rearrange the molecules, to give myself the shock of the new. I think it's hard to change by will, by decision alone, so you have to change your situation, and let it change you.

Has the shock of the new thing worked? Yes, a bit, I think. My French is better - I can now understand about half of what people say to me - as opposed to about 10%. I've had three of four conversations in French in the last few days and didn't panic or gawp, open-mouthed, just carried on blagging Frenchily and hoping for the best. It seems to work. When I walk through the village in the late afternoon, I say bonjour to more people. Dogs still bark but not as loudly. I've written a lot and sent a lot of stuff off to competitions/publishers.I do feel a bit braver, fitter, younger. I've walked hundreds of miles. I've swum in a lake. I've shot lots of rapids on the Dordogne.

Something else I've become more interested in as the year has gone on - nationality. Here I feel more connected to Europe, yet not exactly European. Englishness/Frenchness - what does it mean? If I'm English - and I am - how do I know? If Englishness is about place, home, language, history, familiarity, what can we be proud of? What should we celebrate? What should we love?

And now I'm finding it hard to end - to finish writing - to leave. I hate long drawn out goodbyes. So here it is. A short sharp one.

Goodbye to all of you who've read this - thank you so much for being with us here. If you want to say goodbye too, it would be good to get a final comment from you - to know you were still there. I'd love to know what you think about this Englishness/nationality business.

Goodbye to our petite chatte, Cleo, who won't be coming home with us but who loved it here.

And goodbye to beautiful La Roche Canillac. To all the kind and friendly people we've met.

Goodbye to the trees, the birds, the mists in the valley, the brilliant stars.

- a bientôt.
Heather

Endings and Beginnings

2009-09-13T12:50:00.023+02:00

It's impossible not to write in clichés. It's September. The leaves are falling. The year is over and we're leaving. Ah, the apple trees, sunlit memories. Sorry. As I said it's impossible. I did warn you.

This is not the last blog, but it is the last but one. As the two or three of you who've kept up with me so far will have noticed, I've slackened over the summer months. Summer visitors, swimming, walking canoeing. But now the weather is really changing - west winds, swallows gone and going. Time to come home. Why, you may ask, indeed as many people have asked, particularly ex-pats and French people. As I said a blog or two ago, French people understand the concept of love of country extremely well, they just find it hard to understand how anybody can love any other country but France. Seulement une petite joke, mes amies. And ex-pats have something to prove. That they made the right decision.
Anyway. We are coming home. Libraries. Films. Radio 4. It's our country. We love it. We speak the same language. Our family and friends are there. It's beautiful. Weather is just weather after all.

We're trying to fit in all the things we've wanted to do and haven't managed - last weekend a trip to Toulouse. Lovely city - sunset on the river - all the students back and rampaging around - begging from idiot tourists [yes we gave them money] because c'est un tradition donner l'argent aux l' etudiants as they are tres pauvre - or, as we say in English - for extra beer money.

A group of students were singing socialist songs [imagine!] in the Town Hall courtyard, in front of an exhibition about Jean Jaurès an academic and politician, who campaigned for peace before the first world war and was assassinated in 1914. The city felt full of energy and radicalism - and also artistic advertising - a field of paper flowers sponsored by Kenzo Perfume. We loved it all.

This week canoeing, more walking, looking out of the window at the turning-brown trees. Saying goodbye- not just to the place, but to this year, the idea of a year as a break in the onward rush, the too-fast pace of a life. One of the odd things is that I feel younger than I did when we came last September. I can't really explain it, but maybe the truth is that I had been beginning to feel old. It could simply that I feel fitter - all the walking up and down hills - or that cities are places where you're constantly reminded of your age. Probably the sun has addled my inner metabolic clock- thingy. A good dose of Manchester autumn and winter weather should knock that right out of me.

However - here's a verse of a poem which kind of links trees and France (Finisterre) and the British Isles. And it's by Manchester's [adopted] own, Carol Ann Duffy. A secular prayer with Radio 4 in it. What could be better. Another reason to come home. A woman poet laureate.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itself. So a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth

enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;

then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth

in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales

console the lodger looking out across

a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls

a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

Be here now!

2009-08-31T09:40:00.020+02:00

While writing here, I've tried to avoid naming the actual village we're staying in, although probably most people who read this blog know very well where it is. Not really sure why - maybe I had a fantasy that millions of people would read this and be driven to visit in hordes, overrunning the place and changing it from the quiet beautiful place it is into a kind of Blackpool-sur-Doustre. This doesn't seem to have happened yet, so I think I'm safe to risk it now.

The village is La Roche Canillac in south Correze. There are two good local websites where you can access more pictures and information about the village and surrounding area. The first is Doustre-Plateau-Etangs at http://www.cc-doustre-plateau-etangs.fr/hiver.php?men=45

The Doustre is the local river, most of the area is a plateau, and there are lots of etangs, hence the rather long-winded name - and as this is the official website for seven communes of which La Roche Canillac is the administrative centre - it was maybe a compromise title to avoid giving too much prominence to any one of the communes.

It's a rich and informative site, part translated into English and regularly updated, it includes a diary of events and activities, photos, local history and classified ads. The house we are staying in is in La Roche Basse, which is [obviously] in the low part of the village, below the plateau, on the side of the gorge, looking out over the valley of the Doustre.

The other good website is La Roche Canillac: Un siècle en images at http://www.canillac.fr/

This site includes over 400 photographs and 11 films showing life and events in the village from the beginning of the 20th Century. There are photographs of school classes dating back to 1911, as well as weddings, fetes, celebrations and sports all the way through the century. There are some wonderful wobbly videos showing people water skiing in costumes on the local lake, another of the day the cycling Tour de Correze came through the village - and the one I like best is also a bit bizarre, the 1960 annual fete complete with bullring and bull and what look like travelling toreadors and clowns tormenting a bull - check out http://www.canillac.fr/videos_346.htm Course de Torros. It also looks like some of the local lads had a go too, but the main impression is of blokes running about and jumping over fences, while the [quite small-looking] bull gallops about pretending to be fierce. As far as I can see, no animal-blood actually got spilled during the filming of this event, but I'm glad to report that it seems to have got the sharp point of its horn hooked into at least one lad's derriere.

There's a powerful sense of community and shared history in this site, not least because the larger national and international events although implicit, are kept in the background. You only need to remember the history of France in the 20th century to see the classes of 1911 and 1935 - the children's ages ranging from tiny tots to eleven year olds - in a very different light. And yet the ordinary life of the village goes on, and in the class of 1942 while war roared around them, the kids looking as lively, as naughty, as shy, as always - and inevitably there's one with her finger up her nose.

The other thing that strikes most strongly though, when you look at these pictures, this history, is not only the terrible change that war brings, but what has probably been the greater transformation in the last century - depopulation of the countryside and the move to the cities. The photographs and videos are full of fun and energy - showing the pride and beauty of this place - children, weddings, and of course, this being France, a page showing menus from the auberge and restaurant. On the 10th July 1926 they had Polarde Henri IV and Canard aux Olives. But they also record decline - loss. There is an elegiac feel to the photographs and films - look at what we had, they say, look at how we were. There is no auberge now, no restaurant, the school closed a few years ago and the few children are bussed elsewhere.

So the point of this posting is to say Viens ici maintenent! Come here now! Or Christmas. Or next year. This must be one of the loveliest places in France - with plenty of room! The French tourist season seems to last only 4-5 weeks which is a bit silly to tell you the truth, because the weather is good from about May to the end of September. Warm but not too hot, and with the occasional downpour and thunderstorm to keep it green. It may be quiet but it's not isolated - there are plenty of restaurants, markets and supermarkets within a short drive, you can walk, cycle, swim, canoe, or just look at the views and drink the very cheap wine.

In La Roche you can stay at La Clausure - a lovely chambre d'hotel/B&B/gite place in the village run by an English couple, Steve and Jo who are very helpful and welcoming. They speak English [obviously] and French - know all the local places and activities and their house, which is set in lovely grounds, has beautiful views and is walking distance from the lake and the centre of the village. It has B&B rooms, gite apartments for various size of groups as well as a barn gite for bigger groups. They also have hens, horses and friendly teenagers.

See their website at http://www.laclauzure.fr/

La Clauzure

Sadly, we'll be leaving soon - but you could come - for a week, a month, maybe even a year!

Whew! Made it back without getting swine flu.

2009-08-19T14:34:00.011+02:00

Five days in London and I didn't get swine flu, or a cold, or a dose of England-hating. I did get a lovely new granddaughter and a few days with some of the people I love most, after two weeks here, with some of the other people I love most, which is the best reminder of why, in the end, we will go home.

Re the England-hating, I went to a Vide Grenier [car boot sale] last week, and as I gazed at the French country tat, I overheard English voices behind me. Two couples greeting each other after one couple had been on a visit back to the UK. The following was the gist of the conversation:

'We're so glad to be back. It was terrible, crazy.'
'I know. I know.'
'It's gone completely mad now, the whole country.'
'I know. You're absolutely right.'
'We hate going back now. It's awful.'
'So do we. But you've made it in one piece.'
'Thank god. Whew!'

You hear this kind of thing a lot from ex-pats. I can't imagine French people ever being so negative about France. We need to change the record.

Back in the village, in this summer heat, there is still what passes for a local holiday crowd. There are ten to twenty cars lined up by the lake, people swimming, canoeing, lying on the grass. If last year is anything to go by they'll all be gone in ten days, the campsite will close and the village will go back to its sleepy silences. I used to think it was a bit odd, maybe over-rigid, the way many French people stuck to fixed, holiday periods: Mid-July to mid August - but now I wonder. Perhaps more French people actually like their ordinary lives, their houses and streets, families and friends, and don't need or want to go away for weekends and half-terms and short breaks, as much as the English. I could be romanticising here - it might be money, for instance, and there are probably plenty of other reasons.

Still, the French do seem to like their country and to be proud of being French. Before anybody leaps in, I know there is racism here, and that patriotism et cetera can lead to hatred and anti-foreigners. Of course. But it doesn't have to, and most of the people we've met are as moderate and tolerant as most English people, or at least, like us, they mainly keep quiet about their intolerances. They just seem to like who they are better than we English do. Maybe it's because they [and their media] don't keep banging on about how awful their country is.

Things that are brilliant about the UK:
- The language
- The people
- The countryside
- The rivers and lakes
- The coast and sea
- The books
- The arts
- The food
- Family
- Friends

Of course, most of these are just the same things that French people love about France. That's the point.

A third of France has better weather than we do, I give you that, but only for some of the year, and anyway, not having much, we appreciate the good weather more than the French do. We also have funnier stand-up comics - oh and fish and chips. I knew there was something.

Wild August

2009-08-06T19:34:00.002+02:00

This will be the shortest posting yet.

For the past 10 days we have had three delightful teenagers and their Mum here, so it's been full-on swimming, canoeing, walking, barbecuing, mountain-biking, high ropes, computer games, eating and sleeping. The adults have done the first 6 and the teenagers the last 3. Only joking! [a bit]

And today in London our daughter has had a baby girl so I'm off off to London while R is staying here. The village is full of people on holiday. All the houses are full. There are kids and dogs everywhere. The lake is a beach. Life's a beach.

More in the unforeseeable future.

Les Vacances

2009-07-27T18:27:00.008+02:00

Things are hotting up here. Not just the weather, the schools are on holiday, lots of the holiday homes in the village are in use and there are people about. Les vacances are finally here. We'd been warned that, after Bastille Day, the roads will jam, the French will leave the cities en masse and descend on the sea, the countryside, the mountains. The Dutch, the Brits and the Germans would all get drunk and fall in the Dordogne. R and I have been nervously preparing ourselves. And yes there are more people about: picnicking, running, swimming, looking at the views. Yesterday I even saw four teenagers in the square looking stylishly bored - probably city types! In the local towns, last Saturday, the volume of traffic meant that there were a couple of twenty second delays at road junctions. But, if this is supposed to be summer holiday madness, it's not happened yet. Maybe it'll kick off in August.

There was a village event on July 14th - a Repas Champetre, which seems to mean a meal in the fields. Actually it was in the square near the Salle Mille, which is a community centre. Everybody brought food and drink. Tables were laid out under a big tree and the Conseil Municipal donated aperitifs and drink. Lots of ex-pats as well as local French people and French holiday makers. Yet again, I was struck by the lack of officiousness, nobody seemed to be in charge, or giving orders, or getting flustered, but the tables and chairs got put out, the food turned up: salads and quiches and pizzas and pies; cakes and flans. It was lovely - we sat between a French couple and an English family on holiday, and managed to negotiate a meal long conversation in two languages. Very enjoyable - all it needed was some music but R wouldn't sing . Spoilsport.

In honour of the holidays we went canoeing on the Dordogne - 20 kilometres from Argentat. We'd been on the water about 10 minutes and R., my very own qualified canoeing instructor [qualification extremely out of date I might add], directed us across the river to a place where we'd avoid weeds. As we headed back towards the main stream, I pointed out that we were heading for rocks. Hitting a rock isn't serious, he said, as we hit it and capsised. We both fell out, into the [quite] fast-flowing water, and then had to man handle the boat, half-full of water to the side. As I am smaller than R, I was in up to my ribs. He nearly lost his paddle. I actually lost my temper and almost my nerve. There were tears. There was shouting. But I got back in. And we had a great day. From now on, he's going to wear his glasses in the boat.

Goodbye Cleo

2009-07-13T15:50:00.011+02:00

Just a short post to say that our cat, Cleo, died last Saturday. She had been very ill for a few weeks and although we and the vet tried to keep her going, in the end we had to decide that the best thing was to have her . . . hard to find the right words . . . put to sleep is untrue and sentimental, euthanaised is jargonistic and cold. It was just time to end her life to end her suffering. She was given a sedative and then an injection that stopped her heart. Unfortunately I was away and so R had to take her on his own. I know a lot of people, including many friends, don't really understand about animals, and it is true that they can be a nuisance,an expense, and a tie. I was often ambivalent about having a cat, although R never was. But you learn to love what you care for and over these 15 plus years she had become a friend. The house feels empty, boringly human, although everywhere I look: on the stairs, in front of the fire, in the corner of the settee, on the terrace, I still see her slipping round corners and under tables, a furry invisible ghost. We'll miss her beautiful eyes, her patience and tolerance, her sociability, her unconditional, unwavering affection. We'll leave her here in France, but we'll also be taking her home.

On Holiday from our Holiday

2009-07-04T15:06:00.018+02:00

I haven't been able to post a blog here for a couple of weeks - first we had visitors, and then we've been on holiday for a few days leaving some of the visitors looking after Cleo. We went to the Atlantic coast, stayed at Cap Ferret on the Arcachon basin and also near Hourtin, farther north in the Medoc. I wanted to go somewhere flat and beside the seaside. We took bikes and cycled around forest tracks. We went on a boat trip. We ate ice creams. We paddled and watched the sun setting over the sea. We went to a chateau vineyard and tasted wine and bought a few bottles.

We watched the French on holiday - being together, being organised and being relaxed. No baggy tee shirts or socks and sandals. It was brilliantly sea-sidey and summery and great to get away and to be looked after, but, like all holidays, some of it was hard work. Strange beds, rich food and drink, driving, having to enjoy yourself all the time, sand in your knickers.

It was weird coming back here. I can't say coming home because it doesn't feel quite like home although we were happy to be back to trees and stillness, the empty roads, the telly - we were also homesick for a home to come home to. Our neighbour came out to greet us as we unpacked the car. He said he wondered if we'd gone back to England as there'd been a French car outside our door all week - [ the visitors' hire car}. I felt touched to be known and noticed enough to be slightly missed, but sad that he thought we were the kind of people who could leave for good without saying goodbye.

All the time I've been living here in France, I've been struggling with two opposite inclinations - On the one hand: this desire to compare the French to the English, to search out the differences, good and bad; On the other hand I resist the idea of'Frenchness' or 'Englishness', as stereotypical, over-simplifications, too sweeping, et cetera. For example - the idea that French women are thin is not true: well-off French women may be thin, but poorer women are becoming just as fat as English and American women are - you can see this in supermarkets. The French are a few years behind that's all. Men too: plenty of big French bellies on show on the beach. Also the myth of French people as gourmets and wine buffs: plenty of people buying junk food in Champion; the French couple who shared our Chateau wine tour in the Medoc were just as hopeless as me and him were at tasting and describing the wine. None of us had a clue.

Still, visiting the Gironde, so different from Correze: younger, richer, more urban and urbane,has made me think that there maybe are some aspects of French culture that are shared and, if not universal, at least more emphasised than in England. I don't think this is to do with 'being French' genetically or nationally but in the values and ideas of the whole society. Perhaps it's to do with Catholicism and Protestantism. Or the weather. Or wine rather than beer. Or a bigger country and fewer people. Anyway here's a very tentative list of my perceptions:

1] Happiness and pleasure are human rights - they don't have to be earned.

2] Work is good but only as long as you don't have too much of it. A lot of work goes on here, things are very ordered and organised but it definitely isn't a workaholic culture. This is probably not true for Paris or the other very big cities - but France is not as dominated by city culture as England is.

3]It's OK to feel that your own country is beautiful and the best place to live.

4] Serious conversation is good. To be educated and/or to have ideas is a good thing.

5]Children are people like the rest of us, not aristocrats or royalty. They don't need deference, over-indulgence or false praise.

6] Drunks are not funny but embarrassing.

7] All men can have hair-styles and wear pastel-coloured clothes, not just gay men.

I know a lot of English people believe these things but here they seem embedded in the culture - central not peripheral.

Feel free to disagree.

What we do all day 4: Time with visitors

2009-06-21T18:50:00.010+02:00

One of the biggest pleasures in being here is sharing it with visitors – family and friends. This means that our pattern of life over the past 9 months has been a bit like the cycles of the sea: a big tide of people coming in, all activity and busyness, then, as the tide goes out, and they go home, everything goes quiet and calm again, and him and me lie on the beach waiting for the next. . . some metaphors only stretch so far before they begin to wear thin, don’t you think? - anyway, you get the idea.

Apart from the odd throw away comment, I haven’t really talked much about this aspect of our life here – mostly to protect other people’s privacy, but as there are also plenty of interesting challenges in having lots of visitors, I wanted to go through most of the year before summing them up. If you’ve visited and you don’t want to be named and shamed, look away now. Only joking.

We deliberately chose a big house with lots of rooms and bathrooms, so that it would feel comfortable and spacious when people came to stay and it has been great not to have to queue for the bathroom, or to have to put people on camp beds or sofa beds. Unfortunately this means that we are now so used to en-suites with every bedroom, we’re going to find it hard to get back to wetting ourselves when somebody’s been in the shower for an hour (you know who you are) – or (and to be honest this is my preferred solution), R will just have to go back to work to pay for a second bathroom.
I digress. Get to the point MancinFrance.

What has been really good about having visitors:

1. People to talk to. It can be lonely, particularly in the winter. French people in very rural areas don’t go out much and, although we’ve tried to join in whatever is going on, there isn’t a whole lot going on. So family and friends have meant company, conversation, good laughs and shared activities. Sometimes I haven’t realised just how much I’ve missed speaking English until I’ve bent a friend’s ear for the whole hour from the station without letting her get a word in edgeways, and that’s before she’s even got in the door. (Lui dedans speaks English, of course, and we do talk to each other sometimes, but occasionally you need to talk to SOMEBODY ELSE!)

One of the very best things about being here is to confirm what I already knew. That talk is good. That people talking to each other is good. Listening is also good, but other people are better at that than me. I’m trying to do better. Anyway thanks for listening to me. And if I let you talk a bit, thanks for that too. Make sure you keep it up when we get home.

2. Food. I’ve loved cooking and eating with people. I’ve really enjoyed planning food and cooking and serving it – breakfasts, lunches, dinners. I already enjoyed it before, but was a bit apprehensive that it would feel too much, too tiring et cetera, but it’s actually been a pleasure. All our visitors have cooked for us too and/or taken us out for a meal which has also been a treat, so it’s felt reciprocal. There are a lot of seriously good cooks amongst our f&fs – I’ve learned from some of them how to cook roast goose, risotto, macaroni cheese, lemon tart – plus the right way to eat oysters, and how good market-bought fish soup is. We’ve also also been brought home made jam, chutney, and vats of wine, so none of it has been a hardship and I think, without visitors, we’d probably have been a lot more conservative about food. In the periods without any, I’m sad to say we occasionally have Heinz beans on toast and custard. Interesting combination. We also do not make tea with proper tea in a teapot as one visitor said we should, (she knows who she is) as we can’t be arsed and some of us have less life to live and don’t want to spend the short time left picking tea leaves out of plug holes.

3. Sharing this place. Each time a new person has enjoyed the house, the view, the trees, the quiet, a lovely meal in a small French restaurant, the Saturday market in the local town, a walk in the woods - we’ve enjoyed it that much more, and our experience has been enriched, deepened.

4. Spending more time with people: days, a whole week, can give time for relationships to relax and develop. More space and time to get to know people.

5. Playing games.
- Cranium. We have found out that some people are luvvies in disguise and can sing and act like an old trooper. Also that others of a teenage disposition have never heard of Bob Dylan. My god.
- Learned also to play a great cardgame called shit-something which I now can’t remember the rules of. If it was you who taught us, please send them again.
- Boule. The girls winning.

6. Doing things with grandchildren.

- Rugby with H. Competitive moi?

- Making scones with D.

- Sandpit with C.

- Chucking dirt and sticks in the lake with C and J.

- Teaching H backslang and tongue twisters and getting into trouble with his Dad for forgetting to take the one about the pheasant plucker off the list I’d downloaded from the internet.

I could go on and on – but now I’ve probably reached the limits of your time and patience, I’ve got loads more good things and I haven’t even started on the bad bits. So in the ancient tradition of stories, I’ll just say that you’ll have to read the next chapter to find out what they are.

What we do all day 3: Shopping

2009-06-09T17:47:00.018+02:00

Just like everybody else we shop. But shopping definitely isn't the same here - in some ways better, in others, worse.

Better:

The French cheese thing may be a cliche but it's true. In this area, Cantal Entre-Deux, Cantal Vieux, and Auvergne Bleu are all wonderful.

Fruit is ripe and sweet: peches, nectarines, oranges, cerises,abricots - all unchilled and in season, dripping with juice.

Wine. Cheap. Good.

Tinned fish: Mackerel with aromatic spices in vin blanc. If you know where to get this in Manchester, please tell me.

Chocolatiers and Patisseries. In Tulle, there's one on every corner. All run by women who look like Juliette Binoche.

Small, independently owned shops.

French books shops. Cool layouts and decor. Beautiful-looking books with stylish bindings and wonderful cover pictures. Intellectual-looking bookshop owners with clever hairstyles.

Sunday closing.

Worse:

It costs more. Everything is much more expensive than we expected it to be. You can't buy a free range chicken for under £14. Right now, I imagine some of you saying if you think it's bad there, wait till you get home. Maybe. The exchange rate has made everything worse of course, but prices here are also rising fast. £18 for a supermarket tee shirt. Petrol is even dearer here than in the UK, which means everything else is dearer too. Oil, however is cheaper. How does that work? I thought oil and petrol were different versions of the same thing. Perhaps someone with a better scientific/economic brain than me can explain.

Wine, like oil, also costs less. Which means having to work a lot harder not to drink more.

No big stores. Or chain stores. This is partly because there are no cities near here. But I do miss being able to wander round M&S, John Lewis or Gap et cetera, hardly spending any money, just looking, enjoying the spectacle - what my shopaphobic indoors calls intuitive shopping - which isn't meant as a compliment. In small shops people come up to you and offer to help. You can't just idle about pretending you'd look fantastic in a caftan. You have to try stuff on and find out things about your body you'd rather not know. I didn't realise I'd miss big shops and I'm a bit embarrassed by it, but there you go. I'm here to find out about myself. I've found out I'm shallow. Can't be bad.

Books shops have French-language books in them. This is like sitting down to a feast with your mouth stitched up. Yes, I know: learn the language! I'm trying. I'm up to La Chenille Qui Fait des Trous (French edition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar) now. Only another ten years and I'll be able to have a go at Harry Potter a l'Ecole des Sorciers. Joy.

Sunday closing. Fine in theory. Bloody annoying when you've forgotten the salt.

What we do all day: 2

2009-05-31T18:06:00.017+02:00

9am ish. This is the hardest part - hard to talk about and hard to do. I pour another cup of coffee, go upstairs to one of the little bedrooms, sit at a camping table in front of my laptop and try to write fiction. At the moment I'm writing short stories. Before Easter I was working on a novel and had reached the end of the first section - about 40,000 words so far, and then I put it aside for a while. I'm going to start on the next section soon but don't feel quite ready to begin. I've got two more short story ideas brewing at the moment and want to work on these before getting stuck into the long haul of the novel.

I write from 9 until about 1pm. I'm very committed to it but I also find it very difficult. I'm trying to focus more on stories because I'd like to get some new work published/read within the next millennium. Next week I'm going to create a link/parallel blog, and publish some of my stories plus work in progress there.

The common idea of what writers do, how it works, how you're supposed to feel, hardly connects with the reality - or at least my reality. Maybe there are lots of people out there who feel inspired, who know what the stories are about from the beginning, whose characters 'take over' and tell them what to write et cetera et cetera. Maybe. If so, I'm not one of them. A lot of the time writing fiction is like tight-rope walking. It's frightening but it can be done although it's best not to think about it too much.

I try hard not to say I'm a writer. When I was a teacher, I could hide behind that label, but now, if anybody asks me I sometimes say I'm a bit of a writer. Up to now, nobody's asked me which bit. The right knee, if you're interested. If you tell people you write, often the next thing some say is, 'Have you written a best-seller yet?' Or, 'Will I have heard of you?' As the answer to both these questions is obviously no, I'm wrong-footed, a loser, and probably also a bit of a fake before we've even started on the second drink. I mean, if someone says they're a chemist, you don't ask them if they've won the Nobel Prize yet, do you? If they play football, you don't ask when Man United are going to sign them up, do you? Not if you don't want a punch on the nose.

I just write stuff. Occasionally, say 10% of the time, what I write feels good enough to send out to be published. Approximately 10% of the stuff I send out gets published. Usually in something hardly anybody reads. So, as you see, you've got to like doing it. And I do. I really do. Words. Sentences. Characters. Stories. Books. Reading. Ideas. All that. I just wish I was better at it.

And while I'm grinding away at my own self-doubt, R is two floors down in the garage, grinding away with his planes and thicknessers.

He's making wooden boxes, lovely curved shapes with impossible dove-tails.

At 1pm ish we sit down for lunch and compare notes.

'How's it going?' I say?
'Slow,' he says. 'Too bloody slow.'
'Ditto?' he says.
'Ditto.' I say back.

Ah, the creative life.

What I Do All Day: 1

2009-05-23T18:42:00.007+02:00

7 ish: Open the shutters to let the light in. Stand barefoot on the terrace and look at the day.

Cup of tea in bed. Room service is great here. Reading. At the moment it’s a Barry Unsworth season. I’m now reading The Song of Kings by him. Before that I read The Ruby in Her Navel, which R is now also reading, and before that we both read A Land of Marvels, his latest. All three novels have been brilliant – I think I like The Ruby in Her Navel best – set in 13th Century Sicily where Moslems, Christians, and Jews all lived and uneasily shared power – but it's not a dry read - it's also a pacy story with good characters, intrigue and threat - witty, rich, wise and, once it gets moving, unputdownable. The other two are also great – if you’re looking for a really good read with depth, wit and historical richness – Unsworth is your man. He won the Booker with Sacred Hunger - and I don't know if I read it - does anybody remember reading it? Have you read any of his books?

I'd be interested to hear what you thought. I used to read obsessively like this when I was a kid – following one author until I’d had enough . . . I love it and wonder when and why I unlearned it. It’s good to remind myself that the first rule of reading, known by me as a ten year-old, is to only read for pleasure, for adventure, escape, a new journey.

8ish: Get out of bed. Shower. Dress, etc. Remember to check inside my shoes to make sure that there are no scoloptery thingies or any other creatures in them. You can’t be too careful in the country. Talking of wildlife, we saw another unbelieveable bug the other day.

Here’s a photo of it. I looked it up in the European insect book

and it was too horrible to be in there. I’m planning on sending the photo to the Natural History Website for identification. But maybe there are some French people reading this who know what it is. Let me know. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that its Latin name means Devil Spawn or somesuch.

8.30ish: Breakfast with R at the baronial table. Stare out of the window at the view. Green trees, Swallows dipping down over the treetops. Mozzies already tapping at the window pane. On good days, say Wow,another wonderful day in Paradise [ you have to say this in an Australian accent.] On bad days, say nothing at all - but think, where are all the people, sob?

8.45 ish. Just at the moment we are having to force pills down the cat’s throat – a process that involves me and R first trying to catch the cat, to wrap her in a towel, avoid getting bitten or scratched, stop her spitting out the pill – all the while arguing with each other about the best way to do it. We never agree – me hard cop, him soft cop, but this doesn’t work with cats. Cleo’s illness has already cost us the equivalent of a week’s holiday in Paris – vets in France are just as rich as those in the UK. It has also stretched our [to be scrupulously fair, R’s] French, through extremely complex discussions and incomprehensible instructions. Still, Cleo is an old cat – she’s 15 – which is the equivalent of 80 odd years - the average lifespan of a cat – and we would like to get her through this year with us, even though she is a bloody nuisance. She would probably be happy to stay – no language problems, no other cats within yowling distance, fast moving lizards on the terrace and French catfood – which, of course is far better than the English equivalent. But we humans hope she makes it back to dear old Blighty with us. If not, it’ll be like that Rupert Brooke poem: there’ll have to be ‘Some [cat-sized] corner of a foreign field, that is forever England.’

9.00 ish. Sorry, this day is going extremely slowly.
Next blog: Idle buggers forced to get down to some proper work.

Petit Cochon and May 8th.

2009-05-12T16:42:00.010+02:00

Last week, we were on the terrace everyday with the sun shade up and the sun cream lashed. Cicadas chirruped. Bees buzzed in the Wisteria. The sun was hot and the butter melted. We raked the boule court and, with our lovely, if competitive visitors, were out every evening having a women against men tournament. (I don’t need to tell you who won)

Fortunately we’ve got a boule set with the rules, and as the week went by we began to get the idea and to improve. The clacking of the boules brought out our neighbour who leaned over the wall and watched for a while adding a little commentary. Probably fortunately, none of us could understand what he was saying and later he came down and we began a confused conversation about his petit cochon, (the tiny boule which the English call a Jack is called a little pig in France) - conversation which occasionally bordered on the risque, and seemed - bizarrely - to involve not eating pork while playing. For a time I thought this might be an old onomatopoeic French custom – e.g. you only eat bouef when playing boule and pork when playing pelote, kind of thing. But it turned out that the talk had slipped, unnoticed by me, into a discussion about Swine Flu. Such are the unexpected joys of having the linguistic understanding of a four year old.

A few days later, on the morning of May 8th, our neighbour was off to Tulle, the nearby town, wearing his medals, for one of the Victory day ceremonies that take place throughout France on that day. May 8th is a public holiday and, (apart from La Boulangerie, let’s not be ridiculous) all the shops and businesses are shut. Of course, May 8th is VE day in the UK, but not a holiday, not so noticed or marked. The war and its aftermath feels more powerful here, more real and immediate: terrible events happened in these small and local places, these towns and villages were occupied, people fought in these forests and hills.

There was a ceremony in the village, Madame le Maire led a small parade from the square to the war memorial where a wreath was laid and she read out a statement detailing the events of the war and also giving a message from President Sarkozy. She was careful to refer to Nazi Germany as the aggressors. There is much evidence here of the huge efforts to do away with bitterness between present day France and Germany. This year’s national focus was on the contribution of the African, particularly Moroccan, troups who landed in Provence after the D- Day landings in Normandy. All the French television news programmes showed Sarkozy surrounded by black and brown soldiers, as the French air force painted tricolour jetstreams on the sky over the Mediterranean behind him. Inevitably, one of the points of this display, is that, in today’s multi-racial France the President needs to be seen not to be racist or partial. As always, the past is enlisted to serve the needs of the present.

What struck us about the village ceremony was how ordinary and unceremonial it was. People shook hands when they arrived in the square. There were about thirty people, a few of them men who may have been old enough to have

been young men in the war. Nobody tried to

organise anybody else, there was no formal marching, no agitation about ceremonial or precedence. There was just the laying of the wreath, a small speech and then silence.

I thought of my father who, in photos, looked happy and fit before the war, who joined the air force in 1938, then came back from Italy in 1946, haunted and damaged by whatever it was he did or saw there. He died young after many nervous breakdowns and illnesses. Wars can kill slowly as well as quickly.

Some people describe my generation as the lucky generation, in Western Europe at least, not knowing war except for limited places, experiencing prosperity and freedom. We sat on the terrace today in the sun and wondered what we had done to deserve this luck, this peace and calm? Neither of our families ever went abroad except in the war. Both of our fathers died young, mine in his forties, R’s in his fifties. The war like an earthquake in their lives. A coup de foudre. Shocking. Thrilling. Never recovered from. My father would have been 91 at his next birthday, a few years younger than our French neighbour who survived Dachau. I’d like to reach back and pluck my Dad out of the past, bring him to sit here in on this warm terrace, to play boule with le petit cochon, to drink wine in the sun. We have done absolutely nothing to deserve this.

C. E. L. 1919 - 1965

Cruella D'Avril

2009-05-05T17:47:00.019+02:00

T. S. Eliot must have been visiting Correze when he wrote that April is the cruellest month. Visitors arrived, having left England in sunshine, only to find themselves under a heavy Manchester-type cloud blanket. At Easter, people in London were allegedly sitting in pavement cafes, swigging Chardonnay, while here the rain came down in whatever the French is for stair rods. We were told that there's a local tradition - a bit like Ne'er cast a cloot till May is oot -that says if you can sit outside at Christmas, Easter will be rubbish (loosely translated). Which is only fair, let's face it. And as we were sitting out in full sun on Christmas Eve . . . need I say more?

On the other hand, the trees have transformed this blessing of rain into leaves of the richest greens, the hedgerows and meadows are filled with flowers . . .

. . . the grass is as high as an elephant's eye and somebody's got to mow it. . .

That'll be me then, he said, doffing his baseball cap and out he went, no hesitation. (A tip for any of you seeking a life partner: if you want to avoid too much effort, always try to team up with a workaholic - it makes for a much easier life.)But now it's May and the sun is hot.

Next post - how we weeded the Boule court and confused a cochon with swine flu. Don't miss it.

Now for the Bad News

2009-04-24T17:57:00.011+02:00

In the last posting I promised to list some negatives . . . so here are five: if you're squeamish don't read 3 and 4!

1] Four rush-hours. Four. There are the normal ones in the morning and evening. But even in the local towns these are not exactly rush-hours, more like half hours with ten minutes of minor blockage after which the roads are clear again. Compared with Manchester, these are small beer. But, and this is my main point, in this area, they also have two more rush half-hours hours at lunch time. And people really do rush. They drive like nutters. They shop like nutters. They toot their horns and curse the drivers in front of them. This is because toute le monde goes home for dejeuner and picks up their kids and takes them back to school/nursery again afterwards. And the shops shut for at least two hours so all the shopworkers can drive home for lunch and then get back again. Of course, the good part of this is the eating en famille et cetera, but it makes everywhere manic in the middle of the day. This may all have made sense when most French people worked a few doors down from la maison, or in't fields, and when women didn’t go out to work [how do working women get on with this en famille lunch-cooking business, I wonder?] but surely they can’t keep it up in t’modern age.

Eat butties at your desks like the rest of the workaholic world, French people!

2] Sunshine but no ice-creams.
This is a metaphor. Anything of a vague holiday-ish nature is only open in the period officially laid down in the constitution as holiday time, that is Juillet and Aout. I made that up about the constitution but it could be true. By holiday-ish I mean campsites, outdoor swimming pools, beach cafés, ice-cream stalls, beach activities, boats, et cetera. In this area they are mainly all closed for 44 weeks of the year. Now I know this also has its good side. The area isn’t overrun with tourists, people maintain their quiet lifestyles and order and tradition are maintained. Holidays are holidays and work is work. Yet there is high unemployment and depopulation in Limousin, young people move away to the towns and cities and the population gets older. French people don’t seem to have the habit of going away for weekends in the country as English people do, so there are no autumn, winter and spring tourist seasons in this area, even though it has great potential.

So, if you want somewhere quiet, lonely, unspoiled, this is the place. But if it's outside July and August, bring your own ice-creams.

3] Snakes in the grass
Well - one snake. In the garden. A big one - at least a metre long. Not pleased at being disturbed so it did that neck curling thing they do in films just before they do the rattle and leap at your throat. I exaggerate but it was a bit unnerving. No wonder the cat had been reluctant to go out. We were also extremely reluctant to go out until we checked it on another website and asked our friend H, l'homme who knows everything, and found out that it wasn't poisonous. Not an adder or a viper, not even a rattlesnake, just a Couleuvre - a grass snake. We haven't seen it again.

4] Scutigera-Coleoptrata. I had never heard of this until I came here. I bet almost all of you haven't heard of it either. Let alone seen it on the ceiling or walls of your bedroom, coming out from behind the wardrobe and waving at you with one of its antennae or legs - difficult to tell which. And I am almost sure none of you have pulled back the duvet to find it nestling in exactly the place where you were just going to lie.

You should be grateful.

Once seen in the flesh, Scutigera-Coleotrata can never be forgotten. Here it is.

It's a centipede. Apparently they like stone houses, old barns for instance, so to be fair, they were probably living here long before the house was converted. They can grow up to a few inches in length, they can move very fast and they live for years. This isn't just a French creepy-crawlie - apparently they're everywhere. I got these pictures and more information than I really needed on a website dedicated to them by a chap called Chris Shaw who teaches maths at the University of Maryland and who has been trying to get rid of them for years. See his site here.

But French or American doesn't make a lot of difference. Just knowing they exist means that life will never be quite as safe or secure for me again.

5] La Poste is on strike. I don't know what it's about and don't presume to comment on the rights and wrongs but this means that I can't get the parcel that I ordered from Amazon. Stuff the revolution, comrades, I am bookless in Correze.

Rosé-coloured glasses?

2009-04-17T16:23:00.007+02:00

One or two people have commented that I seem to be a tad over-positive in my descriptions of our life here: weather, house, village, France, people – I’m painting it all as good, even when it’s raining which it is doing a lot. According to these wise and sceptical friends, I’m in danger of seeing everything through rose-coloured glasses.

‘More like rosé-coloured glasses,’ says R cuttingly but he could have a point. The rosé wines sold in the local supermarché are not strong, they’re cheap and they’re a pretty colour. Alcopops for the generationally challenged.

To get back to the point, there are a number of good reasons for being positive. For a start we’re visitors here, only staying for a year so don’t want to carp or be too rude about local culture and customs. I think you have to stay in a place for a while before you can even begin to understand les différences. Also I know some French people read this blog - Bienvenue mes amis - as well as a number of people who live or stay in this very village and I don’t want anybody coming round and putting our fenêtres in, merci beaucoup. This is not to say that we don’t think some things Français are very strange, in fact surprisingly un-English, so for those among you who love to dwell on the dark-side, the next posting will include some negatives.

The biggest change for us isn’t between England and France but between city and country. From central Manchester to tiny village is a huge leap and probably visitors from Paris and Lyon find the change almost as enormous as we do. There’s something else. Time is getting short. When you’re younger you feel as if there’s always a future in which you can do any number of things, go any number of places, live any number of lives. Then you realise that it isn’t true (for me that realisation came late, I always was a bit slow on the uptake), that the future’s running out fast and if you want to do something, better do it now. So, not only do I want to be here, but I also want to enjoy it, to see what there is to see, to revel in difference, strangeness, even coldness and wetness, to be awake and alive.

This reminder over our village cemetary sums it up exactly.

Winter trees, black berets and visitors

2009-04-06T16:35:00.013+02:00

Although it's raining les chats et les chiens at this very moment, spring is racing ahead, green everywhere, flowers like I've never seen and hysterical birds. But there are still places where winter isn't quite ready to leave and so I've put in a couple of photographs to say goodbye to the beautiful naked trees as it is possible we may not see them again.

I assume that as nobody offered to support me in my cycling epic from Tulle to Bury, that you noticed the date of the last posting. Somebody did suggest I had gone slightly bonkers, which may be true. On the other hand a few people seemed to take seriously the idea of a beret for him indoors, a proper black one, of course. They may be right. He's not convinced as yet, but I'm working on it.

The story about the English cyclists coming from Bury to Tulle was not at all a joke - and in fact Hyphen, the twinning association, based in Tulle, has been very helpful to us, in a number of ways: French conversation classes, social events and contacts. Last week we went to the spring dinner at a nearby Auberge organised by Hyphen and enjoyed an evening of food, kir, wine and conversation with people from at least five countries: France, Holland, Germany, Spain, England. People in Hyphen are so warm and friendly that, although we are only here for a year, some of the people we've met have made us want to stay for longer, to get to know them better.

I may be away for a few days as we're expecting visitors for Easter: two academics and three boys. The weather forecast is terrible. Should be exciting.

Bury and Berets

2009-03-31T15:55:00.032+02:00

Two things to tell you about today.

1] Tulle, which is the capital of the Correze departement, and the nearest town to us, is twinned with Bury.

Yes, that is the actual Bury, north of Manchester. In July 2008, three chaps, with a combined age of 175 made an heroic cycle journey from Bury to Tulle, a distance of 1210 kilometres [ missing out the Channel of course, let’s not be ridiculous].

Here are two pictures of the three blokes: one where they look heroic and misty, setting off from a suspiciously sunshiny Bury; the other picture shows them meeting the Maire of Tulle.

In case you have difficulty in picking them out, the English cyclists are the ones in the middle of the group.

This year a party of twenty is going to do the return journey, and as we’re now members of the Tulle-Bury twinning group, we’ve been asked if either of us would like to join the group. R’s concentrating on running so I’m thinking about it. It’s bit daunting as I haven’t done much cycling but I do need to get fitter. Would any of you ace cyclists like to do it with me?

If you say it in miles it sounds less scary: 752 miles - Tulle to Bury. Downhill all the way.

2] The second thing is that R’s becoming more French by the day. In recent years he’s become convinced that he needs to wear some kind of hat, particularly in the sun, as he thinks he might be going a tiny bit bald, despite my assurances that he’s still got a fine head of hair. His normal woolly[aka robber’s] balaclava is too hot and the baseball cap looks American, not a popular look round here. So he’s toying with the idea of getting a beret. I’m not all that keen, to tell you the truth, but there you go, he’s his own man. Apparently there are hundreds of different styles but he’s honed it down to just three. .

What do you think? Knitted Red? Yellow Pom Pom? Cool dude black? If you haven’t already cracked it, now’s your chance to put a comment on my blog. Please help him choose.

And another thing - you can walk from the door

2009-03-28T10:59:00.015+01:00

One of the other things I love about being in't country, particularly around here, is that you can walk from the door and in minutes be in woods or fields, out of sight of houses. This village, this whole area, is a walker's paradise. There are short walks and long walks in all directions, the routes carefully and conscientiously marked out by . . . well, I'm not exactly sure who, but whoever it is, they make a brilliant job of it.

You can start in the lane outside our house and follow the signs, and as long as you go clockwise, eventually you'll come back round again to the place you started from.

There's a local booklet with maps and descriptions of all the walks and a large scale plan in the village square.

That clockwise business threw us a bit at first. We've used the booklet to try out many of the walks and not having any idea that there was a 'right' way round, went the 'wrong' way a few times, which turned into a kind of weird but infuriating cherchez les signes game - you'd see one of the coloured markers on a tree, say and then miss the next two or three and wander miles off the path and have to retrace your steps. Eventually the retracing would reveal another marker on a tree and you'd set off again, sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong direction, but not bloody-well knowing why. I just assumed it was because I was one of those women who can't read maps, and as long as I eventually arrived somewhere, I didn't care all that much, but it drove Mr Mountain-Leadership-mapreading-is-my-core-business completely bonkers. Absolutement nuts. Hopping-up-and-down-on-the-woodland-path-mad.

Until we . . . no, fair does . . . it was he who realised, what you've probably realised already, that round here there is only one way to walk a circular path and that is clockwise. Just as some French roads only have the destinations on one side of the roadsigns, so path markers are only on one side of the tree. If you're coming at them from the other side you miss them. Simple. Probably something to do with Napoleon.

This isn't real life - just a rehearsal.

2009-03-24T14:03:00.023+01:00

As well as an adventure, this year is a kind of test. Coming to the end of one kind of life: full-time work, bringing up children, I want to see whether I'm stuck with Manchester or whether it's possible to live in that weird place called The Country. Sometimes, to find out what you love, you have to leave. If we are going to move out, away from friends, chip shops and chewing-gum pavements, I want to know whether I'll like or not. And, in order to make things even more complicated, we thought we'd carry out this experiment - not in The Country UK-style itself, but in Another Country, because, well, just because. Fun, adventure, challenge, plus helping out the banks in their time of crisis by paying them exorbitant exchange rate fees.

So how's the test going? Results so far.

I thought I might be bored, that the country would turn out to be a little bit too countrified for me, and I expected that it would soon - to put it bluntly - get on my citified nerves. There have been moments of that, long days in January when him and me have looked at each other and thought the same dark, unspeakable, unwriteable thoughts. But, to tell you a truth that many of you already know, it also isn't much cop waking up at three in the morning in a Manchester winter and remembering that there's still 6 hours to go before sunrise and then only another 6 before sunset. So yes, I have been a bit bored sometimes but actually, at the risk of sounding like a bore, that isn't such a bad thing. I'm also a writer and am having a go at a novel and the slow days, the lack of distraction, and the silence, make it a lot easier to focus, to work longer, to go deeper.

There's something else that's harder to describe. I feel more private here than in the city, unwatched, unnoticed. Yet at the same time, there's also a greater feeling of being - [and here's the problem of how to express this without sounding like a bighead arsehole as one of my Manc friends would say] - of being significant. Not important or special, but just a person, alive. Here, where there are so few people, and where the really important beings are the trees, most of which are much bigger and far longer-living than me, and where the stars and the galaxies can actually be seen blazing in the pitch-dark sky, to be just a small anonymous human being can feel [sometimes, almost] like enough.

On the other hand, let's get real. This being-in-the-country lark isn't exactly isolated. Here I am on my laptop, on t'internet, plugged into to the hivemind of the world. At our leaving party, two friends gave us a webcam so we could Skype them, while others made sure we had their latest mobile numbers and emails. Another, calmer, friend asked, with heavy irony, How many different means of communication do you really need? Bring it on, I thought.

For instance, today I've had an average number of electronic experiences. Let me list them for you:

1] Two texts, one from a friend, the other from the present Mr MancinFrance, who happens to be Mr MancinManc for a few days.

2] A landline phone call from the estate agent who is looking after our house in Manchester.

3] A comment on the blog.

4] Various emails - some from family and friends, but lots from ticket touts and people

pretending to be banks. Also at least three a day from Amazon, but they can contact me anytime. I love you Amazon.

5] Not to mention the Google ads that turn up alongside my

emails which are annoying and bloody brilliant. An email about my blog posting called: Why am I here?, triggered half a dozen ads for books and helplines for suicidal people. I also get a lot of ads for lady flying instructors. Haven't worked that one out yet.

And this village may look all ancient stone and mossy roofs but there are plenty of satellite dishes and excellent internet access. The area also has a good website in both French and English.

This isn't real isolation. Without all these ways of connecting with people, without being able to get books through the post, without being able to speak to you here, the city in me might rebel, despite the wonderful trees and the brilliant stars.

Printemps

2009-03-18T20:13:00.008+01:00

Spring is definitely here. Grass growing. Sun shining. Blossom blossoming. Supermarkets full of gardening gear and Easter eggs. Compared with Manchester, there are definite seasons, at least in my limited experience, so far. Autumn was colourful, misty and wet. Winter was bloody freezing - all the time. And now, after three days of sunshine, it's all popping out: grass, leaves, lizards and traffic. There's a kind of manic work fest going on. The road menders are mending, the builders are throwing up houses, gardeners are digging industrial-sized heaps of manure into their vegetable plots. Instead of hibernating behind their closed shutters, huddling by their wood stoves, people are driving about everywhere, we actually had to stop and pull in to let another car pass on our lane the other day - that's the first time that's happened since we arrived.

I don't want to risk too much stereotyping, but in this part of the French world, people seem to like things to be clearly defined, to be as distinct like the seasons. Many people still have a midday sit down meal that lasts two hours with the family and so the shops shut for two and a half/three hours. But then they open at eight thirty and shut at seven and if someone comes and does work in your house - an electrician or a plumber say, they don't stop for tea or coffee. Work is work and lunch is lunch. In a similar way, winter is the time when not a lot gets done, when you stay in and don't drive places much unless you have to. Now they're all making up for it, hence the spring mania.

And it's not just the people we have to worry about. Apparently there are one million boars in France and the local paper is warning motorists to watch out as boars get frisky in spring and start jay-walking. If you run one over you can take it home and eat it but I think I'll pass on that.
Maybe this is going to be like one of those cruel Northern English weeks in March, you know the kind, when the sun comes out, and you think yes, here it at last, and then it goes again, the sun and the warmth and doesn't come back again until June. If then, let's be honest. So, yes, maybe this absolutely glorious spring weather in Correze will shift back next week into three fleeces and woolly-hat weather. In a perverse kind of way, I wish it would. This is too beautiful, too definite and distinctive a season. How will I ever bear to go home if it stays like this?

Come back rain. Come back snow.

Giving Paris one last chance

2009-03-13T18:30:00.009+01:00

We went to Paris. As I hinted in the last posting, the idea was that we would completely ignore the semi-marathon and have the kind of fun you expect to have in the city of light, love and other clichés. This was a touch difficult as, when R was still in peak running condition, I had booked a hotel as close to the running venue as possible to save us both the agony of a long hobble back. So close, in fact, that we woke on the fateful morning to the sound of loudspeakers in the Bois de Vincennes calling the running faithful to the start line. Which was a bit tactless, I thought, after I’d stopped sniggering.

We watched them set off in the rain, that happy few, that band of brothers and sisters, and I have to tell you that there were a few tears, because it did actually hurt that he couldn’t do it, that the body just will not do what it’s bloody well told. I took a photo or two and then we walked hand in hand through the dogshit to the Metro.

We last stayed in Paris years ago, for a weekend. It was a bad bad weekend. For a start we camped. Can you imagine? We were in a two-man mountain-style tent and we had no table or chairs, so we kind of squatted on the ground, surrounded by hordes of Eurocampers lounging on what looked like three piece suites, who watched, incredulous, as we cooked our simple and terrible meal of rice and beans, no doubt hoping that we’d entertain them as well by setting light to our hair with the lethal and terrifying Primus stove. Nobody actually told us to move on and find our own kind where we’d be happier, but it was probably just a matter of time.

When night fell, they retired to watch their car-battery tellies and we stayed out to watch the barges passing and the stars. Or we would have done if it hadn’t rained. Actually it wasn’t just rain, it was Marks and Spencer’s rain: not just wet but sleeping-bag-soakingly wet, not just heavy but tent-bucklingly heavy, river-running-through-it heavy, having-to-pack-up-in-the-middle-of the-night-and-sit-in-the-car-until-the-morning-heavy.
Later there was the business of trying to have a proper French meal on the Champs Elysees. As you do. And then finding that everywhere was either full or too expensive. As it is. So we ended up in Burger King.
To sum up. We camped in Paris. We got rained off. We had a burger in Burger King. Later, not being in very good moods, we had a row in Notre Dame. As you do.

Unsurprisingly, we hadn’t been back to stay since, so this weekend felt like a bit of a gamble. Paris we give you one last chance: don’t mess up. And it didn’t. There was no camping, no flooding, and definitely no burgers. It is still very expensive, but then capital cities are.

We went to the fantastic Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie http://www.cite-sciences.fr/ which is huge and packed with French families out for the afternoon but which is big enough not to feel crowded. Outside there’s an enormous mirrored dome called the Geode which looks like it’s dropped in from the nearest galaxy, and surrounding it is the Parc de la Villette which is a strange space full of post-modernist follies and walkways that seem to go nowhere as well as a fairground and cool arty cinemas with cool smart arty types smoking Gauloise thinly and blackly in queues. I read that Jacques Derrida advised the architect who designed the Parc and you can’t get artier or smartier than that.

Afterwards we strolled along the nearby Canal de l’Ourcq like proper flaneurs, and looked at how French people do Sunday afternoon. Good shoes, smart hats, stylish babies and lots of tiny dogs. There were also quite a few men with those man-bags that Frenchmen don’t seem to mind being seen alive with, let alone dead. You’ll have guessed by now what Mr. Macho thinks about them. It wasn’t much different from a typical day out at Castlefield, except that the flesh is definitely thinner and the pound is weaker, and the only people wearing trainers are people running. The next day we walked along the Seine in sunshine and we went into Notre Dame and watched people taking photographs of each other looking at statues and lighting candles. We didn’t have a row although we spotted a few people who did.

It was a great weekend. Paris, you’re forgiven.

Not Running in Paris

2009-03-07T10:34:00.006+01:00

We're off to Paris for a couple of days. This was to be the occasion of Monsieur's glorious return to the running scene - the Paris Semi-Marathon - mais, malheureusement, his training up and down these vicious local hills did his back in.

So instead of him nearly killing himself in order to prove he's not dead yet, and me hanging about watching thousands of sporty types tape up their nipples and Vaseline their bits (don't ask), our trip will have to be just sight-seeing, eating, drinking and enjoying ourselves. Sad.

The Language 1: Getting my Horses Cut.

2009-03-05T17:26:00.023+01:00

N'inquiétez pas, I'm not going to write this post in French. Given my current French level, I'd need a few weeks to stagger through a couple of whole paragraphs. On the other hand I may sprinkle the odd mot here and there, just to give you the idea that I know what I'm talking about.

I went to the hairdresser today for the third time. To tell you the truth, I'm not very good at the conversation bit even in English hairdressers. I run out of things to say after about ten minutes and spend the next hour looking at myself in the mirror, which is not my ideal way to spend an hour these days. Going to a French hairdresser is absolutely terrifying for the same reason squared. Cubed. Tenthed? (Sorry, my Maths is even worse than my French.) Fortunately Madame la Coiffeuse in this village is patient and kind, she speaks slowly and clearly as you need to do with linguistic idiots, and better still, she knows everything and everybody. Today we discussed the weather, it was snowing this morning, raining this afternoon and sunshining this evening, (just like dear old Manchester, n'est pas? Except for the rain, of course.)

After that she asked my opinion of the current unrest in France: the strikes, the unemployment et cetera. I imagine, by now that you're a touch impressed at my understanding, but in fact she actually talked about this topic for five minutes or so, and I picked up a few key words, (grève - strike, chômage - unemployment; manifestation - demonstration) which at least gave me some idea of the subject. What she thinks of the situation, I have no idea, even though she told me, I think, at some length. She could be a raving leftie, or a raving rightie. Not a clue. Which is quite relaxing - if you don't know what people think, if you can't understand the nuances of opinion, politics, religion, ideas, et cetera, you can't categorise people into those you agree with and those you don't. Not only do I not know what she thinks, I haven't a clue what I think, either. Which again is quite relaxing. In response to her question, I gave her a Gallic shrug in the mirror and tried something like 'Peut-être il sera une revolution nouvelle.' She looked a bit alarmed at that, so I shut up. Jokes don't translate well in any language.

The thing about the horses, in case anybody, who is even worse at French than me, was wondering, is that I have now finally learned the difference between chevaux (horses) and cheveux(hairs), having had it painfully dinned into me by my Alliance Française French teacher back in Manchester before we came. Her teaching method was to fall about laughing hysterically whenever I said chevaux instead of cheveux or vice versa. It's a good method. It worked.

The other thing about cheveux is that it's a plural, which seems weird until you realise that actually you do have quite a lot of them, so it's the English that's up the spout.

So - two for the price of one today - cheveux cut and a language lesson. Unfortunately my French still isn't good enough to tell the hairdresser that I'd rather not have my hairs shaped into a firm bouffant style. Back home when I saw myself in the mirror I looked like Margaret Thatcher with just a hint of Nicolas Sarkozy.

Vive la Révolution! Off with their horses!

Wood Mania

2009-03-01T18:02:00.011+01:00

Wood is a big deal here. A big big deal. In all directions, we are surrounded by woods, as you may be sick of hearing. Then there’s the wood-burning stove which is beautiful and excellently efficient at heating the upstairs bedroom. The floors are chestnut, the roof trusses and beams are oak, our two main tables are made of a wood so dark and thick it looks fossilised. This suits him indoors down to the grain of his being, the root and branch of his very self. Even before we moved here, he had a slight but under-control wood fetish – we had to have stripped floors, wooden kitchen units, and, at his insistence, lovely beech kitchen surfaces which need loads of work to keep them from turning a slimy black.

Here, where wood, like love, is all around, this mild fetish is turning in to a full-blown mania.
He is not alone. In this area, every Frenchman appears to be obsessed with his woodpile. It’s the one of the key local products. The Limousin region is famous, not for wine or cheese, but for beef and wood, and of course, many people are employed in forestry and associated work. But, throughout the winter, the thing you notice in this village and surrounding countryside is that there is a constant wood-race going on, every chap with an axe or chainsaw is out in his garden, his backfield, chopping and chipping, stacking and restacking, trying to make his own wood pile the neatest, the most stylishly stacked, the best and the BIGGEST. If French woodpiles are anything to go by, we are in for a new Ice Age any year now. Or Nuclear Winter. Or the collapse of the energy infrastructure.

People here hoard wood. All the French people we have met have been generous and warm, but where wood is concerned they become – sorry, have to say it, mes amis – a wee bit tight. They won’t give it away, well who would? But they even hate selling it. Even wood merchants hate selling wood. We ran out before Christmas. Typical townies. Typical English. Foolish wood virgins. Could we find any more locally? In a place where the wood grows on trees? We could not.

We asked around. People whispered names and telephone numbers behind their hands as if we’d asked them where we could locate a crack cocaine supplier. We phoned up or called round. Malhereusement, non! Desole, non! Non! Non! Non! Eventually we located someone who would sell us a bit, not too much, at a certain price, for which we were truly, grovellingly, grateful.

The thing is that this has just made him indoors even more obsessed. He has become very French in the wood department. Maybe he’s always been French. He wants to buy a wood but in the meantime he wants to go home to Manchester and concrete over the back garden so there’ll be space for his woodpile.

And we’ve got gas fires and central heating.

Not Skiing in Le Lioran

2009-02-23T14:30:00.017+01:00

Last week we went with family visitors to le Lioran, a nearby ski resort in the Cantal, which is about an hour and a half/ two hours from our house, depending on whether you drive likea girl racer [me] or a pensioner [him]. Le Lioran is very popular with French people, but less well known outside France. I have never skied, haven't been to a ski resort and had no idea what a big deal all this snow business is. The Cantal is the next department to ours and the resort is a snowy bowl inside a ring of mountains, with pine forests, pristine snow fields and craggy edges.

It says on the Le Lioran website that there are 42 pistes: 11 greens, 12 blues, 14 reds and 5 blacks. I assume somebody will know what that means. There's also a cable car up to the highest peak, drag lifts and chair-lifts onto the pistes - plus,according to the website's English version, a telebaby,[no idea] a big air and a lot of nature.

Him and me hadn't got skis, and it being half term, there was no possibility of us having ski lessons, so, for a while, we did our city yokels -gobs open impersonation again and just wandered around looking at the hordes of people being hauled up the mountain and whizzing back down again. There were lessons going on, mainly of tiny children, only marginally younger than some of the kids skiing down on their own, apparently fearless. We also joined the other hordes sitting in the sun and drinking chocolat chaud and vin chaud, and eating cheese and chips. Can't get Frencher than that, can you?

We went up in the packed cable car to see the top of the mountain which was spectacularly mountain-ish - a bitter wind, blowing hard, spinning sharp cold snow off the peak into our faces. There's such a holiday mood at the bottom, drinking and sunglasses and clever ski outfits and stuff, that it was a bit of a shock to realise that there was actually serious weather up there. The wind became so strong it looked as though the cable car might not be able to get down again and we'd have to walk down the ski run, [mmm, sounds great], or toboggan down on our bottoms or something, but the wind dropped for a few seconds and we got down. Still, we were glad of this minor thrill as watching other people being active and whizzy began to make us feel envious and a teensy bit old. This was galling as both of us have done lots of walking, including [him not me] serious stuff in high mountains. [He made me add that. In case anybody thinks he's a pensioner. And unfit. Which he is not. Enough already.]

So next day we hired snowshoes, raquettes they're called, like big crampons, and we went for walk along a path around the perimeter of the site. It was good to get above the crowds and to actually walk in snow through the woods. I was just thinking to myself how wonderful it was to get into big nature, to be one with the elements et cetera, when we arrived at a clearing and R received a phone call from a friend. While I was waiting for him to finish the call, I thought I'd take the time to ring somebody else and tell them about the perfect blue sky and the shiny snow, and as I paced about the place, speaking, I spotted a woman sitting on a bank under trees, also on her mobile. You will get the point here without me having to labour it. All three of us. On phones. Seriously sad.

Still, we thought it was an amazing place. Brilliant for people with kids. Lots of chalets and flats and apartments for people to stay in. Nearby villages with hotels and restaurants. A relaxed atmosphere. Loads of fun and energy. R and me intend to go back when it's not a school holiday and we don't have to show ourselves up in front of five year olds, and have a proper skiing lesson. See if we can break a leg or two.

Some People

2009-02-17T18:29:00.009+01:00

Our nearest neighbours are a couple in their nineties. Monsieur is more sprightly than many forty year olds, hopping up and down steep steps and coming out to see whatever’s going on. Madame is less active, but both have been kind to us, giving us jam and a squash they grew in the garden, serving us cake and a glass or two of wine when we went to say hello.

We were told by a few people that he had been in the French Resistance, and at the time of D Day, during a major uprising which was crushed and punished by the SS, he was sent to Dachau, and only survived by the skin of his teeth. Many other resistance fighters were executed. In the resistance museum in the local town where this happened, there are photographs of some of these people hanging from the lamp posts that line the main street next to the river. We went to this museum in the autumn and were surprised to find the entrance in the corner of a scruffy yard and the museum itself, almost inaccessible at the top of three flights of steep wooden stairs. The exhibits pulled no punches, but there were no multi-media displays, no reconstructions, no airbrushing of this history for tourists. The two wars, with their memorials, are well remembered and carefully marked, locally. In November, in every small village we passed through, the Mairie or war memorial was decorated with flags and flowers. The local newspaper had photographs of numerous remembrance events. There are also many roadside shrines and markers, recording the struggles, victories, and losses of the resistance movement. It must be hard for local people, particularly the younger people, to keep remembering such horrors that happened here, in this place, on this ground, amongst, sometimes between, their own families, their grandpères and grandmères. So perhaps it makes sense that the museum is undeveloped, held in a black and white timewarp, almost hidden away. On the other hand the memorial at Le Champ des Martyrs, as it is called, is large and well-kept. The meanings of these contradictions are hidden from us, incomers, know-nothings.

In the river valley below the house, perched on the hillside , is a goat farm, a ramshackle, hippie-looking place with a dozen thin cats and a small pack of dogs which rush out barking, when you walk past. A man comes out and says, ‘lls ne sont pas méchants’ which is true and after a while they begin to whine and wheedle around our knees. The farm is surrounded by old machinery, abandoned cars, an ancient caravan with English number plates, vegetable plots hacked out of the terraced hillside. The goats plus a couple of sheep and some of the dogs come and go in a little jingly jangly herd up and down the roads and paths around the village and valley to find pasture, driven by some of the people who live in or around the farm: – a cool dude-looking bloke with John Lennon glasses and haircut, and a collection of other people: beautiful young women and men, who sit amongst the trees and grass, while the goats eat. In December I saw one young woman dressed only in layers of jumpers, thick skirts and Doc Martins, sitting on the frosty grass reading a book. The whole caboodle, place, people, animals, feels like a ghost of the seventies: all that collective-y, self-sufficiency, commune-y thing still going on here, golden girls and boys with blond dreadlocks and flowers in their hair, still dreaming in the garden.

The Village 1

2009-02-15T16:06:00.015+01:00

The village is very old and mostly beautiful, French hobbit-world, as a visitor called it: stone houses with shutters and turrets - a few with lapped semi-circular slates on the roofs that look like gingerbread biscuit slates from a fairy tale cottage. In the lower village, the houses jostle and snuggle together, higgledy piggledy, tiny windy paths and lanes between them. Donkeys, sheep and horses sometimes graze in between the vegetable gardens and the woodstacks and the boundary between village and countryside is porous, vague. All around are hills, fields and woods.

I want to describe this place as accurately as I can, to do it justice. But this kind of breathless description, these romantic stories – stressed city people coming to peaceful calm countryside; moving from speed to slowness, from noise to silence; have become so over-done – A Year in Provence, Driving Over Lemons style - that now it’s hard to write anything that isn’t just another cliché.

A hundred years, two hundred, three hundred years ago, in the UK, most of the movement was the other way. My Irish grandfather who I never met and who came to Manchester as a young man, from a farm in the Mourne mountains, told a joke which had been popular at the time – 19th Century - when so many Irish people were leaving Ireland to work in English cities, a semi-racist joke, half against himself, which was passed down through the family. The story goes that Pat and Mick come to the city from the farm and are so amazed by the big buildings and the traffic that they walk about all day with their mouths so wide open in astonishment that children throw horsedung into them. R and me walk around this place like Pat and Mick, gob-smacked and gobs open. There’s plenty of horse dung around here too - unlike Manchester today – but, and this is where the idyllic country village story begins to slip a bit, there are no children here to throw it in our mouths.

The village is quiet partly because it is so depopulated. The railway that used to come here from the town is gone. The Auberge closed a few years ago and still hasn’t been sold. Many of the houses are second homes, empty most of the year. There are many houses for sale, that have been for sale for years and years. The school has closed because there are hardly any children and so the few that there are are bussed to a nearby, bigger village.

The younger people here all move away – to town and cities – for work, just as my grandfather did: the same process, the same direction, from farm to street, from rural to urban. Last week we went to a brilliant photographic exhibition by Yann Arthus-Bertrand called Bestiaux, in the Jacques Chirac musèe in Sarran. This exhibition celebrates and records farm animals – pigs, sheep, cows, horses, goats – alongside the farmers who care for them, who produce the food that we eat and care for the land that we love to look at. One of the statistics set out in the exhibition was that in 1955 69.1% of the world's population lived and worked on the land but by 2005 the figure was 51.4 % and in 2050 the rural population will be 31.4%.

The people who move here, to this village, who replace the people who move out, who do up the houses, who stop them falling into ruin, are either second-homers, or older people – French, English, German, Dutch.

In the first month were were here, we were walking down the village street which was so quiet it felt deserted. A car came round the corner, stopped and a woman we had met before leaned out.

‘Are you settling in?’ She said, kindly. ‘We must get together when things have calmed down.’

As she drove away, I thought if things calm down any more, we’ll all be in the cimetière and I wondered if this quietness, which feels interesting and new, - so un-cityish – will drive me up the beautiful stone walls by the time the year is over.

Not Being Old

2009-02-11T17:14:00.015+01:00

My birthday today. I'm not saying how old I am which I know is a cop out but there you go. The world is the way it is. Ageism lives. One of the many advantages of being in a quiet French village is that you turn out to be younger than most of the other inhabitants. Which is nice. Mostly I try to forget about age. After all, I breathe, I think, I eat - I do all the things that human adults do - what's age got to do with it? As somebody that I've forgotten the name of said, once you're twenty five you should be an adult and you stay an adult till you die. [I paraphrase - having also forgotten the exact quote.] On the other hand the older I get - you may have noticed this too - I keep bloody forgetting things.

On birthdays, as at other times, presents are great but the really important thing is affection and connection with people I love and care about,family, friends, even those who don't know about my birthday. I've had a lot of kind words and warmth today and I'm grateful. The older you get and the farther away you are, the more they matter.

Another thing about being my age is that nobody else who's into this blogging lark seems to be within 25 years of me. I looked up other Manchester blogs. Lots of great stuff – particularly Manchizzle, Mancubist and Travels with Baby. But they all made me feel as if I’d dropped off the planet. Full of talk about clubbing and sh***ing. Except for the one about the baby. But am I really the only person over thirty - forty- even blogging or is everybody else pretending?

There’s this thing a lot of writers do – they put photos of themselves on book jackets taken years ago – so they’ll look younger. But don't knock it - if it works and people buy their books. . .
So here's what I really look like.

The House 2. Arriving. Being here.

2009-02-08T14:50:00.017+01:00

We drove out of Cherbourg in sunshine. A long drive. Caen, Le Mans, Tours, Chateauroux. Great motorways, slow N roads. Long, long, long driving. 450 miles. 720 kilometres. But the roads in France are so quiet and easy compared to England that it didn't feel hard. Good views of the countryside from the motorways and not much traffic, even on a Monday, even in towns. We drove two hours on and two hours off. Cleo slept and slept and slept. No eating, drinking, pissing or shitting. The cat that is, not Roger and me - we did plenty. We spoke to her every so often, and she lifted an ear and half-opened an eye, but otherwise she didn’t move at all for the whole journey.

The wide flat countryside of Northern France, low hills in the distance. At an Aire de Repos we pick our way through the dog crap on the grass and sit in the sunshine, drinking coffee. On the N road we snake through small towns and villages, then out again through hedgeless fields. Cabbages. Sweetcorn. Polytunnnel tomatoes.

The A20 motorway south. Fields of sunflowers and vines, then as we approached Limoges, the country is less flat, more wooded. Hills covered in mixed forests. Cooler air. We finally come off the motorway and phone the owner of the house to say we’re nearly there, but then we get lost, my fault. It’s almost dark now, and I’m tired, beyond tired, as we head out along a deserted road with no familiar signs, and I try to convince myself and R that it is the right road, it must be the right road. He isn’t convinced and so we turn back and now the signs make sense again. 21km, 14km, 10, and here’s the turn off from the main road up onto the plateau. We arrive at the village and pass two girls leading horses, a couple of dogs following, the only living creatures we’ve seen for miles. The long road twists and turns around the hillside, tree trunks and rocks flashing by on the left, the hill on the other side falling sharply away. We pass an old rickety barn on the right and then there are no trees, just space, dark across the valley to the even darker trees on the other side.

Then the turn into our lane and we arrived with the light almost gone, light streaming through the big front door and the owners coming out to greet us. We got out of the car and there was handshaking and talking, and we came into the house and they were telling us how this works, how that works, telephone numbers, setting up the internet, wine on the table, milk in the fridge, et cetera et cetera, until they finally went.

What was it like to arrive? Overwhelming. A clear night: half-moon, brilliant stars, the vague scribbled shapes of trees around the house and down into the river valley. We opened the windows and leaned out, speechless. We drank the champagne we'd brought for this moment, breathed in the French air, and looked at the French trees and the French bats and the French moon. I texted a few people and they texted me back. We fell into bed and when we woke next morning we were still actually here.

There's just one big living room on the middle floor, a big open barn space which is at the same level as the road on one side but on the other the French doors open directly onto the hillside. There are staircases up and staircases down, a huge wooden table with room for ten chairs. Two sitting spaces with the woodstove between them. High dark beams, the chestnut wooden floors with patterned rugs. The wicker settee and glass top tables. A Chinese cupboard with brass rod fastening, brass lamps, a coffee table as rough-cut as a butcher’s block – the stuffed red settee, yellow curved-leg chairs. Pictures of seascapes, horses, the Dordogne, Egyptian ruins, of boats and lemons, of grapes and old houses. The whole place a brocante-mix of French country and Far Eastern style that kind-of works.

Upstairs are bedrooms, bathrooms and office an space. Downstairs more bedrooms, bathrooms and the door out to the veranda which overlooks the garden. The garden slopes and is less a garden then a mole sanctuary: lots of mole hills, new ones every day [once we saw a tiny, snuffly, whiskery nose peeping out.] We're not overlooked, which is a big thing for people who are used to living in a city. When we look out at the back of the house, we see nothing but sky, moon, cloud, trees, just occasionally the lights of a car on the road on the other side of the valley. From the side window we can see the lane and the other houses of the lower village.

So here I am. I'm in one of the upstairs bedrooms which I've turned into a study. It's a small green room with green painted walls, green rug and pale grey branches filling the window. Through the trees are the black roofs and stone houses of the village down the lane and there's a culverted stream which runs under the road and falls down into a small gulley close by. In September there were red squirrels clicking and chattering in the big walnut trees next to the house. Now they've gone and there's nothing but the sound of the water,of a chainsaw droning in the woods and my fingers tapping on the laptop keys.

It's hard to believe that a place like this is on the same planet as the city, as any big city like Manchester. I'm not sure whether I miss it or not. Jury's out.

Rhymes, reasons and rude words - look away now?

2009-02-02T16:00:00.013+01:00

It probably hasn't escaped some people's notice [sceptics, anti-romantics and just plain naughty kinds of people] that the title of this blog rhymes with something a bit rude. It took me two whole postings to realise this and then I blushed to think of the laughs, the sniggers. I even, for a moment or two, thought of changing the name.

But then I realised that, [setting aside the sexual aspect where we won't even go], that the scurrilous version of the title kind of nicely echoes the question in my first posting: Why am I here? After all, being a temporary ex-pat could, if you looked at it cynically, be just a kind of pointless, self-indulgent . . . well, you know the word. And to tell you the truth some of it is just that.

But it's not only that. Sometimes what feels like a life that made sense, no longer does so. A lot of things had come to a stop: full time work, having children at home. The sense of belonging in a particular place also seemed to have diminished. Solid ground turned out to be shaky and some things I'd always believed in turned out to be wrong. To just go on in the same old way began to seem like just going on in the same old way. I wanted to discover whether a shift in place could mean a shift in perspective. To find out where home might be, heart as well as place. To learn to do some things better. That's part of the reason we're here.

[As well as the cheese and the wine that is. And the view. And summer when it comes. And . . .]

So I'm keeping the name!

The House 1: How we found it

2009-01-30T14:18:00.010+01:00

We found the house on the internet at the French Locations website. Many people advertise their gites there for long winter lets and I emailed a number to ask whether they’d be willing to let for a year. A few said yes, so, in February 2008, we came to view half a dozen, spending a week driving hundred of miles and discovering again what I know but keep forgetting - that France is big and the maps are small. Houses that seem close to each other on the road map turn out to be about the same distance as London and Land's End. No wonder they call us Little Englanders.

We visited five houses.

No. 1] Was in a village on the Dordogne. This one had tenants already in it - a young Dutch couple - photographers - who clearly had no intention of moving out - and who were a bit surprised by our arrival, although they politely showed us round. Embarrassing - we think the landlord used us to give them a hint. Nice.

No 2] Was a tiny two up one down gite attached to a ramshackle farmhouse and vineyard. The gite had tenants who were soon moving out -a middle-aged couple with two huge dogs who lived in a cage in the living room - [the dogs not the couple.]
The English owners were in their forties, trying to make a living from a vineyard and gite business. They seemed like nice people, friendly, a bit anarchic, half-hippy/half-Grand Design hopefuls. They looked exhausted and the place seemed in serious need of cash. Chickens, goats, cats and kids wandered about the overgrown garden. Bits of machinery littered the yard. We could tell they were desperate for us to rent the place and it was cheap. Still, we'd never have got any work done. There was no workshop for him, no writing space for me, so it had to be no. But sometimes now, when the pound's value drops even lower, I think about that place, how we might have saved ourselves loads of money, not just in rent, but in running costs as it was farther south and not high in the hills. If we'd stayed there maybe we'd have reverted to our own half-hippy days, picking grapes, swigging free wine, going barefoot,letting our beards grow for just one more time.

No 3] Was bizarre. Two houses in the middle of nowhere. Big abandoned-looking gites. There was no key to get in with and so we were forced to view through the windows. Dead furniture. Sad kitchen units. Homeless sofas. Outside a half-built swimming-pool with a mosquito conservation area at the bottom. The house minder who was showing us round helpfully told us that there was a legal dispute about the pool which might or might not be sorted when our tenancy began. She was the one who lost the keys and who also let us know that she was going back home [to Scotland] as her husband had brain damage and needed a better climate for his health. They were going back to Perth. I thought she must mean the Australian one. But no, she really meant Perth in Scotland. As I said, bizarre. Nil points.

No 4] Was ok-ish. A nice French country house in the Lot. Looking out over a plain towards distant hills, the house backed onto a farmyard. There was a nice swimming pool and a fantastic,double-sized workshop. But the farmyard was full of tractors and lorries and we imagined them driving in and out each day. And it just didn't have that je ne sais pas.

We were so knackered by driving up and down this particular map page that we couldn’t imagine doing this again, so we began thinking that we should settle for this one, but it felt like a cop-out - surely a proper adventure has to be more than ok. The next bit is going to sound as though I’m making it up but I can’t really help that. Of course I am telling a story - shaping, framing, missing things out. But mostly it’s as true as memories ever are. Sometimes things really do happen the way you hope that they will.

It was late in the afternoon. We drove along the wide Dordogne river valley, past a dam and a lake, then turned onto a much smaller road that climbed into the hills. For an hour this road twisted and turned, passing through the odd hamlet and village, the occasional field, but mostly through huge swathes of empty countryside. Empty of people that is, empty of houses and cars and traffic. Full of trees, streams, rivers. Full of all the creatures living unseen.

We came to a viewpoint by the side of the road and stopped to look. On the opposite side of a narrow valley, a village clung to the hillside. Grey stone houses, black slate roofs, a narrow tower with a bent lightning conductor. The sun cast a warm winter light on the village house walls. We stared. We looked at each other. We got back in the car and carried on driving towards it without saying another word.

The road wound down into the valley and we crossed a bridge over a tree-shadowed river then climbed back up the other side into the village. No cars. No people. I was thinking: bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell. Words let you down when you most need them

2009-01-25T12:24:00.005+01:00

The Bloody Horrible Weather [again] and the even more Bloody Horrible News.

Sorry but it can’t be helped. At the risk of boring everybody to death, yesterday was the day that one of the worst storms ever hit the south-west of France, causing floods, huge winds and tides, electricity failures, collapsing building as well as loss of life and so, even though my last blog posting was about weather, it must be mentioned. We felt this storm here in the Correze - there have been trees blown down onto roads and floods in nearby valleys, but it hasn’t seriously affected us. This is the second big weather disaster to shake France, particularly the southern half of France, in the last month. A couple of weeks ago there was an enormous snowfall in Marseilles which closed the roads and schools for a week and which had the radio stations buzzing with Sacre Bleus and Quelle Horreurs. *

The odd thing is that I wouldn’t have known about the disaster in South-West France if friends and family from home hadn’t thoughtfully contacted us through email and text to ask if we were ok, hoped we were surviving the deluge, not squashed under a tree, et cetera.

One of the biggest changes about being here is the lack of news. We don’t get English-language papers, unless someone brings them when they visit. It is possible to get international versions of UK papers in one or two shops in towns twenty odd kilometres away, but it’s almost always the Daily Mail on the rack. I’d like to think that it’s because all the others have gone by the time I get there but I suspect that’s wishful thinking. Perhaps large numbers of people who become ex-pats are more likely to read the Daily Mail, since the Mail seems to believe that Britain’s a lost cause which seems a bit self-defeating. However, I’m not that desperate, so I usually go without.

We hardly ever watch television news here, either. Although we do have Sky, we decided from the beginning that we wanted to be in France, in mind as well as body, so we don’t watch the UK news as we used to do practically every day back home, although we did weaken and watch President Obama’s inauguration. A couple of weeks ago we finally had French telly installed as a way to help us learn the language, and we have watched French news one or twice but as I still don’t understand most of it, I tend to get distracted by thinking about how much better looking and better dressed French politicians are than ours are. I’ve never got into reading news on the internet much so, all in all, this tends to be pretty much a news-free zone. Hence the shock when by chance last week, I picked up a couple of UK broadsheet papers from a shop I hadn’t been in recently, and brought them home for what I thought would be a good old news fest.

I did know about the recession, course I did. Two members of my family have recently lost jobs and others are nervous. Our income is dropping fast and we daren’t look at what our savings are doing. I knew things were bad, are bad, and are likely to be worse in the future. This isn’t Mars. On the other hand, because I hadn’t experienced the shed-load of hysteria, despair and doom that fills up the papers and screens every day, I hadn’t quite given up the will to live that the media seem to be encouraging us to do. Not having this daily diet of horrors - horrors that I can do nothing about - may be boring, but it’s a bloody sight less frightening.
I’ll think again before searching out a real newspaper. Sometimes it’s just better not to know.

___________________________________________________________

* I’m not well up on modern French damning and blasting, so sorry if this sounds a bit Three Muskateers-ish. So far we’ve only met nice respectable French people – and not even a merde has crossed their lips in our hearing. They don’t seem to have scallies, teenagers, drunks or football hooligans in this village, so I’m a bit limited in the swearing department but I hope to learn.

See: http://www.parislogue.com/travel-tips/essential-french-swear-words.html

Weather

2009-01-20T20:12:00.016+01:00

We arrived in September and it was still summer. Sun almost every day. Warm, reliable sun. We sat outside on the terrace. We happily ate lettuce – well at least I did. We said the kind of things you say when you come from the North of England. Wow. Sun! It’s hot out here. Isn’t this great. Isn’t this fantastic. Look, it's sunny again.

Lizards sunned themselves on the
terrace. Bees buzzed. Grasshoppers jumped. Ticks ticked in the grass. For the first two weeks of October, you’ve guessed it, there it was again. That lucky old sun had nothing to do but roll around heaven all day.

Then it snowed. In October. Our close neighbour Monsieur B shook his head apologetically and said, ‘Ce n’est pas normale.’ ‘Yeah, right,’ I thought.

One or two people back home have sent us gloomy, self-sacrificial emails, saying that we’ll be happy to know that the weather’s horrible there, that it’s dark and wet and cold. Et cetera. We appreciate the thought. But it’s winter here too. This is Limousin, one of the wettest places in France. They drain lakes as big as Windemere so the rivers won’t flood when the snows melt. We’re in the foothills of the Massif Central, and not far from here you can see the icy peaks of the High Correze and Cantal in the distance.

In November, it rained, Manchester-style, for days on end, the clouds resting on the treetops, small rivers running down the lane outside our house. In December, it snowed again, this time with more welly, and our lane was blocked.

Before I go on, let me just say that although what I’ve written above, and what I’m about to say below, about this winter weather, sounds like moaning and complaining, it isn’t. Or at least it’s not the same kind of whinging I usually do at home.

We deliberately came in September, so that we’d experience the autumn and winter first, so that we’d get a feel, a taste of the place – it’s hard to put into words - as a private French village, shutters battened down, going about its ordinary life. And that’s what we’ve got, although much of it isn’t at all what we thought it would be, for which we are grateful and of which more later. The weather-whinging comes naturally to us, we wouldn’t be true Mancs otherwise, but we do love it. Serious rain, proper snow, mists that fill up the valley like pure white seas: you see them coming and going. Somehow they matter more here.

Local French people seem just as obsessed with the weather - le temps - as people in the UK. Madame La Boulangiere says ‘Il fait froid,’ practically every time I go in. Mind you, she’s well aware that anything more linguistically complicated is likely to reduce us both to mindless smiling. And she’s right. At times, it is certainly froid, much froider than we usually experience in the centre of the city, even a city as poorly performing on the weather front as Manchester. Minus 4. Minus 6. Minus 8. We may be 1000 miles south of Manchester but we are are 1200 feet above sea level. I am wearing quaduple layers which is nearly all my winter wardrobe at once and it’s getting very itchy in here. In December I bought 3 hot water bottles.

We have central heating and a woodburner and it’s beautiful watching the oil level drop like the value of the pound and the logs burn. It’s a long time since I had a proper fire and I’ve missed one. This particular fire is designed to burn in two areas of the living space, which is a clever idea and also beautiful. The fire is big, like the barn, with two huge well insulated glass doors which do a fantastic job of showing the flames roaring up the chimney, and an almost perfect job of keeping the heat from coming THROUGH THEM! This is a big house, an old converted barn. It’s very barn-like. Brilliant beams, open staircases and lovely big windows. As well as being big it’s also high, full of lovely cold air. I sit by the fire and look up at the rafters. I think I bet it’s lovely and warm up there, under the tiles. Birds probably perch on the roof ridge to defrost their claws.
When we came to visit in February last year to look at the house, we met H, a lovely German chap who has lived here for 13 years and is in love with the place. We asked him about the winters here:
Does it snow much?
Nein, nein, he said. Hardly at all. And when it does snow, it hardly ever stays.
Just like Manchester, I thought. The odd light sprinkling. A frost or two. So far we have had five snowfalls, three of which stuck for days and one of which snowed us in. The forecast for tomorrow on Meteo is neige. Compared with what they get in parts of Germany, this probably is a light sprinkling. We’ve bought snowchains.

Christmas

2009-01-18T15:13:00.004+01:00

Christmas and New Year are over. I usually say thank god, Scroogishly, but actually this one wasn't so bad. We spent Christmas with our daughter, son-in-law and his parents. This was a bit of an experiment in in-law bonding. It went surprisingly well, despite big differences, particularly in political views - some of us being Thatcher and Royalty admirers and others being old socialists and republicans. The main thing was that there was a lot of warmth, kindness, booze and food. Tristan and me cooked a goose together, which turned out very well. The weather performed very well too. We also were able to sit outside on Christmas Eve on the terrace in the sun, and then we had snow on Boxing Day.There was definitely less panic and mad shopping here than in the UK. People only have the Christmas day as holiday and we didn't see any TV adverts. On the other hand there was still very annoying Christmas musak in the local supermarket. All in English, or perhaps I should say American. I'm dreaming of a . . . and Jingle Bells. Horrible.We also had a bit of local socialising over the holiday - we took a little gift to our nearest French neighbours, plus drinks with a German couple who live close by and who have been so helpful to us. They invited us to a mulled wine evening, which was our first really French evening out, although only two of the eight people there were French - two were Spanish, two German and two English - us! I will write a whole blog on this evening so more later.Now him and me are settling into weeks of winter here, mainly alone and quite lonely, of which a lot more lately. For the moment, though, I'm still working out this blog business.What is difficult about writing a blog is that, as it's so public, so hard to explore in any honest way some of the things that are really important to us. Relationships for instance. Our family and friends, the difficulties of keeping in touch from so far away, the fears of being forgotten, of becoming distant, the pleasures and challenges of seeing visitors in a different context.How do you avoid being so careful that the writing becomes bland and boring?How do you write honestly without breaching your own or other people's privacy?I'd appreciate your views if there's anybody out there.

Precious Time Slipping Away

2009-01-16T16:52:00.007+01:00

I should have started this blog in September. Now it’s already January, we’ve been here for four months already, so much has happened, already those first impressions are slipping away and I’ll never catch up. So I’m not going to try. This blog won’t be a perfect record, a diary of events which could get repetitious anyway, but a pick and mix, the things that seem important to me, plus anything else that comes up. I’d like to focus on specific aspects of being here so I’ve made a list of titles to keep them in mind and I’ll be trying to cover them in the next few weeks. Here’s the list so far:
The weather
The house
The village we live in
People
The language
The wood and the trees
How we spend our time
What we miss
Food
The surrounding area – countryside and towns
What we don’t miss
Animals
Shopping

This list business could get out of control, so I’ll stop there for the moment. I may not manage to cover all of the headings, and some may merge into others, but, hey, at the moment, I don’t even know if anyone else out there is reading this.

Next post: The weather.

Why am I here?

2009-01-07T16:08:00.007+01:00

Look, I said to him, we’ve lived all our lives in just one place, one northerly, wet and bloody-minded city. Wandered the same streets, seen it change from a place with a shoe shop, a hardware store and one estate agent into another place with cafe-bars, charity shops and estate agents in double figures. Woman and girl, man and boy, kitten and cat, all spent beneath the same beloved but snot-coloured sky. Jobs ended. We’ve got small incomes, but more than enough. Time to cast off the mind-forged manacles. We need a shake-up. An adventure, I said.

So here we are. In France. Limousin. The Correze. In a big cold house which feels as though it’s wedged into a crack, a crevice above the valley on the hillside, my window looking out through black winter trees at old snow on village roofs.

All we have here is a foothold, a toehold really. The house is ours just for one year, rented from an English couple who live in Cornwall, and our place back in Manchester is let out to tenants for the same period. A year in France. Me, him and Cleo the cat. We’re not looking for an old barn of our own to do up. We’re not looking for a second home, we couldn’t afford it, and anyway, one house is bloody hard work to maintain, so why have two?

So what are we here for exactly? Good question. Anybody round here know the answer