C’est la vie!

Dear Friends

I hope you are all well and had a good Christmas? I realise that it is a while since I have posted and the last couple of months have not been my best blog-wise. I hope you will stick with me as I get back on track.

When I set out to write this blog about our life in France, I didn’t want it to be an ‘Instagram perfect’ view of life here. I thought my approach would be an honest view of starting life in a new country in a crumbling old place in ‘la France profonde’ (literally deep France, but means provincial France, sometimes loosely translated as ‘the middle of nowhere’!). In the main I have done that. You have experienced the administrative nightmares, the floods and spiders, as well as the beautiful views and the fascinating finds in and around the house, the wine, the food and much more! However I have glossed over a rather tough aspect of the last year. No, not the pandemic as the toughness of that is not exclusive to us. Covid-19 has touched each and every one of us in some way, whether through illness, learning to accept surgical masks as every day wear, PCR tests or just the general anxiety that seems to have accompanied this pandemic.

This other tough thing has been the sad realisation that the risk we took buying this house has not entirely worked out (slightly complicated history as the neighbour’s grandparents owned it until the early 1990s and our neighbour wanted to buy it but couldn’t afford it). Long story and one for another day – if you would like to hear it? Don’t get me wrong, we love it here, we love the house in spite of damp issues, floods, and a never ending list of jobs to do (actually always increasing!). Risks are like that – you win some, you lose some. We don’t regret moving to France or this house, but we have some challenges to overcome and the B&B plans may not be viable any more due to this view from 3 of the prospective B&B bedrooms:

Not the lovely view of old and far from ideal for paying guests. I have hesitated to write about this but this is our reality. For now I will say that after a year of being friendly and sociable, and even being our witness when we got married in 2020, our neighbour has decided he doesn’t like us anymore (if he ever did), and after berating us for not being from around here, and therefore incapable of understanding anything, then threatened to make our life a misery! Thus far we are not miserable, but the cow slurry field is quite annoying and unnecessary as the farm is miles away.

So voilà! We are having to rethink our plans for our petit château. We are far from beaten but need some time to regroup and some ideas!

Tomorrow I will catch you up on our chaotic December, including my trip to the UK to collect my Mother, just before the UK went onto France’s red list. I have also been having a think about posts and am changing things again. 2022 will see more regular posts back again and finally some visible progress on the renovation (not just all the hidden things no-one can see). Over the weekend I will be looking back at 2021 with some of my favourite photos.

In the meantime, stay safe and thank you for reading my blog. I hope occasionally it makes you smile. We are very lucky to have been able to move over here and life in France continues. Ever optimistic and a bit of a believer in things happening for a reason (hard to fathom sometimes but…), I know we will work our way through this.

Of course, we still have plenty of coffee and chocolatines (or general fab cakes and pastries!), plus the rescue animals to keep us smiling.

A bientôt

Ali xx