The day after the incident with the text message and shortly after DS was stung by a hornet, I was chatting to our neighbour (voisine) – “M” – who kindly invited us to join her the next afternoon when she was expecting a visit from a friend. Together they were going pick the pears that…
It happened. James said it would sooner or later. I was always more optimistic but now the shine has come come off and I’m awake to it. It started because I tried to buy a secondhand bike. DD is now well into her third year and I’m wracking my brains trying to think up interesting…
We’ve just returned from an exploratory trip (holiday, of sorts) from the Charente and Limousin areas where we discovered there were houses with the kinds of specs we were looking for for sale within our price range. Having stumbled upon a few potential properties a couple of weeks ago we decided it would be good…
Oh, it’s been a long week. Plan A was always to buy a small house with a large garden but when we arrived all the properties we saw were so terrible we decided to investigate building instead. Plan B. That all seemed straight forward – we’d buy land, live in a van onsite, etc. –…
Something I hadn’t considered at all when moving was that there might be different attitudes to health outside of the UK. A different language and culture I expected, or course, but as far as health goes I’d generally heard that the French have an excellent (albeit not free) healthcare system and as such had no…
When we agreed with the owners to take this place that we’d previously rented during holidays in June and September, both nice warm months, we were warned by our neighbour, Marie, who we know from those holidays, that it wasn’t very warm or well insulated and that winters here could be pretty hard. We shrugged…
While we’re in no way religious, Christmas has always been a special holiday for me. I think it goes back to my University years, when I looked forward to coming home, meeting up with old school friends who had gone our separate ways and also, of course, reconnecting with family. Since settling down the draw…
I’ve got a bad case of the blues today. Why? Well, this whole property search seems to be all highs and lows and sometimes it’s hard to maintain any optimism. Then something new comes up, something we like, somewhere we can envisage making our home, and that is usually the point where we find a…
As of today we’ve been here three whole months. Wow, the time has flown. I was so relieved just to be leaving at last after a really quite difficult three months leading up to the actual move (DS was only two months old when James started cracking the “we need to pack up the house!!!” whip)…
This was supposed to be a post about how easy we were finding the whole process of registering the car with French plates. First we collected the necessary paperwork, then we went to the Sous-Préfecture in Limoux, which is basically an administrative office similar to a town council office back in England, where we were given…