Welcome to France! And now for a crash course in not getting things done.

One of the criticisms often bandied about the UK’s nearest neighbour is that it takes a long time to get anything done. By coincidence, one of DD’s favourite movies is the Muppets: Most Wanted, which parodies this stereotype brilliantly with a detective who downs tools for a long lunch and then goes on a 3-month holiday. Anyway, as if to welcome us in true French style and ensure we set our expectations low, we were treated to our first taste of this on our very first full day here.

Before we arrived we had arranged with the gite owner two prices: one for the place with and another for without Internet. Suspecting that we wouldn’t have fixed line Internet we’d done some research and found some fairly reliable and potentially inexpensive, at least comparable to £50 per month, mobile alternatives. However, a 4G LTE solution that would be temporary and fairly immediate to set up while also providing enough data for us to get our work done would have set us back of 100 euros a month, as a French bank account is usually needed for the more sensibly priced solutions, with month-by-month plans targeted more at tourists, so having a fixed line installed and running bog standard ADSL or, ideally, VDSL Internet was definitely preferrable. So we were pleased when the gite owner e-mailed me in the week we were moving out here to say that Internet was going in on the day we were arriving, which would mean fully operational Wi-Fi. Yay! Yes, it was going to cost us a little more but it was definitely the low-hassle option. So that was the Internet issues dealt with.

Next up was heating. We’d taken this particular gite over the winter on the basis of it having a wood burner installed, as we didn’t fancy spending the winter here without one. The owner assured us they were putting one in, so we were happy enough that at least we’d be warm; we’d manage without Netflix but heat was not something we were going to compromise on given the proximity to the mountains. So imagine our delight when we turned up to no Internet and – yes, you’ve guessed it – no woodburner!

But it was all fine and under control, apparently. Debbie, the property manager, explained that the telecoms engineer would be arriving at 2pm on the day we were expecting to collect our cats to finish the installing the phone line. At roughly 3.30pm the telecoms guy turned up. By 5pm the cable was installed but no Internet – actually the line wasn’t working at all; for that to happen Orange needed to do something and then someone else, maybe him again, would come in to finish the job. At some point int he future. Obviously he gave no indication of when either of those things could or will happen but gave a very definite shrug of the shoulders.

And the woodburner? Well, they ordered it over a month ago and it was due to arrive “on Friday”. The big question seemed to be, which Friday!? No-one seemed to know. It seemed that at some point, most likely on a Friday, the woodburner would arrive. In the mean time we should expect a guy to come round to cap off the chimney to prevent the forecast rain dripping into the living room. True to form, said guy never showed up, so we spent the first week, when it rained and then some, with buckets and a plastic sheet adorning the floor under the gaping hole that was the chimney for said missing stove. Then there was the question of whether the woodburner arriving at the shop would translate into the woodburner being installed. We suspected not but we were proved wrong and, yes, by virtue of having been here just over a month, we are lucky enough that the woodburner has now been installed and bar a few technical hitches (like the self-assemble handle just falling off) we have heat, which is nice on the cooler evenings.

The phone line on the other hand? Well, that is a tale that rumbles on with no end in sight. If you’re reading this (or any posts I’ve made since we arrived) the chances are I posted them while sitting on this step outside a neighbour’s house, thanks to the generous “loan” of his Wi-Fi password, but people are generous here, so it’s worth the wait and also gives us something to talk about every time they leave the house and find one of us sitting outside – and I can think of worse places to sit. Welcome to France!