I'm in England now, so that Small can see her Father, and I can see the Teenager. That's the thing about living in France, for me, having to come back to England a lot. When I do I'm not sure who I am anymore, and where I actually live, and where I like best. And also, the day before I fly, BF and I generally fall out, badly, at midnight so there's an added frission of stress and upset and a vague depressing feeling of having been here before, and not in a good way.

In England, unlike chilly France, the sky is blue, and so at first I'm jolly glad to be here away from the cold and rain, and endless domestic chores of France. Here I'm just an almost single bod gadding about, ping ponging between different sets of friends, a bit of a nomad with a bag over my shoulder.

At the Ex's house to pick up the Teenager so that I can be a Macdonalds Mum for the afternoon (actually slightly more sophisticated now - a shopping Mum), I see my ex sister and brother in law. It's the first time I've seen them in 7 years, before then it was nearly twenty years of hanging out together. They're lovely as always, and we're all pleased to see each other, but it's uncomfortable exchanging news in front of the ex, and so we all stand awkwardly around on the sunny pavement. The kids just look on,Small looking glum because 1. she is missing me and seeing me reminds her or (possibly more likely) 2. she is having a ball in England with her Dad and second family, and doesn't want to be reminded that she's torn between two homes and two countries - a feeling she only gets when she comes back to England. In France she's a little French girl happily charging round on her bike and riding horses and generally being fine and a bit French.

Away from my ex family and my ex life, no one in England seems that cheerful, and no wonder. The endless drone of financial ruin is everywhere and getting on everyones nerves, and it feels as if everyone is under the cosh in some way, standing on the edge of a precipace not knowing if they're going to fall, or be pushed or walk away unscathed. Meanwhile the wretched media, having battered everyone into the ground with tales of woe and disater and hardship is now saying it all might get better - too little, too late.

I feel like I need another adventure, and I still haven't got a horse, so part of me wants to sell up in France and buy a farm in England. Not my most practical thought, and since I haven't actually won the lottery and still have no desire to sign up for TV work again, I'll probably have to give up on the thought before it takes root.

What do I miss? My old life, the fact that friends and family are a drive away, the English countryside, warm houses, knowing my way around. Being able to chat without feeling like an idiot who will never get the hang of a new language.

After five days Small and I get back on a plane, early in the morning, Small in tears as she says goodbye to her Dad. I didn't get long enough she sobs, I miss my Dad, as the plane lifts and soars through a clear bright blue emptiness. I feel wretched, the cause of all the anguish.Nor did I, I think, not time enough or home enough.

Laughing Ducks and the Languedoc

It’s one of those days. I’ve been on the go since 6 this morning – the Thursday French lesson for four hours at Teenage Daughters school, making lunch for everyone - builders, kids, BF, me - clearing up, driving all over the Languedoc to find the colour, digging the garden to get it ready to sow for grass, making the supper, dealing with difficult renting issues in England, at both our holiday cottage in Cornwall, and our flat-which-should-be-sold by now, sympathising with Teenage Daughter who has problems at school because some kids are being horrible to the English kids, washing up the supper, tidying up, going to buy a bottle of wine because BF (I hate drinking, he says) has just scarfed the end of the rose. Apart from the sunshine, it’s not a day I have enjoyed much and then to put the final finish to it, BF and I have a row and go to bed, and then I can’t sleep because the small amount of not very good white wine I have drunk is galloshing around, and I wish I hadn't drunk it.Next morning at 7.30 am, there are five men at the gite, it’s bright sunshine, and I make them all tea and coffee. The girls go off to school. We look again at the colour on the restaurant and the Lurcher tips some pigment in the mixer and off we go. 'It’s very difficult to get the colour right like this' says our Macedonian , shaking his head sadly, 'very difficult'. But we mix up two batches, and surprizingly, first time it looks great. I am elated. It will go well! It's all going to work! Then we put the coloured render on the wall, and it still looks great. Then the render is smoothed out and as it is smoothed, it goes muddy and grey, right before our eyes. That’s horrible says BF. The Lurcher and I try various mixes, various colours. Whatever we do, it still looks horrible. Then we realise that the reason it's going from soft peachy yellow to horrible is because the tiny black stones in the sand, which no one had noticed before, come to the front when the mixture is smoothed onto the wall, turning the colour to a murky muddy dirty yellow. "You should have got the paint, Tonne Pierre" says the Lurcher "thats what you want", then "you don’t know what you want". "I do know what I want" I say, (near tears), "I want that colour over there. – I’ve always wanted that colour over there". I point at the restaurant opposite, as I did when we first agreed the job . BF doesn't say anything, just comes up and stands behind me, towering over us both 'Well you won’t get it like this" says the Lurcher, and calls the boys off and takes them all home so he doesn’t need to pay them, promising to be back shortly. It's not yet 10 oclock. 'We need white sand, without bits in it,' say BF and our Macedonian, before they go back to the rest of the work on the gite - sanding beams, finishing walls. So I career off in a hot car again, the dog at my side, in search of some sand which doesn’t have little black bits in, and predictably enough the Lurcher doesn't come back, probably going to the pub, which I reflect, grumpily, is where I'd like to be. The sand turns out to be six miles up the road, so it's only seven return journeys with a trailer to get what we need, to replace the sand with gritty bits in that we've already dumped in a pile in the yard. Then all we’ve got to do is sieve the three tones of white sand by hand to get the grit out so that we finally end up with the fine white we really need, which BF does, as the lads lean on spades and watch. Then it's only another hot week of full on work for the whole team to put it on, and then it's done. And our gite is transformed. It's a pale lovely yellow, slowly coming alive in front of us. At the end of the week we give the lads beer and wine, and we raise a glass as the sun glints on the canal, and the boats glide by in the soft South of France early evening light, and we look at our peachy colour which isn’t really the same as the restaurant opposite but pretty nice anyway, and for a moment we think we know why we are here, and it’s all worthwhile.

July 08

(1594 words)

Apart from the chap who said he was a builder but turned out to be a con man, we like all our builders. There’s the woodman and the Macedonian, and Craig, in love with a dark eyed part Spanish part French woman. There’s Pierced Jimmy, descended from the Cathares, and a silent Frenchman whose wife brings him on a scooter and stays all day, watching and waiting.

Then there’s Lurch, who we've trusted with the final rendering of the gite we’re much too lovingly restoring.

The Lurcher has a dark haired woman tattooed above his wrist. "she told me that she always wanted to be on my arm, so that night I got a tattoo, and now she is", he's already knocked through the windows on our gite, and now we're finishing the outside. At last. We’re more than three months behind now, one of them due to waiting for the permission to do the work, one due to the con man and one of them partly due to Lurch. Because although he works hard long days in the scorching summer heat, regularly putting in weekends, he then blows his brownie points by not turning up for days on end. We know now that if he's not here, red eyed and shaking, at eight in the morning, he won't be coming. But he does a great job, and we like him, and now that he’s actually started the render he has a team working with him and so he’s here on the button every day.

Lurch and I are having lots of discussions about colour. We’ve already had lots of discussions about colour. It’s important, because, obviously, it’s on the front of the building. Apart from whether we like it, we’re bang in the middle of the village, by the famous bridge, so the marie have to like it too.

So Lurch and I have talked over what we want, for three months now. Right at the beginning, we showed him the restaurant opposite and said, we want it to be like that. It has to be like this because the Architects at Batiments de France and the Marie have told us (or not actually told us, but not actually told us that we can’t, which is the way it works in France) it is the colour they want. Lurch has told me, reassured me, again and again, that it’s no problem, that he has done it lots of times before and he wil give me exactly the colour and texture as the restaurant opposite.

So, it’s all fine until the day before work begins, when I say, as arranged, shall we go and pick up the colour? Lurch looks startled, then worried and shaky, takes a long drag on his roll up, and says 'I’ve got cement drying, and I can’t'. It's the hottest day of the year so far. Cement won't so much dry fast as incinerate.

'OK', I say, taking a deep, already slightly bothered, breath, 'I'll go, what should I get, how much should I get?" . I know now never to expect anything to be simple in France, if you do, you’re in for a tough time. Lurch looks worried and shaky all over again, and explains a bit. My heart sinks. I know that I will go to the builders merchants he suggests, and I will ask them, in (very) bad French for what I think we want, and they probably won’t understand me, and even if they do, if they don’t have what we need, I will be stuffed, because they will give me directions,very helpfully but very fast, to where I need to go, which I won’t be able to understand. especially given that I probably wouldn't have understood even in English because directions just aren't my strong point.

In the end we decide that Pierced Jimmy should come with me, and we trek off with the dog in the blistering heat, windows down, fans blasting. We drive down loping roads to the first merchants. They don’t have it, and they direct us to the next one, another 10 km away. There, we buy several plastic bottles of powdered colour, none of them quite right, but the sales person explains that we need ‘une melange’ - a mix of all of it to get what we want - so we're hopeful it’ll be fine.

When we get back, I explain that although none of the colours are actually right, the colour is to be a melange. 'That’s rubbish' says BF, straight at my exhausted face, 'where have you been, how can we possibly get the right colour from that?' 'Well we’ll just have to see', I say, 'we’ll know when the team arrive tomorrow and they put it on a whole face of the house, then we’ll know if it’s right or not'.

Of course any fool can see that we should do a patch test first, and I suggest it to Lurch but he says no, we can’t do that, it will all be fine, that’s what I use. Ok I say, being any old fool.

Feb 08

So, to get an income we have to finish the gite and to do that, we must apply to our Marie (the local major),  to get 

permission for the work.  In most areas this takes a month, but this is the Canal du Midi - basically  one long conservation 

area, so here it'sa minimum of three. Having no idea how to apply, I go to the local tourist office for advice. There the M & Ms, 

the bilingual and mutli lingual tourist  officers advise me. 'You must first go and see the architects, Batiment de France 

in Carcasonne', they tell me, 'Discuss with  him your plans, and then put in your preable (permission document)". That way I   

will know what I can do straightaway and won’t waste precious months asking for something I can't do, and then having to 

start  all over again . 

You need an appointment with the architect, says one M, (five and a half fluent languages), 

and rings the chief architect for me. Ah, but you can’t see him for six months she says, when she comes off the phone. She 

shrugs,   then seeing my look of dismay says 'I’ll try someone else'. This time at the end of her call she's got an 

appointment for me to  see an architect in Carcasonne next week. 'He' s used to dealing with foreigners', she says, 'and he’ll 

speak English'.

All week I write down everything we want to ask the architect, and learn it  In French, just in case, practising my spiel to 

anyone who will listen, including the dog, and collect  photographs and pictures of what we want to do, so we can do a show 

and tell. The following week, on the day of our appointment, which happens to be my Birthday, and a no-school Wednesday, 

BF, Little  Daughter and I head to Carcasonne,  driving past the fairytale castle and getting hopelessly lost before

finally trudging the last bit in the cold wind until we find the modern, not very architectally stunning offices on the side

of a grey river. 

What we most want  is permission for a pretty balcony, and to leave our little gite unrendered, to show off it’s 

pretty stone walls. If he won’t let us have a balcony, says BF, I’ll just haul him over the desk. I can’t be doing with all this 

permissions nonsense.

We are shown through to a tiny office, where a small elegantly neat man with a  pointy grey beard, our architect de Batiment, 

joins  us. As I try to stop LD  grabbing the hole punch and the stapler I ask the architect if he speaks English? Anglais? he 

answers,  Non. Great, I think. Taking a deep breath, and trying not to look panicked, I take the stapler away from LD  and go

through what we want, starting with the balcony on the first floor, so that our guests can sit and watch the canal. 

A pretty one, like this, we say, showing him the pictures we have collected of typical French local balconies. Un Balcon? Says 

the architect, looking at us, not even glancing at the photos,  'Oui', we answer, hopefully smiling. 'Non', he says. 'Ce n’est pas 

possible'. We pause. I don't look at BF, who is busy relieving Little Daughter of more stationary. Ah, Ok. We would like to 

finish the outside in its original stone rather than render.  Is this possible? 'Non', he says.' Ce n’est pas possible'. It crosses my 

mind that he is having a joke on us, forgetting that the French don’t really do jokes, but he looks very serious, and when I ask 

him again, just to check,  he says non again, just the same, no smile, no joke. 

Finally we have a breakthrough. Can we put in some windows? 'Its possible', he says, like this, and expertly draws

windows, one above the other, the top ones smaller than the bottom. We can have more windows as long as they were 

‘equilibre’ – bigger on the lower floors, smaller as they go up, with their centre lines running the same from top to

bottom. How long will it take for permission to come through, we ask. 'Troi mois', he answers. Can we speed it up at all I say? 

'non', he says, 'trois mois'.

We haven't got much that we wanted, but it's still my birthday when we leave so we go to the fairytale castle and sit in a chintzy 

restaurant full of Americans and Germans where we have a very bad cassoulet and a very good glass of rose, and

then walk about a bit in the howling chill wind under the grey sky, looking a the batiments until finally we get too cold and 

head for home.

Now we can get on and write our preable, a detailed document with photographs and and drawings and plans in a special 

format. Once we've done that we only have to copy all of it seven times in colour, and hand it to the marie and hope that we 

can start building in three months. We try to be cheerful. But as we drive back through bleak windswept vineyards I'm thinking 

oh my god, we can’t do what we want to do, what have we done? Then I think I’ve left England, I’ve spent all this money and 

got this huge mortgage, and I still haven’t got a horse, which is all I really want in the first place.

When we get back, wheezy Jean from next door has left a plant  on our doorstep, and the light has started to shimmer 

on the canal as a watery sun makes it’s way through the opening clouds, and the geese are honking. And suddenly the 

sense of possibility returns, the hope that we can create a good life here, that the children will get an education away from the 

endless celebrity culture swamping Britain, and as the wind finally drops and the evening sun comes

through a bit more there is the thought of the days of sunshine, even in January when the air is warm, and everyone lunches 

outside and SD  bombs off round the village on her bike in a way she never could in England in our busy

town, and suddenly, shivering, on our step overlooking one of the best views on the Midi, I know why we are here.

Jan 08.

‘I just want to be normal’, wails Little Daughter, hanging onto me as I grip the jerking 

wheel of the Espace, ‘its too difficult Mummy, I want to be able to talk to my friends. 

Why are we here?’

We’re driving through windswept Languedoc vineyards under a harsh grey sky on the

way to school. When you read about families taking the plunge and moving to 

France, you tend not to hear about the endless cold, the uncomfortable, unrenovated

and unheated houses, how the children miss talking to their mates in a language they

actually understand, and how learning French does not, in fact, happen overnight, or

even in a few months. 

Winter in the South of France has taken us all by surprise, and small daughters not the only one

who’s fed up. BF has taken to silently wandering around with a

sledgehammer, hammering down walls in what will be our upstairs, and Teenage

Daughter locks herself in her room whenever she’s not at school, emerging

occasionally to eat, or to shout at someone (no change there then). And bedtime is

early. Very early. Teenage daughters school starts at 8, so we’re all up when it’s still dark, and

after a day fixing up the gite in the howling winds we’re ready for bed by nine. Apart

from fatigue, bed is the warmest place. Our house is very cold - the 1970s tiles that

line its floors are built for the super hot summers, and there is no proper heating, no

fire, no burner. The French must be a hardy lot is all I can think when I step shivering

into our freezing unheated bathroom each morning.  

December probably wasn’t the best time to move to this pretty medieval village billed

as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the Canal du Midi. Before we bought it, our house had

been in the same family for the last one hundred years, and decorated to look like a

tacky nightclub in the last twenty. We have a big project ahead of us and a lot of

adjusting to do. A big house, a small house, a big scruffy garden, and a courtyard

overlooking the canal. It’s a dream lifestyle change and a fantastic renovation

opportunity, or to use BFs phrase, it’s a derelict - actually two derelicts.

 

The small house will become a gite and the plan is to do that up first so we can rent it,

to get some cash. This means living in the big house as it is, complete with no heating,

not enough bedrooms, green velvet walls, carpet on the ceiling. Picture a beautiful

classic French house with all it’s original features and then picture a nineteen eighties

conversion with all the features ripped out, and that’s us. We’re the house they crop

out in the thousands of photos, which are taken here every year. On top of that BF

and I sleep in the front room, as for reasons I can’t quite remember we didn’t factor in

the current lack of bedrooms when we bought it, and we gave Teenage Daughter the best and

biggest, because she is the teenager, instead of insisting the kids share. Yes, you can

question the logic. So Little Daughter also has her own room, but at least we get the

telly, and the view.

All our stuff is still in England, along with all our cash, which is actually not cash at

all, but bricks and mortar in the flat we didn’t sell before we left, which was a minute

or two before the biggest property crash in the last twenty years. We moved for

warmth, and an easier style of living, a way to be closer as a family, especially for me,

because I was a busy television producer, giving an exhausting hundred and ten 

percent in all the wrong directions, and I never got to see my kids. I was so exhausted

that  when me and kids went camping, I ended up in hospital with severe pneumonia. 

So I decided to call my hectic-have-it-all-life a day. I stopped buying, stopped

working and looked for something new, and now here we are in the South of 

France. And it’s bloody hard work; all in a language I can’t yet get to grips with,

despite my years of learning it, and its cold, and the kids hate it.

So right now, although I don’t tell her, I think Little Daughter has a point and I’m not sure why 

we made the move, or what in hells name I’m doing driving an ailing Espace (believe

them when they say that Espaces go wrong a lot) across a pitted vineyard road, living

off loads of borrowed money, and freezing cold.