Our Holiday in France

We had a purpose. We were looking for a holiday home. We were thinking of a pile of stones. If we were lucky the pile of stones might have a roof and maybe a door. But it had to be in a pretty location. Separate from its immediate neighbours and surrounded by its own garden.

We did look at a place with the above specification but, well it just wasn’t right.

The man from the estate agency talked to us and he’d seen it all before. He said that a ruin was the most expensive way; building ones own the next most expensive and to buy an existing house was the cheapest option. So we started looking at building plots and second-hand houses. But more of this later.

Our holiday accommodation was delicious. My cousin John had lent us the little cottage that adjoins his house in France. We got the keys (cle) from the lady up the road. We thought that with our smattering of French language we could get by. But what we lacked were the connecting words in a sentence, words that fit around cle and maison, to mean “ “Hi! I’m from England, we’ve come to stay at the cottage down the road. May we have the keys?

In spite of this lack of language we managed to select food at the Charcuterie by pointing and feeling hungry. But it’s a real problem not being able to say more than, “Bon jour Monsieur”, when meeting a stranger on a distant footpath.

France is a different country and the street signs and advertising hoardings are foreign. Mostly in England the adverts are subconsciously turned into meaning; but here one has to look hard and interpret the meaning from the picture content. The French text also has its share of apostrophes, and they have more strange little marks around the letters, accents, diacritical marks, umlauts and cedilla. All these add to the strangeness plus the unusual pronunciation of similar words. I read in a book that in general each French word stresses the final syllable, a bit like the Australian rising intonation strategy.

I noticed also that the written French language seems to contain a great deal more lower case parts to the names of places. And place name also tend to be compound names for example, le Bugue, St Avit de Vialard.

It was such fun to open the cottage ourselves. The shutters first and then the inner French windows that serve as the front door. We opened all the window shutters and the light streamed in. We explored the kitchen, the lounge, the terrace and the two lovely bedrooms. It was just all so well kept and clean and tidy. Everything was there, plates on the dresser, corkscrew in the draw, radio in the cupboard. TV!! well we never found it but it was no loss because we tried the TV in the hotels on the way down and back and the programs are awful and even more packed with adverts than UK TV.

We also had an instruction manual on how to work the cottage, very handy. The manual also had a section on where to eat out – but we didn’t use that part of the manual.

The bathroom was great. Hot water for the bath and a normal loo. The loo, bath and sink all match with a glazed pattern that was new. Sort of two tone, merging from a luscious deep chesnut around the tops to a sable colour at the bottom part.

In the evening we sat at the dining room table and enjoyed our homecooked canard (see the French is getting better) and sat later at the handsome open log fire.

In the morning I lay in bed and examined the beamed ceiling and considered each of the beams that had been cut and raised to new non head-banging height. I could see the old tenons and been cut off, the beam raised and shortened, and I considered the problems of cutting new mortises in the roof member.

The cottage lies in the valley of the Vézère. (See! now I’ve put in an e with an accent to the left and an e with an accent to the right – It feels a bit overly complicated.) The sides of the valley are limestone cliffs. On our second night we watched the most exciting thunderstorm from the terrace and although the flashes were not visible directly because of the trees the booms and crashes were doubled and tripled by the echoes from the surrounding cliffs. An excellent evening’s entertainment.

We went to le Bugue many times and soon discovered the road via St Cirq. Le Bugue has the local super markets: Intermarche, Aldi and Leaderprice. The range of foods was excellent. Even better than our local UK Sainsburys.

At the deli we found some novel items – Celeriac salad and Cous-cous with mint. Market day in

le Bugue and we were amazed at the size of the asparagus and the artichokes.

Most days we were out looking at building sites and old houses. There was something good about this because it gave us a purpose. We glanced at the gifty shops in the town saw them no more. We studied the windows of the Immobilier.

We had been all over the internet from England and already had a few appointments to look at property. An example was a house in a village ( a ruin). The price was listed at 44,000E and even while we looked at it the price went down to 38,000E. We offered some money on a plot which had been for sale for nearly 3 years. It was listed at 16,000E and I offered 9000E and they counter offered 10,500E. My conclusion was that prices are very soft. The list price is only the roughest guide.

Trundling around by ourselves we came across allsorts of lovely places. We accidentally arrived at Villereal on market day. So quaint with the old wooden covered town centre market. But on a typical day we would be examining the map, and finding our way to specific location. Seeing the very heart of France without the gloss prepared by the tourist industry. By lunchtime we would be parked in the sunshine on a building plot in the middle of nowhere having a pique-nique of cheese and pate.

What Belinda loved:

The quiet roads, the crazy french drivers, the meadows full of absolutely loads of wild flowers, the rivers, the dordogne very big, the vezere more gentle, the mint in the grass in front of the cottage that smelled lovely when we walked to the front door, the neighbours cat who was very friendly. the purple irises that seemed to grow everywhere