One of the reasons I started this blog was to save a few trees and use it at Christmas to keep friends and family up to date with our news. My motives weren’t completely altruistic, though, and were partly prompted by the slog of printing out 60-odd double-sided copies on our ink-jet printer, then folding them and stuffing them in the envelopes. So, if you got one last year, I hope you appreciate that it was a real labour of love! However, the problem with avoiding the donkey work is that I’ve had more time to write this piece, so I apologise for it being so long. There’s no prize for getting to the end, and I won’t be offended if you give up half-way through!
It’s hard to believe we’re into our second year of our new life in France. We feel very well established in the village, with Sarah doing a spot of English tuition for friends’ children, and occasional sessions at the local primary school. Jonathan has also been helping village friends with the odd computer problem, and regularly plays tennis locally.
Through local contacts, Sarah has also started helping a lawyer in the nearby town to improve his English and is really enjoying it. We’ve also been far more involved in community activities than we were ever able to do in Godalming. Jonathan won third prize in the bowling at the village celebrations for the national day on 14th July and as a result was pictured in the local paper. We’ve also both enjoyed being invited to classical piano concerts and French song evenings.
Probably our most important news this year is that we’re the proud (or should I say besotted?) owners of a girl golden Labrador puppy called Circé (pronounced ‘Seer-say’). We’ve both always been fond of dogs but it’s only been feasible to have one since we left the rat race; neither of us felt it was fair to have a dog while we were both working. Our feeling that it would be best to wait until after the building work was put to one side after we adopted a lost Labrador for a weekend last year. Although his owner retrieved him (sorry for the pun) after a couple of days, he left a big gap when he went and we decided we couldn’t wait; probably a good job as we’ve not progressed as much as we’d hoped with our building plans this year, but more of that later.
We were both very keen to find a reputable breeder and through the website of the French equivalent of the Kennel Club we tracked down a really nice Labrador breeder about an hour’s drive from home. We first met Circé when she was three weeks old and she came home at the beginning of October when she was almost three months. Since then, as you can imagine, our lives have not been entirely our own and we’re enjoying every minute of it. She’s settled down really well, is as bright as a button and has quite a penchant for brushes, as you can see from the picture!
The other thing that’s taken up much of Sarah’s time since the Spring is the vegetable patch she’s renting from friends. It’s about ten minutes’ walk away from the house in a lovely spot by a stream with beautiful views across fields to the village. From what people have told us this part of Cirfontaines could have been the vegetable farm for the monastery down the road at Clairvaux. It’s quite a thought that people may have been growing vegetables on Sarah’s patch since the 13th century! It’s quite a big plot – 27 metres by 9 – and although Jonathan has helped in the evenings and at weekends, Sarah has done most of the graft. She’s found it’s been a great way to meet people, as her fellow plot-owners have given her lots of advice, much appreciated as the growing season here is completely different to what she was used to in Surrey. Her ‘brouette anglaise’ (a folding wheelbarrow she bought at a Hampton Court flower show several years ago) and the English tools she uses have been quite a talking point.
Weather-wise 2007 wasn’t a good year to be a vegetable-growing debutante but we’ve been in good company as even the older people in the village thought this was the worst and wettest summer they could remember and, following a very mild winter, this made for a plague of enormous slugs. The worst thing was losing the whole tomato crop (more than 70 plants!) to mildew, but the consolation was that so did most other people, even those who had less compunction about using all sorts of chemicals.
However, the courgettes went mad in all the rain (even the slugs couldn’t keep up with them) and Sarah’s very proud to have grown such a wide range of vegetables on the plot, including fennel, peppers, chillies, sweetcorn, broccoli, carrots, celeriac, cucumbers, parsnips, French beans and squash. The spinach is still going strong and we only picked the last of the lettuces a few days ago. So who knows what’s possible if we have a good summer!
Circé enjoys going to the vegetable patch and has been a great help with the harvest, as you can see!
Jonathan’s also done his fair share of gardening, and has enjoyed it even more since he bought himself a tractor-mower and trailer at the end of the summer. Although Sarah wasn’t convinced at first that he needed one, she was won over after Jonathan nobbled one of her friends to tell her how much he needed one! He was right as it’s reduced by half the time it takes him to cut the grass.
The wet summer means we haven’t enjoyed the pool this year as much as we did last year, although when Jonathan’s nephew, William, and his friend Coryan visited in September they were determined to swim every day! We were very hopeful when we had the pool opened up for the season at the end of April, as we’d been enjoying what turned out to be some of the best weather of the year in the early Spring. We were foiled, though, when the pool maintenance men (or piscinistes) spotted that the plastic liner had cracked and would need replacing. Without boring you with the technical detail this meant draining the pool of all 100,000 litres of water, removing the old liner and its felt ‘underlay’ then getting a new one fitted before re-filling the pool. Mind you, when we bought the house the former owner told us that it had already outlived its 10-year life expectancy so the last two years have been a bonus.
After all the sun we’d had in the spring, this was very disappointing, but a couple of days after this news the weather broke and it rained for pretty much all of May and early June. While this compensated for our disappointment, it also delayed the fitting of the replacement liner which can only be done in completely dry weather. Normally the removal of the old liner and the fitting of the new one would take two days, but after having one fitting appointment rained off, we decided to remove the old liner ourselves, meaning the specialists only needed one dry day.
Taking the liner our was the easy part but stripping off the underfelt from the concrete pool walls was a devil of a job, made more unsavoury by the swamp of green slimy rainwater which had collected in the deepest part of the pool. We only achieved this with a lot of help from our old friends Lis and Will and their two girls, Josie and Pippa, who came over from Switzerland for a working weekend in May.
Picture: Josie, William and Jonathan scraping the felt by the swamp at the bottom of the empty pool.
Eventually we had a few days respite from the rain in the middle of June and the piscinistes fitted the new liner in blazing sunshine. Of course a week later, by the time we’d re-filled the pool with another 100,000 litres of water (and yes, we’re metred!) the rainy weather had set in again.
The frustrating thing is that we had a really good Autumn and if the pool had been heated we’d probably have been able to swim until mid-October. Unfortunately the water never had the chance to get properly warm during the summer so while the air temperature was warm later in the year, the water was far too cold for any but the hardiest swimmer. In fact we do have the means to heat it using the central heating boiler but as this is powered by propane and you could probably see the dial on the tank moving steadily down as the temperature of those 100,000 litres inched up (or should I say centimetred up?) we’ve never attempted it. This has spurred Jonathan to research other means of heating the pool and, given we’ve got a huge almost south-facing roof at the back of the house, we’re planning to have solar heating installed.
This is only one of Jonathan’s plans to save the world. Since a friend bought him George Monbiot’s book ‘Heat’ for his birthday in January (at my suggestion, I have to admit), Jonathan’s been a man with a mission. He’s replaced all our light bulbs and is in the middle of his insulation programme before the winter sets in. He’s becoming an authority on alternative energy and I expect by this time next year we’ll have a log-fuelled central heating boiler and will be selling electricity to EDF! I jest not.
This brings us, finally, to news of our building work. We engaged an architect to draw up plans for the house and both outbuildings in September 2006. By March we’d got plans for the house but not for the two barns which we also want to renovate. Worse, the proposed costs were around three times the budget we’d set. While we’re canny enough to know that projects like ours typically go over budget and we had allowed a bit of a ‘cushion’, we were disappointed that all this had taken so long. The cardinal sin from our point of view was the fact that this news was communicated in a letter rather than in person! Sacking him, in French, was one of the hardest things Sarah has done, especially as he and his team were so nice. So we found ourselves back to square one in the Spring with no plans and no architect. Once again we turned to the internet, found the website of the French professional association of architects and got on the phone. After organising on-site meetings with three local architects, we’ve found one who’s easy to communicate with, understands what we want and is very enthusiastic about the project. So as we come to the end of the year we have plans for all three buildings including creating a two-bedroomed holiday cottage from one of the barns as well as adding a bedroom, more bathrooms and an office for Jonathan to our house. The outline figures look much better, too, so we’re hoping we can get going with the planning approval and tendering for builders in the new year.
We’ve had a lot of pleasure from the visits of friends and family this year; Sarah’s dad has enjoyed several visits and helped her paint the front gates in March. Although he’s not been in the best of health recently, he’s looking forward to spending Christmas and new year with us. Jonathan’s parents have had the best of the weather, coming in both April and then September – probably the best two months as far as sunshine was concerned. We love welcoming friends and family to our home and exploring with them this lovely and unspoilt corner of France.
Lots of interesting things happened in 2007 which never made it onto these (electronic) pages so one of my resolutions for 2008 will be to update this blog more often. If you’d like to get more of our news by email, use the ‘Subscribe’ option on the right hand side of the screen near the beginning of this newsletter (underneath the photo of me!).
We hope 2007 was a good year for you, too and that 2008 is at least as good for you and everyone close to you.
