This extract is from a chapter of Joe & Kerry Laredo’s book:
Foreigners in France: Triumphs & Disasters reproduced with the kind permission of Survival Books. This particular chapter relates the ups and downs of our collaborator Martin Hills and his wife Julia as they go through the process of buying and selling property in France.
Chapter 11 - Picking The Right Place
Londoners Martin and Julia Hills bought a holiday apartment in southern France and found village life a shock. It took them two more moves to find what they were looking for.
Julia and I moved permanently to France about eight years ago. We are both Londoners, by birth and inclination, and so are essentially urban, if not indeed metropolitan, people. The significance of that was to emerge later. Today, we are both in our sixties. We are interested in politics and the arts and have spent much of our married lives buying and doing up old houses to our tastes - mainly because the houses we liked and could afford always needed renovating. Julia had given up her job to raise a family and so it was she who principally developed DIY skills.
We have moved house more than most people - partly because, once we feel we have got a house 'right', it lacks challenge; and partly because of a disinclination to put down roots.
Julia's background was scientific: she had been engaged in veterinary research. I, on the other hand, was and have been for most of my working life, in one form or another, a professional writer. Indeed I still am, writing for a number of English-language publications in France. For many years I ran a Fleet Street marketing communications consultancy, which meant working in and across the allied fields of public relations, advertising, conferences, exhibitions, publications and all that kind of thing.
Why France?
In our case, for a variety of reasons, there was never much doubt. For years we had taken all our holidays abroad. We preferred the freedom of driving and, given the existence of the Channel and North Sea, came via France. In the course of our touring, we covered most parts of France, making a point of not rushing through to the destination.
Another factor was that my business, which was highly personalised, didn't have an unlimited future, as long-standing contacts moved on or retired, to be replaced by younger people who preferred advisors of their own generation. While technology enabled me to dispense with secretarial staff and even an office, it was clear that we should prepare to live on a much reduced income, and we were well aware of the differences in property and living costs between France and England.
Thirdly, we had had to accommodate and nurse both our parents in their later years and we were determined not to saddle our children with that burden. Distance would help. On the other hand, our family remains in England and we wanted not to be so remote that visits in either direction would be too difficult or costly.
When, in the mid-eighties, we realised that we might be able to afford a holiday home abroad, the only question was where in France it should be. We considered somewhere in the north - we had become very attached to St Omer in Pas-de-Calais, where we had often stopped. There, we should be able to go over for weekends. Then we considered somewhere further south, like Dijon in Burgundy, which we also loved. That would probably rule out weekends, but could be reached without an overnight stop. We didn't then consider the south, because the distance seemed to preclude any but long holidays.
However, as retirement became increasingly imminent, we began to use our holidays to examine particular areas more closely and the changes in my working conditions opened the field more widely. We were also now taking into consideration the relative ease or difficulty of selling quickly should we decide to retire elsewhere.
It was on one of these trips that we first came to Var and instantly fell in love with the extraordinary scenery, carmine earth, mountains, vast forests, charming and picturesque villages, and - as we then thought - marvellous weather. I should also mention the light - you don't have to be a painter to see why the extraordinary clarity drew so many of them to Provence - and the smells: walks through the woods are inseparable from the pervasive odours of thyme, rosemary and all the other famous herbes de Provence. We were hooked.
On subsequent trips, we started to develop criteria. As city dwellers, we liked the contrast of country holidays and began assessing villages. The right one had to have a river. It must have a choice of basic local shopping, not just one butcher, baker or candlestick-maker. It had to have a sufficiency of bars and restaurants, from cheap and cheerful to places suitable for celebrations. We also considered seriously the financial side. If we weren't going to be there that often, could we let the place when it was unoccupied? Seaside places were easier to let, but they were more expensive and we would hate to be there in the height of the season. On the other hand, what would happen to our property in our prolonged absences?
Then, on a leisurely return from Italy, we happened on a leaflet describing the conversion of an olive oil mill into a small block of flats. The architect sent us a video and we bought off plan. The site was on a steeply sloping riverbank in Cotignac, a village we had already rated highly, a little north of the A8 motorway between Aix-en-Provence and Nice. At the rear entrance to the building, our apartment was at street level, but at the front, looking over landscaped gardens to the river, we were on the topmost two of four storeys.
The apartment had a large living/dining room, with cloakroom, kitchen and pantry off it on the lower floor, and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the entrance floor above. The stairs were against the two-storey rear wall, which was that of the ancient olive oil mill, and we had a south-facing balcony at the front. This had the advantage that, when the sun was low in winter, it penetrated the full depth while, when it was high in summer, the apartment stayed cool and shady. There was also a large power-operated skylight for through breezes.
A further advantage was that the deal included optional letting management, a facility comparatively rare at the time in inland parts of Provence.
Mistakes & Problems 1
Broadly speaking, the purchase went smoothly and, having visited the architect to choose details of finishes, we were able to arrange all the stage payments and completion without having to leave London. We had been careful to read up about French methods of conveyancing and felt quite confident that we needed no further advice. That was our first mistake. Well into the process we were told that planning permission for the original design had been rejected unless changes were made. One of these was that our large cantilevered terrace, leading off the main room, had been cut back to a small balcony.
We thought that this change would probably be sufficiently radical for us to pull out and get our money back - but we weren't sure and were reluctant to scrap everything and start over again. We regretted this later, as ours ended up the only apartment without a terrace and the disadvantages became apparent.
The next problem came when we took possession just before New Year 1988 to find that the floor and wall tile choices we had so carefully made had been disregarded and replaced with more expensive ones. This rankled and dented our confidence in the architect. The large terracotta floor tiles had been laid unevenly - we were told that this was the "traditional Provencal manner" and, with interior walls already on top of them, nothing could be done.
Worse, the essential treatment of the floor, entrusted to the architect's nephew, very much a non-specialist, were like a very old DIY joke. The boy had literally painted himself into a corner and the sole-pattern of his trainers was permanently imprinted the length of his exit route. Eventually the affected tiles were replaced at considerable inconvenience but, happily, at no cost to us.
Coming To France
Around 1992, the decline in my business - and the fact that it could be handled as easily from France as from London - decided us that the time had come to move. We put our house in Islington on the market and, reckoning that it was too small to live in full-time, also put the Cotignac apartment up for sale.
The timing was far from ideal: the UK housing boom had collapsed and the adverse exchange rate had made the French property market, in those days always sluggish, grind to a virtual halt. It was unclear which property would sell first - in fact, both took over three years,
As it turned out, the UK market began its slow recovery before that in France picked up and the Islington house sold first. We put the bulk of our UK goods in store and moved down to Cotignac in stages from late 1995.
Arriving, we set about disposing of much of our second home furniture, chosen with holiday lets in mind, to make room for their UK equivalents. Some we got rid of locally; other items that the children wanted were shipped back on the return leg of a part-load. It is useful in such circumstances to be aware of the French dépôt-vente system for disposing of second-hand goods. This is similar to the UK's junk shops, but differs in that the goods are sold on commission, the percentage rising with the time they remain unsold, to the point when ultimately the previous owner gets nothing. Another possibility that we discovered later is Emmaus, an international charity which will take most things in saleable condition.
It is worth adding here that, should you have the luxury to be flexible about arrival times, there are great savings to be made by letting your removers select the delivery date that suits them best, particularly if you are not moving enough to make up a full load.
We set about devoting the winter to transforming a place suitable for a few weeks' holiday into one for full-time occupation. This meant building in a great deal more cupboard space, which we did ourselves. It also meant discovering the differences between English and French DIY. Among the most obvious of these is that the product ranges in DIY stores and builders' merchants' are not identical. For example, in the UK we had extensive gradations of thickness of MDF readily available; in France, only two or three.
Also, certain products appear to have no French equivalents: we have still to find one for Unibond PVA adhesive, which, on a builder's tip, we find invaluable in cementing (you paint it in dilute form on the surface to be cemented and then mix it into the cement to ensure a good bond). Nor have we found knotting fluid for preparing new wood for painting or varnishing.
I have mentioned that Julia is the practical member of the team and she has found great reluctance on the part of staff at builders' merchants' to take seriously requests for technical advice from women. Staff at DIY stores seem less chauvinistic but can be less technically knowledgeable or simply less familiar with professional products.
Cotignac
We liked Cotignac very much and enjoyed the fact that our apartment was only a couple of minutes' walk from the centre. It is a pretty village of some 2,000 inhabitants set amid beautiful countryside - vineyards, forests, olive groves - and protected from the north by a high tofu cliff surmounted by the remains of two towers, said to have been erected as an early warning system against Saracen raiders. The cliffs hold troglodyte caves, part of a long history recorded by a local historian in a series of vast handwritten and hand-decorated tomes, and by a local heritage society for whom we helped design a series of exhibitions once we had done most of the work on the apartment. This society, like the village itself, is very cosmopolitan, with expatriates from Australia, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the USA, as well as the UK and incomers from all over France. For those seeking to improve their French, this can be a disadvantage, as so many people speak English.
Mistakes & Problems 2
parts and outgoings and virtually to charge what they please in the way of service charges, in France the whole development becomes the joint property of its sub-owners. They elect one of their number as syndic and that person either administers the property or sub-contracts the work to an accountant or estate agent. A major difference between property rules in France and the UK affects multi-occupancy developments, such as blocks of flats. Where, in the UK, it is common for the developers or owners to handle the administration of common parts and outgoings and virtually to charge what they please in the way of service charges, in France the whole development becomes the joint property of its sub-owners. They elect one of their number as syndic and that person either administers the property or sub-contracts the work to an accountant or estate agent.
As largely absentee apartment-owners, we had mostly been able to keep aloof from the running of the development, simply paying our dues on time. Early on we had attended the AGM of the co-proprietorship, which was conducted in French and was chaotic and rancorous, with people shouting all at once. After that, it was easy enough simply not to be there at such times.
However, as full-time residents, we became uncomfortably aware of the tensions that had built up. The role of syndic, or administrator, had passed to one of the few French residents, who had successfully reduced the outgoings. However, the bulk of owners were foreign - English, Belgian and American - who mostly let their apartments when they weren't using them. The syndic complained that the visitors' use of the swimming pool required vast amounts of chemicals whose cost fell on the full-time residents as well as on those who made money from lettings. Those letting resisted paying a larger share of the service charges and the syndic and his wife tended to find fault with their tenants.
This conflict found angry expression at the AGM and created an uncomfortable atmosphere at other times.
Since we were no longer letting, we were on neither side, but couldn't avoid hearing the complaints of both. It was a great relief when we finally sold the apartment the following spring.
A different sort of problem, relating peculiarly to ourselves, was that we were totally unaccustomed to village living. We were startled, on being introduced to strangers, to find that they already knew all about us - we had reckoned without the village grapevine. We found the business of everyone living in each other's pockets uncomfortable and somewhat intrusive.
We also realised, when there all the time, how much the village itself had changed and continued to do so. Cotignac was expanding rapidly with endless building of new and undistinguished bungalows springing up everywhere. Throughout the ever-lengthening 'season', tourists abounded and on market days it was impossible to park anywhere near, though this didn't initially affect us. The boom was reflected in the changing face of the shops: every time one closed, it was replaced either by an estate agent's or a boutique selling tourist kitsch (though these often survived only a single season). The contrast between the hyperactivity of the season, with countless entertainments, and the cessation when the tourists went home became more marked.
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Next Move
Having agreed the sale of the apartment, we had three months to find somewhere else to live. In all our many previous UK moves there had always been plenty of time, because of a combination of conveyancing delays and the fact that, at most times, one was somewhere in the middle of a chain of sales and purchases, any one of which could run into problems. Here, there was little scope for flexibility, as our buyers wanted a holiday home and were not selling. There ensued a frenzied search for the next place, for which we hadn't prepared.
We knew we wanted somewhere with a garden - Julia is a gardener (practical, again) and hated not being allowed to tinker with those surrounding the apartment block. We cast the net fairly widely but were not having much luck. Once again, we had reckoned without the village grapevine. Still less had we underestimated the friends we had made, albeit in the expat community and over such a short time, who seemed determined not to lose us - another total surprise.
As the sands ran out, we began seriously - but very reluctantly in view of the hassle and expense involved - to consider putting everything back in store and to rent until we found the right place.
Then a friend came up with a promising deal. A lady who had been trying to sell for some time and was becoming desperate enough to drop her price substantially had a house with a large garden a little outside the village. Could we see it? Of course. Did it meet our needs? Well, sort of. We saw it and, although it hardly conformed to our tastes - a modern bungalow - we decided that it was acceptable.
The house had been unoccupied for about a year and we viewed it first on our own with the loan of keys and later with the owner. When we agreed the sale, we drove Madame back to the apartment to arrange an appointment with a notaire. Cotignac has only two notaires, who work in partnership. It is the buyer's right to select the notaire and we chose the one who had handled our sale. Madame was vehemently against this as she had, apparently, had a run-in with him on some previous occasion. It wasn't important to us and we were prepared to use the other partner
At this point a farcical element entered the proceedings. When we got back to the apartment and I was about to call the notaire, I found a message from him on the answerphone, asking me to call back. Madame suddenly waived all opposition to our using him, declaring that it was "a message from God".
An appointment was arranged and Madame and the notaire seemed to have arrived at a sort of armed truce. However, later stages were marked by periods of hysterics and floods of tears on the part of the vendor. Though wearing and time-consuming (not to say inexplicable), these further meetings completed our purchase without either problems or further divine intervention.
The house we had bought was an example of the off-the-peg designs widely offered in France then and now: formulaic, characterless but scrupulously disguising its breeze-block construction under approved stucco colouring. Like so many around, it reminded us irresistibly of Pete Seeger's song about 'little houses made of ticky-tacky'.
Although the house didn't greatly appeal to us, the garden did. It was long and slightly wedge-shaped and had quite a lot of olive trees dotted around, as well as shrubs and a few fruit trees. The house had a large terrace to the south shaded by two established platanes-muriers (trees which bush out hugely to give shade in summer but can be cut back to the rims to let light through in winter). It also had a wind-out blind to extend the shade on the terrace. The previous owner had added a huge garage, though with entry for only one vehicle, and this struck us as offering potential for conversion.
Before we committed ourselves, we talked to the planning officer at the mairie, who explained that, under the then rules, we could expand a great deal if we chose. He also urged us to put in a planning application as soon as possible as the zoning rules were under review. "Put in the for the maximum you want," he advised us, "because, once you have permission, you have ten years to complete whatever you want to do, regardless of subsequent changes to planning regulations."
Mistakes & Problems 3
We had never previously looked at houses that were unfurnished; nor had we ever bought a modern house. These factors were to present problems. Empty houses look a great deal bigger than furnished ones, so that this one proved to be smaller in reality than we had supposed. Such misconceptions aren't helped, for British buyers, by the fact that houses are described in France in terms of square metres of 'habitable space', which is to say excluding such things as garages, corridors and bathrooms, and so give no idea whatsoever of the dimensions of individual rooms.
The design of this kind of modern French house, like those on housing estates in Britain, tends to run to one very large living room, all other rooms being relatively small, so misjudgements about dimensions can be serious, as we discovered. Our bedroom, for instance, once it had our double bed installed, left only enough room to walk around it sideways!
Our unfamiliarity with modern houses left us unprepared for another snag. All our previous houses had been at least a century old, constructed at times when space-saving was not a consideration. Hence it was almost always possible to win extra space when needed. In contrast, new properties are designed not to leave a square centimetre unexploited - a great disadvantage for would-be converters. We got over the problem to some extent by converting the garage to a self-contained apartment with two rooms, cloakroom, shower room and utility area.
As advised, we had put in for planning permission for a more extensive conversion, including a partial first floor (we really don't like bungalows) and a roof terrace. The latter had to be redesigned, owing to the vagaries of local taste - in effect, the whims of the mayor (though this may become less evident as more powers go from individual municipalities to the new agglomerations). "Cotignac," we were told, "doesn't like large balconies or roof terraces." Cotignac also didn't like windows that were wider than they were high and doubtless many other things that we hadn't included.
In the event, we didn't get around to doing more in the way of major works than converting the garage. Curiously, this created a new problem when we came to sell. We had imagined that we could simply pass on our accepted project to the next owner to continue or abandon as he chose. Not so: we had to reapply for planning permission not to do what had been allowed. This cost us time and money in the critical closing stage of the sale.
Moving Again
Although we had never been very fond of the house, we had contrived to make it work for us tolerably well and the garage conversion was very convenient for putting up visiting family and friends. The garden was agreeable, though we soon realised that its size, 2,750 square metres or rather over half an acre, was not large enough to be left to nature but too large in the amount of work it required to keep it in order.
We also found the location, some three kilometres outside the village, trying. We could and sometimes did walk in, but this meant traversing a very steep hill - bad enough going, terrible coming back loaded with shopping. We felt as though we were living in a suburb, with all the disadvantages of both town and country and few of the benefits of either. Inevitably, it became a drag to have to get the car out every time we needed a loaf or a bottle of milk and, when we did, it made more sense to go to the nearest town, where the choices were wider. We had not appreciated how not being right in the village would reduce our involvement in its life.
However, these matters were what might be described as low intensity dissatisfactions. What prompted the next move was that Julia's left hip, which had been deteriorating for some time, came to the point of needing a replacement and she could no longer handle a large garden.
After the last experience, we decided to put the furniture into store and rent a house in the village until we found what we were looking for: a larger house with a smaller garden, in the centre of wherever it was. As it turned out, the house sold quite quickly to an American family who wanted a house that they could let and also use for holidays. They chose an English-speaking notaire, as they spoke no French, which simplified the proceedings, although by then we were familiar with them.
We moved out at the beginning of October 2000, five years after moving to France and a little over four after the last move. We were able to find a large rented house in Cotignac, which meant we could put fewer things into store, and prepared for a long period of house-hunting.
In the event, we were there for only two months, having found our present house in Brignoles - which, again, had been unoccupied for a long time - and moved in just before Christmas 2000. It is a large house close to the town centre, on four storeys.
It was built in 1830 and was originally detached, although it is now effectively in the middle of a terrace. It has a huge garage, originally a coach house (which retains the original manger) with two further large rooms to the rear, beneath a large terrace at first floor level. There is a modest-sized walled garden behind, largely given over to trees, mostly fruit.
The move went smoothly, apart from the fact that Julia fell and broke her wrist just before it and was still in hospital when it took place. Friends from Cotignac rallied round to help with the house cleaning, which was of Augean stables proportions.
The house is on the busy N7 but a bypass is due to open soon and this should reduce the traffic, currently averaging 900 HGVs a day plus cars and the seasonal flow of caravans and camper vans.
Brignoles
The town is twenty kilometres south of Cotignac and has access to the A8. With a population of nearly 16,000, it is one of the larger towns in Var (where even Toulon, the biggest, has only 170,000 inhabitants) and the smaller of two sub-prefectures. Like many French towns, its super- and hypermarkets are on the outskirts, so many people in the surrounding area hardly know the place or remember it only for traffic jams. Friends from Cotignac have been surprised at how attractive it is when properly introduced.
It has an extensive 'old town' area, which had been allowed to run down over a long period but is currently undergoing major restoration, property owners being encouraged by generous grants to take part. Among many interesting and historic buildings are the former palace of the Counts of Provence, now the town museum, and a former olive oil mill, now imaginatively converted into a municipal art gallery. It is a place of tree-shaded squares, narrow lanes, unexpectedly vertiginous flights of steps and ancient ramparts and well deserves its listing as a ville fleurie. Beautiful countryside is close at hand.
There is a large new médiathèque, a small studio theatre, a large open-air theatre and a two-screen cinema. The town is known for the quality of its public entertainment, which regularly includes a mediaeval fete, festivals of jazz and piano music, and free concerts and outdoor big-screen film shows in the summer. Brignoles also hosts the department's main agricultural show, on a scale comparable to a UK county show.
Mistakes & Problems 4
We don't think we have made many mistakes this time. The most obvious one is to have underestimated what it would take to put a place that had been badly neglected to rights. We were well aware of the poor state of decoration and general upkeep but it took time to appreciate just how much bodged and ill-advised DIY would have to be redone properly. The garden too proved to have been planned with more enthusiasm than common sense, with too many trees planted too close together for their eventual size - a problem we had also to deal with at the Cotignac house.
The first problem on moving in was to dispose of the huge amount of junk that the previous owners had left behind. The house had all the appearance of one whose occupants had had to flee it in an emergency, with clothes and toys abandoned and even a broken-down washing machine in the garage still fully loaded with garments. Fortunately, we have a large car - and, better still, friends with large vans - and the dump isn't far away.
It is my understanding that most house sales contracts, in both France and the UK, include a clause requiring the previous owners to clear out their rubbish. If this is so, it has been disregarded by every vendor we have encountered. It is hard to see how it might be enforced , without delays that might only make matters worse; if it isn't enforced, the clause might just as well not be there.
We have already had the roof overhauled and the two main floors rewired and re-plumbed and are tackling the long slow task of redecoration.
So far, the biggest problem we have encountered is to find last year that the wall on the stairwell had become very damp and the plaster was coming off in places. This turned out to be the result of a leak in an apartment next door. That was in February and the landlord's difficulty in evicting his tenant meant that the leak wasn't repaired until October. We now have to wait for it to dry out before the wall can be re-plastered and decorated, happily on our neighbour's insurance.
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French & The French
Our French, upgraded from distant school days by courses of tapes, videos and frequent visits, was probably better than average when we arrived but we feel that it deteriorated during our time in Cotignac, because English was so widely spoken. We tried to counter this with informal conversation classes but there is still large room for improvement and we hope that the fact that there are fewer foreigners in Brignoles will help. We have managed to cope with films in French, if there isn't too much argot, but haven't yet attempted French theatre - though we were tempted by productions of Shakespeare in French.
A particular problem in this area is dialect. Many Provencal words have been absorbed into the local language and the more extreme cases of local patois can be virtually unintelligible.
We had French neighbours both at the apartment and the house in Cotignac and we got on well with all of them. However, we have found it difficult to make close friends among them, partly perhaps because the French seem to have ambivalent attitudes towards foreigners. They like the benefits they bring - Cotignac, for example, could never sustain its variety of shops, bars and restaurants without them - but they do tend to drive property and other prices up, even though there is little evidence to support claims that they take as holiday homes houses that young French people would buy if they could.
Foreigners generally prefer old property or to build new, while the French broadly prefer modern houses.
There is the further aspect that les Provençaux are notorious in France for their clannishness. As a result, all the friends we have made here are from the international community. This matters less to us than to people accustomed to closer-knit village life; city dwellers are used to a degree of isolation.
As I have indicated, we are familiar with the business of 'doing up' houses and probably our most advanced French vocabulary is in this field, though local argot terms - such as paillasse, normally meaning a straw mattress but here a kitchen work surface - weren't initially obvious to us. Because we understand the processes of carpenters, plumbers, electricians and plasterers, we have had few problems with any of these specialists.
The only major building work we have undertaken so far involved the conversion of the Cotignac garage. We consulted friends as to which local firms were most reliable and were given a list in descending order. The supposed best had retired and we picked the next, who proved efficient as well as extremely amiable and helpful.
I should, perhaps, explain that, in this area, getting anything at all done can be problematic. During the slump, the French building industry reacted rather as the British one had earlier: firms which had traditionally employed all their own craftsmen laid them off. The craftsmen became self-employed and sub-contracted or worked directly for customers where they could. Long-standing apprenticeship schemes fizzled out. When demand came back, there was a desperate shortage of talent - and still is - and the attempts to recreate apprenticeships will take time to make up the deficit.
The problem applies particularly in areas like this, where there is a building boom, and is accentuated where, as here, there are many second home-owners who come down in the summer and want problems resolved while they are there. The temptation to exploit these 'rush job' requirements is irresistible and can make it hard to find help at the height of the season.
That said, we have been pretty lucky. Our original builder entrusted almost all the work to one operator of impressive and versatile skills. We were equally impressed by that fact that he arrived each day with the biggest cold box we had ever seen and had a daily three-course lunch with wine. At first, he declined to join us for lunch on the terrace but eventually unbent sufficiently to offer us some of his wine.
In Brignoles, our first plumber/electrician (the combination is common in France) was a delightful character - amusing and interested in what we were trying to achieve. He had no inhibitions about joining us for coffee and chatting about all manner of things. He was also a good and efficient worker - but totally unreliable. He would leave at the end of the day, saying, "See you in the morning," and disappear for a week or more. Eventually, he vanished, never to return, without even leaving his last bill as a memento.
His successor, in contrast, worked like a Trojan, wouldn't stop for a coffee and ate his sandwich lunch while still busy wiring or plumbing. Like all the others, he was charming and efficient and, with the obvious exception, someone we would happily use again.
Medical Matters
If you move to France as an EU citizen, at least from the UK, you are entitled to reciprocal cover for a period of two years. What we hadn't appreciated was that this was two calendar years, or part thereof. So, leaving in October, we were covered for only 14 months. Over that time, Julia was covered by my national insurance. I expected then to have to pay into the French social security system. However, conveniently, Julia became 60 at this time and so was able to cover me as her spouse.
I have mentioned that Julia broke her wrist at an awkward moment and that she subsequently had a hip operation.
Both these events required in-hospital treatment and the latter a period of recuperation - in a splendid clinic near Hyères, where we were impressed by the facilities.
The clinic had indoor and outdoor swimming pools, both for therapy and for recreation, accommodation for families, educational facilities for children, and two gyms. Dining arrangements were divided between a number of rooms small enough to avoid a sense of mass catering, where there was a limited choice of menus and to which friends and relatives could be invited for lunch. There was also a small snack bar for less elaborate entertaining. Having subscribed to a mutuelle (a top-up insurance scheme), we had to pay nothing for any of this, nor for the physiotherapy following the wrist-break.
Later I had a minor operation which necessitated a couple of nights in hospital, again at no extra cost. As is customary in French clinics and hospitals, there are no wards - just two-bedded rooms, which may be had without sharing (for a price), also covered by the mutuelle. In all these cases, what might be described in other contexts as 'after-sales service' has been beyond reproach. Although our only other medical experiences were in the UK, we see no reason to doubt the WHO verdict that the French health service is the best in the world.
The 'faults' that exist in the system - that proprietary medicines are unnecessarily prescribed when generics would serve, that GPs tend to ask if there is nothing else one would like (in response, no doubt, to the French enthusiasm for pills and potions), and that everyone has free access to any number of specialists, all of which increase the cost of the health service and consequently contributions to it - are currently being addressed.
Conclusions
We very much like living in France and wouldn't readily go back permanently to the UK, even if it weren't unaffordable. We enjoy the quality of life, reasonably-priced food and drink, the climate (even if the weather is not always as fine as is supposed), the highly varied countryside. Perhaps above all we like the egalitarianism, where waiters, shop staff and others are treated with politeness and a respect for their professionalism they wouldn't enjoy in the UK. We have found no pet hates and even the bureaucracy, of which many complain, is fairly efficient and probably little if at all worse than anywhere else.
I can hardly describe our progress as triumphal but so far, apart from the setbacks I have described, it hasn't been a disaster. I am conscious that this might suggest complacency or self-satisfaction but, in fact, the problems we have had and the mistakes we have made simply generate a wish to get better at living in France and to engage more fully - and we have ideas about how to do so when we are less busy with house and garden.
If we have any advice to offer, it would be to approach living abroad by being open to new experiences and avoiding comparisons with 'home'. Picking the right place to live is essential. We would recommend seeing as much of the chosen country as possible before settling on a region or a specific location. As you home in on an area, be sure to visit it at different times of the year: not only does the weather vary but a spot that is full of life at the height of the season may seem quite dead at other times. We found it helped to draw up a specification of what you want and need as a yardstick against which to compare places - a scoring system could make this easier.
It is well worthwhile making serious efforts to speak the language as well as you can. Fluency is ideal but not essential provided you can make yourself understood and understand other people. Whether they can speak your native language or not, local people will appreciate your making the effort to speak theirs, even if you don't do it well.
Do we miss anything? Yes, of course. We miss the cultural life of London. We miss the theatre, but we are aware that, had we been able to stay there, we would no longer be able to afford to enjoy it. At a more trivial level, we miss odd food items that aren't available here, though increasingly they are becoming so.
We - more so I - miss the pubs, particularly the Fleet Street pubs, which were so much a part of my erstwhile milieu, even though they and Fleet Street aren't what they were. All this amounts to a nostalgia, but it is pointless to indulge in an unrepeatable past, and we try to avoid doing so. Our present and future is here and now and, though we have 'folk memories' of the UK, that is all that they are or should be
