A year in France

When our children were little we took the plunge and uprooted to the French city of Orléans, on the banks of the Loire. My husband was offered a job working for a dynamic (and scary) Australian tycoon who’d snapped up a French business, so we crossed the channel, rented an old house covered in vines and enrolled our daughter at the local école maternelle. 

Ten months later the scary tycoon changed his mind about the project. We moved back to the UK and took up where we'd left off – older, wiser and a bit better at speaking French. But sorting my office out this week, I came across some columns I wrote in Orléans and the memories came flooding back. Here are some extracts:

“My daughter finishes school this week for the long summer holiday. Despite being the only non-French child in the whole school she’s coped brilliantly. She can now speak a few words in French, count to ten and has made firm friends with a group of five-year-olds in the next class up. One of them, a little girl called Philippine, lives near us and the pair of them kiss each other on the cheeks when they meet and hold hands all the way to school.”

“My two-year-old son’s hair, bleached even whiter by the sun, is the subject of much comment in the boulangerie. ‘That hair will keep you in your old age,’ one old man told me admiringly.”

“The French are intensely proud of their cheese. Charles de Gaulle once claimed there were more than 400 varieties of the stuff so we’re trying as many as we can. But my husband was stunned when I went to Paris for the day, stumbled across a branch of Marks & Spencer and couldn’t resist buying a packet of mature Cheddar. ‘It’s absolutely sacrilege,’ he protested when I got home. ‘How can you buy English cheese in France?’”

“I never realised how seriously the French take their holidays. Instead of staggering their time off work throughout the year, everyone goes away in August. By late July my daughter’s schoolfriends have all disappeared to the seaside, my husband’s office is virtually empty and even the local grocer has shut up shop for the month. When our neighbours realise we’ve booked our grandes vacances for September, they are absolutely astonished. 'Oh la la,' exclaims Marie Therese, our next-door neighbour. 'You’ll be the only people in the entire district in August.'”

“All the houses in Orléans, old and new, have shutters – to keep them secure and, in high summer, cool. We have seven pairs on the ground floor alone and closing them at night and opening them in the morning is quite a job. I haven’t quite got the knack of it yet. As I opened the dining room shutters this morning I almost beheaded a woman walking along the pavement.”

Reading an Alastair Sawday guide changed my life

The arrival of Alastair Sawday’s newsletter in my inbox always brings a wry smile to my face. The founder of Sawday’s Special Places to Stay will be completely oblivious to this fact but reading one of his guidebooks completely changed my life.

I’m not joking. Nine years ago, desperate to book a last-minute summer holiday, I bought a copy of his guide to self-catering properties in my local WH Smith’s and began ringing some of the places he recommended. I’d left it far too late and virtually everywhere was booked up, but the owner of a gite in the south of France said she’d suddenly had a cancellation and could offer us one week. We snapped it up like a shot and a couple of weeks later were en route to the Drôme, a wonderfully unspoilt region sandwiched between the Rhône Valley and the foothills of the Alps. As we drove halfway down a remote French hillside to our destination I had no idea that this place was going to have a major impact on all our lives.

In the following years we returned time and time again to the Drôme, enchanted by its lush, green landscape and majestic mountains. For some unfathomable reason it’s far less famous than Provence, its tourist-run southern neighbour, but just as beautiful. Lots of people have never even heard of it – and those who have discovered it want to keep it that way.

But more importantly, the owner of the farmhouse where we originally stayed became a dear friend. So much so that when we bade farewell to her after yet another blissful holiday I suddenly heard myself saying “I’d love to buy a small place here. Please will you keep a look-out for us?” Within months she’d spotted a rundown farmhouse for sale 20 miles away and sent me an email saying ““Beautiful place. Great potential. South-facing, with its back up against a wooded hillside. Very old farm with heaps of charm.”

So that was it. The next year I bought the House With No Name - a rambling 16th century house with a tumbledown roof, a plague of rats and a heap of rusting cars 12 feet deep in the barn (I’m not exaggerating). And it all began with Alastair Sawday.