French Life-expat France

I made an interesting discovery a couple of days ago that might be interesting for people like us who live in France and only have French television, or for owners of second homes in France.
We get out television using TNT - digital signals that are received through the aerial and converted by a decoder. Hence [...]

Well I’d never heard of QROPS (Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme) until I was sent this article - but they actually look quite useful if you are an expat with a substantial UK based pension fund. Could be why I hadn’t heard of them, perhaps? Read on, you might just save a few pennies…
What exactly [...]

Given that summer is here at last…I thought I’d take a look at the best ways of heating your house in France. Better late than never, and it might just help reduce the cost of fuel / oil next year - which I’d guess won’t be any less than it is now. There are now [...]

Mrs B has now returned from her Loire Valley exploration and all is returning to normal. Apparently I was supposed to have prepared a slap-up dinner for her return, not hunt in the bottom of the freezer for old fish fingers, but apart from that momentary lapse all is well.
Her most exciting discovery was this [...]

A long time ago I had a good camera and took lots of ’slides’ of fascinating places. Remember slides? Little bits of plastic that you watched by projecting the picture onto a big white screen. These are now sitting in the attic going brown and spotty until I get them converted to digital photos.
But for [...]

I just got back from my whistle-stop tour around the Camargue, Arles and Nimes, and very nice it was too. I saw everything I wanted to see, ate all alone in restaurants while others sat in happy family groups, and generally rushed about with an “it’s Tuesday so this must be Nimes” type visit.
There is [...]

Let’s try and keep our spirits up. Petrol prices mean that everyone needs to stay at home, petrol shortages mean that we can’t go anywhere anyway…and I’ve hired a car starting this evening so I can go and do research on the Nimes region.
So either I won’t be able to set off, or I’ll set [...]