Well, it’s been a good week down here in the countryside.
As part of having websites I receive lots of emails asking for information on all sorts of things – the best theme parks in France; the best way to point a stone wall; the tax position on selling property, etc etc. This is good, I don’t have a problem with answering questions. I typically get 2-3 such queries a week, and a response usually takes me about 15-30 minutes.
Only thing is, and you’ll find this hard to believe, I almost never hear back from the people I respond to. Less than 1 in 20 people actually bother to send off a quick note to me saying thanks for the trouble. Now we’re all busy, but frankly I do get a bit annoyed.
So this week I have been cheered up. One person I had responded to sent a nice email thanking me for the trouble. And another, who had been reading this blog, actually phoned up to offer me some good advice. That’s more like it, and thanks to both of you!
Cheered by knowing there are decent people in the world, I then received an email from a small town in the Midi-Pyrenees asking if I would include their town on the site. I have of course, and was pretty chuffed to receive the request.
Then finally, to make me even happier, google had one of their infamous ‘pagerank updates’. Well I’m not sure how many people know or care about such things, but google give each site and page of a site a ‘mark out of 10′ that, in principle at least, says how important the site is. they update these for public-view every three months or so. anyway, the francethisway site went up from a 4 to a 5. This is very exciting for me!
Although my daughter reckons 5 out of 10 hardly sounds very exciting, and that she’d be in trouble with a mark like that, it’s really better than it sounds!
I assume you already use firefox and the google toolbar that shows the pagerank? Tut-tut if not, it’s faster, safer and easier than ‘certain other browsers’ and you can see the pagerank of all the pages you visit to help you know if they are important or not! If you don’t, shame on you – use the button over in the right hand column of this blog to get it now! It only takes a minute and you’ll thank me for ever. Or at least, 1 in 20 of you will.
Anyway, that’s enough good news to be going along with, I’ll find some bad news for next time.
Greetings people.
Stumbled across your web-site this Sunday morning as my peaceful world was being torn asunder by surrogate afro-french grand-kids, either teething or exploding with youthfull exuberance.
My French lady(indirectly responsible for the above) is probably going to drag me kicking and screaming to live in her central France home town of Bourges. Life in North London is fine but a chance of bailing out of the rat race into a medieval wreck bought with whatever is left from the sale of an inflated priced one bedroom flat?It has a magical ring to it.I also quite like the total impracticality of just pulling up sticks and doing it on a shoestring.
Not too sure how these blogs work but I guess someone just responds to my email address.
Anyhow,one unconstructed ageing hippy looks like becoming your correspondent in Central France if you need him(And you get a bi lingual French female version thrown in for free!)
Off to see a couple of places there at the end of this month and will hopefully report back if the dream is not killed dead by the sight of drooling Gallic estate agents
Best wishes to mine francethisway host and anyone who is about to embark on this type of wonderful madness.
Yours in happy trepidation,John Falkner
Hi John,
No need for kicking and screaming quite yet, wait until you’ve lived in France for a year or two and had a few battles with French bureaucracy before you worry about that. Do you have a cunning plan for survival or is that side of things going to wait for a while?
We like hippy correspondents and all contributions are gratefully received and poorly paid. Certainly the francethisway guide to the ‘centre’ region of France is particularly in need of love and attention and local knowledge.
Look forward to hearing from you when things get moving
Cheers
Well, this ageing north London hippy and lady wife left Palmers Green in late 2005 for Poitou Charente, and haven’t looked back.
Not once….. the newspapers that were considered an addiction lie unread in the kitchen, the desire for bacon has much reduced, and the delght of being able to leave the car outside and be certain it won’t be broken into overnight brings a peace of mind beyond compare. Our medieval home is part of a castle built by Richard the Lionheart….really…. isn’t a wreck, and cost the price of a one-bedroomed flat in N13.
Upsides –
friendly people, great food and wine, an organic food movement that is like a fundamentalist religion, peace and clean air, and a much reduced cost of living; few crowds or queues and a respect for the other person.
Downsides -
only one, the driving.
Buy a tank.
Good luck.
I don’t think I’ve read a ‘proper’ newspaper for three or four years, except for the occasional bit of one that gets left in a gite. It does mean I have no grasp on what’s going on in the world but doesn’t seem to have mattered too much so far.
Wow, a castle, I’m jealous! I saw a website selling castles the other day and was telling our daughter which one we’d buy when we are rich. “No way” she said. Apparently our house is already embarrasingly large compared to her friends, and it would be impossible to invite someone round to a castle. The French can be a bit sensitive about wealth and social differences.
Anyway, glad you’re enjoying yourselves, so are we!
Cheers
Our bit of the castle was probably regarded as the garden shed – the house is made of what was the original stone from the castle – the walls may well be original, and the house probably had three floors , not the two we have now; we also have a ruined pigeonnier in the garden.
Beaucoup bulot, as one local pundit put it….
Much more interesting is the system of tunnels that runs under all the houses in the village – we have nine in our garden; the house next door has a tunnel that runs directly to the donjon, part of the original castle.
Apparently the house was a bordel, where the associates of Richard Coeur de Lyon kept their lady friends…each bedroom in that part of the house has a separate staircase that descends into the subterranean system.
And then there is the local tale of the four German soldiers who went missing just before the liberation, and are rumoured to be buried somewhere deep in another tunnel…….
You want history and intrigue? We have it here.
Beats north London every time…..
G
Great story Gerry, thanks for sharing it with us!