French Life-expat France

I understand that the flood of expats arriving in France from the UK has slowed down quite a lot recently in the face of falling house prices and an interminable number of TV programmes telling everyone what sad miserable lives we expats lead, battling against poverty, bureaucracy, and of course the French.
Ah well, not to [...]

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 [...]

OK it’s not just a France problem, it’s everyone, but I thought I’d grumble about the price of petrol.
I have every sympathy with people in the USA who complain that they are paying $4 a gallon - about 50 euro cents a litre. Well, we are paying 1.45 euros a litre, three times as much [...]

This is part 2 of the not entirely serious look at the important things to know about France. (See HERE for part 1)
N is for…Napoloen Bonaparte. What is there to say about the most famous French leader in the history of the Republic that has not already been said? Born in Ajjacio,Corsica in 1769 he [...]

For those of you who have never visited France, or are planning a first trip, here is a light-hearted but handy alphabetical run-down of trivia that it might be useful to know.
A is for….Asterix the Gaul, a pugnacious little fellow who completely encapsulates the French personality. Created as a cartoon character [...]

It seems that packing up and moving to a different country can be a bit confusing - presumably people enter into a state of delirium and nervous excitement in the weeks before moving. Now I mention it, so did we…this is a guest blog article, see credit below, although I have rudely added my own [...]

Between the 17th and 18th centuries, four generation of the Cassini family set out to draw detailed maps of France, and given the poor condition of roads and information available they did an exceptional job of it. The ‘final’ versions of these were published in the years following the French revolution, based on pre-Revolution information, [...]

For quite a while now I’ve been trying to extract an article about French pop music from teenage daughter. Unfortunately cash hasn’t worked and Mrs B has said that torture is not an option, so the project has been set aside for the time being. Presumably until daughter has a pressing need for a new [...]

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about whether expats are entitled to join the French health system, now largely resolved. But the question remained, is the French health system still as good as its reputation?
The Commonwealth Fund has released the results of a survey of health care in the leading industrialised [...]

More on this picture of Florida’s state flower in a moment. First a few general comments about life here in France this week, particularly the way it revolves around the village hall.
Autumn must be on its way, because the signs for ‘night markets’ (places were villagers and tourists eat together in a town centre, while [...]

Out on our bikes this week, my French cycling companion and I were amused to pass a hunter waiting patiently by the edge of the road…we cycled a further 50 metres around the corner and there was a stag happily eating grass in the meadow, just out of his sight.
There are restrictions on deer numbers [...]

(Later edit: comments about food addiction that were previously here have been deleted because of possible offence, see comments that follow this blog entry. Apologies to those who read them and were offended.)
…the point of this little story was the second item on the news. Apparently, in France at least, you can now sell your [...]

Now this is what I call exciting. Having been promised that TNT television would arrive at our rural outpost sometime in about 2011, it has unexpectedly arrived early. TNT is a system by which additional television channels arrive through the television aerial (not a satellite dish) and get decoded by a clever little box.
A word [...]

I thought I’d try and attract your attention with a hard-hitting headline this week. The drug problem I’m referring to is widespread in France, expensive and dangerous. And completely legal.
My youngest daughter had a cold that wouldn’t go away so eventually Mrs B carted her off to the doctors. They emerged exhausted and hungry two [...]

Ahhh, the peace of autumn. The last holidaymakers have gone until the spring, and the only sound to be heard is the tractors beavering away in the neighbouring fields.
I say autumn, but the weather here is more like summer. For weeks now, the weather has just been getting better every day, and I suspect it [...]