France This Way...the blog!!

Every year a lot of people stay in gites (holiday rental self-catering properties, for those who don’t know) in France. That’s good news for me of course because I’ve got two, and if they were empty all year I would be even poorer. Unfortunately most people prefer to pay more and come in August, rather than take a chance on the weather and come in February when prices are much lower. I suppose I can understand that.

In fact February is about the time that most people start thinking about their summer holidays. OK, so there are people who book in December and January rather than wait until the nice places are booked up, and very well they do from it, but nobody much seems to have noticed that.

Today I was going to write about ‘how to find the perfect gite for your holiday’ and offer all kinds of useful advice, but that is going to have to wait a day or two, because I am going to ask a favour instead.

During four years of ‘giting’, if that is the verb for running gites, we have had almost no problems at all. Everyone has been happy and written nice things in the visitors book, and a lot of people come back the following year, so we are confident that we must be doing something right.

But last week all that changed. We have heard from other people about ‘difficult guests’ but I never thought we would have them, after all our place is more or less perfect, isn’t it? Well now we have learned the truth.

Our gite is, I now realise, little better than a troglodyte cave, which only the most desperate and poverty-stricken tourist would dare enter, while spraying antiseptic potions on all exposed surfaces. In fact, suitable only for a large number of small children to dismantle piece by piece, while making a noise that would put an Iron Maiden concert to shame.

Paradoxically, the horrors of the gite must have some form of attraction because the guests didn’t go out once in a fortnight, apart from a crazed dash each morning (by one of the group, leaving the remaining members to continue the demolition work) to buy bread and croissants.

Insects are getting in to the house, they complained. Could that be because all the doors, windows and shutters are open all day, I wonder? Usually, to keep the heat out, at least one of these is kept closed in the daytime. Mosquito nets are quite impractical in France, and seldom used, because windows open inwards, and shutters open outwards, so a mosquito net between the two stops the shutters being opened and closed from inside. This is, as I’m quick to apologise, the countryside. Insects do turn up from time to time.

Do we have a rule against erecting a marquee next to the swimming pool? Well, I suppose not, but it would be nice to be asked. Do we have a rule saying that the washing line at the end of the garden should be used, rather than a clothes drier in the courtyard that we all have to look at all day? Well, no, if truth be told we don’t actually have a rule.

Do we have a rule saying children should be in bed (or at least reasonably quiet) after 10pm; and that hunting lizards in our private area is perhaps unnecessary (there are 15 acres to ‘hunt’ in, without sitting in our porch). Well of course not. We imagined that common-sense would win the day, and that pages of rules were unnecessary and would be unwelcome.

So we are reluctantly going to have to bring in new rules for next year. We haven’t finalised them yet, but they will probably involve banning children under 12 years old. It won’t affect us too much – we will be able to rent the house out in the summer with or without children – but it is a shame for the 90% of people who manage to control their children and have a nice holiday.

So the upshot of this is: in the next few days, I’ll perhaps explain how to find a nice gite for you and your family. But try and remember, finding a nice holiday is important to you – but finding nice guests is important to the gite owners.

Meanwhile, let me know if you are looking for a child-free holiday in 2007, in a traditional Perigord farmhouse now overrun with escaped lizards.