Note: this entry is inspired by the ‘weekend of patrimony’ in France (this weekend) when many of the great buildings are opened free to the public.

Our daughter has just started her second year at lycée and one of her subjects is history. Turns out her history teacher is in training to be an architect, so architecture is taking rather more importance that you might expect and a trip to the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao is part of the course.

If you have never seen it, the Bilbao Guggenheim is a very beautiful modern building – but no obvious link with French history springs to mind.

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I’m a long way from home travelling around Burgundy at the moment, which presents me with a challenge – whenever I go away, Mrs B and the girls complain that I don’t think of them at all. This is based on the fact I that I never buy them presents from whereever I’ve been.

Earlier in the year I did buy them a nice bit of cheese from a farm in the Auvergne but they forgot that very quickly. There’s gratitude for you. So to make amends, as I was ambling around the village of Chablis, I thought I would buy a posh bottle of the local wine.

OK the girls won’t thank me, but scoring a couple of brownie points with Mrs B can’t do any harm.

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Good news for the Greens this week – starting next year France are introducing a Carbon Tax of 17 euros for each tonne of carbon dioxide that gets emitted into the atmosphere.

Well, good news if it has any impact on our behaviour, sorts out the planet, and gives our grandchildren something like a breathable atmosphere and reasonable weather conditions as their inheritance.

If all it does is sweep more money into the state to pay an army of civil servants, which is what I suspect will really happen, then it is less exciting.

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Back in April I posted about a problem with house insurance – or rather the startling finding that our (and probably many others) gites were not properly insured. You can read about that at ‘oops I forget to insure my property‘ (as it should have been called).

Now a new and equally startling insurance quirk has been brought to our attention, relating to UK registered cars that are kept and run in France.

People living in France but driving UK registered cars are supposed to get them re-registered in France – but many don’t bother. There are certainly plenty of expats living around here that have been driving UK cars for a long time, presumably to avoid the hassle of re-registration.

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The rentrée – return to school after the holidays – takes on a significance in France that it doesn’t have in the UK, or perhaps elsewhere, so I thought I’d give a quick run-down of what it’s all about.

It’s always a stressful time when the summer holidays come to an end – not for me of course, since I have an unnatural ability to ignore everything that goes on around me - but for Mrs B and the girls. The panic starts a few days before school restarts, when long lists of obligatory stationery and books are suddenly produced from school bags that have been gathering dust for the last two months. 

The list of requirements can run to two or three pages, with hysteria setting in if a single item isn’t exactly as specified. Apparently turning up with a 48 page writing book, when it is supposed to have 96 pages, can have consequences you (and I) can’t begin to imagine.

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Thought I’d offer some slightly more constructive advice than usual today, for anyone looking to make money from home with their favourite hobby or interest. And it’s not me offering to pay so you don’t need to worry about bouncing cheques.

There are now apparently well over 150 million websites on the internet, the vast majority of which are a load of old rubbish, but that still leaves a lot that are active and interesting sites. Approximately 100,000 – 500,000 would be a reasonable estimate.

One of the big challenges for website owners is keeping their sites up to date with interesting features and content – and a site that never changes or gets updated sooner or later ends up in googles great internet dustbin, never to be seen again.

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Today was one of the few days in the year that I look forward to and dread at the same time – the day when we (myself and the local chap I usually cycle with) go out for a bike ride with the regional cycling group. It’s all very nice thinking you’re doing a great job on your own, but it doesn’t mean much if you can’t keep up with anyone else.

So today was the big day that we were to find out. Each year a route is planned from one of the local towns that us mere mortals can attend, without the usual need for multiple copies of a doctor’s certificate.

If you go along to one of these group rides yourself (most towns hold them), the most important thing is not to have a bike that looks more expensive than anyone else’s. If you have a flashy bike and do well, everyone will think (or at least claim) it was because of the bike. So if you usually ride around on the latest Trek Madone carbon fibre model you need to leave it at home and hire something decrepit from the local bike hire shop. Preferably with a shopping basket on the front.

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Everyone tells me that discussion forums are nothing but trouble – forum members are rude to each other; spammers sign up just to tell of the delights of via*ra;  everyone thinks they know better than everyone else; and worst of all – there is no possibility of ever making a penny from a forum despite the time and effort they take.

So what to do? Ignore public opinion!

france this way have taken a bold step into the unknown, and added a shiny new France forum. At the same time I also added a ‘comments and questions’ box to most of the pages in the ‘main’ site so that people can, well, ask questions or leave comments.

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Occasional storms aside, it has been very hot and sunny down here for a very long time. This is good for holidaymakers, who expect nothing less, and less good for the garden, as many plants have long since abandoned all hope of rain and chosen instead to shrivel away and wait for winter.

While the holiday makers are bounding around outside in the sunshine and hopping in and out of the pool,  I tend to sit inside with an industrial fan about 50 centimetres away from my face and turned on at full power. It does mean my hair looks a bit startling when someone knocks on the door wanting to borrow a cup of sugar  but otherwise it works quite well.

Problem is, I do like to ride my bike every day – and by the time I’ve finished my ‘urgent tasks’ for the day, the temperature is well into the 30’s (around 90 degrees if you like ‘old money’ temperatures). So every day I put myself through the same torment – I set off cycling through the French countryside at about 2pm, full of energy and well prepared with two bottles of cold water.

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Eymet is a very pleasant bastide town near Bergerac, worth a visit if you are in the region to explore the 13th century arcaded houses around the main square and to amble along the river.

It’s not exceptional compared with other similar towns in the Dordogne department, which has many stunning medieval towns and villages, but somehow the town has attracted a reputation that means that Eymet has a constant stream of journalists and reporters, and a fame that exceeds its size and importance – it is known as being the town full of English.

Not unfairly perhaps, because the town does have a lot of English families, along with an English cricket club, an English tea-shop…

If a UK newspaper wants a story about expat invasions, happy expats, miserable expats, rising house prices in France, falling house prices in France, or anything else that concerns the expat community they send a couple of reporters off to Eymet.

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From 1 July 2009 the VAT rate on restaurant meals was reduced in France from 19.6% to 5.5%, in an effort to encourage us to all eat out more and bring prosperity to the catering industry.

Many restaurants haven’t actually passed on the reduction to their customers, and it is very doubtful whether we will all rush out to restaurants more often anyway – how many people really think ‘Ah, good, the fixed price menu is now 22 euros instead of 25, let’s start going out more often…? ‘

But anyway, that’s the big idea – and apparently it will cost the French government two billion euros a year. Oops, little slip there, it should read ‘will cost the French taxpayer two billion euros a year’. A subtle difference, but I think you will agree it’s an important one.

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I received an email a couple of days ago, the second of its type I have received in the last week. :

Hi, I wonder if you can help. Family friends are currently in France and are extremely disappointed in the gite they have currently booked and do not wish to stay until the end of the week as currently planned.
I just wanted to check if you had last minute availability (starting tomorrow) for 2 adults and 2 children – they are flexible on the area – as long as they can find somewhere.
Many thanks for your help.

A little while ago I posted about ‘Does Your Villa Exist‘ but that is really very unusual. A much more common problem is the one above – where you turn up at your ‘attractive cottage in the countryside’ and find that it is quite horrible, for a bunch of reasons that usually include cleanliness, location or wildlife.

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We get a lot of ‘farmers protest’ type billboards along the sides of the road near us, mostly to do with the fact that supermarkets sell the farm produce for a price that is way in excess of the price the farmers receive. OK so French farmers aren’t top of the list for the public sympathy vote, but I can see their point.

One of the more common placards at the moment reads ‘Le lait c’est la vie, le produire c’est mourir’ (’Milk is for life, producing it is is to die’ _-a poor translation but you get the idea). The dairy farmers have seen the price they are paid for their milk drop dramatically this year (the price is set by Brussels) and are losing money fast.

What can they do?

Some local farmers here in south-west France are now taking the enterprising step of selling their milk directly to the public and apparently they are doing a very brisk trade with demand exceeding all expectations.

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This is part 3 in a series describing how to create your own website – see Gite websites for others.

We have seen how to create the world’s most simple (and least interesting) website, now we need to improve it – firstly by making the page interesting and second by adding links to more pages.

Making the page interesting

There are two aspects to this: the content of the page (description of your business, pictures etc) and appearance. These two aspects should be seen as separate processes, and this week we are only looking at content – I’m afraid you have to wait for the next tutorial before it starts to look nice!

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In Provence there are restrictions on access to substantial parts of the countryside during the summer months because of the fire risk, and nowhere more so than in the forested regions around Marseille.

The tourist offices in the region hand out leaflets offering good advice – such as ‘don’t park your car in long dry grass’, and ‘anyone caught smoking in a restricted zone will be publicly guillotined’.

Despite the precautions, about 15,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of forest gets destroyed each year by one of the 3,000 fires in the region! (Note: if you are a heavy smoker planning to camp out in Provence next week read some advice about avoiding forest fires before you get the barbecue out.)

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