French Life-expat France

I haven’t had much time for writing recently, because it is our busiest two weeks of the year. As you can guess, living in the south of France and running a couple of gites (holiday rental properties) is not always the hardest job in the world.

It is harder than you think - it must be, because everyone we know thinks we do nothing all year, and get concerned about how we fight back the boredom of not having an office to go to - but all the same we’re not talking coal-mining, or cotton picking. A lot of the time it is, I have to admit, quite pleasant.

But the two weeks before the holiday rental season starts is different. During April the grass grows about five centimetres a day, so needs constant cutting. And we have about two hectares (five acres) of garden and grass, so that takes a bit longer than your typical suburban back-yard.

Mrs B has a fine ability to designate a large area of field as a herbaceous border, plant it out carefully with coordinated plants, and make things look lovely. But we pay the price for this magnificence in April, when these vast areas of garden get overrun with weeds.

But really it is the mess and havoc that I and the children wreak during the winter and spring that needs sorting out. Building work is a winter occupation, since people on holiday don’t want to hear me playing with the cement mixer. So come the middle of spring we have heaps of unused sand, numerous bags of lime and cement, and usually a pile of bricks or two scattered around. Trust me, if you are re-pointing the walls of a building it is not easy to get the quantities exactly right, so there is always some left.

Likewise, we burn a lot of wood in the woodstove during the winter, but there are usually a couple of cubic metres left over, scattered around the parking area. And worst of all, during the winter Mrs B uses the farmhouse, that we rent out during the summer, as a greenhouse. It stops the plants all dying in the icy winters we get, but is not perfect for the first guests who arrive, to find the have booked a holiday in the world’s largest plant propogator.

Hence, little spare time at the moment. It is our favourite time of year, being pretty much like an enormous spring-clean that shows everything off at its best. There are flowers everywhere, thanks again to Mrs B, and although I seem to have a genetic smelling problem (I can’t smell flowers) they do look very nice. So we both rush around, weeding, cutting, moving and chopping, but with the worlds happiest smiles.

Above all it is me who smiles a lot, because until five years ago I worked in an investment bank, and strange as it may seem, the pleasure of moving heavy objects from one place to another is infinitely greater than the pleasure of catching an early train to the City of London to value credit derivatives. Even with the relative poverty that goes with such a lifestyle, never ever would I dream of swapping lives back, which of course I couldn’t do anyway because five years of sundry building work doesn’t look too impressive on a CV for banking.

Anyway, I’m off now to hack the brambles from a terrace, chase some rabbits from the orchard, and smile to myself until it gets dark and I can go to bed, happy. Hope you are doing the same.