France This Way...the blog!!

A question we are often asked, is how does the quality of life in France compare with that in the UK? A tough question because it depends so much on the individual (yes, you!) and their circumstances.

If you are retired and living in luxury in Berkshire the answer will be different than if you are working at a job you don’t like in a poky office for 18 hurs a day. But I’ll try and highlight a couple of the obvious things that make a big difference, at least for us.

Weather

The weather in the south of France is notably better than in the UK. Spring and autumn tend to be pleasant or warm, and summers are longer and more consistent. Sitting on a sunny terrace with your morning coffee in the middle of May is a great way to relax. The sunshine DOES give you a sense of well-being.

Roads

The roads in rural france tend to be much quieter than in the UK. Traffic jams are almost unheard of and the roads are well maintained. You would be surprised how much stress and exhaustion this can remove from your life.

Of course, if you live 15 km from the nearest shop you will spend rather a lot of your time in the car which offsets this a bit. Especially when you know that your husband is sat at home on the terrace enjoying his morning coffee.

Food and Wine

There are lots of good restaurants at affordable prices, and the food in the local markets is usually of high quality. Strawberries that taste like those strawberries you eat 30 years ago, cheese from the farm, and so on. Likewise wine – good quality and cheaper than in the UK.

Have you tried French wine recently, or just Chilean chardonnay etc? A lot of wine around the world has become similar in taste (ooh, hope that isn’t a controversial statement, I’m not an expert) and a nice French red is both different and enjoyable.

We are 25 kilometres from a McDonalds or any other fast-food outlet.

Children and Youth
In rural areas there is still a strong culture of family, and respect for elders. Youth drunkenness is very unusual and there is rarely a reason to be nervous about walking through the streets of your local town at 11pm.

Cost of Living

Everyday bills – property taxes, water bills, insurance and so on are more or less the same as in the UK. Certain food and drink costs are lower, but on average you wil spend roughly the same in the two countries. Petrol and cigarettes are no longer cheap in France.

You could try downshifting to France if you are a hardy, rabbit-shooting, chicken-keeping kind of family, and probably live cheaply on a couple of rural acres. You still need to put petrol in the car and so on, but you could save some money if you tried hard. Not for the faint-hearted, and probably just for the dreamers. I’ve not seen anyone successfully downshift without selling up and moving back to the UK, but I’ve not seen everything!

Conversation

Tricky one, because it depends on your neighbours as much as anything. Suffice to say, if you are a chatty outgoing kind of person, you move to a remote farmhouse, and you can’t speak French very well, this will be detrimental to your quality of life. It can be a serious problem, more so if you are the kind of person who can’t stop chattering all the time.

Time with the family

We now eat all our meals together as a family, which we didn’t in the UK because of work and time constraints. I hope this is good for all of us, like the textbooks say it is.

But you can have too much ‘time with the family’ – you might find having hubby with you all day is really a bit too much. Mrs B can’t see too much of me of course, but less fortunate wives have partners who sit around looking bored and getting under their feet all day.

The other side of the problem is that part of your family will now be 1,000 miles away, and you will see less of them on a daily basis. Probably more during the year as a whole because when they do visit they stop for two months, and eat you out of house and home until you have to get the local maire to evict them as unwanted squatters.