The One That Got Away

You must allow me to tell you how ardently and hopelessly I love the 'one that got away'. Mainly, because my friends and family are quite sick of hearing about it…

You must allow me to tell you how ardently and hopelessly I love the house that got away. Mainly, because my friends and family are quite sick of hearing about it.

So, there’s this French house…

It’s not the one I’m buying.
It found me one random day in an early lockdown, sat drinking gin in blankets because the pubs were all shut. “I’ve had enough. I’m going to buy a house in France” I announced dramatically, being the dramatic, announcing kind of person I am. Scrolling Rightmove, I found the first one with a vaguely pretty picture and said “Here. Look. This is my French house”.

And the thing is, it was.

Pale grey-green shutters, old crumbly brick. In those 5 or 10 minutes, the joke became utterly serious. A house in France went from a ‘someday maybe’ to a ‘right now, definitely’: I make multi-six figures and can work from anywhere with wifi. I can describe, in complete detail, the contents of a pencil case using my pointless GCSE French vocab. Why not buy a house in France? Would my savings be any safer in some pension fund, tied to London office space futures during the biggest workplace shift since the Industrial revolution? (another topic I like to talk about at length).

Above all else, it just had that immediate, ringing sense of rightness to it all. You know that feeling? Suddenly, I just knew: This was my house. This was my next challenge. This was where I should be directing my interest and focus; my unique blend of irritating tenacity and soft, loving magic for the next decade or more.

And so, The French House Dream was born.

In many ways, that first, perfect house set the yardstick for every other house I would look at. And I did look at others, of course - how ridiculously implausible would it be for the very first French house I saw to be the ultimate right one for me?
But the more houses I saw, the more perfect the original became.

4 bedrooms, two living rooms. A kitchen with pantry and ancient bread oven, opening out into gardens and fields. White paint, old stone floors. Original fireplaces. Wooden windows and shutters and higgeldy skylights patched into the old tiled roof. A wide expanse of orchard, trees and meadows to the rear. Little outhouses too, for a goat, maybe, or a beloved pet rooster and hens.

It was perfect. Still is, probably, if the new owners haven’t done too much harm.
But it never got to be mine.

Lockdown restrictions meant we were unable to travel. Worse, they meant I was unable to even apply to renew my passport, which had expired in the early months of the pandemic.
I expressed our intense interest to the French estate agent, but he was uncommunicative at best. I imagine lots of overseas window-shoppers take the time to send emails suggesting they’d quite like to see a house. It’s all very easy when it’s still theoretical.

Knowing what I know now, I should have insisted on a virtual viewing. I should have sent a friend or a follower from France. I should have jumped in. But I didn’t.

This house had been sat quietly on the market for several years already. What was the chance it would sell, now, once I’d gone and set my heart on it?

Two days before we were booked to finally go and view it, another offer was accepted.

I crawled into bed and cried.

Under the French system, acceptance of an offer is final. Still, I held out hope. I wrote to the home owners in French, explaining our predicament and my love for the house. I sought legal advice. I refreshed the ‘under offer’ listing daily in the hope that the buyers might pull out, be unable to find funding, disappear under mysterious circumstances or be struck down with a terrible illness and die. (Dramatic, remember?)

But alas, they continued to live healthily and happily, and the sale was completed in time.

That should be it. I should have moved on.
And I have, in lots of ways. I’ve bought another house, for goodness sake! But still, in my mind, that first house remains the One That Got Away.

I have lived in that house for nearly 3 years in my imagination. Painted the walls in Orla’s room; reopened the old bricked up window holes; picked fruit from its trees; repainted its kitchen.

I have stalked that house, quite literally; driven to its remote patch of countryside and crept around its gardens like the total madwoman I clearly am. Clambering out later with nettle rash and illicit videos like some sort of real-estate fetishist peeping Tom. It was every bit as beautiful IRL as I imagined. (It was also empty and semi-derelict. Apparently the new owners are doing more extensive renovations than I had planned).

Even now, as we await confirmation that the vendor on our house in France has finally signed off on the last of the paperwork, I am still dreaming of the one that got away.

I google it daily, just in case. In case it comes back on the market, in case this current purchase falls through, in case all my stars re-align and it turns out it was supposed to be ours, after all.

And today is just another day where that didn’t happen.

Logically, I know that this is a narrative of nonsense spun by my brain. A house is a collection of bricks, mortar, wood and glass. Everything else - the daydreams, the perfection - is all just a story I’ve got used to telling myself. Logically, I know.

But in my heart, I’m still quietly convinced that this house and I were meant to be.

I’m not putting the dream on pause, though. I’m not waiting around on the off chance that she somehow comes back to me. I know enough about love affairs to see the dangers of letting the bitter end of something short, hot and passionate leave you with vision tinted a suspiciously rosy shade.

So even if I never get to live in her, I will always be grateful to the French House 1.0.

She made it all possible. Our mad, frantic love affair was the catalyst to this whole unfolding adventure ❤️.

And this, I suppose, is sort of my goodbye to her.

I know lots of you have a One That Got Away, too. Tell me about her! How did it end? Are you happier with what you ended up with, instead?