Waiting For Our Montage Moments

Was it worth spending literally ALL our money on a crumbly old house in the French countryside?

Remember when I had a dream of buying an ancient house in the French countryside? Somewhere I could swim in the river and lie around in meadows all day? Where I could write in nearby fields after eating fancy French patisserie confections for breakfast…?

Well, dear friend: It is happening! I still can’t believe it but I am living this (utterly surreal) dream. Right this moment, today, I am writing to you here, from said French house fantasy reality. It’s pretty wild.

Such a big part of this all being possible is thanks to you readers. To the internet, to community and to this Substack space.

It’s given me the financial justification to write more. Not that it should be necessary - I consider creativity as essential as oxygen and h20 to a healthy human- but let’s be real here: the money helps. It can buy us time and space and room to breathe. With my health reducing my capacity down to just a handful of hours each day, the luxury of getting to do what I love to support my family is never ever going to get old.

One thing I find myself writing about often is the French house itself. I have so many drafted updates; diaries of winter snowfall, flooded kitchens with tiny rivers, small comforts we’re slowly carving out of the cobwebs and damp… but then I hesitate.

Does anyone want to read about this? The messy middle; the less-than-perfect reality of a dream come true.
It’s easy to forget when you’re in it that the bad bits aren’t nearly so awful when it’s all second-hand. And we’re friends here, right? You won’t judge me for my sweaty, knickerless, 1pm-wine-drinking ways…

So here it is: a deeply honest update on all of our French adventuring - the good, the bad and the creepy-crawly.

The Dream vs The Reality

I’ve developed insect paranoia.

Things I have mistaken for a scorpion this month: A dead spider, a tuft of wool, two different dried leaves, a small twig, one scrumpled piece of purple Washi tape. Actual scorpions sighted in my entire time in France, ever: zero.
I think it’s the unfamiliarity of the insects here that really freaks out my brain. It’s not a conscious process; logically I know they can’t hurt me, besides the odd mozzie bite. Instead it’s something primitive; an ancient part of my mind that wakes me up screaming convinced there is something crawly and leggy hiding inside my bed. There isn’t, usually - but what if next time there is??

Brocantes often sell a whole lot of crap.

Yes, they sell a lot of treasure, too, but tracking it down can be infuriatingly hit-and-miss. Sometimes you get up at dawn (ok, fine, at 7am, but on a weekend) only to feed the pale flesh of your ankles to the chiggers and midges, traipsing around a field full of overpriced baskets and spooky china dolls. Other times you swing by late with low and breezy expectations and end up with so many bargains you resort to strapping things onto the car! There is zero in-between with this.
I think flea markets might be closest that humans can really get to hunter-gathering in the Western world (no, big game hunters, your cruelty does not count). Is that the last surviving vial of the bubonic plague or a just cute little vase? Look! That cupboard is exactly what you need for your kitchen… but are you willing to look inside? I’ve never been base-jumping or paragliding, but I imagine it’s a similar level of risk and thrill.

I cannot wear underwear here.

Or ok, sometimes I can, but there’s a certain humidity/temperature ratio at which point all of it becomes unsustainably bad. It digs. It twists. It makes my whole body sweat in ways I really didn’t think possible. So French-Summer-me is, it turns out, a bit of a temptress who will frequently go around in a sundress with absolutely nothing underneath. (Just as well really, as a mouse chewed holes into a pair of my nice Soma knickers…)

The food is phenomenal, all of the time.

Every meal is incredible. Salami and salad and fresh baguette in the garden; tomatoes as big as my face. Salade de Chèvre at the local bistro. Accidentally over-ordered salty fries with sandy hands at the river beach. 3€ wine in sipped from cheap plastic cups. Afternoon ice lollies as an entire food group. I can’t remember what we used to eat in England any more, but it definitely wasn’t like this.

I’m still disabled.

What? I’m as surprised as you are! While it might make perfect logical sense that my body hasn’t magically defied medical science simply by moving to the Continent for the summer, I confess there was still some tiny, secret part of me that was hoping it would. Never overtly, of course - I’m much too rational for that - but in the hazy, casual daydreams of a Yorkshire winter afternoon.
At the French house, I’d tell myself, I’ll sit out everyday in a giant floppy sunhat and play dolls with Orla on the grass. I’ll bake bread and choquettes at dawn in a steamy-windowed kitchen. I’ll take long romantic walks with my husband in the woods.
But now that I’m here... nope.
That’s the thing about invisible disabilities, I suppose: they’re so easy to push out of the picture, even when we’re painting it ourselves.
Last week we attempted to walk around Bergerac and I was the perfect study in droopy and breathless malaise. In the end we had to cafe-hop - a citron presse here, an ice cream for Orla next. Anything so I could sit down instead of fainting, and as I sat looking at my little family’s quietly disappointed faces, I could have cried, to be totally honest. It never stops being a nightmare, the cage of crap health. And it never stops telling me to hate myself.

It really is like being on permanent holiday!

Now I’ll caveat this with the fact that for me, holidays always mean a certain amount of work. It’s just how I roll… or rather, how I poorly structure my calendar, mental energy and time. So when I say it’s like a permanent holiday I don’t mean like a break from work. I mean all the other stuff: endless sunshine. Swimming in the river every day. Trips to French supermarkets with exciting pickle aisles. The smell of sun cream and tomato vines; happy childhood memories that must belong to somebody else. (Orla, I’m hoping).
If you’re a do-er, all of this might not appeal, but my health robbed me of any compulsion for industriousness many years ago, and I have learned to adapt. Foreign travel has mainly been about slow and dreamy immersion for me for a number of years now, and at the French house, I get to do it for real.

French Winter.

Damn it, I had such high hopes. Somehow I convinced myself that although, obviously, Bordeaux isn’t south enough to escape the changing seasons, we still might run to the French house when the British winter drear became all too much.
It actually seemed to be true as we drove down in late December; 0 degrees and drizzly in the UK, we were met with 15 degree sunshine and a soft, silky breeze en France.
Then we got to the house and found that the hot water needed 24 hours to reach shower-able temps. Then the kitchen flooded, massively, and then the septic tank overflowed. We discovered the huge, 70s fireplace was merely a decorative one. And then the temperature dropped, we got 2 feet of ‘unprecedented’ snow and were reduced to huddling together as a family under a single heated throw.
It made for great stories and even better photographs but smug-sunshiney-escapism this was not. Guess I should have bought a place on the equator or something. Live and learn.

I’m still walking mosquito bait.

I am upset. Somebody, or possibly the internet as an amorphous whole, lead me to believe that at some special critical point my body would acclimate and stop over-reacting this way. Reader, it has not.
If the mozzies don’t get me then it’s the ants, gnats, midges and hell, even the spiders will have a go given half a chance. Every day I slather on repellant that makes me smell like a cheap citrus mocktail, and every night I wake up clawing frantically at my screaming skin. I owe my last vestiges of sanity to cheap mosquito window screens and the magical hairdryer trick (as long as you can handle for as long as you can bear it. Denatures the proteins or something!). And while I acknowledge that I am, indeed, a veritable snack, it seems a little unfair that everyone else is immune while I look like I’m single-handedly bringing Measles back.

I’m outside, all the time.

In Yorkshire I can get a bit hermit-like. Maintaining the delicate energetic balance between my business, parenting, domestic life and social activity often means there’s precious little margin for error, and going outside on a work day - even just to walk, or to grab a coffee - can mean an essential spinning plate crashing down to the floor. So often I just… don’t. I don’t risk it. Whole weeks can go by without me leaving the house and it’s terrible for my well-being - mental, intellectual and physical.
In Yorkshire we don’t really have a garden, though - just a patio area that is open to the street and to all of the lovely neighbours that want to stop and say hello.
In France, though, I get to be a meadow-based hermit. I can lie on my back in the daisies and watch the clouds, only talking to people by prior arrangement. Sometimes the house gets so hot that it virtually ejects us out into the woodland or beaches, and then I come home and lie in a hammock in a tree. My vitamin D levels are going to be incredible. I wish it could be like this all the time.

Our friends are coming to visit!

Despite a couple of false starts (one couple have separated; another had to rearrange) we’re hosting some of our favourite humans this summer! This was always such a big part of my dream for this place: sitting out together as the sun sets; early-morning bakery runs and long lazy afternoon swims and chats while the kids run wild in the trees. Time together - to finish sentences and drinks in a way we never seem to manage on fleeting afternoon catch-ups back home. Whenever anything in life is wonderful I am immediately desperate to share, and this dreamy summer adventure-land is much too magical to keep all to myself.

Renovations are not like the montages in my head.

For starters, I’m not wearing half-undone dungarees with an artful smear of paint on my cheek. I mean, what gives? Worse still are all of the unexpected incidents. Patching the roof has become an Olympic level game of whack-a-mole and there is nothing remotely charming and romantic about squishing on a slug barefoot. Why won’t half of the plug sockets work in the living room any more? Why?? And where are the youtube videos explaining why the water from the tap in the bathroom keeps giving us a mild electric shock?
It was all a bit dismaying, tbh, until Jean-Bernard the plumber turned up in a beret to de-sludge our sewage system and restored some of my faith in this whole endeavour. He spoke no English and I’ve yet to reach the Duo Lingo module on septic tanks, but we communicated effortlessly using Google translate. Imagine my excitement when, upon finding a pipe blockage underground, he carefully typed out that he would come back the next day with his ferret. A ferret! Basically just a long cat - and I LOVE cats!

Perhaps it was trained to scurry down pipes and claw away at the clog? I was very excited to make its acquaintance.
So you can imagine my disappointment when it turned out to simply be the French word for a pressure washer hose. Still, the beret and him saving us somewhere in the region of 10,000€ by finding the missing part of our septic tank were still enough to give me a rosy glow. I call him my French Husband now.

The shutters are still yellow!

Why? Pour quoi?? I was so determined for this to be one of the very first changes but urgency and comfort have continually won out. Fortunately I’m now talking with Farrow & Ball about rectifying this, (Skylight? Eddy?) so I asked my husband to measure them today so we could calculate the paint quantity we would need. He came back in and said it was 359m2, meaning we’d need approximately 1360 litres of paint! Umm… I don’t think their gifting budget is going to stretch to that!
Fortunately it turned out he’d messed up the measurements and put the decimal point in the wrong place, but the initial confidence with which he announced that number still gave me the vapours. Maybe they’ll stay yellow forever, after all. It sounds like an awful lot of work.

I don’t speak fluent French (yet).

For a while I hyper-fixated on DuoLingo (do you use it? Can we follow each other there and be friends?) and my French galloped way past my previous high school standard into new and exciting heights. And then, inevitably, my obsession stalled. Turns out, actually talking to people in a language you’re both clumsy and ineffective with is awkward, embarrassing, and hard. (Honestly, I find talking to waitstaff and shop assistants stressful even in English, so this shouldn’t have surprised me so much).
Where I am making some happy vocab gains however is in the world of online shopping. French Vinted and Le Bon Coin do not pander to the struggling ex-pat in their second-hand listing titles so you need to know all of the synonyms.
Want to look for a bathroom sink? You’ll also need the French words for washbasins, hand basins, vanities and washstands at your grasp. I like to think that while my mastery of the French language may not be getting that much wider, it’s growing deeper all the time. It may never have been true that Arctic indigenous people have over 50 words for snow, but I think I’m getting close to that with my rustic interior vocab.

A Plague of Eyelash Bugs.

Picture for a moment, a large, fluffy false eyelash strip running leggishly across your bedroom wall. Nightmare fuel, right? Officially called ‘house centipedes’, my friend Rachael nicknamed them the ‘eyelash bugs’ which is actually far more taxinomically correct. I’ve tried really really hard to get along with them - they eat the mosquitos, and I clearly need their help - but after one plopped unceremoniously onto my pillow in the night and then audibly scurried past my face I have taken official objection to their ridiculous number of legs. And no, in case you’re wondering. They cannot be trained to lie passively on your eyelids all day, so what even is the point?

Orla made friends!

She speaks zero French (and is currently refusing to learn any), so it’s been tricky to find any company for baby girl. Luckily, our neighbours run a very small campsite in the summer, and this last week a whole bunch of children around Orla’s age arrived from Holland. They’ve been playing together ever since it is so magical to see my once-shy little girl blossom with new found confidence. Between them there’s very little shared language but that doesn’t seem to matter. They spend hours swapping the names of objects in their respective languages, getting snacks from the kitchen and playing hide and seek in the trees.
Yesterday I looked out of the bathroom window to see a boy and a girl were catching butterflies with a net in the meadow, like in a 1950’s children’s book or something.It’s idyllic, and to see Orla so happy here is such a relief.

So, was it all worth it?
Does the French dream live on?

For me the answer is absolutely, yes. It’s the dream that what keeps me going in the trickier times, and it’s the dreamy moments that keep my hope alive.

Yesterday, I went outside and pruned the roses in the golden hour light, and it made up for a whole afternoon of financial stress. Even though I was wearing my husband’s giant crocs while doing it.

Sometimes all of the prickly realities can feel like bad omens; they make us worry that perhaps we have made the wrong choice. But really I think they’re the proof of it happening - proof that we’ve left the fantasy realm and moved into the living. Our dreams when made real aren’t full of montage moments but that doesn’t make them any less magical.
If anything, it just means that we’ve opened our eyes.

How about you? Still with me?

Are these updates fun?

For whatever reason this is the topic I hesitate to share on the most so I’d love to hear your thoughts!