À Vendre

I'm going about this in all the wrong ways. If I had started when I meant to, I would be well under way by now, but as it turns out, I will have to get you up to speed on the events of the last year or so and then continue from there. A bit like Star Wars, only less intergalactic warfare and fewer SFX.

OK, so scrolling back to August 2010...

While G and I were camping in St Ceré, in the heart of France (where we had camped twenty-odd years ago on our epic two wheeled adventure - another story for another time), we found ourselves one Sunday morning peering at properties advertised in the window of the several high-street Immobilier offices, all closed for the weekend. Not high-end properties, you understand; definitely lowest of the low end. The kind featuring a single poor photograph of a stone barn or shed and a price accompanied by tantalising, though cryptic phrases such as "grange à rénover", "76 m2 au sol" "vues dégagées", "dans un petit hameau"...

We had always dreamed of owning a small place in France; of living there one day. When we lived just across the Channel, in Kent, we'd holidayed with the kids in France almost every year, slowly stoking the flame of our passion for France and all things French. But owning a property remained a pipe dream.

Fast forward to 2010 and once again, G and I were in France on holiday, though alone this time, the kids no longer kids and no longer interested in family holidays. Sniff. And this time, home was not in leafy Kent. We were no longer "Disgruntled" of Tunbridge Wells, but "Chip on the Shoulder" of Sydney. Sydney, Australia, that is. We had had to endure a nightmare flight lasting at least a week which was instantly erased from memory as we dropped our bags in the small rental apartment in the 19th of Paris. We had just a couple of hours to claim our spot on the Champs Elysées for the cycle-past of the Tour de France...    A week in Paris followed by a slow meander through the summer sloth of the Dordogne, Lot and Cantal departments brought us to nostalgic places from past visits.

And so, back to St Ceré, which we'd fondly remembered for its Medieval town centre, its river, its campsite with stream and bobbing ducks. Only, in the intervening years, the town fathers must have redirected the stream and packed up the loudly-complaining ducks, for neither were in evidence in the town campsite. It was still leafy, though.

But I digress.

We were hooked. Doing frantic sums out loud, we decided that we could, it seemed, afford to buy a pile of stones, a heap of French rubble, and start to plan our attack on our French Folly.