Hi Valerie, thanks for the link etc.
The area is another reason for not moving, simply because the area we would most like to move to would be in the Southwest. However, apart from my parents who have a holiday home (dilapidated ruin) in a remote village near Tern (?) and the odd French relative in Marseilles, we would be starting up again without any support network, which although not a necessity, is nice when you have three young children. We left London to settle in Worthing without this and it has taken the best of 3 years to get a good amount of friends etc around us and we still miss our friends in London. If we wanted to have a good support network (which means probably also a lot of interference from the in-laws!) then we would settle somewhere near Troyes in the Northeast. So, there you have it :-).. short answer, we dunno!