communal boundry sounds about right, or some other landmark. The 725 was decided by the planning officer at Decazeville and myself in his office (a rough guess as to the distance!) when we moved the entrance (from route d’Agnac to avenue de Fayrerès)
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So right. After Japan I thought the french address system was amazing!! Still think it’s one of the best things about the country. Better than the English system too. It’s so efficient and succinct
Staggering that anyone can find us, ideally a postcode that got you a bit closer than 10km would be nice.
Sorry, but I think I can think of hundreds much better!
To each his own. But give me a few of those hundreds. I’ve just had a couple of glasses of fine french wine so I’m in the mood to discuss a little !!
Wine’s a useful starting point!
However, I’d add buying most of our food from local producteurs, two hours for lunch rather than eating a sarnie in front of a screen, seeing thousands of wild flowers in the meadows because most of our local beef and dairy farmers don’t need to use pesticides (fromage du lait crù, hundreds of kms of mediaeval woods for walking, incredible variety of cultural landscapes, the politeness of the rural French (can’t vouch for the rest), the climate (even on a day like today), respect for intellectuals, intelligent discussions on TV, being able to buy a big 700 year house in a beautiful setting for under €70K.
And last but not least, it’s not present-day England!
Will that do for starters?
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You bought your house for under 70k. Now I’m really jealous. Bravo you. I agree with all you’ve said ( though the pesticide use near us is rather horrible they were even using planes only a year or two ago) but I do think their postal address system is amazing. It thrills me that in five words and five numbers the postman can find our house. It’s one of the unsung geniuses of France.
Sorry, but in post13 on this thread, I cited a basic problem, but if in addition i) you’re at the bottom of a gorge without cell phone reception and ii) as happened today, the courier’s delivery address lists the commune and the road, but not the village,I 'd suggest the system isn’t that good!
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Not true at all! We left France after selling our last house in 2008. We returned in 2015 and bought a new house. At some point we got a very nasty letter about not having paid our tax fonciere bill. I went to the tax office in Bergerac and it turned out it had been sent to the house we’d sold 9 years earlier!!!
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We are rural too, we have a house name but EDF wouldn’t use it until we insisted they add it to the address for the attestation. Our (French) neighbour about 1/2 km away has the same problems and he’s lived there for about 60 yrs!
If you’re really stuck, you could always make a free investment in What3words. It’s a navigation system that divides the world into 3 m squares and gives each one 3 words (hence the name). That way, anyone can find not only your front door, back door, side window, outside loo,etc but any part of your ‘estate’! but don’t ask it to go up.
Look it up, very clever…
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Ha Ha luckily your name is House!!
What 3 Words is a UK company that aims to get round this problem. I don’t think it’ll catch on on France but could do for Africa for example where they don’t often have street names. It’s good fun, as some of the word combinations (like photography.impaled.flicker for a photography fan like me) are quite funny.
Why not? You can switch to whichever language you please. It’s strength lies in the avoidance of mishearing numerical coordinates.
I agree, and I am a fan! I’ve had some good conversations with the founders (one of them anyway) when I was living in Gabon! I just meant from the point of view that most places have a “normal” street address.
There are growing concerns based around the fact that What3Words is a private company, meaning that in theory at any stage they could decide that users will have to pay to use the service. Not such a big deal for Joe Bloggs, but since it is becoming more used by the emergency services and the like it has wide ranging implications. ‘Get the fire brigade hooked on the service then charge them a tenner every time they need to find out where the fire is’ sorta thing, they’re very litigious with other people trying to use their system to create open source versions of W3W for apps and such meaning that if you want to use it, you must use them and only them, which again isn’t a big deal for Joe Bloggs trying to get UPS to actually deliver his Amazon purchase to his house today, but doesn’t necessarily bode well for tomorrow if big companies start to rely on it. I would definitely have big concerns about it becoming prevalent in developing countries like you say given that they already don’t seem very willing to give their product to the world for the good of humanity, places like Africa have had more than enough of people ripping them off at every turn.
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Good points, Kirstea, I didn’t know about all of that.
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I think the most likely scenario is that Amazon, Google or silmilar will buy the company for a few billions, market it heavily to make it ubiquitous then start to charge end users.
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Sorry, just realised a couple of people had already pointed out W3W…