@Bonzocat What about French bank / credit card statements? Tax returns? Mayor / doctor who could attest how long they have known you?
According to the advice on the French website you can use whatever information you deem appropriate.
Thankyou Warren, have taken down the maybe compromising photos - still an innocent at heart!
Did you ring - heard a voice but couldn’t get to the phone on time!
Yes, I called straight away, your phone number was easy to find. 
you bought the house in 1988… and presumably changed the house insurance to provide full cover insurance when you moved permanently in 1991… Résidence Principale
so look at that policy…
other than that… decide on a date which you can prove… so long as you prove more than 5 years… (if that is the angle you are looking at…)
your first Tax Return will get you near enough… the year at least.
Bruce please don’t worry, as you have been here for more than 5 years you don’t need any of the health info etc. All you need is:
- Passport
- Proof of settlement - it honestly doesn’t matter that you don’t have an exact date - take a stab at an approximate date and upload the earliest doc you have - so yes your drivers license should be fine. all they really care about is that the date is prior to 5 years ago so you are well over the line!
- Current proof of domicile. Just an EDF bill or something like that is all you need.
Don’t worry you’ll be fine!
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And maybe just to do belt and braces pop onto the ameli.fr site and download a new attestation from your account.
Thank you one and all. Not worrying so much now. It’s just that I’ve always been a stickler for getting the facts right – no loose ends means there’s nothing to worry about!
Stems I think from my training/working as an architect where you really must have everything covered correctly otherwise you can be in real deep ****!
Thanks Jane – I now have an Ameli account and have downloaded an attestation. Didn’t know Ameli existed!
Thanks Stella and Sue – shall look out for those dusty old tax/insurance documents and refile them.
And thanks Tory for your reassurance!
As in “don’t forget to include a roof” 
Sorry - couldn’t resist. Well, there are those urban myths of houses with no stairs on the drawings…
When I was 17 I started my first job as a dog’s body to a civil engineer on a building site. He told me of an error involving 2 teams responsible for building an underground tunnel which would eventually meet in the middle. The error was that one team worked in metric and the other in feet and inches. The tunnels didn’t meet in the middle!
Oh yes the golden rule if a project starts in metric it finishes in metric or vis versa
I would love to have been there when the two teams broke thru’!
“Yours is out by 11 5/32”! "
“No! It’s yours that’s out by 28.37cms!”
NASA did that, too. One team working in Imperial and another in metric. The fligth path of the vehicle was out by so much it vanished into space, as I recall.
One thing I have never understood - why do makers of Imperial tape measures always include metric? Nobody is going to work in both, so why not just Imperial, if you must?
And, working from the other end of your workpiece, you have to turn it round, so now the figures are all upside down.
As a test, I bought 5 metric tape measures in a FR brico - the bloke on the till was rather surprised - and sold them on eBay for 100% mark-up. I asked a FR friend if he could source 100 or so at trade prices but he never got round to it. Now I’m in FR I might.
Another golden rule when working in a team check your tape measures against those of your collègues I’ve known some to be out by 1/8´´
Or get your type of measurement right. In the late 1800s the guy who owned the farm where I grew up (In Oz) wanted a shearing shed built, he left detailed plans for what he wanted built but then left for a long voyage to the UK and back. when he got back he couldn’t believe his eyes at the enormous shed before him. It had all been built to plan - but in yards rather than feet 
Being of an age that I can work in both I tend to choose whatever is convenient - but what really annoys me about steel rules that are marked in both is that they are arranged so that one measurement is always at the top and the other at the bottom.
E.g. something like this:
I’ll guarantee that if you flip this 180° so that what was the underside is now uppermost it will look the same.
However, as far as I can see this is exactly what you do NOT want.
Depending on the orientation of the workpiece one edge or other will be the natural one to make measurements with, but I’d like to be able to flip whichever edge that is between imperial and metric, and none are arranged this way. 
I have fully switched to metric - I can no longer be doing with imperial, a daft outdated system that thankfully most of the world has moved on from.
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Try being left handed with such items.
I’ve only ever known and been taught metric when I was in school in the UK, so I’ve never used imperial and definitely don’t need it here in France.
Now the UK is back on their road to independance, maybe they will fully instate it again!
Regrettably the USA persists in using it, all of it. The BBC write-up of the new launcher for the next Moon missions expressed the thrust of the solid fuel boosters in lbs.
The worlwide scientific community is beholden, in my view, to working in metric, a system designed, beyond the simple units introduced by Napoleon, for science.
But the BBC has lapped up the melange of units dished out by NASA’s press office. The main rocket is ‘65m [212 ft]’ . The two boosters produce ‘8.8 million pounds [39.1 Meganewtons] of thrust’.
I’d say that the lb is not suitable in any circumstance to describe a very large weight. And it is a measurement of weight, not ‘thrust’. Used in this way it assumes that the rocket does not move but could support 8.8 million 1lb bags of sugar 1cm off the ground.
The newton is the unit to describe the power of these engines, being a unit of acceleration. And acceleration is the name of the game in launching a mass out of the Earth’s gravitation field.
I believe Wall St still uses fractions to describe prices “US$ rose 7/32 of a cent later dropping 3/16” Dumb. They have a decimal currency!
Force, in fact which is why it is useful for measuring engine output, acceleration does not have a fundamental SI unit being expressed in terms of distance and time (metres per second squared - m/s2 or ms-2).
The nice thing about SI units is that they combine properly, Newton’s 2nd law states
So, force, mass and acceleration are linked by the equation F = ma - so 1 newton is the force which will cause a 1kg mass to accelerate at 1m/s2 - it’s almost always much messier to do such calculations in the imperial system.
By the way - assuming acceleration due to gravity of ≈ 10m/s2 and the average weight of an apple being ≈ 100g then 1 newton is the downwards force exerted by an average apple lying on a table 