Apart from almost the kitchen sink, we took everything and have since disposed of some utensils. But I’m so glad we took our Panasonic Bread Maker. French baguettes are nice, but can be quite tough on ageing teeth!
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Ask away - The Big 4 Reasons.
1] Based in the old city centre of the fab city of Valencia I was losing 3 months/12 thru’ intolerable heat.
I had excellent a/c but I didn’t want to spend 10-12 weeks hiding out in my flat, with the a/c on. Going out and about simple reduced one to a greasy blob. I did try. I once took a couple of visitors on a ramble round the sights of the city centre, in July. I was absolutely tottering with heat exhaustion after 3 hrs. We are talking of temps of 38-45C daytime and 28-30 at night, for 10-12 weeks. It’s not what you’re s’posed to expose yourself to, in your 70’s. You don’t see abuelas and abuelos out in it.
2] I wanted a place with some outside space, preferably green. I looked at country properties but the ones in my price bracket were little more than peasant hovels set in the parched campo, needing everything doing - and would never be on mains water or lekky.
3] My Fr is of a different order to my Es. I got along OK on a day-to-day basis - pharmacy, fantastic Mercado Central, P.O etc but I knew that I was never going to progress much further than that, at age 72. In Fr I can have a gossip with my neighbours, got along fine with Sparks, Enedis and co.
4] Equity release. I was most pleasantly surprised to find that I could parlay my very smartly done-up flat, bought in the pits of the ES property bust, and refurbed to a good standard by a crack team of locals, at very reasonable cost [Fr costs make me weep. I’m doing far more DIY that ever I wanted to], into somewhere I liked in FR and have a bit left over ‘to go down south’. And that I have done.
The house is, as one of our fellow SFistas cracked, “Shoddy modern [1958] French building” - I call it The Plywood Shack - [see pix] but it is on the edge of the pleasant [but entirely post-6 June 1944] town of Vire, Calvados and has the most wonderful view across the valley of the river Vire, which I can hear tumbling along, way below me.
The houses here are on the north side of a cliff. From the lowest part of my garden I look over the roof of my house.
From the front of my house the view is the same - I look over the roof of my neighbour over the road.
And I have a garden - my first ever! - with a beautiful azalea and a Reine des Reinettes apple tree that produces hundreds of delicious apples - good for cider/Calvados, I’m told.
So the Plywood Shack is OK by me. I have all my tools from previous UK refurbs and am slowly making good some astonishingly bad building. The walls of the bathroom are made of studding panelled out with hardboard, this tiled [!]
or covered by wallpaper - in a bathroom!
There is a sort of summer house/over-spill bedroom shack - The Bothy -
also plywood, and a shed/atelier.
The French way with prices is a constant puzzle. There has been comment here about the cost of French emulsion paint - not very good and silly expensive.
My house had a splendid ‘boat/sleigh’ bed which the family moving the old folk’s stuff out offered to me for €300. When I turned this down - I pointed out that there were a number on Leboncoin for 100/120€ - they didn’t negotiate. They stuck it on Leboncoin for €300.
I bought exactly the same thing, with a new mattress for 80€! It was listed at 100€. I cheekily offered 80€. In UK they would have said, “Let’s split the difference - 90€” and I would have accepted. But they just swallowed my offer of 80€.
Those IKEA Poang armchairs are on Leboncoin for 60€ - 80€ - 100€ [with the footstool.] I bought a very tidy one for 15€!
I don’t get it… 
My original search area was south of the Loire. But I took fright at the prospect of the garden turning the shade of a digestive biscuit - the hotter summers are defo making their way north. There’s been plenty of comment to that effect on SF.
I knew I’d be safe from that in Normandy and so far - Nov '20 to date - that has been the case. And apart from this cold snap, which we did not have last winter, winters are very mild… Somerset/Devon with better summers and much cheaper wine.
And Valencia is still there - RyanAir from Nantes 38€ return.
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Ah! You saw the comment copied by Griffin36. I will put it on Ebay as an auction item. It has to go. A single bid and it’s sold. I can’t afford the time to wait for an ‘acceptable offer’.
It’s a great van [Vauxhall Movano 2.5 CDTi LWB/Hi], drives like a train, passed the MoT last Tuesday, is on +/- 215k miles and is a project. I have lots of bits.
Warning: Do not even dream of getting a RHD DIY camper reg to FR plates. They don’t ‘do’ DIY campers in FR, especially RHD. That’s why it’s going back to UK for sale.
I kept my right hand drive Landrover and glad I did.
I struggled In a french hire car, kept wandering over the centre lane slightly !!
No problem at all when my car eventually arrived. Because it’s got quite a high Sitting position I can see over the cars in front. Made a huge difference.
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You’re the second person to give such good reports of Valencia. My son’s (probably ex very sadly) Romanian girlfriend lived there for a year and thought it was totally wonderful. I haven’t been, but clearly I need to, just not in the summer. And just to digress, I could actually marmalise son. We all love Adi and she is gorgeous, kind and clever, just lovely in every way. What more could anyone want?
Back to your move, I do get the heat element. Our Ozzie neighbours don’t like July and August in their house because they can’t get out enough. If it is unbearably hot, the only thing for me is to plonk myself down by water and stay in it for much of the day. I’m glad you’ve found somewhere that is so right for you and envy your language skills. Your views are just gorgeous and I think the food in Normandy can be wonderful too. I’m keen on calvados too!
PS you sound a bargainer par excellence!
As a child on the côte d’azur I wasn’t allowed outside between 11.30 and 4.30, no children were. Risk of sunburn and insolation.
Everybody does. I visited for 15 years - a couple of times for 6 months each time - before buying and living there for 5. During those 15 years I would witter on to all and sundry about how marvellous the place is. Some years in, my god daughter went there for a week. Her p/c simply said “Now I know why you like it so much”
A pal from NYC, a self-confessed hysterical Jewish neurotic, said, “I feel no menace, walking around this city” For her to say that …
For a folio of photographs of Valencia and two of its most celebrated fiestas [Our Lady of The Forsaken and La Fallas.] put https://www.chrisnationphotography.com into the address bar at the top of your screen. Don’t try Google. It doesn’t find me.
How ‘Blue Ruffles’ could be in any way ‘forsaken’ I cannot imagine. That photograph has me on my knees every time I see it.
[quote=“vero, post:106, topic:38885”]
As a child on the côte d’azur
[/quote] As a child in Singapore we went to school at 07:00 and finished at 12:00. Most days my mother dropped me off at Singapore Swimming Club or [I could swank] my dad, officer in Royal Corps of Signals, would turn up in a real Jeep, driven by ‘a driver’.
One of the places we lived in S/pore was the ex- residence of the manager of a fruit loading shipping dock, out in the country. It’s where I became obsessed with fishing, aged 5. I had strict orders always to wear a hat. One day I didn’t and the result was severe sunstroke.
Fortunately my mother, having served the entire war in India and the Far East in the Q.A.'s and at the time was theatre sister of Q. Alex’s Mili Hospital, knew how to deal with me.
I did it again in Italy. Almost comatose and hallucinating like mad. My mum parked me in a chair at the cafe at the IT/CH border while she went off for jugs of iced water. While I was sitting there a woman came up and said, “You don’t look very well, little boy”. My mum was just in time to prevent her pouring a glass of brandy into me!
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I want to spend some time, enjoying your pictures - great stuff!
We were lucky enough to be in Ronda when they had a festival and some of the costumes were amazing, but these are on another level.
What I wish we hadn’t brought to France:-
OH’s several hundred C19th /C20th European classics and my collection of fairly obscure late C20th US and European fiction - none were ‘airport books’ but all were in the same paperback format and printed on cheap, wood-pulp paper.
Sample conversation,
“You don’t need to take Dostoevsky, you’re never going to read him again and anyway, he’s all yellow and falling to bits.”
“Ah, but I can’t just throw away Dostoevsky - he was very important to me!”
For the sake of domestic harmony, ‘was’ was never questioned and in due course Dostoevsky (together with all the other Russians and the rest) joined us in France. All are no longer with us.
By contrast, I recently discovered that Simon Schama’s wonderful Landscape and Memory, which was only published in paperback in the UK nearly thirty years ago, had been available in hardback in the US and so I’ve recently replaced my dog-eared, heavily highlighted and annotated UK copy with a very inexpensive, good condition ex-US public library hardback. The non-fiction section of the library chez nous continues to expand and flourish, because it’s an active professional research tool that’s continually in use, while in the meantime, fiction has been efficiently relocated to OH’s Kindle.
There’s a similar, as yet unresolved back story to our art collection, but I won’t bore you with that…
Is Dostoevsky to be sanctioned - or used in evidence in the ICC? Edited to reflect the quote was the good doctors wife
Shame, could have offloaded my hardback copy on you! I have decided to get rid of most of my reference material, and get more light hearted.
Interesting question
There’s recently been quite a bit of debate about this sort of thing in arts media.
The arts are often divided into the creative and interpretive arts (theatre, ballet etc).
For me, one of the most savage indictments of modern Soviet and more recent Russian culture is that there is virtually nothing of note produced after the 1930’s in the creative arts. By contrast Russia has exported interpretive arts, particularly classically trained musicians and dancers.
But this also reflects the larger cultural/economic malaise of Russian society, more than a century after the revolution the country hasn’t really progressed beyond being a primary producer/exporter ie. largely, they’re still selling raw materials, rather than making more complex consumer goods. In this respect they’re more like a third world country (‘global south if you prefer’). Whereas China, whose revolution was much later, has leap-frogged over Russia and now has for instance ten e-car manufacturers who through low prices, will in the next few years probably secure a huge swathe of the Western car market.
Boycotting or banning Russian cultural output wouldn’t bother Putin, but more importantly, most of that work, in whatever medium was produced in opposition to Putin’s reactionary values.
quote=“JaneJones, post:111, topic:38885”]
Shame, could have offloaded my hardback copy on you! I have decided to get rid of most of my reference material, and get more light hearted.
[/quote]
Thanks for the thought - However, I’m still trying to write things of relevance and only yesterday got a lovely e-mail from a professor at Gothenburg University who’s put my writing on the aesthetic footpaths of the English Lake District (ie. routes between ‘views’ rather than settlements) on the syllabus of his land management degree.
OK, I wish I’d brought my 1812 overture album and left my shostakovich 5th - or blimey is it the other way around?
Just ask Alexa. If you don’t have an Amz music sub and ask her to play the 1812 she will give you a lecture on only playing specific material to subscribers but here’s some thing similar. Up will come the Shosta - or the other way round.
My father was stationed at RAF Changi from around '66 - '69. I was at boarding school in England so only there for the holidays but previously in Aden (around '63 - '65) I did the same as you - school at 7, afternoon in the sea (with shark net) or pool. Loved it as a child, hell for my poor mother. Being at the time of “terrorists” or “freedom fighters”, (depending on which side you stood), going to school meant a bus with an armed guard and close wire netting over the windows. At 8 I thought it was all very exciting, as a parent you view things differently!
If you like Marmite bring stocks with you as it’s very expensive in French supermarkets. We actually prefer (English) supermarket own brands as Marmite seems to have got more gloopy and less tasty over the last few years.
And golden syrup.
I second the emulsion paint, although for exterior use you may be better with the French stuff as British paint isn’t expected to have to withstand the extremes of temperatures.
I was in S/pore 53-56/7. We used to go to the beach at Changi. It had a stout pallisade round it, like a US fort in the Wild West. Korea was on at the time, with the ‘side show’ of the Malay Emergency, which kept my mother and her colleagues busy in the operating theatre of Q Alex Mili Hospital. There were occasional alarms - and constant marches and demos by communist sympathisers. I do remember one day when all the officers were sent home with their side arms because things were boiling up.
Friends stationed on Cyprus during the independence movement led by Archbishop Makarios, sitting indoors behind a wall of glass French doors, saw a grenade land on the lawn - and fail to detonate.
I agree with @teapot about Marmite… We failed to bring enough over when we moved, as you don’t always know in advance what you’re going to really miss. I appreciate it may lead to my being stripped of UK citizenship, but the local scarcity & extreme expense of Marmite has lead me to bulk buy … Vegemite!
You can get golden syrup in Intermarche but as they are franchised I suppose it depends which one.