About vicawhite

Magazine person by day, French house renovator at all other times! A love of Breton tops links the two but not much else. I live in SE London for most of the year but spend holidays and happy days in Gensac - a tiny village in SW France in between the not-much-larger villages of Maubourguet and Vic en Bigorre. My day job is very glamorous. My holidays are not. And that's how I like it.

Things to do in SW France (by Arthur and Sebastian)

Posted on August 5, 2013 by vicawhite

Welcome to Pau!

So here they were, my boys, to meet me at the airport. My single summer was over and I had two weeks in the bosom of my family in France. Two whole weeks without deadlines, fashion crises (omg pink’s out, punk’s in!) or worrying about what to wear to work (all documented on .company.co.uk should you ever want to see). Instead, I faced two weeks of wearing shorts, stripey t shirts and a variety of flip flop type footwear.

I could at this point do nothing. Nada. Sit on a sun lounger or our beloved hammock and just chill. But I can’t. And as my boys had spent four weeks doing little more than playing in the pool, visiting vide greniers, eating pizza at Restotop our local restaurant, or visiting our friend’s camel farm, I decided that now Mummy was here – activities would commence. Wether anyone wanted to go or not. I scoured the Internet, visited the local tourist info office and it turned out there was plenty of stuff to do within an hour or so’s drive.
So should you ever be in SW France – here is the White Family guide to places of local interest as written by Arthur and Seb.

1) The Pic du Jer Funiculaire

A rare moment of affection (or is Seb trying to crush Arthur to death?)

Peter was a little underdressed for a day out on a mountain

Whilst we were waiting for the cable car thing that takes you up the mountain there was a huge beetle – we took a photo of it.
We took the train up the side of a mountain when we got to the top we walked to the very top it was exhausting and at the same time very fun. This is what it says on the internet about it….
The Pic du Jer, towering over the town, is recognizable by its large cross which is illuminated at night. You can get there by a hundred-year-old funicular railway which takes you to the summit at an altitude of 1000 metres in a few minutes; it’s a charming trip.
At the top, a gentle path takes you to the observatory, where you will discover a unique panoramic viewpoint offering a 360° view over Lourdes, Tarbes, Pau, the Argelès-Gazost valley and the summits of the Pyrenees. We had fun.

2)Crazy Golf in Plaisance

It’s pleasant in Plaisance

When we got to the crazy golf course at Plaisance we saw our friends Oliver and Elliot, they were at the swimming pool next door. At the crazy golf there are a total of 13 holes. I won by a point, it was Epic! The final hole you have to get the ball inside a well (Mummy came last). Seb and I both had a can of coke because it was so hot. After we finished playing our game, we had ice cream it was yummy. This is a good place to come to but it is closed a lot. In fact we have been here lots of times to try and play crazy golf but it is closed. I think maybe it only opens in the afternoons.

3) The Tour De Termes

Sorted!

Taking stocks

At the Tour which is not too far from our house – there was a cage where they used to put bad people, so Seb and I went in it. In every room in the castle there were some wax people in different scenes from the olden days. There is a really cool gift shop. I got a bow and arrow that Seb broke straight away – and he still owes me a bow. This is what I found on the internet about the Tour.
The Château de Thibault de Termes was a medieval castle in the French town of Termes-d’Armagnac, in the Gers département. The keep (La Tour de Termes-d’Armagnac) is the only vestige.

Construction of the castle dates from the end of the 13th century and start of the 14th century for Jean, Count of Armagnac. The keep is 36 m (~118 ft) high and includes six levels. Strategically built on a hill which dominates the valleys of the Adour and the Arros, it allowed the d’Armagnac family to keep watch over the frontiers of the province of Armagnac. Its most famous inhabitant was the founder’s son, Thibault d’Armagnac, companion of Joan of Arc. He gave evidence on her behalf at her trial. Cool huh?

4) The Rope Park at Aignan

Rope park!!!

We went to the rope park at Aignan we had to do like a little course to learn how to do it. There are four levels blue, yellow, red and a zip wire across a lake. Daddy was so heavy he got dipped in to the water when he did it – but I didn’t.

Although I got stuck on a red course because it was too hard. When you google Rope Park at Aignan Mummy’s blog comes up because she has already written a post about it. Cool. It is our favourite place to go and loads and loads of fun for kids. We would definitely recommend it.

Yeee haaaaa

5) The Chateau De Montaner

what Seb thought of medieval history

So I’m going to do this one myself as Arthur and Seb have apparently grown bored of doing blog post reviews. And besides, this was one of my favourite days out despite being a thousand degrees hot that day.
The Chateau plays host to medieval reenactment stuff but we had got there too late or too early to see people ride around on horseback in funny costumes.

What we did get to see were wild birds being trained – the owls were a big hit with the kids thanks to Harry Potter. There were more stocks…

stocking!!

But the best thing of all, was a calligraphy class they have running all day which brought out the Roy and Hayley Cropper in Peter and I. I absolutely loved it and despite being a completely unsentimental person usually who goes through the house throwing out kids early artwork, birthday cards etc, I’ve kept our calligraphy from this day.

If you would like to rent our lovely French home click here for details

Summer being single

Posted on August 2, 2013 by vicawhite

Another summer had rolled around. Now for many the concept of my husband and children living in a different country to me is hard to understand. And I admit it is a little odd. But in many respects it makes great sense. For up to four weeks a year, I get to go out, see friends, party,have lie-ins, go shopping without someone insisting we go via the Lego shop first. In short, I get to be single and childless again. And don’t let anyone tell you different – it’s GREAT!

Spontaneity is something there is little of when you have children. Just getting out of the house can take anything up to twenty minutes by the time you’ve located a missing shoe, or got half way down the road when someone decides actually they DO want to take their scooter. And as an only child, truth be told, I find this really hard. And the thing no one talks about when they have children is how unrelenting it is. We have no relatives nearby to help so we’re it. All the time. For Peter this seems less of a burden. Largely as life in general is less of a burden to Pete. He is one of those infuriating people who uses expressions like ‘hey don’t worry about it, it will all be wonderful’ or ‘vic, it’s ALL good’ (he’s actually stolen this from Gwyneth Paltrow as response to my ‘what would Gwyneth do? Life mantra) But for me, it’s actually quite tough.

On a more practical note, Peter is self employed so can take off to France for six weeks in the summer while I am a wage slave with only five weeks holiday a year. So all in all, it makes sense for him and the boys to go feral in France while I live it up in London. And this summer held prospects of a lot of fun. My friend Dawn was getting married so I had a hen weekend and a wedding weekend to fill my single time. The hen was vintage themed on an open top double decker bus and took us all over London for a day. And there were barman on the bus, and we stopped for lunch and we got shamrocks painted in our hair at Bleach in Dalston. And it was crazy amounts of fun. And I didn’t have to get home and explain to a ten year old and six year old why I was wearing a funny dress, have a shamrock on my head and reek of mojitos.

And it was Olympic year – so I tried and tried to get tickets to go and see something but in vain. Until, I managed to get one ticket to the women’s soccer final. And so I went up to Wembley, on my own to watch football. And it was a strange sensation watching other people in couples or big groups marching up Wembley Way. And as I struggled to take a ‘selfie’ just to prove I’d been there at all, a nice lady took pity on me and offered to take a pic of me. And suddenly being on my own was a little more sobering. And, watching women’s soccer on your own, Olympic or otherwise is rather a dull experience. And when the Mexican wave comes around you feel like a total idiot jumping out of your seat by yourself.

So towards the end of my four weeks of partying, not only was I exhausted and possibly malnourished from a diet of wine and pistachio nuts, I began to yearn for noise, mess and unreasonable demands. So, reader, i remembered why I had children in the first place – it’s really what life IS all about. So perhaps the real joy of being apart is that it makes you want to be together. And anyway, partying at weddings til 3am is a young woman’s game. It WAS fun tho!

A blog post about eating. Food. Yum.

Posted on August 1, 2013 by vicawhite

I love it when a flan comes together!

It might be time to talk about food. In a list I often mentally compile of things I love the most, food would be well up there. The children and I like to play Sophie’s Choice for food – one food for the rest of your life and nothing else??? I’m torn between ice cream and pizza.

Anyway, suffice to say – I LOVE food. On that list it comes somewhere below my children, narrowly above clothes shopping and hovering around the same place as watching Take Me Out while wearing a onsie. In fact, watching Take Me Out, in a Onsie, with my children AND a giant bowl of salty popcorn is my Saturday night Nirvana (shhhh don’t tell anyone!)

And being in France equals an amazing opportunity to cook. I am time rich while there. I have a lovely big kitchen with massive work spaces. I have amazing produce given to me by various neighbours and friends. I even have an electric slicer with about ten different attachments for julienning vs grating! And for some reason, while in France my children adhere more closely to those Jamie Oliver ‘kids food’ guidelines (you know how he always does those recipes for minestrone soup etc that he claims his kids LOVE? Well, I’ve never met a kid yet who eats soup – mine look at it like the woman in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom looks at the plate when when they serve her monkey brains) BUT while they may not tuck into my home made Gazpacho – while in France the children will try all sorts of things that they never would at home. Some of their faves include confit duck, pate, chorizo and rare steak. Cous cous is still a swear word in their vocab though.

In our second summer in Gensac we were inundated with courgettes. We had courgettes from Serge. Courgettes from Sarah Bird at la Maison Des Chameaux and courgettes from Pete and Ness the only other english people in our village who like us to bring them Daddies sauce when we visit. They in return give us home made jam and fresh veg. I think we get the best deal!

Cooking in France has become my thing I do to relax. As I find it too boring to sit down and do nothing – chopping, frying, steaming and mixing are to me what lying on a sunlounger reading Fifty Shades of Grey is to others. So when I arrive I make oodles of Gazpacho (Jamie Olivers recipe and a load of salad dressings in old Bonne Maman jars. I make quiche with crab and shrimp, apricot tart, onion tart…. the year of the courgette glut I even pickled courgettes.

I make pain perdu, cherry compote, and at Christmas we feast on goose. And I have loads of great cookbooks full of french recipes which I try and ammend to suit our purpose. And my lovely nutrionist Petronella turns a blind eye when I go to her to get weighed on my return (you see people, its things like this that I drop in every now and then just to remind you that in real life I edit a fashion magazine – I HAVE A NUTRIONIST! She’s lovely helped me shift a stone many months ago but these days we meet up more for a chat than for any nutrional expertise but should you ever need one she’s here

Some times my husband tells me how happy it makes him to see me fully relaxed and chopping up shallots. And that’s nice. Cos I know that often at home I am like a banshee shouting and screaming and crying about how stressed I am or how messy our house is. Or I’m lying prostrate on the sofa watching Corrie on catch up with a glass of wine in hand too tired to speak. Or worst of all, I’m throwing myself on my bed surrounded by clothes that DON’T FIT and blaming everyone but myself for my lack of time to exercise *runs off attacks another packet of KP salted nuts…..

But in France – none of this matters. Its all fresh ingredients, home cooking and enough exercise for it not to matter really. And the satisfaction of seeing all my lovely creations on the table mean it doesn’t matter that my denim cutoffs and getting a bit snug! You should come for dinner. x

It is A TART!

all-terrine!

Courgette rice and some easter eggs

courgette cake and courgette quiche

I’ve lost my bread!

More courgettes!!!

Clafoutis

The smallest room in the house

Posted on July 29, 2013 by vicawhite

I haven’t shown you around our top floor yet. Largely because it is derelict. Or it was. We had been so busy doing up the bits of the house we needed to use that we left the third and top, attic floor well alone. Our cleaner, Madame Landauer refuses to go up there on the grounds that it makes her Peur (scared) – she is convinced there are bats living there or worse (can’t think what would be worse than bats really – lions? Crocodiles?)
But we had by now bought an enormous chandelier to light our way up there. It is made up of hundreds of wine glasses which seemed rather appropriate for our French home. Though ironically, it came from a danish website whose name I just can’t remember. But if you google ‘wine glass chandelier‘ they come up I think. It is a grand hallway to a shabby set of rooms.

The two attic rooms in my mind will one day be a dorm for loads of kids and the other a lovely master suite with roll top bath in middle of the room but for now they look like this…

And in between them was a horrid little room with the ceiling falling down and damp rot everywhere….

We desperately needed another loo – so that while one person showered the other, up to, 13 people didn’t have to cross their legs! And this bathroom could be used by all sleeping on the second floor in it’s various interconnecting bedrooms.

So we decided to make our rotting, top floor hovel, middle room a bathroom. with a curved, walk in shower, a loo and the original sink, salvaged. We plastered, we painted and we caulked. Peter replaced the ceiling and the floor and then we tiled and we painted some more. And we drove our floor tiles all the way from here as I’d found them on the Topps Tiles website and had nowhere in London that they would work but in France? Somehow ok. They are the Henley range and I love them.

So here is our top floor bathroom now! Jolie non?

Want to see more pics?

Posted on July 23, 2013 by vicawhite

So in real time I am currently in France. At my French house, so it rather makes sense for me to blog. I am in theory on holiday with time to relax and do things like blog. But somehow, while I am here, I have no time at all. By the time we’ve got here, opened up the house, tidied up a bit and panicked at the sheer amount still to do just to stand still, it’s all we can do to sit down and relax.
So rather than write elaborate blog posts of an episodic nature, I think I may just take loads of pics. So first up, guest bedroom.

Teaching friends how to play Pooh Sticks

Posted on July 16, 2013 by vicawhite

So we packed the Candys off home having had so much fun we were all sad it had to come to an end. Petra, lorraine and I pledged to reunite us all in London and the kids said meaningful goodbyes along the lines of “I’ll FaceTime ya yeah?”

Which left just Levetons, but not for long. In a whirl of bed linen changing and replenishing food and wine stocks, we waited for that nights arrival of Uncle Richard and his friend Shona who he has known, just about forever and consequently, I’ve known her a few years shy of forever.
Richard and Shona used to share a flat in the early nineties when they all moved to London from Edinburgh Uni. Shona and her sister Louise found and paid the bulk for the flat so Richard was given a Harry Potter style box room barely bigger than his futon bed (futons see – early nineties!) this is where I also used to stay while doing my work experience at Inside Soap magazine. And while some of Richards ‘London’ friends could be quite intimidating for a girl from Newcastle, Shona and Louise have, from day one, made me feel welcome, provided a guiding hand and been there for me and my family (when Arthur was a baby and Richard would volunteer to look after him he would always make Shona come along for nappy change duties!)
Shona and her sister Louise eventually moved back to Edinburgh to open a B&B which should you ever go there you MUST stay at as its stunning. Www.millers64.comwww.millers64.com

So it was lovely to have Shona visit us for a few days in France. And as we had chef Leveton in residence we could provide Rich and Shona with a feast on arrival. And Richard’s personal bottle of Ricard.

And for the next couple of days the kids played on the ikea hallo hammock,which, cost per use is priceless. They swing on it, they jump on it, the tip each other off it and then they fight about it. Simples. They were discontinued in IKEA but Peter managed to find one on eBay after a year of having a saved search.

So now we have two and the fighting can increase. Sometimes I actually get to lie on it and read a book but a child invariably launches themselves with force at me while on it.

And then we persuaded Shona onto a bike for possibly the first time in twenty years. There is a small river about a ten minute cycle from our house where you can swim in summer but most of the year we go there to throw stones or play pooh sticks. Its a simple game that children can do for hours and uncle Richard can use the time to go online and check his air miles, while keeping half an eye on the children of course. If you’ve never played I’ll let Pooh explain…

And the bike we’d leant to Shona came from a place called Emmaus which is like a giant, permanent car boot sale. They’re all over France and I’ve read in French fashion mags recommendations for ones near Paris but ours is, frankly filled with toot. I can no more imagine seeing Emmanuel Alt there than Brad Pitt (tho maybe he and Angelina have been as they DO have a French chateau). Peter and the boys however LOVE it. And it is the perfect place for Peter to add to his growing collection of bikes (worth a blog post all of their own). The bike allocated to Shona needs a new saddle. We knew this from seeing the way poor Shona was walking when we got back from our ride. She had valiantly not complained as I think she was rather enjoying getting back to nature. The lovely thing about our house in France is that it makes our otherwise ‘urban’ friends put on rubbish clothes and get on bikes. Be gone your cappuccino bars and designer dresses this is about rickety saddles and shorts. And Shona seemed to love it all as when it came time to finally pack everyone off and start operation clean up, she said she was definitely coming back. And we’d love to have her. I might even get her a futon.

Full House!!

Posted on July 11, 2013 by vicawhite

And then the Levetons arrived. And the house in France was as full as it had ever been during our ownership. We had six Candys, four Whites and now four Levetons. And everyone introduced themselves and although Candys and Levetons have met over the years they don’t know each other very well at all. And we all did lots of grand emotive ‘marvelous to see’ you sort of air kissing. And then Benny and Seb probably starting fighting as this is what they both love to do.

Best friend Petra has been best friend Petra (as opposed to Petra who works with friend Darren which is how she first entered my life) for twenty years or so. We met when we shared a house together back in the early 90s when she was a young accountant, I was an editorial assistant and we shared a diet of covent garden soup company soups and Jacobs Creek Chardonnay. Apart from our love of dry white wine we had little in common. It still baffles our other mutual friends that we were and are still so close. Petra is sensible. I am not. She has a big serious job these days doing something big and serious in a big bank. I edit a magazine about shoes and lipsticks. If we were in a Bronte novel, she would be that good and sensible older sister who wears her hair in a bun and marries well while I would have ringlets and be running off with some penniless, handsome soldier to Brighton! But best friends we are. And her daughter Cara is my god daughter and I aim to be a terrible influence on her and steer her into some highly inappropriate career in the media. In turn Petra is godmother to my eldest son Arthur and I expect her to return the favour and convince him to go into banking, earning loads of money so he can keep us all when we are old.

The Levetons were repeat guests and Cara was rightly a little miffed that ‘her’ room where she stayed last Easter had been given over to Mabel and Henry for the duration of their stay and she and brother Benny were squeezed into the guest room with their Mum and Dad. At least for the nights of overlapping guests. But to lighten the initial faux bonhomie I decided to take everyone to the La Maison Des Chameaux. Where better to bond than in a muddy field covered in Llama poo?

We can at La Maison Blanche provide wellies now for every size child as we’ve been collecting them over the years, so while the girls had style issues (tho Gracie, who has forged a pretty great fash-identity already by dressing in boys clothes 80% of the time was thrilled with her black pirate ones) we made like we were off to a festival.

And Sarah and Paul welcomed friends of La Maison Blanche to La Maison Des Chameaux with bras ouvert. Opening up, letting the kids feed the animals and showing them some basic goat and sheep training which for 8 kids who have been born and raised in central London is like seeing rhinos mating in the wild. And although my friends who between them edit a fashion magazine and do something important in banking are more used to lives that involve expensive restaurants and private hire cars (NB Petra stopped drinking Jacobs Creek a LONG time ago) in vertiginously high heels, they both threw themselves into a day of mud and camels.

And they have both dined out on tales of their friends’ friends who have camels and live in SW France. And the children tell their friends at central London day schools of the time they fed real, live, llamas and their friends probably have to google ‘live animal’ just to verify their existence.

And in the evening we invited Sarah and Paul from the Maison Des Chameaux to dinner and they brought their boys and Troy, an American 20something student who was living with them for six months to get some vet training. And Peter was able to bore/regale Troy with the story of how he was cut from the film Titanic. And Petra, Lorraine, Sarah and I were able to drink lots of rosé and dance in the kitchen. And the kids all watched a film or played table football until they were so tired they begged us to let them go to bed! And they were probably a bit bored of their rosé weary mothers saying what a “lurrvley time all of us togethuuur were haaaving”

Which left just Richard and Shona to arrive…. And for THAT We definitely needed a bigger cubivin!

One house, 16 guests

Posted on July 4, 2013 by vicawhite

waiting for the guests to arrive

And with every half term or summer holiday that has passed we’ve had various people come over, one family at a time. But now that the house was getting more habitable, we were starting to get repeat bookings. And by Easter 2012 (for newcomers *waves this is roughly where the blog is right now) we had a lot of interested parties.

It is no exaggeration to say that I have a lot of friends. On a sliding scale from inner circle, see them all the time, known them forever friends to barely know them but we bump into each other now and again and have fun together. I love making new friends, if real life was like Facebook, I’d be ‘adding as friend’ every day. Thanks to my job I am constantly meeting interesting, fun people and maybe it’s the ‘only child’ in me, but I am like a magpie, always on the lookout for new, shiny friends. But what I sincerely hope is that I always make time for the oldies and originals. The ones whose children are my godchildren, the ones who were bridesmaids at my wedding and the ones who I could turn to in a crisis. As a result of decades of magpie like friend collecting, my friends are not necessarily friends with each other. They’ve met, over the years at weddings, birthdays and bbqs but I don’t have one big gang of friends who all know each other.

But this Easter, they were all coming to La Maison Blanche and who knew how that would go?

The first to arrive were the Candys.

The Candy children go native

I met Lorraine about 15 years ago when she interviewed me for a job. We ended up dancing in a basement bar somewhere in Soho having only stopped off to get some cash out of a cashpoint. I got the job. And some days we wonder if it actually WAS a basement bar or wether we inadvertently stumbled into someone’s living room and just danced there as we’ve never found our bar again….

Lorraine has four children and a diabetic dog. And our fifteen year friendship has now been enhanced by our husbands becoming great friends (they go to the theatre together – we suspect its just so they can sit in the dark and rest) and now our children are friends and ichat each other with smiley faces and words that aren’t words but merely a string of letters to express emotion LOLZ. Sky the eldest of the Candy children is quite formidable, tall and sometimes bossy she is one of the few people that can keep Sebastian in check – she even terrifies me sometimes. But I love our chats about life and the universe and as I have no girls of my own I always enjoy my times with Sky especially now as she is getting older. I can hardly believe that all those years ago on a New Year’s Eve night out, when Lorraine told us she was pregnant we (rather selfishly) declared that it was a disaster and would “ruin everything!” In fact Sky’s arrival has been the start of an amazing adventure for us all. One that still runs. Gracie in the middle is beautiful inside and out and both my boys are in love with her. Seb has a pic of her as his screen saver on his ipod and gets very embarrassed when we draw attention to this. She is potentially their Helen of Troy in later years. Henry is an enigma to my boys, having grown up in a household of women (apart from James and Duke the dog) and intitally he and Seb despite being the same age were the toddler equivalent of playdate between Ross Kemp and Jarvis Cocker. But bizarrely, over the years, the two youngest boys have formed a strong bond over their love of moshi monsters and the Wii. And finally there is Mabel. Loved by everyone. Especially her, often truculent, god father Peter.

So we were all very excited about their arrival. And its a quick and easy plane ride from City Airport to Pau we had told them. You’ll be here for lunch on Good Friday. I’d made a quiche.

cheesy!

They texted excitedly to say they were about to take off. But then about twenty minutes later we got another text ‘Forced to land at Stanstead – being held here’ The plane had a problem and they’d been made to land at a nearby airport only minutes after their start. And then they were held in an aircraft hanger like the hostages in Die Hard in Nakatomi Plaza for hours with no food or water. And then they were put on a bus back to City Airport. And at this point we sat dismally in our kitchen convinced that the Candys would just give up and go home to North London.

On holiday in Cornwall with the Candys

But thanks, I suspect, largely to Mr Candys fortitude they persevered and got back on a plane about five hours later and got to Gensac finally around 6pm having been on the road since 5am that morning. And we could not have been happier as our favourite holiday companions were IN. THE. HOUSE. Literally.

And for forty eight hours it was just Whites and Candys, building dens, fires in the woods and eating our body weight in cheese. But soon the Levetons would arrive with their two children and the friend combining would begin. But thats for another blog post.

40 years young

Posted on June 29, 2013 by vicawhite

A trip to Istanbul to celebrate getting old!

And so readers, it’s at this point in the timeline of my blog that I turn 40. I’ve never really worried about ‘big’ birthdays. I truly believe the only reason for melancholy around them is if there are things you wish you’d done. A life you wish you’d led or something you fundamentally wish you could change about where you are right now. And at this point I am perfectly fine with just how its all gone to date.

A good friend of mine recently starting blogging about her approach to fifty http://5til50.com/ as it had thrown up all sorts of questions in her head about life and where it takes you. In her case, as in mine, life has been pretty amazing (as I pointed out to her while we reclined on a rattan sofa in Soho House LA, drinking champagne) And I sincerely hope not to sound smug but I point this out only to underline what facing milestones is all about. Its about working out where you’ve been and deciding where you want to go. Life is linear, there’s a start and sadly there will be an end (well not that sadly I really don’t want to live to be 102 and fed thru a tube – can’t see the point really. Though a friend recounted the other day a visit to his 102 year old gran, when I asked what she did all day he said ‘mostly plan her meals and watch Loose Women’ suddenly it didn’t sound so bad!) Anyway the point is, there’s no going back you’re heading in one direction and even Walt Disney and his cryogenics or plans for eternal youth or whatever he tried can’t hope to change this so MAKE IT COUNT and NO REGRETS.

And owning this house in France has for sure added to my life contentment. Madness at times? Cause of huge rows in the White House? Yep. But an adventure for sure. Not as crazy as emigrating to Australia aged 24 and not if I’m honest, as much fun as my year spent living in LA aged 26. But an adventure. And one that offers future fun for all my family. So when I AM sitting in a chair watching Loose Women 2073 (presented by the offspring of Nadia Sawalaha and Lorraine Kelly no doubt) I know that in rural france somewhere my sons and their offspring are probably finally getting round to replacing that cheap kitchen. Good luck to them…. For now I’m 40 and I’m fine with that and I OWN a house in france. This is what french forty looks like…… fun huh?

French cuisine innit?

sometimes I read books in France! No really, I do..

“egoiste” (only funny if you remember the Chanel ad!

Ski-ing Barbie!

Alice n me!

Look how happy we are!! (we prob had a row about Fanta just after this)

Rope Swing Barbie

yum!

Jazz at marciac

The white family and the white stuff

It’s shabby chic (or is it just shabby?)

Image

For some time, the phrase Shabby Chic was a buzzword in interiors. Cath Kidston, Kirstie Allsop et al encouraging us all to mix twee with retro with floral and come up with studied shabbiness. And I do love it to a degree but at home my husband (rightly) refuses any attempts of mine to girly up our home. And my two boys laugh in the face of a chintzy print. So in France, I indulge my girly side. I have wallpaper, I have quilts, I will attempt to smuggle in as many cushions as possible and I may even aim for some fringed lampshades at some point.

The house is so big that Mr White is sort of fine with some of it having a girly feel. And it rather suits the rambling, run down feel of it all. It would be odd to throw a state of the art, Italian marble kitchen into rural France (and we can’t afford it anyway!) so shabby chic it is. Thank god there’s a term for it, otherwise it would just be shabby! We had a shabby Christmas….

A shabby bedroom with laura Ashley josette wallpaper (just the words Laura and Ashley would send Mr White into a decline if I tried them in London)

We use outdoor furniture as a dining table (see above) but not for long readers! Dining room makeover coming soon…

And we use Cath Kidston Cowboy print A. LOT. I’ve always loved this print but have thus far only persuaded my male family to go with it in the form of an oilcloth tablecloth. For some reason in France they think its ok.

And we have lots of French Toile quilts which may be girly but they are perfect for snuggling under in the winter when watching Bullit on Peters 16mm projecter. Which I would argue is a boy version of shabby chic – old, slightly broken and not really as good as just buying Apple TV in terms of viewing pleasure but SO much more romantic. So you see, there’s a shabby chic for everyone.