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Because of the nature of blogging, I’m worried that new readers *waves might wonder if I ever actually show any pictures of my actual house. You know, like rooms and interiors shots and stuff? So I thought I would do … Continue reading
Serge!
It is definitely time for another post about our French neighbour Serge. When I mentioned him in a previous post several people demanded he make another guest appearance – like Tom Selleck in Friends. Only without the tache. Or the good looks. Or previous existence as Magnum PI. But you wanted more of him anyhow!
We first met Serge on our second visit to La Maison Blanche. We had been shown around the day before by Patrick the estate agent after what we assumed had been a ‘big lunch’ for him. His face was shiny and the colour of red wine and his demeanour, suitably ‘relaxed’. But as the house was little more than a derelict shell, Oliver Reed could have shown us round and established that only a pair of idiots would buy it, so Patrick had little to do other than hand us the key and mumble ‘tres grande’ a lot.
Peter shows the estate agent around the property.. hic
The next day, we drove back for another look at the outside. To gaze wistfully through the gates and decide if we had the stomachs and the funds for such madness. Or so we thought. No sooner had we pulled up outside than Serge popped up with a ‘spare key’ which he’d been keeper of like Gandalf for probably twenty unoccupied years. He insisted we go in for another look and raved in French about the sheer majesty of e place. “C’est la Maison pour Le monarch de la village” he insisted which Pete rather liked the sound of. And once we finally moved in, we insisted that Serge keep a spare key and he has had that key ever since, as we never asked for it back.
In the years since he proved to be an absolute god send. He’s dealt with flood, famine and plagues of locusts for us. Well actually, flood famine and plague of mice which he called us at 5am English time to tell us about. “Les souris, les souris” he shouted down the phone. “Ou?” I replied “PARTOUT!!” He yelled back. Along with our friend Sarah Bird (who we were able to phone and have a slightly less hysterical conversation with, in English) he went in, laid poison and in a couple of days time they were all gone. In my head they all left to set up a new home somewhere else, like in Watership Down as opposed to them all staggering off to die in our barn, a slow, uncomfortable death by poison like a Poirot character! Or that episode of Midsommer where the murderer force fed his victim poisoned pasta!
Serge speaks no English whatsoever (why should he?) and because he is such a help to us, we have him for lunch or dinner at least once each visit at which I use my good, but not fluent French to discuss topics from Briitsh Royals (he is obsessed with Diana, William, Kate so we have that in common – we talked for hours one lunch a year and a half ago about fact Kate ‘pas enceinte’) to the French economy (to be honest I leave that to Peter and listen for when he gets back round to something like Prince Albert of Monacco and the bride qui courir!) I really must get Serge a subscription to Paris Match.
Serge lived with his mother who was so old that several times when we went there for lunch we suspected she had died at the table – turned out she’d just fallen asleep during the salad course. She was 89 years old and Serge had never left home. His brother and sister are both married with children but for Serge, the last twenty years had been taken up caring physically and emotionally for his mother. Even if he popped over to visit us, she would stand at his (and her) gates across the street and wave her walking stick shouting for him like that old woman in ‘allo ‘allo who used to see ‘ze flashing knobs’.
We entered his life at a time when caring for his sick, aged mother really had become his life. And each visit, as we arrived he would run over grinning as if the circus had come to town (in many ways it had!). Nowadays he always gets up early to make sure our fires are lit before our arrival and even restocks our woodpile which we have tried to offer him money for but he blanches in offence because we are ‘les Amis’…
And so, when the phone went in our London home around this time at 5am in the morning we assumed our house had encountered some sort of natural disaster. Instead it was a sobbing Serge calling with the news that his mother had died. He had wanted us to be some of the first people to know and Peter tried to say all the right things but at that time in the morning we didn’t even have the computer switched on to google translate ‘we’re so sorry for your loss’. Desole seemed the best answer…. But we hope that despite few intelligent words in our non mother tongue – Serge would know that we were genuinely sorry. And we knew what a momentous thing this was for him. A strange mix of sadness but also a freedom he had never known. No more staying home in case his mother needed to eat, bathe or even pay a visit to the toilet. The world was now his oyster – at the very least SW France was his oyster. But what do you do when you can do anything? It’s like some sort of Stockholm syndrome – as much as you hated being so confined – once you have unlimited freedom you’re almost afraid to take it. I wonder if Serge even has a passport.
And on our next visit he broke down in tears at our arrival and got out the order of service leaflets from the funeral and filled us in on how his brother and sister are not speaking to him because his mother had left him the house in return for all those years of sole care (and having spent a bit of time with her we have to say he’d earnt those bricks and gardens) and we asked what his plans were now. And he didn’t really know. So he seemed to just carry on as normal. Cutting down wood in his forest, tending to his amazing garden which provides us with loads of great fresh veg and pretty flowers.
Courgette quiche and courgette cake…..
Flowers from le jardin de Serge
He says that he has plans now – he may even travel to London. But I don’t think he will. I think he will stay in the house of his mother until he dies too. Tending to his garden and making us lovely cakes and les merveilles (french donut type things – delish) But maybe I’m wrong and when we go back this summer Serge will have dyed his hair black, started wearing cravats and announce he is going on a world tour. But then WHO would look after our keys?….
Old stuff but not THAT old
I love mid -century modern furniture. Although, to be honest, I didn’t even know what that was until a few years ago. You may not know what it is. In short, if you are my age (27 -haha!) its the stuff your parents probably had in their starter homes and threw out when you were about six or seven in favour of ‘nice new stuff’ My parents used to have an amazing massive glass lamp stand with a huge bright orange linen shade which I remember thinking looked a bit odd at the time. They also had a scratchy brown wool sofa with wooden feet that again I hated on the grounds that a)it was brown and b) it was scratchy but looking back it was all deeply cool. So much so, I have essentially recreated the look to go in my kids sitting room in france only the sofa isn’t scratchy or brown. (see above)
The best place to buy mid century modern furniture is of course ebay using searches like G Plan, Eames, danish, or retro. Sadly people these days are very aware that people like me want this old stuff so they charge a premium but if you use plenty of different search terms and DON’T search for mid century modern (cos really only those in the know would use this term – Gladys throwing out her old sideboard in Penge would never refer to it as such!) you can still get some bargains – thanks Gladys!
We have a sideboard just like this in London
Or, even better, you do what we did and you find a sofa lying on the road… this is the story of the yellow G Plan sofa in the picture at the top….
A couple of years ago, I was on my way to our local station to go to work. And on the way there I passed a tired, broken, ripped up old sofa. It was G Plan style and just the sort of thing I love. But the cushions were dirty and torn and it looked terribly sad. And it had been dumped on the street unloved and unwanted. So I did what any sane person would do – I phoned my husband and told him to come down the road and get it. Carry it home on his back and find it a home. He told me to bugger off. He had a point. So I went off up West to work and forgot about the sofa.
A few months later as the tennants were being thrown out of the house we would later buy -which I forgot to mention in earlier blog post is actually six doors down from where we were living – and as part of their clearout they had dumped a sofa on our street outside the house. MY SOFA! It had manage to move closer to where i lived all by itself. Like the Littlest Hobo. Or those cats that cross continents to be reunited with previous owners who moved away without taking them.
So Peter had to go and get it now. The furniture gods had spoken. And so we brought it home and then drove it down to France. And in the meantime we bought an upholstery gun and some staples and a retro fabric from John Lewis who do a great range in 1950/60/70s fabrics called Atomic.
John Lewis fabrics with a retro feel
And I got my sewing machine out and made some new cushion covers for it – with zips no less! And ta da suddenly it looked how it does above. And it had only cost us the price of the fabric. And I love it. Though not entirely snuggly (see above comments about scratchy sofa – the seventies were NOT a time of comfort) it does provide the perfect place for me to sit and read French Grazia in the winter.
But where else can you find such gems IN France? Well, as it turns out this is around the time we met some lovely English people called Stephen and Philippa. They live in an amazing chateau in a village called Aignan – and from there they sell brocante. And they have lots of mid century modern stuff there (as well as properly old stuff too) so I bought my crazy orange lamp and a black leather chair (see below – covered in teddies).
Chair from Brocante Lassalle
And as small world would have it, Stephen lived in Greenwich before moving to France and Philippa is a fashion editor so it was more than furniture kismet that we were introduced to them and their chateau and their brocante. And now we often bump into them on Sunday’s at Vide Greniers and race each other for the mid century gems! And for New Year this year, they invited us over and we felt very grand telling people we were spending new year at a chateau. Which should you have some spare cash is currently for sale. Go on – its a bargain!
So just as our French home was taking shape, with heating, a working toilet and even a specific room for the kids to read French literature (er, ok, play on their iPads). We could have friends to stay, pretend we were a family in a White Company catalogue wafting around in Breton stripes and espadrilles and post pics on Facebook about our ‘gorgeous French home’.
Back in London, we had a lovely four bedroom house in Greenwich, a historical, leafy bit of London with a huge royal park and a branch of Nandos overlooking the river. The. Dream.
We’d bought our current house when Arthur was born and although it needed a bit of ‘doing up’, new bathrooms and kitchen etc, it wasn’t too bad (and remember we are seasoned doer uppers). Several years later and it was really lovely. Big eat in kitchen, two nice limestone and slate bathrooms, four gorgeous bedrooms – ours with Cole and Son Cow Parsley wallpaper in yellow which I loved. It had carpets. It was warm. It had a bright red glossy kitchen and a nice garden with decking and an outdoor seating area. So.
We did what any normal couple would do – we bought a disgusting huge house that wasn’t even a house, it was three flats. On the day we went to look at it we met a Jack Whitehall-esque (jack whitehall in Fresh Meat I add – in real life he prob lives in an Islington townhouse) paid by the council tenant who was there to stop squatters moving in. He was arriving back from the Co-op at around 10am with a see thru carrier bag containing half a loaf of hovis, a half pint of milk, a bottle of lucozade and 10 Marlborough Reds.
The room that was to become our kitchen had a mattress on the floor, half eaten pizzas in boxes, lager cans with cigarette ash around the ring pull opening and the occasional boil in the foil lasagna with cigarettes stubbed out in them.
It had three front doors, one of which was accessed by a horrid metal fire escape up the side and when we first moved in, to go to bed, we wearily left the middle front door, climbed up the fire escape and went in the top front door.
It was, and still is, the biggest project we’ve taken on and as we were concurrently doing up the house in France too, it was an act of madness. S why did we do it? Well, largely because it looked like this…..
Or more importantly, once Nester, our neighbour had been and helped us saw off the metal fire escape, and roger, another neighbour painted the front and some Farrow and Ball Studio Green had been applied to the front door. It looked like this…
A grand house with steps up to the front door. Like in Mary Poppins. The way I had always imagined people in London living, when I, as a child lived in Newcastle. With nannies jumping over roofs and chirpy cockney chimney sweeps popping in to say hello. It has four large bedrooms, six reception rooms and four bathrooms. The perfect home for my boys who were getting bigger and smellier and basically need a separate floor where they can be big and smelly.
The interiors sadly were and still largely do, look like this though…
But, hey, at least we have a nice home in France to escape to right?
It’s charming isn’t it? This room upset me greatly. Tucked away at the back so quite easily avoidable but there nevertheless. Like hairy toes. Or ‘bacne’. But because there was so much else to do we’d left this room well alone.
But then it was time to sort it. If we made the worst room nice, the whole house would feel better right?
So each visit Peter would dismantle a particularly hideous aspect of it. First the nasty rusty water tank which was on the wall was yanked, sawed and yanked again off the wall. Then a sledgehammer was taken to the concrete units and sink. I attacked that myself with great gusto imagining all the things that irritate me. Like bad shoes. The rain. People calling me Vicky. Peter uses the same technique when we go running together – if I look like I’m flagging he gets me to get fired up by listing things he knows make me cross. Crocs on adults can usually get me an extra half a mile….
And then we started painting everything white.
And this all coincided with a visit from Petra and Stu so we got Stu to help paint the ceiling. And we rewarded him with confit of duck and some Madiran in the evening. Plus the knowledge that he was helping his friends with their insane French folly. The general consensus among our friends seems to be ‘amazing thing to do – but we’d never do it’. And I take their point. But after a lot more poly filling, painting, and brocante buying our room finally looked like this! Ta da….
The walls we painted Farrow and Ball Parma Grey and the mix of mid century modern furniture is all much longer stories which I’m going to save for another day! Or another blog post. And over time we added more and more stuff to the walls etc so it now really looks like this and is what we refer to as the kids sitting room.
A post in which I throw something open to the public vote. It will be like X factor or ‘farrow and ball Factor’. I may even get Dermot round to announce that lines are now closed but you may still be charged.
I need to decide what colour to paint the outside of my house and its shutters! And I just can’t. It’s is a monstrous decision and one we will have to live with for years.
My options are – Stick with white walls and add a coloured shutter? Or paint the walls cream/grey/beige and have white shutters #firstworldproblems. And don’t get me started on the front door.
Options I’ve found and like include the following….
So what do we think then? Comments v welcome.
It might be time for another visit from Uncle Ricard. He had, by now been to visit several times but in terms of this blog I haven’t documented them all (it has been noted, quote “yeah I’ve read the blog but there isn’t nearly enough about ME!” Unquote.)
But I’m doing him a disservice because, he’s right, so much of the stories we are building up around this French home have involved him. Not, you understand in a manual labour sort of way, but in terms of building a lifelong experience for us all to remember in our dotage. When we’re all sitting in wipe clean chairs in a retirement home for magazine journalists we’ll talk about the time we drove back from the Marciac jazz festival with uncle Ricard in the back of our estate car like your parents used to do with kids in the 1970s when there were no laws about seatbelts. One friend happily recalls car journeys to Wales as a child lying in sleeping bags in the back of an estate car while both parents smoked with the windows tightly wound up. Ah – the 70s!
Anyway, I digress. Uncle Richard had come to stay yet again – once we had dried his guest suite out. He is, in fact, the best person to visit in times of crisis because he always arrives and loudly declares ‘oh love, you’ve done SO much here,’ even when we haven’t. And his visit this time involved skiing (us, not him. Never seen Richard on skis – cant imagine it) and various trips to the local tabac to buy Pokemon stuff for the kids. Evenings of Ricard drinking, and a day trip for him and the kids to Pau. Pau is a really pretty French town with a large castle, some upmarket fashion shops and evidently a branch of Quick Burger where the children persuaded Uncle Richard to take them.
It was on this trip that thanks to Paul and Sarah our friends who own the local Camel farm (see earlier blog post if you’ve missed their arrival on the scene ) that we discovered the joy of the cubivin. Bought from any of the local vineyards this is an 11litre box of wine that you fill yourself from the vats of wine like a petrol pump. Our favourite two are Chateau Barrajat where you can get amazing Madiran red for just 2€ a litre or Sarragachies which does lovely Rose for just 1€ a litre. Mon dieu. Sarragachies has the added bonus of a very attractive man selling the wine who has that Gallic Eric Cantona thing going on. He may in fact make it onto frenchtotty.com a website my friend Lorraine and I decided we should set up despite it being sexist and objectifying. Trouble is we have so far in rural France only found the man at Saragacchies and Roman the builder to go on it. We may need to work on the business model a bit more.
So, uncle Richard helped us fill our cubivins. And then he helped us drink them.
And then we took photos of ourselves blowing raspberries so that if you catch the pic mid raspberry your lips look like Angelina Jolie’s. Try it…..
OK so for all the interiors lovers reading this blog I thought I should start doing some ‘get the look’ posts. I am, after all, a journalist – so if I can’t do the research for you then its not much of a blog. You want links right? You want to be able to buy the stuff I’ve bought for my house and recreate it in your own home. Such an interiors addict am I that some of my children’s first words were ‘tear books’ and ‘mood boards’. So here in the first of a series is my GET THE LOOK page…. first up – kitchen
Ikea varde base unit
Kitchen units – IKEA VARDE and as I already explained – my particular Varde units were bought via ebay making them even cheaper than IKEA! As this is a freestanding kitchen, it seems that people quite often buy these as a temporary measure while having a kitchen fitted so there are lots of them on ebay in really good condition. And they come with worktops so you can just buy and throw into a room and you are done!
ikea varde wall shelf
varde drawer unit
We had planned to mix and match a bit more with our kitchen but having bought all this varde stuff I also had a tear in my famous tears book for some amazing wicker lampshades that came from IKEA. And so I decided to get those too. Full price. Imagine that?
ikea leran pendant
And then we have amassed loads of great rustic looking things. We have loads of open shelving with our Lincoln crockery piled high which Peter buys up on ebay all the time. The best place to buy it is chinasearch or ebay. It originally came from BHS in the 1980s and sadly they no longer do it. But in later posts you’ll see my other great BHS finds. Im not saying I’d buy clothes there BUT the homeware is really great and the sales AMAZING. Check out bhs.co.uk
BHS lincoln – rustic from the high street
And we have loads of French yellow confit pots. Some provided by Madame Landauer and some picked up for next to nothing at Vide Greniers. In the UK they are quite desirable and some places sell new ones for a fortune. 
You can find something really similar in terms of french rustic cook pots at Toast.
French pots from Toast.co.uk
Or for more french style homewears try Plumo where I stumbled upon this lovely vase that looks just like one of our vide Grenier finds.
amphora vase from Plumo
And finally, I love giant clocks. And the best place I have found to track down giant clocks is Graham and Green. I have clocks from there in my London home and I splashed out and bought this one for my french kitchen.
Wall clock from Graham and Green
So there you have it. Add in lots of blue and white plates which I am adding to all the time buying them up at vide greniers for 1 EURO or less and lots of empty vanilla yoghurt pots lined up on the fireplace. I could tell you where to buy the pokemon game pictured on the worktop here – but it is possibly the worst thing we’ve ever bought. Kids love it. Its interminable. Stick with the cook wear!
So this post is going to be one of ‘those’ episodes. The bit where everything goes wrong. We’d had the house for a little under two years now and it had been fun. We’d done long, slow, cheap renovations and although there was still a lot to do, we felt like we’d climbed a DIY mountain.
And then, in January 2012 we read on the BBC website with alarm that the weather in SW France was terrible. Torrential rain, icy cold temperatures. Inclement.
It’s always a little terrifying leaving our poor house on its own for weeks on end in between visits. We know that Serge has his watchful eye on the place (heaven help anyone trying to get into it or even onto our land – he is like captain Mainwaring in his sense of duty towards it all) but he is no match for natural disasters like floods or fires. Or even our giant cherry tree crashing into the roof in a gale or some such.
But if was none of the above which brought our first disaster. It was all our own stupidity.
We always turn off water and electricity in between visits. But when we packed up after Xmas although we turned the water off, we didn’t drain the heating (we were of course not used to having heating in our defence) This turned out to be a schoolboy error.
We arrived at our usual early morning time (7am having driven through the night) to find the house colder than ever before. And readers, I am not good with the cold. Which given that I am from Newcastle is odd but suffice to say, I am the only Geordie I have ever met who used to go drinking down the quayside in a polo neck jumper. It is little wonder I had no luck with the opposite sex until I moved south.
So my lovely husband, sensing my state of unrest, cranked up our new, wood fired stove which powers four or five radiators downstairs including one in the newly renovated guest bedroom. And then we headed out to the Saturday morning market in Vic en Bigorre expecting to return to a toasty downstairs.
Instead, we returned clutching bags of cheese, flowers and a whole roast chicken, to find our newly renovated guest bedroom, plus our lovely bathroom approx a foot under water. My nice toile quilt, bought previously at the Vic en Biggore market, had soaked up the dirty pipe water like a sponge. My hessian curtains I’d made from scratch were sopping and a jute rug I’d bought from Marks and Spencer floating on the surface like it was in the third class cabins on the Titanic. A parallel with particularly painful connotations for Mr White as in his acting days he was cut from the James Cameron epic. He remains one of only about four actors to be cut from the film after what was six months of filming in Mexico. He made no money in residuals from the biggest grossing picture of all time. So really, a soggy bedroom is nothing in terms of life disappointment to him. But I was devastated.
And so we grabbed buckets and started bailing out. It turns out that the temperatures had dropped so low in the month we’d been away that our pipes had frozen full of water, the water expanded and cracked the pipes and even one of the radiators, so when we turned our heating on, the water melted and shot out everywhere while we were buying a chicken. Plumbing 101 really. And I was sad for a while seeing so much hard work ruined. Damp walls only just painted in Farrow and Ball Old White. Lovely cast iron radiators cracked. Obviously we cleared it out, but we were cold and fed up and it was like those bits on Grand Designs were they go to break with Kevin saying “I’m not sure they’re EVER going to get this place finished…..”
But, the bedding got washed, the curtains dried out and the rug we burned on the kitchen fire so it kept us warm while Peter mended the pipes and installed a new cast iron radiator he just happened to have in the barn. And we put our onesies on and I told the boys tales of women in the Newcastle Bigg market who wear tiny skirts and men who wear short sleeves even in winter. And they looked at me wide eyed to think such a place could exist – a place where no one makes you wear a coat! Imagine a place of such wonder. And they planned their move there ASAP.
A quick post to talk about people who are ‘good at games’. I am not one of them. Ive always been more of a shopper than a netballer. Always last at cross country at school and for whom sports day was a thing of torture, i could never see the merits in running around in the cold and wet chasing a ball. But, finally, aged 40 i have reached a stage where I actually enjoy sport. I even go running occasionally. I have learnt to surf and I love my bike retrieved from a skip that Peter customised for me by spray painting it navy blue and adding a basket and a big silver bell. Very Amelie.
And one BIG reason to get a house in France is to do outdoorsy stuff. Or indoorsy stuff that doesn’t involve plugging anything in. And i spend a large part of my time there instigating sporting pursuits. Like playing table tennis or swimming in the pool.
Or cycling to the bakery (6km) and back on one of our dozens of bikes – all retrieved from skips or bought at emmaus which is like a permanent giant car boot sale. Peter has even bought a tandem which we can cycle to the village on like Tim brook Taylor and bill oddie.
There’s swingball which takes us all back to the 1970s and will possibly one day, take someone’s eye out.
And of course there is skiing. Which I took up at the age of 39 and finally got the hang of aged 41.
And there is even a rope swing park at a nearby village, Aignan, where we can scale great heights as a family and zip wire across lakes.
So finally I have become sporty. Miss Tilly my old PE mistress would be stunned. Though getting into a communal shower with thirty other girls afterwards I would still have a real problem with.
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