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.

Godfather number two

Posted on May 2, 2013 by vicawhite

hammock days

And so you’ve met Uncle Ricard – Godfather extraordinaire and provider of Pokemon cards, trips to the Tabac, bellyaching laughs and a tiny dose of embarassment for Arthur over his Englebert Humperdink singing voice (young people reading this – he was a bit like Tom Jones but has not, as yet been asked to ressurect his career with a slot on The Voice – he may, I fear have represented us at Eurovision recently though!) A better Godfather you could not wish for, especially if, like Sebastian you simply don’t have one.

An oversight at birth – a bit like his middle name which was mean to be Sebastian Edmund John White but when Peter got to register the birth he forgot we were adding in my Grandfather’s name – John and so Seb is simply Sebastian Edmund White. We’d never nominated anyone to be Seb’s godfather. He has two lovely godmother’s Jane and Camilla but no men to guide him through life save his father.

Sebastian – thanks to Johnny Harbottle for lovely pic

LOOK AT ME!!!

Sebastian has the face of an angel but occasionally, the temperament of the devil. He can laugh like a drain then seconds later be so angry he looks like one of the monsters on Dr Who who have come to subsume the soul of the Dr’s latest assistant. He loves being the centre of attention and I hope in later life this will manifest itself as him becoming a actor or pop star but it could also end with him as a master criminal!

Music producer or safe cracker?

Sebastian makes you want to love him so your heart pounds, but like those inappropriate boys at school, uni and life, he’ll never love you back as much. He is far too busy googling the word poo on the internet to bother with familial pleasantries. The only person he does love, listen to and seek approval from is our friend Stuey. The gorgeous Stuey who is loved by children and animals like some sort of cartoonular character. We imagine him being awoken each morning by sparrows pulling back his bedsheets with their beaks. Australian by birth which also appeals to Sebastian “one day I’m going to move to Australia with Stuey,” he tells us, Stuey has lived in the UK for the last twelve years and has gone native. We haven’t quite persuaded him to watch Coronation St yet but he does love a London pub and a Sunday roast.

He had by now payed several visits to our French home and it was one night, sitting around our kitchen table that we hatched our plot to give Sebastian the best godfather ever – the one person he really really likes (other than Animal off the Muppets). And so we asked Stuey if he would be, a bit later than planned, godfather to Seb. And he said yes of course. And we cracked open another bottle of Madiran and considered it a fine evenings work. Big tick in several boxes. And next morning we told Seb who thought it was very cool to suddenly gain a godfather at the age of four especially one who was really good at outdoor sports and comes from a land where everyone is upside down.

Stuey is in charge

And then we all went skiing and Seb could show his new godfather how good he now is on skis! And we were pleased because being Australian meant skiing is the one sport Stuey ISN’T proficient at. But he’s going to learn next year and will no doubt be whipping down black runs before all of us. Strewth!

Piste!

Tidings of joy?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by vicawhite

And before you know it, it was Christmas again – this time with partial heating AND my parents. In less than two years we had managed to take a house with no water, heating, walls or heart and turn it into a family home. A warm, bustling, family home for the first time in twenty years. With noisy meals, heated games of table football and plenty of rowing about what time bedtime is. Regular, family stuff.

We had learnt by now via neighbours a little about the enormous french family who once lived in what we, the White family now refer to as La Maison Blanche (see what we did there?) It was once home to a family called Mouledous. The Mouledous had eighteen children and they all lived in our house in Gensac. Like the old woman who lived in a shoe. There are now dozens of Mouledous scattered around the local area. There’s Dr Mouledous in Maubourguet who we took Seb to once for scurvy or some such Victorian illness for which Seb is a magnet.

Then, there is the genteel and elegant Francoise who is no longer a Mouledous by name as she married. She is a retired paediatrician and lives in a beautiful old windmill on the edge of our village and invites us over for aperitifs and speaks such posh French we can understand every word (unlike Serge our other neighbour, with whom a conversation is probably the French equivalent of a chat with Gazza). Francoise’ daughter is married to an English Dr and they live in Ealing with their three ‘English by birth but French by manners’ children.

Finally, the best Mouledous of all is Frank Mouledous. Frank recently returned to his family home in Maubourguet with his Hawaain wife to open up rural France’s, one and only California surf shack, burger bar. Called The California Kitchen it’s the kids fave place to eat in France – go figure – but it’s not just the enourmous burgers which are made from scratch and delicious. Or the american style cheesecake which Mrs Frank makes from scratch and is delicious. Its not even the fact there is no loo at the California Kitchen so you have to run across the street to the Town Hall if you need a pee which the kids think is way cool. the big draw of the California Kitchen is the fact that Frank is a big bear of a man in a chef’s outfit who talks to the kids in a French/American accent. He might have stepped out of one of those dreadful shows they watch on the Disney channel where the Dads are always overweight and bufoony, and the Mum’s naggy and in charge. And Frank always offers up free desert for which my children would happily follow the child catcher, never mind a man who could be Selena Gomez’s onscreen Dad!

So this Christmas we would have a family Christmas the like of which our still a bit shabby house had not seen for about twenty years or more. A Christmas to make the Mouledous memory proud.

Peter and the boys bought a huge tree that filled one ‘kings speech’ style corner of our salon. And because we now had a concrete floor in the salon, we moved all Christmas operations into it. The table we normally use in the garden with a white linen tablecloth to disguise the fact it’s an outdoor table. And mistletoe found in abundance in our woods.

And my mum had brought onesies for the boys from Primark so they could feel cosy when they got up on Xmas morning to see if he’d been. Which of course he had.

And we could begin to see how our holiday home could actually be a real home. With a sofa, (ikea natch) and lots of rooms that we could spread out into. We may not be a family of 18 but when all our new Mouledous friends pop round for a glass of wine and some cashews we hope they’ll be impressed. And perhaps explain where they all used to sleep! Because readers, next Xmas we’ve got our friends the Candys coming to stay and they are the closest thing to Mouledous we know as there are six of them! We may need a bigger goose!

X marks the spot

Posted on April 21, 2013 by vicawhite

This post is thanks to my friend Pippa. In response to an earlier post where I discussed having to wear flip flops at all times as to get to any nice room in the house. “You know what you need?” said friend Pippa, who I get the train to work with every other morning after we’ve dropped our kids at school. “A map. A floorplan map of the house Pooh Corner style so we know where all the things you’re talking about are.”

What a genius idea. A Harry Potter Marauders Map. So here it is for PIppa and anyone else who is interested. Drawn by me so excuse the non accurate nature of it.

Elephants breath vs mouses back

Posted on April 18, 2013 by vicawhite

Not quite Babington yet…

We may have had our fair share of guests by now but we’ve relied on their pioneer spirit to see them through. That and a supply of flip flops for crossing unfinished floors. The house was slowly taking shape and with each holiday that passed we became more confident that one day we would have one of those holiday homes you could imagine on a website of ‘baby friendly boltholes’. We had a few finished rooms and had started to collect some bits of furniture.

Until now we had vacated our master bedroom and bunked into a little room next to the boys room when people came to stay. You have to walk through it to get to the boys room which curtails any chance of privacy and means that Arthur wakes us up with his 5am rises which he has done since birth and even now age 10 doesn’t show any signs of changing. I am hoping that one day he will be one of those teenagers that you have to drag out of bed with threats of cold water. And the room itself is fin. Cute even. I found the granny quilt on ebay (you actually search for just that – granny quilt) and we have no problem moving in while guests come to stay.

Our room when guests come to stay. Cozy.

But as another Christmas loomed large, and this time my parents were feeling brave enough to make the trip (the prospect of heating and not peeing in a bucket had increased their levels of interest in another holiday) we wanted to get a proper guest room ready. The room pictured at the top was the one we had earmarked. It was downstairs and next to the one finished bathroom (see below).

So together they would make a really nice guest suite. I could possibly start sidelining as a B&B landlady. But as usual there was a lot of work to be done before getting Alistair Sawday round to give us a five star rating.

The loo/rats nest was in the far corner. Like Nimh. Then it was gone.

By this stage we were old hands at doing up our rooms. And this room did not phase us. Oh no. Despite originally having a loo in the corner with a rats nest underneath it (we tend NOT to share this info with guests before they’ve slept in it) The most horrible peeling ceiling. A funny coat rack thingy (technical term) which I actually kept and put in another room later on and broken windows.

We got to work with a vat of decorators caulk to fill gaps in the wooden ceilings. A gallon of white undercoat and gloss for ceilings and woodwork. Another gallon of white emulsion for the walls and a lot of patience to apply all of the above. Ourselves. And finally hours of pouring over Farrow and Ball paintcharts to choose the colour for the walls, about six changes of mind over which particular shade of beige or grey to go for (Elephants Breath vs Mouses Back – #firstworldproblems) We settled on Old White

Beige by any other name. Old White if you want to pay lots more for it

And we painted. And painted. And I got the children to help and they painted. And then Peter filled the holes in the ceiling and I painted that too. And this was probably some sort of school holiday/half term or other and my friends were facebooking about their sunshine breaks to Morocco/Dubai/Majorca (I even had pangs of jealousy as people fessed up to being at Centreparcs – not for long admittedly)

And it was finished. Although it didnt yet have a floor – just some mucky cold concrete but I bought a rug at Marks and Spencer and that would do for now. We bought a Leirvik bed from Ikea and carted it back from Toulouse. Along with yet more Hemnes drawers (I will be calling my next born Hemnes FYI)

Thanks IKEA

And finally we added a great glass chandelier we’d found at a Vide Grenier. And i made some curtains out of my favourite hessian fabric bought on ebay – with black out lining for extra warmth. Voila. And the rather splendid 1970s pic of the fallen madonna with the big boobies was found in a Vide Grenier for ten euros. A bedroom fit for parents and anyone else who descends from now on. Want to come and stay yet?

Where’s my water?

Posted on April 15, 2013 by vicawhite

Tom Daley wouldn’t stand for these conditions!

Every holiday home needs a pool. Somewhere to focus the all day lounging. And in the first summer as the temperatures had soared in SW France we had made do with the above. It was even too small for Arthur but Seb rose to the mini challenge (he was behind on the pain chocolat consumption something he would make up for in years to come!)
We had, by now an exhaustive list of local pools of which there are many but they all only seem to open for one month of the year. When we first bought the house and had no hot water I had the genius idea of going to a swimming pool where we would be able to shower/swim/shower (any other combo would have resulted in us getting thrown out for environmental reasons). And so we spent days in our early first visit on a crazy wild pool chase – finding one on the Internet, driving for miles…. Finding it closed. We finally googled an indoor one in Lourdes where I hoped I could bathe in holy water and come out a size 8 but when we arrived at it – it was the one day of the week it closed. So much for spiritual enlightenment.

Even our little local French villages have amazing outdoor pools but they reserve opening for July and August only. I have no idea how the business model on this works but there is clearly little economic sense in opening before then.

We did eventually find one brilliant outdoor leisure complex in Mirande – only twenty minutes drive away which opens in June.

Ludina at Mirande

A combination of three pools, slides, table tennis tables, sunloungers and snack bar – we thought we’d hit the jackpot one June half term when we discovered it open. As we paid our entry fee though, the lady behind the counter eyed us suspiciously – “les anglais?” She posed. “Oui” we said excitedly. “Ah” she said as if that explained it all. We were the ONLY people in there. It was warm and sunny outside but not boiling and as soon as our pasty, white, english flesh hit the water we understood why we were solitary bathers. It was FREEZING. As with most french outdoor pools, there is no heating. So if you happen to be there at the beginning of the season when the water has had little sunshine on it – you may as well be in that bit at the end of Skyfall when Bond tussles under the ice with a bad guy. Obviously so as not to lose face we carried on regardless. The kids feel no cold anyway and were thrilled to have the slides to themselves and I shivered in the shallow end praying for it to be over.

Once it IS July or August though there are loads of great local pools to visit in Marciac, Vic-en-Biggore or Plaisance. And best of all in years to come we discover the Lake at Aignan which is a man made beach next to a gorgeous green tinged lake.

Aignan and on and on….

With slides and a rope park with zip wires and dangerous climbing feats to attempt. The kids love it.

Peter got ready for his bushtucker trial

And we love the amazing restaurant there with prawns the size of small aliens you can crack out of their shells and get covered in prawny juice but not care cos you are in a damp swimsuit anyway! Best way to eat seafood. Which makes sense really – perhaps that WAS the original purpose of the bikini – to eat seafood without spoiling your clothes!

Breton cover up you say?

Of course the easiest way to do some swimming in rural SW France is to build a pool. And this of would have been Peter’s preferred option. In fact he had plans to do this before we even had a kitchen or a bathroom but good sense prevailed – in other words I told him not to be so ridiculous. The truth is, if we did build a pool we could rent our lovely holiday home out for others to enjoy and charge more and find it easier to rent. And readers – I hope in the not too distant – real life we will be doing this, but you’re still a couple of years behind when we had not the finances or the time to do this. So instead we bought an INTEX pool which takes days to fill, is freezing cold at first and which Rebecca Adlington may find restrictive in terms of Olympic length swimming, but for our two boys it was ideal. At 15ft across there is plenty of room for them to swim about and for peter to float in a lilo with a bottle of beer in hand at around the 5pm mark. We have none of us worked out yet how to take chips n dips in there with us – but if we did it would be just about perfect.

Day tripping

Posted on April 5, 2013 by vicawhite

We were still finding our way around the Gers. It’s a little known part of France without the glamour of Côte d’Azur or quaint picture postcard lavender fields of Provence. And as we’d bought the house without any advance planning or investigations we really had no idea what we would do for every holiday, for the rest of our lives in this part of France. Drink wine? Eat cheese? We did by now have French versions of trivial pursuit and scrabble but this alone could not fill four, two week holidays a year. We had a striped hammock for lazy day, book reading and we had explored a host of local eateries (in the early weeks with no heating or water, we ate out just to keep warm and use a nice toilet) our nearest restaurant is called Les 3Bs and serves everything with a nouvelle cuisine style whipped sweet potato mousse. Hake, pork or beef all with sweet potato mousse. And aguilettes de canard for the kids. But after almost a year in the house we could barely utter the words sweet potato without feeling billious. Besides, eating and drinking could not fill our days (well it could but we’d all be the size of pavarotti by the end of the holidays) so we began some local explorations. Here are our some of our favourite finds should you ever find yourself in the Haute Pyrenees or Gers.

1. The Maison des Chamaux
As I’ve already blogged, our friends Paul and Sarah Bird run a fabulous animal park only fifteen minutes drive away. And as we were now friends we could see camels and drink wine concurrently. This is not the same experience for paying visitors. But go anyway as its fun. Camels can be stroked, goats are jumped through hoops and wool is spun. My personal fave are the pigs. In mud. Happy as.

2. Biarritz
My craving for a slice of old school glamour led us on a day trip to Biarritz. A two hour drive but a place that makes me feel like I am actually on holiday. Chic people, posh restaurants and a faded glamour. The beach is big and if not directly in season, not too busy. We built sand castles, ate salad nicoise and wished we had more time to rent boogie boards.

3. Le petit train d’artouste
Discovered when our friends Ian and Alice came to stay. A good, almost two hour drive into the mountains, this is a cable car ride to a tiny train which then takes you on an hour long ride around the edge of a mountain. Best of all, along the way are dozens of beavers which being the only English people on the train we took great delight in shouting each time we saw one. Leslie nielson eat your heart out. At the end of the route is a great walk to the top of a mountain lake and a great sense of satisfaction that we had lung fulls of mountain air to flush out the night before’s peach schnapps marathon. Then, as bad fortune would have it, but giving us something to remember the day by, on the way back the train tombe en panne. We had to walk the final kilometre to the car park, dodging beavers as we went. But as we trudged wearily back to our car, we agreed that Beavers and Breakdowns would be the perfect title should Ian ever write an autobiography.
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4. The Marciac Jazz Festival
For which Uncle Ricard came to stay and did his best akerbilk impressions. The one thing guaranteed to send the children into spasms of embarrassment is uncle richard’s singing. Made worse only if I join in sonny and Cher style. Made even worse if the song in question can be sung ‘club singer style’. So imagine their horror and our joy to discover the local jazz festival which runs through the month of August features not only real, snare drum and trumpet style jazz, but also, New Orleans style jazz bands in the town square where you can all sing and dance along. The village of Marciac is taken over each night for a month by tented restaurants, bars, ice cream vendors and jazz bands so you can sit outside, eat amazing food and sing as you eat to ‘when the saints come marching in’. And on a balmy summers evening tHere really is nothing nicer, even when uncle Richard insists on conducting himself throughout the meal in his ‘dobby the free elf’ voice (dobby LOVES Harry Potter….) and Sebastian danced for a crowd, and we all had massive ice creams and Arthur prayed for a replacement family.

I could go on, but suffice to say, we had found plenty to do in our funny little, unfashionable part of France. And when all else fails, there IS French trivial pursuit where you can answer Charles de Gaulle or Vanessa Paradise for everything!

Chauffage

Posted on April 4, 2013 by vicawhite

So before another winter drew in (which makes us sound like the Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie right?) we had to do something about heating. we bought a large wood burning stove (some very long convoluted way I seem to remember probably involving ebay) and had it delivered to south west france.

The one thing I do remember is that it weighed a tonne. And having gone to all the trouble of getting it from somewhere in the middle of england via ebay and then having it driven the fourteen hours to Gensac which by our standards is a major investment (had it not been so heavy Peter would probably have made the kids pull it down on the back of their bikes!) Parking up. Getting a complex array of ramps, jemmies and towels to soften its landing across the gravel driveway, and with some help from puffing and panting frenchmen. Using a hydrolic jack, peter managed to get it up a ramp, up the front door steps. Then, in slow motion, we saw him stumble, the stove wobbled, he stumbled some more and the brand new, most expensive thing we’d invested in, stove crashed onto the gravel driveway. And the glass window made of special fire resitant glass which comes at vast expense smashed. Into many pieces. I might have shouted MORON at this point in my typical empathetic manner. Peter looked crushed. And we were still freezing.

But, long story short. We ordered another piece of glass and fixed it. Dozens of cast iron radiators were bought on eBay and driven over to France. Two at a time so as not to ruin the back axel (technical term right) and Peter installed them all.

If you want to know how this wood burner pumps powers all these radiators – don’t ask me! Check out husbands blog www.gensachouse.co.uk it talks about water being pumped etc. pressure etc. blah blah. All I know is that the downstairs of the house was toasty for the first time in its lifetime.

Renovation recap

Posted on March 22, 2013 by vicawhite

So where are we at with this house? We’re having people to stay so it must be quite close to being done right? Well. Here is the thing. Bits of it look nice. The bits I’ve shown you. The kitchen, one bathroom, two and a half bedrooms and the barn now has a floor. (Mr Landauer the gardner came with gallons of cement, tonnes of gravel and excitingly for the male members of the house – a digger/tractor thing *technical term)

Le Tracteur thingy

First put down ten tonnes of gravel

Then pour on gallons of concrete…

And we have a table tennis table, swingball (another great 80s throwback – Pete and i dress up as John Lloyd and Chris Evert while playing for authentic feel) and a massive hammock for the garden. But inside? There is A LOT still to be done. And when friends come to visit we feel bad making them holiday and DIY, so work slows down. And if we have friends to stay then we feel bad going off and painting or plumbing, with a casual ‘help yourself to a slice of Brie’ so work slows down. So I must at this point thank Stuart for his Herculean efforts while technically ‘on holiday’ as he did spend an entire day, with Peter painting the ceiling in one of our dingiest rooms. And to our friend Mr Candy for his mini-break with Peter to install top floor windows in the early days. It was, and is, MUCH appreciated. And now that bits of the house are habitable, Peter can’t really justify heading over alone (or with Mr Candy) to ‘make essential advances in wiring’. So things have slowed. Considerably. And as this blog is being written in the past I thought it might be good to have a recap. Its roughly May 2011 and here is where we are at…

ROOMS THAT ARE FINISHED AND LOOK NICE

1.kitchen

Vic began to wonder if her lamp choice made her a basket case?

2. Downstairs bathroom

Wouldn’t you just die without the Metro tile?

3. Master Bedroom

It was time to clear out the dead wood

4.boys bedroom

La Carte SVP

5. Upstairs hallway

ROOMS THAT STILL NEED A LOT OF LOVE
1. The top floor!

On our top floor are two massive attic rooms. My goal is to make one a master suite with freestanding bath. The other is to become a ‘dorm’ for our younger guests. But right now they both look like this

Nice for bats!

2.The entrance hall

Not exactly Southfork is it? This is first thing you see if you enter via the enormous front door. Pete has done some plastering and some painting but there is still quite a bit of work needed.

3.The downstairs bedroom

This is going to be a guest room. It has the finished bathroom attached to it and at the moment you have to walk through this to get to the bathroom. Note it DOES have a radiator. Not quite hooked up yet. I might let Pete explain the heating to you all – it is beyond me! This room once had a loo in the corner of it so at least that has gone to the dechetterie (french for tip) and it has had a coat of white paint by this stage – it WAS worse than this at one point!

Its all white really

4. The grand ‘salon’

We rather pretentiously refer to this room as the ‘salon’ because sitting room just doesnt seem right. It is huge. It is grand. And one day it will be a salon. But right now it looks like this…. we did around this time have Mr Landauer come in and concrete the floor so we could at least walk through here without stepping on a mouse or rat or some such scurrier. But I thought I should give you the ‘basic’ picture.

Its all gone a bit ‘kings speech’

5.The worst room in the world (indeterminate eventual usage)

Look at this! Truly the ugliest, dirtiest room in the world. This is pretty much the worst room we had to contend with with a horrid huge water tank that took hours of sawing and yanking just to get it off the wall. And incredibly when we first visited the house this is the only sink we had and we used to USE it! But reader – this room will in about a years time from now become awesome. Just wait!

Cup of tea anyone?

6. The Dining Room

But not one you’d really want to eat in. All these not so nice rooms are connected to the nice rooms so even if you are sitting in the lovely kitchen having a glass of rose – if you need to wee in the lovely bathroom you have to walk through any two of the above to get there. Which is where flip flops have become essential items.

Pink to make the boys wink

7.The Top Floor bathroom

Yep. Check this baby out? Holes in the ceiling. A bucket to collect the water that pours in up here and no floor whatsoever.

Can I have a pee please Bob?

So thats it. Nice right? Want to come for a visit yet? Maybe leave it another few months? And see what we get up to?

A french house for all

Posted on March 21, 2013 by vicawhite

What IS the point of having an 8 bedroom house in the middle of nowhereville France? Its a question I ask myself often. Despite being affordable to buy by London standards, and despite our total lack of budget for renovations, it does still suck out a considerable amount of cash every month. Our paint bill alone equates to the GDP of some smaller countries (maybe there actually IS a small island nation somewhere called Farrow and Ball and I am contributing to its healthcare provisions). So just in the spirit of open-ness and to give you a vague idea if you were thinking of buying your own slice of rural idyll here are just some of our expenses around this project. And while it is not Sarah Beeny renovating that place in the country and buying £100 a roll wallpaper extravagent, I will concede there are ways we might be more frugal. But as, when my husband points out every month if I went to Asda rather than ordering Ocado I could spend the differential on a handbag I am forced to admit – I have LIMITS.

Expenses

Vide grenier tat or what we could call essential furnishings like chairs to sit on etc…… £50-350 each visit to france. And we still have masses of empty spaces where furniture really should be. It took us two years to find a dining table and chairs.
Boring house stuff like flooring and insulation and pipes and wires to try and make progress £300-£1000 each time
Paint ….. roughly £150 per room (we have 13 rooms plus hallways – you do the math)
Drive down there ….. £100 petrol, £60 tolls, £80 tunnel crossing. If we flew and rented a car this would be more like £800 each time. So we set off after school on a Friday and drive through the night. The boys sleep and Peter and I take turns to drive. It is not so bad. It sounds bad. It honestly isn’t. The kids watch movies till they fall asleep. And we drink lots of french coffee and make lots of stops and grab sleep where we can. Then we arrive at our place at roughly 7am in the morning. Stop off for warm bread at a just-opening boulangerie. And we pre warn Serge our neighbour, who goes in before us to light the fires and leave us butter and milk (and sometimes home made cake). And when we get there we get our coffee machine going and breakfast like kings before even thinking about unpacking the car.
Super U shopping….. a lot – french food is EXPENSIVE. Don’t be fooled by thoughts of Wafting around markets with your basket filling it with mishapen cheap veg. It is more expensive to buy at local markets than it is to shop at the supermarket. Or indeed order Ocado. In fact it might even be cheaper to get ‘Dave in an Aubergine van to drive a veal shank down to SW france than buy a Jarret de Veau at our local market) BUT it does all taste delicious. See below…
housekeeper/gardner who keep eye on place and come in before we get there and make up beds, clean. Yes this is a total extravegance. I could make our own beds. I could clean. BUT its a holiday. And the Landauers are like Ray Krebbs used to be to the Ewings kind of living off our land (of course he eventually turned out to be Jock Ewing’s illigitimate son and I seriously hope this does not turn out to be the case with Mr Landauer!) We initially paid Mr Landauer to gravel our driveway. And then he came back and suggested he concrete floor the barn. We said yes. Then he suggested he concrete floor our sitting room and we said yes. Then he suggested he mow the lawns. And chop wood. And his wife could clean. And we liked them. One day he turned up with an enormous mirror he wanted to sell us and we bought it.

I suspect that they have us pegged as a slightly scruffier Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley cos we’ve got the biggest house in a three mile radius, and I am loathed to disappoint them. Yah – sometimes when they come over I sling on a pair of white jeans and some corky wedges! We trade Christmas gifts each year and Mrs Landauer once asked me if I could find her a english tea service. She dreamed of being able to serve visitors coffee in proper ‘english’ cups and saucers. I think she specified flowers on them. And it so happened I owned just such a tea service that had been my grandmother’s. And when I gave it to her she looked beside herself with joy. And I have visions of her sitting in her house daintily pouring coffee into each cup and drinking with her little finger sticking out which she may or may not have seen in an Richard Curtis film. I have no idea how old Mrs Landauer is. I treat her like my Mum as she has that sort of weary pity for me in her eyes – this poor feckless girl who can’t even clean her own home sort of look. And, unlike my mum I hasten to add – she has the weary face of a woman who works really really hard all week for not that much money and has four kids to feed one of whom is disabled and in a hospice permanently. So she looks very old. But she could actually be younger than me. I have no idea. And now we feel bad telling them that we can’t really afford to pay them escalating cleaning and concreting costs. So we keep paying them and they keep doing stuff. And giving us strange doiley lacey things she likes to drape over my modernist furniture.
IKEA – roughly £300 every six months just so we have beds and chairs and er stuff to fill the enormous empty rooms
Fun stuff – like going to visit spas, eating out, skiing, zip wiring cos you dont want to go on holiday and JUST play scrabble – approx £300 each visit

Savings

Cubivin – a 25l box of wine from the local vineyard that costs €1 a litre!
Not going on fancy skiing holidays – saving approx £3000 a year (we’d def go somewhere nice right)
Not going on fancy foreign holidays to Maldives with kids clubs etc – savings £7000 a year
Summer childcare – well techinically nothing as Peter would just do it but there’d be clubs right? And they are all about £250 per week

Stuff that makes having a french house TOTES priceless..

Having all our friends to stay. Sitting around our giant wooden kitchen table (cost of £500 from friend who sells Brocante) with a mess of adults and kids all leaning int to help themselves to roast pork, jamie oliver’s courgette rice and drinking vast quantities of our red wine cubivin. With candles lit around us, cheesy tunes on Spotify and an evening finale of dancing in the kitchen, videoing it on our iphones and then dying the next day when we play it back.

a table for 8 please…

Like when my BFF Petra came to stay with her two children (including my goddaughter Cara) i looked around one eve as we all feasted on duck and thought ‘yes. this is why we bought this house.’ And when the two four year old boys (mine and hers) played in a paddling pool in an inch of water for four hours leaving us to sit in deck chairs drinking wine, we realised we don’t need kids clubs. We ate huge meals outdoors cooked by Petra’s gourmand husband Stuart and we laughed. And we had the time to have those conversations that sometimes London living just doesn’t allow. Petra and I shared a house together with four others back in the early nineties – like ‘This Life’ (young people reading this – it was a TV show like Skins but with professionals sharing a flat back in the nineties. Think, a show like Friends but with sex and drugs) and we’ve been best friends ever since, twenty years in fact. But as she has a very big important job (she has proper career in finance and is v successful at it – eye wateringly so) and I have a sort of big important job but doing slightly dafter things like meeting One Direction, we don’t see each other as much as we should. France gives us days to catch up. And she and her family came back the following Easter as Cara couldn’t wait to go back to “the big dirty house” as I say – priceless.

Sew WHAT?

Posted on March 16, 2013 by vicawhite

sew not difficult to do!

I don’t DO sewing. I barely do washing. In fact when my children were recently taught a mother’s day song at school that went along the lines of ‘she does the washing, the cleaning and the shopping too..’ apart from being so cross at the implication and using it as an excuse to rant at my two sons about a hundred years of female emancipation, I needn’t have worried as they both spotted the error in the lyrics announcing ‘but you don’t do ANY of those things mummy.’ Exactly. I go to work. I work hard. I can afford to pay someone else to do that stuff. Or imagine this, I share this workload with my MALE partner (and does ordering Ocado on your ipad count?) Anyway, suffice to say I am a modern woman who is thrilled to be able to go online and order things. However, as having a house in France meant yet more opportunities to search the Rockket St George website for soft furnishings my husband grew increasingly frustrated with what he describes as an ‘almost compulsive cushion habit’. He’s right. I am to cushions what Hunter S Thompson is to illegal substances. Why stop at one when you could buy THEM ALL? And so, I decided I would see if I could make my own. I would stop spending insane amounts of money on bits of square fabric sewn around the edges and I would teach myself to sew.

How hard could it be? I bought myself a sewing machine and sat down and read the instruction book. I learnt how to thread spools, do back stitch and forward stitch and not much more besides. And then I went on ebay and bought scraps of Cath Kidston fabric. If you could be bothered you could make a fortune selling old bits of rubbish that any normal sane person would throw out. There I was paying £3.50 for a 50cm square piece of spotty fabric. The kind of thing I would chuck in the bin if I had it left over from something. This is probably how Alan Sugar started and why I will never be a millionaire. I am the person buying up other people’s rubbish rather than seeing the money spinning potential in raggedy old bits of material. Truthfully, when you take into account postage and the time I spent fashioning these scraps into cushions I could have just gone to John Lewis and bought them for less. But, NOT THE POINT. I felt a massive sense of achievement when my cushion mountain was complete. And then I cheated and bought some White Company bunting on ebay.

But the fact was, my god daughter Cara was coming to stay and I wanted to make a room for her to sleep in that would get out all my ‘mother of sons’ frustrations. Boys do not appreciated hand made cushions. Or bunting. Or the lovely quilt I also got at the White Company. Oh or the lovely IKEA Minnen, white metal bed frame. But I hoped, that Cara would. And so I also went on ebay and sourced a wall of flower paintings. I bought up loads of cheap paintings that others were trying to get rid of and then painted the frames white and hung them in a group on the wall over her bed. And when she came to stay with her mum, my BFF, Petra, she LOVED it. And I cried with joy when I saw how much she loved it. My boys don’t get that kind of ‘really? all for me?’ look on their faces, other than maybe if I order them a dominoes stuffed crust meat feast pizza. But when Cara was shown the flowery room in France that was to be hers for four days, it made all the sewing and ebay sourcing worthwhile as her little face quite literally lit up. And I was bitten by the sewing bug. And taught myself how to make curtains! But that’s for another room on another day…..