This is the longest I’ve ever been without visiting La Maison Blanche. In three years of owning it we have always visited at least every five or six weeks. At the moment its been nearer 15 since we packed up and shut that great big front door for the last time. We know its OK, because Serge has his beady eye on it. Serge is our neighbour who lives across the road in two rooms of his quite large house. Who brings us wood on his tractor and mows our lawns but refuses to take payment for any of it because we are his ‘les Amis’. And woe betide anyone who tries to mess with the house of ‘les Amis’. He once called us in a grand panic at 2am in the morning. Peter answered his mobile having seen ‘Serge’ flashing on the incoming screen with a large measure of trepidation – the only two times anyone else has called at that time of night it was Peter’s family with the news that his father and subsequently his mother had died. No good news ever comes at 2am in the morning.

It was though in this case simply an incident with ‘les jeunes’ or YOOF as we would say. It turned out that Serge’s panicked ramblings at 2am were simply to tell us that some young people had kicked our gate. And then….. We asked? Well, nothing it turned out, they’d just drukenly wandered on to the next gate to kick.
I’m telling you this to underline how lucky we are to have Serge and his beady eye. Without him we would worry all the time because our house is our pride and joy. And as we’ve now got so much sweat equity in it, the thought of anything going wrong is horrifying.
So we give Serge a lot of love, parcels of English cheese (like snow to Eskimos) and British royal paraphanalia. He has a Baby George commemorative biscuit tin coming his way this Christmas which he will love. And Peter promised we’d put an extra latch on that gate.

As I’ve got quite a few new followers, I thought it might be worth reposting one of my early posts about buying our house. Why did we do it? How did we do it? Again, why did we do it? So here is the story of La Maison Blanche ….

So how DO you end up buying a house in a tiny hamlet in SW France? Well this involved a lot of ‘bookmark bar dreaming’. You know the thing. You see a house you love for sale by trawling french property websites, you drag it onto your bookmark bar and then open it every now and then to see if its still for sale. Imagine yourself there throwing big dinners for friends, cooking Confit of Duck, wafting in the backgarden picking lavender. Chances are though, it still will be for sale because most tumble down French property is difficult to sell. Only crazy English people buy falling down, in need of attention, French properties. So in the current market they can sit there for sale, getting more and more run-down as months go on. Which is what happened here. Until, two unconnected events took place.

1) My mother-in-law, Joan, died. She was 82 years old and had lived a wonderful full life. There were stints in Africa as a midwife in the 50s, dodging doodlebugs in WW2 in London delivering babies and then going to Canada as part of the war effort where she met her husband, Lee. After returning with Lee and his children from a previous marriage to her home in Devon, she went on to give birth to my husband Peter and his sister Ruth. They, finally settled in Bristol and had several grandchildren. These children and grandchildren, including my husband Peter were left a nice sum of money when she died (her husband Lee had died in 2000) for which we were very grateful but had no plans to spend impulsively.

2) Peter did a bit of ‘bookmark bar dreaming’ clearing out. He decided to revist all those properties he had optimistically bookmarked and have a REALITY check. There was no way we could afford any of them even with a little windfall. Except…. As he got to a Maison Du Maitre in the Haute Pyrenees with it’s own 1 acre wood, 6 bedrooms and bright yellow (albeit falling off) shutters, he noticed the price had been reduced by almost 150000 Euros! Zut Alors – this would never happen at Foxtons… Miraculously, this home was now within our grasp.

And so, in May 2009 with the children left at home with my parents, Peter and I flew to Pau to meet up with a slightly smarmy (probably slightly desperate) estate agents called Patrick at a property that had been on his books for over 2 years. We fell in love straight away. We saw beyond the nicotine stained, EVERYTHING, mould encrusted bathrooms, ceilingless and floorless rooms with rats and mice living there. What we saw was an enormous house where we could holiday with our friends, a huge barn that we could spend a lifetime renovating long after the house was finished, a wood where the family could build a treehouse and a local village with restaurants that served soup, salad, steak and chips followed by creme brulee and a carafe of red wine for just 12 Euros each. And so reader, we put in an offer…..

Game on!

When we bought La Maison Blanche – we naively thought that bringing our children to rural france for every holiday would mean shared rustic experiences. There were to be no televisions in the house, so for at least ten weeks a year they’d be unable to watch that god awful rubbish on the Disney Channel involving the same rotating five actresses all bleating on about “dating and like, friends and like, totally relating…”

Instead, we thought, smugly, we would all sit around and talk. They’d ask questions about our lives before them – show interest in the history of us, the house or themselves. Oh no. We might occasionally get ‘WHAT?!!!*** THERE WAS LIKE NO MOBILE PHONES WHEN YOU WAS YOUNG….THAT SUCKS’. HOW DID YOU, LIKE, INSTAGRAM?’ But of course these days you don’t need a TV to watch, er, TV (yep thanks netflix and youtube). So electronic items have seeped into our french life. And access to moving pictures is unrestrictable as Peter needs his computer there to do his work and I need my ipads to play Candy Crush Saga. So it began with the children then using them to watch films. And then came the Olympics so we worked out a way to live stream via BBC.com to watch the Opening Cermony and so before you know it you’re right back to where you began with constant, 24 hour, TV access.

Anyone know what the thing behind me does though? Plays big black plastic disc things…

But if the battle against electronic items is a losing one – the war is being won slightly thanks to our enormous and ever increasing board game selection shown above. In London we may occasionally get the Monopoly out for a long, slow, torturous game which always ends with Seb banging his fist on the board and sending houses flying when he is losing, but that’s it. Apart from games of cards or endless pokemon card exchanging that I still don’t understand. However, in France just the lack of a TV seems to encourage game playing. And trips to Vide Greniers always result in some classic being bought in another version french or multilingual (I once found the French equivalent of a Countdown game)

My best ever buy is Mastermind – a 70s classic based around the TV show but nothing to do with the TV show. You have to work out the sequence of coloured pegs your opponent has selected. If you’ve got right colour, right place – you get a black peg. Right colour, wrong place – a white peg. Sounds wild right? Well it is.

Mastering your mind

J’achete!

And who could fail to be excited by french versions of English classics. French Trivial Pursuit played late, drunkenly at night can keep adults entertained for hours “c’est Vanessa Paradis?” Pretentious nous? And even Monopoly when played with french properties somehow seems just that bit more exciting. Occasionally we even get to the end of a game without anyone storming off in a huff of bankruptcy. Or reaching for the remote control to find out what’s happening to Austin and Ally.