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…..

Kirsty Allsop whatevs! Vic’s homemade bedroom

It’s all gone downhill

Posted on March 8, 2013 by vicawhite

the smiles did NOT last long

We had eaten a goose who we had looked in the beak. Spent Xmas morning in our onesies. But there were to be yet more ‘firsts’ to come this Christmas. Christmas 2011 was the Christmas we went skiing. As a family. Together. A magical first where we could discover the joys of heading on piste together, laughing, falling over but dusting ourselves down and getting back up, heading off for chocolat chaud with contented grins on our faces and a sense of joint achievement. Except that wasn’t what happened. The real version involved us dragging our less than enthusiastic two boys to a resort about an hour and a half drive away called Cauterets. We excitedly rented our skis in the village and then joined a queue for a lift to take us up to the slopes. And then we queued. And our skis were heavy and cumbersome. And we queued. And it was cold. And we queued. And we were BORED! Two hours later we finally got on a lift. And we were at a packed, less than charming resort to find all ski lessons booked, neither child nor I able to go two feet without falling over and our only attempt to get onto the nursery slope prevented by grumpy French people stepping over us or pushing us out of the way as we fell over en route to the magic carpet. Arthur declared it ‘the WORST day ever’ and I’m inclined to agree with him. Was THIS the fun people wax lyrical about?

For facebook purposes Arthur raised a smile

Peter was a seasoned skier (with a Prince Charles style all in one ski suit to prove just how long he’d been skiing. His skiing dates back to a time when people went to C&A for ski gear and thought they were sophisticated!) so I think he had hoped his family could join him in his love of the white stuff. As we trudged back down the mountain having paid hundreds of pounds in gear hire and lift passes and having skied NOT AN INCH Peter looked like a broken man. He is a patient man and as you can see from the photo below he is ordinarily a happy man (note photos were taken BEFORE we even got in lift!) But Peter had never experienced skiing with people who couldn’t even get the skis on and then proceeded to throw insults at each other like a family on Jeremy Kyle who’ve just found out their uncle is really their dad.

Thank god for that trip to Decathlon!

It was, to quote, Craig Revel Horwood, a dee-sas-ter. We drove home feeling depressed. Cold and depressed. And our house was a mess. And it was cold. And once again I began to wonder why the hell our holidays have to be so hard. Even a skiing trip was a little off piste. No package hol with ECF lessons booked in for the kids and free time for Peter and I to spend together. Instead just a fraught, cold waste of time day where I still couldn’t ski and neither could either child. Though the pics DID look impressive on Facebook! Our friends would never know the truth.

But like cyclist Tom Simpson who mythically said ‘put me back on my bike’ (after a bad fall and he went on to die so really should have said ‘let me go for a lie down’) we decided to give skiiing one last go. This time we visited a resort nearer to us called Hautacam. Our neighbours had suggested we visit as it was very close but VERY basic. Just a couple of runs, a cafe and a ski hire shop. Which it turned out was just what we needed. It also had a mountain luge which the kids loved and although we weren’t exactly Frans Klammer we did at least get on a mountain. And go down a slope. And Peter got to scratch his ski itch and I was utterly rubbish which made everyone laugh. I did however get to debut a fantastic all in one ski suit I’d found. Maybe Pete was a bit previous in throwing his out. It ALL comes back round you know.

Joyeux noël

Posted on March 3, 2013 by vicawhite

Our first french christmas tree

Probably one of the best things I have ever done is spend that first Christmas in our French house. Freezing cold? Yes. No Christmas Downton? Sadly. Hand picked baubles from The White Company? Nope. Instead we had a goose with its head and gubbins still in place, a tree decorated with paper chains and some borrowed flashing fairy lights from serge. And we had Pere Noel. And he came, he came!

pere noel il arrive!

I LOVE Christmas. Always have. Family Christmas for me has always been a special day of eating, game playing, Xmas TV watching and more eating. My grandad would rally us all into a game which involved kneeling on a chair an throwing cards into his upturned, felt, trilby hat which always had a thick layer of Brylcream on the inner rim that was residue from his heavily brylcreamed hair. I think you scored points for getting the cards on the brim, in the hat or on a newspaper the hat was placed on. Sadly I can’t remember exactly. Which is one of the problems with family traditions – you’ve got to keep them going. My grandad died almost thirty years ago and I don’t think we played the trilby game ever again without him so now I can’t remember it.
So you make new traditions – and for us, the winter of 2011 meant all new FRENCH Christmas traditions. Starting with Lucy, our goose. At home we always had turkey despite Peters pleas for goose for the best part of a decade.

Lucy’s goose was about to be cooked

please note our 7 letter words!

I wasn’t sure I’d like it. My father with his limited food palette was absolutely sure he wouldn’t like it, and besides we ALWAYS have turkey I argued. So Peter was overruled. Until this year. My parents had decided it was too far and would be too cold (they were right) so elected to stay home which meant I was the lone voice of dissent against the goose. Peter’s gain was Lucy’s loss. As I had to work all the way up to Xmas eve, Peter and the boys went on ahead and I did the very civilised London to Pau flight from City Airport later on. This meant it was up to them to ‘get everything ready’….. A goose was bought from Leclerc and a tree procured with some help from Serge. The boys made paper chains to put on it and by the time I arrived there wasn’t much to do except get into a onsie (no photos!) and sit in front of the fire with our trusty scrabble board.

In France children leave their shoes out for Pere Noel to fill with chocolates. They also eat chocolate logs. In fact it is small miracle that French children aren’t all enormous given the vast array of chocolate options open to them. Some mornings I wake to find my kids eating pain chocolat, drinking chocolat chaud and about to top it all up with some bread and Nutella. If we lived here permanently I would have to treat chocolate with same strict quota rules I have I place for playing Minecraft.

logging on

And on Christmas Eve we made fondu and I added too much kirsch and the children said it tasted like ‘wine’ (let’s not phone Esther rant zen to report the fact my kids seem to know what wine tastes like – I’m guessing they recognise the smell) but I declared fondu and all it’s stomach filling, artery hardening properties a new White family christmas tradition.

The children began to realise how cheesy their parents were

yes we fon – DO!

I once read that children like traditions. They love it when as a family you do the same thing every year. Like my Grandad and his trilby. Well so it shall be with fondu even though no one seems to like it but me. And in years to come we even inflict it upon guests who don’t like it. I care not because ITS TRADITION!
And Pere Noel came. And he had had presence of mind to get English books like a Lego annual not in French. And he filled the shoes with chocolate (cos we needed a bit MORE chocolate) and he filled the Christmas sacks with presents. And Lucy was cooked the night before and reheated on Christmas Day (Jamie Oliver’s best day ahead goose recipe) and we all loved it. Even me. And we huddled around our tiny table in the kitchen (the only warm room) and we pulled crackers brought from England and put on silly paper hats. Sebastian even ate a sprout. A tradition he was not keen to continue but which we have made an annual ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here bush tucker trial’ style experience.

Sebastian went crackers

Is that green stuff on my plate???

And there was no pressure to even get out of our pyjamas (tho we did) and there was no timetable. if we wanted to eat at 4 o’clock or 9 o’clock we could. And once we’d packed the children off to bed we got the scrabble set out again and didnt even mind that we were missing Christmas Day Corrie (well I minded a bit but I’d sky plused it back home anyway) And we wished it could be Christmas every day. Just like this one.

Happy Christmas!!!!

La Vida vide….

Posted on March 3, 2013 by vicawhite

Ah yes this looks old and broken enough….

My husband loves old stuff. I hope this will be a good thing when I am in my 80s. He will have his very own living, breathing ‘relic’. What he really loves, is broken, old, stuff. When we first met, he lived in a wooden house with a porch in west Hollywood. You could sit on the veranda like a 1950s American prom girl waiting for her date. He’d rented the house when it was falling down and no one else would touch it. And then, he’d fixed it up. As a result, while most of our friends lived in small apartments in weho or Venice, Peter had an enormous house just off Sunset where we all threw parties and he could listen to his Motörhead vinyl so loudly that once, some nearby dwelling Hells Angels came by to ask him to turn it down.
And so buying a house in France equals peter’s dream. But one of the best things about trying to furnish this house is our weekly visits to vide greniers. Like car boot sales only much much better as each one holds prospect of hidden gems. Held on sunday mornings and publicised in the local areas as if Justin Beiber was playing a one off gig there with posters EVERYWHERE in the weeks beforhand. or you can visit http://www.vide-greniers.org And our kids LOVE them. Maybe in the way some boys inherit their father’s sporting prowess or love of a particular football team, peters legacy to his sons will be a love of broken, old tat.

what’s french for plastic tat?

We give them five euros each and some basic French ( enough to bargain someone down for old Pokemon cards – far more useful than a level French right?) and send them off. Meanwhile, Peter and I trawl these aladdin’s caves of wonder hoping to find stuff to fill our home that isn’t from ikea!
We’ve introduced all friends who come and stay to the joy of the vide grenier (some more impressed than others – my friend lorraine remains thrilled with her olive server complete with toothpick holder shaped like lily pad, her husband James, less thrilled with the fourteen pony club trophies their kids bought)
We have over the years bought everything from our dining chairs to tennis racquets. Plates shaped like fish (never used) to fire irons to hold our logs (used every day). And Now I’m going to share with you a selection of vide grenier jewels. Vintage finds or other people’s rubbish? Tat or treasure? To us, always the latter.

She really did have life on a plate

Knew that learing french for police hat would come in useful one day – un kepee s’il vous plait

we are the champions

Hall chandelier. Bought, painted, rewired and lit

smashed painting – bought some new glass and is good as old

Nobody puts cupboard in the corner!

Nothing to do with TV show of same name. No one knew why in the 70s. Still don’t today.

An armchair by the fire ours for 30 euros

NOTHING to do with Walford?

Tell me about it….stud

Enter the Camels!

Posted on February 26, 2013 by vicawhite

My BFF had the hump

Its amazing the cast of characters that weave in and out of your life at various times offering support,fun, mischief or simple friendship. Over the years, I’ve collected some AMAZING friends via school, uni, work, randoms I’ve met and can’t even remember how I met them. No story of our french house would be complete if I didn’t around this time bring in some eccentric and wonderful new friends – ‘The Birds’ (people whose surname is Bird but they own a CAMEL farm! Yes I know – I will explain all as we go along…)

I desperately wanted to avoid being one of ‘those’ english people in france. The ones who seek out fellow Brits to chat about marmite and hellmans mayonnaise or lack thereof. In my early twenties I lived in Australia and made the fatal error of only befriending english people. As a result, we sat around bars in Paddington, moaning a lot about how rubbish Australia was (yeah all that year round sunshine and those endless sandy beaches are a REAL downer!) It was only around the time I was leaving that I made an Australian friend (hi Kelly if you’re reading this) and got to see Syndey through some optomistic Aussie eyes and it was WAAAY more fun. But then I had to leave – I had a new job in LA and Kelly and I moved to Melbourne for a month (I don’t even remember why) and had a ball. And I’m facebook friends with Kelly fifteen years on. She has two boys too. And she’s had a nose job (hi again Kelly – don’t mind me telling everyone -it IS a great story). And the point of all of this is that you should seek to make friends with people from the country you’re living in not just jaded ex pats. however…

Alice was embarassed to hear she had a camel toe!

Back to The Birds and their camels. You probably want to know why there are english people living in rural france running a camel farm. You need answers right? Well sorry to disappoint but to explain away the Birds and their wonderful existence in Castlenau Rivier Basse would be far too simplistic. Suffice to say – WHY NOT?

I had heard of an animal park La Maison Des Chamaux only about 15 minutes drive away from our house and decided to take the kids there while Peter messed about with the septic tank or some such. I had no idea it was run by english people and expected nothing more than killing a few hours looking at some camels and encouraging my children to take an interest in animals beyond Patrick the starfish in Sponge Bob.

The park is tucked away off the main road and has jolly signs showing you where to park and which way to go. We arrived a little late for the demo which involved a lady wearing an ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ style hat and waving a stick at some llamas while children could lead them around the park and feed them. There were dozens of kids there transfixed and Sebastian couldnt wait to have a go at ‘training’ the llama. Arthur had already established that he ‘didn’t like animals’ and wandered off into the wood to do a nature trail. There were goats, pigs, sheep, llamas and the jewels in the Camel farm crown – three enormous camels wandering arms reach away in a field and river as if it were perfectly normal for them to be living in rural france not in a desert with Lawrence of Arabia on their backs.

I’m on a Camel Farm – get me out of here!

And as my kids learnt how to spin wool, make a goat jump over a fence and what the French for camel is, I got chatting to a nice Englishman called Paul. It turned out, he was Mr Maison des chamaux and the lady with enthusiasm you could bag and sell, leading the llamas around in the IACGMOOH hat was his wife Sarah. He mentioned that he was an electrician (as well as running a camel farm – camels need lights right?) and as I currently had two sockets servicing my entire house, my ears pricked up. He ended up coming over to help Peter with our wiring, inviting us back to sample the joys of the local ‘cubivin’ and to properly meet Sarah when she wasn’t knee deep in llama poo and we loved them right away. They have pet pigs who sometimes live in their house, a plentiful supply of red for the grown up guests accompanying the kids we bring over for animal feeding, and a cheery voice at the end of a phone every time we arrive in France. The Maison des Chamaux has become somewhere we visit early on during each trip to our french house. the kids are desperate to see JAh JAh the goat, who they fed from a bottle when he was born and who now is a large goat with horns, whose main aim in life is to eat all the food he can. Like goat vs food with JAh JAh in the Adam Richmond role. They love the Bird boys, Elliot and Oliver who are two of the most polite boys I’ve ever met – proving that its not just ‘French children who don’t throw food’ but also ‘English children brought up in France who don’t throw food’ though, they do love to play on an x box.

And the Birds are totally immersed in local French life. Their kids go to local schools, their animal park is famous in the local area (terry Wogan has a house nearby and goes about his Intermarche shopping without anyone noticing but Sarah is ‘la femme de la Maison des Chamaux’) and they’ve built a fabulously unusual life for their family in this rural part of SW France with the camels they rescued from slaughter somewhere in Russia. So they’re not ‘those type’ of English people either but I’m glad they made an expat-ception for us!
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a separate summer

Posted on February 17, 2013 by vicawhite

‘And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation’ Khalil Gibran.

Good morning barn

It was the summer of 2010. Before Kate and Wills got married. Before One Direction and when I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my husband. It was the summer we separated.
The school holidays yawned ahead of us like an eternity. Weeks of telling Arthur, who was now 6 nearly 7, to turn off electricals and go outside and kick a ball about. Then remembering that we live on a relatively busy London street and have a postage stamp sized garden, and its not the 1950s. As Peter was to be sole carer of the children over the summer while I went clipping off to work each morning in inappropriate footwear, he began to hatch a plan.

“What do you think about me taking Arthur to France for the whole summer and you staying here with Sebastian?” he mooted one morning over breakfast. Six whole weeks apart? The longest we would have been apart in over ten years. I wasn’t sure. I’d miss him. I’d miss Arthur. I’d be looking after Sebastian ON MY OWN (you may not have met him, but let me tell you he makes the kid in Home Alone look under-resourceful). Id have no one to work the sky plus if it broke! And most of all, isn’t it weird to think its OK to spend that long apart. Does it mean our relationship is somehow flawed if we are able to live comfortably with only Skype to communicate. We’d been married for 11 years at this point and while there were elements of resigned comfort in our relationship – we get quite excited when there is a BRAND NEW episode of Midsommer Murders – I like to think we are also more in love now than when we met drunkenly at a party fifteen years earlier. (He has no recollection of our meeting – in fact the only thing he claims to remember about said party is that a transvestite porn star was there – he’s right but it was LA in the 90s, there was a transvestite porn star at most parties.)

But it made sense. We had all that space in France, a wood, fields and about ten broken bikes leaning up against one another in a barn. In London, we had a Victorian terrace with an urban decked area complete with olive tree and seating area that we had done pre-kids.

The deck factor

And so it was agreed. Seb and I would stay home with Yvonne our amazing neighbour agreeing to look after him until I got home from work in the evenings. Peter and Arthur would spend one feral summer, wearing the same pants for days, existing on bread with Nutella and making plans for an enormous treehouse they would one day build in the forest.

Now that’s a back garden!

a rooftop pool you say???

Seb was really too young to care where Arthur and daddy had gone, and besides I took him to shoreditch most weekends with uncle Richard and he got sole attention, ice cream and swimming in a rooftop pool, what’s not to love? Our Shoreditch summer was really so enjoyable that we forgot to miss our nuclear family. Our new alternative, child free family who drink cocktails at midday, spend hours shopping for fresh flowers and hang out in private members bars DID have a certain allure….and besides, my boys overseas were happy. Eating their body weight and gaining around 6lbs each, their skin the colour of stewed tea (could have been tan, could have been lack of hygiene) and their smiley faces over Skype telling me of trips to Bricot Depot and the time Arthur found a salt n vinegar crisp the size of a saucer!

Its all gone a bit Dalston….

But on the day we landed at Pau airport, reunited for a two week holiday, the sight of their (dirty) faces through passport control made me realise the best thing about being separated for the summer. The realisation that you can’t wait to be reunited.

My husband and a glass of rose! Back together again (husband – obvs we HAVE rose in London too)

Its not really a holiday though. Is it?

Posted on February 11, 2013 by vicawhite

So who wants another room makeover? Thought so. Enough with the mushy emoting, tales of friendship and the like – what you really want is to see photos of a semi derelict bedroom and then further pics of how it looked once we’d painted, plastered and bought bijou extras from quaint little french markets – right?

To be honest, I think I’m going to have to add an element of jeopardy to this blog because right now its all going a bit too well. Surely we need to run out of cash, have a roof cave in, discover bats that are part of a conservation order in the barn. Like those bits in Restoration Man when he goes off into his round study and ponders ‘how its all going’ and wether ‘they’ll ever get this project finished’. At the very least one of us needs to have an affair or lose our job otherwise its just two smug, happily married people who own a house in the south of France and no one wants to read about THAT!

Well just to move the plot along a bit, I’m going to sleep with Roman the sexy french builder. Sadly not, I’m afraid. But I am going to start getting a bit disillusioned. We’re almost at our first summer and the house is taking some shape but maybe not as much as I’d hoped. The boys are still sharing a room that could be a film set but its that bit of The English Patient where Ralph Fiennes is bandaged up in an old bed rather than ‘Amelie’. And our bedroom is little more than a mattress on the floor. And this does not please me. As I’ve mentioned, I work in fashion and although I don’t mind a bit of roughing it, I do have to hear constant tales about colleagues travels to villas in Mustique, Riads in Marrakech or even just boutique hotels in the Cotswolds and they all sound rather nice. And I, by contrast, am sleeping here……..

Its just like a boutique hotel really

It was around this time, I began to wonder….. was this really what I wanted from a holiday home? Did I even want a holiday home? Was this all Peter’s dream and not mine? I married a man who hates sunshine, swimming and relaxing. His idea of a holiday is to smash down a dividing wall with a sledgehammer. He likes reading books and collecting old junk. I by contrast dream of a Heidi Klein bikini, a white sand beach, a mojito and ideally someone else to do the washing up. My job is pretty stressful and was it madness to think that I would then want to spend my holidays, painting, cooking, lighting fires and all of the above in a run down, dirty house.

I think I may have shouted that at him several times around this period as I tripped over wires that snaked all around the house as we had only about two working sockets and a million extension cables. Or when I trudged through the dark, dingy back rooms of the house to get to the bathroom in my flip flops because the floors were too disgusting to walk on without footwear. Oh and dont get me started on the days spent entertaining the children on my own while Peter was up a ladder painting, plastering or mending. ‘WHY CAN”T WE JUST GO ON HOLIDAY LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE?” I would shout. Loudly and often. And it was this kind of disillusioned moaning that prompted him to start work on project master bedroom. (And not just so he could be on a different floor to me wallpapering quietly on his own – though I am sure this also had a bearing on his decision).

Peter was clearly wise to the fact that the bits I DO like about owning a french holiday home are the shopping opportunities and the interior planning and so it was with project bedroom. As I think I’ve explained – this is a budget operation. In fact the budget is, there is no budget. So I searched ebay and discovered a range of Laura Ashley Josette wallpaper that someone was selling off for only £5 a roll. In many ways having no budget makes all your decisions for you and so it was with this wallpaper. Would I have chosen it if I could pick anything in the world? Probably not. But I love it and I suppose it kind of chose me.

The glass light that was already hanging in the bedroom was cleaned up and I love the fact its been there all along and we’re simply adding to the stories it could tell. The floor just needed a polish and we bought simple white curtains from IKEA. A mirror was sourced on ebay and came cheap because it had some bits missing from it which Peter simply glued back on (it’s amazing how people sell ‘broken’ stuff on ebay that isn’t even really broken, it just needs a bit of tlc) And then we bought a bed. A giant four poster one from IKEA that I’d always like the look of – EDLAND which crazily they have now discontinued -there are entire forums devoted to this online!

And from separate Vide Greniers we found bedside tables that don’t match. Some lights were bought in Marks and Spencer and driven over one trip. And finally a set of HEMNES drawers again from IKEA. I suspect for a more authentic french feel, it could do with some more stuff in it that isn’t from IKEA but you know what – we have the rest of our lives to buy stuff. And Claire Danes’ character in Homeland has IKEA drawers in her bedroom so it’s OK right? (although she is a bit of a looney and in love with a known terrorist and I’m only on season one so please don’t post and tell me it turns out he’s not a terrorist or whatever because I HAVEN’T SEEN THOSE EPISODES YET!)

And so, despite my moaning, I actually rather like going to our French holiday home every holiday. Having jumpers and jeans already there in my HEMNES drawers so I never have to pack to go away. And one day those snaking wires will be gone and we’ll be able to plug stuff into the socket in the same room as the appliance (I know this reader because in real life I’m way ahead of you!) And best of all, I have a bedroom that looks like a boutique hotel. Its a little known place in SW France don’t you know? Mustique – PAH!

Logging on

bedtime

Uncle Ricard

Posted on February 6, 2013 by vicawhite

There are five of us in this French House

So there is someone else you need to meet. Someone who has been our most frequent guest over the last few years at La Maison Blanche. My BFF. My children’s godfather. Karen to my Valene (Knots Landing ref – youtube it) for the best part of twenty years now – Uncle Richard. He’s obv not my Uncle Richard – though he is the older of our twosome – but as my children always refer to him as such it has stuck – or it did until he came to France where he gained a new moniker. But more on that later.

Richard and I met twenty years ago in the kitchen of an unassuming publishing house – well, I say publishing house – it was two magazines housed in a garage down a back alley of an unfashionable bit of central London. But to us it was the publishing house of dreams. It really was. This, despite the fact we had to dodge junkies to get into work each morning and, once, when a pigeon died in our water tank our boss told us just to walk to Habitat to use the loo or wash our hands. And we were fine with this because we were JOURNALISTS! Journalists who ended up buying one of those paper lampshades every time we needed a pee, but journalists nevertheless.

It was our first job in and Richard and I were respectively, features writer and features assistant on Inside Soap magazine. This meant that he got to write about EastEnders and Corrie and I got to do Emmerdale and Brookie! Partly this was some sort of soap hierarchy, but moreover, it was because as the youngest of the two, I had a young person’s railcard and it was cheaper to send me on the train up north. Glossy media London it was not, but as we both came from spiritually and physically miles away from London – to us it was like we’d landed a part in Press Gang – only it was real. And Dexter Fletcher wasn’t in it. But nevertheless, STUFF. OF. DREAMS. We worked hard, we went to every free party going, we got inappropriately drunk with the cast of Soldier Soldier and we made amazing friendships with our colleagues on our sister mag – TV Hits.

We dreamed of working at ‘proper’ grown up magazines with staff canteens and payrises. And somehow, over the years, the entire team of people from Inside Soap, TV Hits and a short lived one off mag called ‘Supermodel’ managed to land ourselves a series of ever improving jobs. Richard in TV and me in women’s magazines. And this meant we could no longer share a desk, the walk to work and our lunchtime trips to Cafe Mania – the local sandwich shop where we once spotted Prince Edward grabbing a lunchtime baked potatoe. But we talked in some form or other, and still do, almost every day. And when I moved to Australia to edit a magazine, he came to visit. And when I moved to LA, he came to visit. And we laughed all the time. Usually over things that no one else could understand – our first boss used to say we were like Dolphins with a language like a series of sonos squeaks decipherable only by us.

Now my children love him as much as I do. And he loves them as much as I do. And these days, he and Arthur send each other text messages every day that make each other laugh or LOL cos its all electric now. And I can’t imagine any part of my life without him in it. So if we go to France – he comes too as often as he can. And as we see the house take shape through his hugely positive eyes it keeps us going even when sometimes we may want to throw in the towel and go on a Mark Warner holiday instead.

And when Uncle Ricard arrives at Maison Blanche, he settles himself in and pours himself a Ricard (he usually arrives in the afternoon – we’re not talking 9am Ricard drinking here!) And he sits down in front of the fire checking his emails and says ‘This really is what life’s all about love.’ And so he became known as Uncle ‘Ricard’ and we amassed a huge amount of Ricard related paraphenelia which the children insist on buying each time they see some at a Vide Grenier. So even when Uncle Ricard isn’t with us – we can recreate a familiar scene using Picachu.

Pikachu loved a Ricard after a hard day of evolving

On, this, his first visit though, Uncle Ricard arrived in a Renault Twingo having flown into Toulouse. I’d never seen Uncle Ricard actually drive having based our relationship for the last twenty years in urban London locations! But as he pulled into the driveway and announced ‘Oh My GOD It’s Chateau Vallon’ (short lived ancient French soap opera – again – youtube it) I knew this was to be a match made in heaven.

Oui oui – c’est un velo!

And we cycled into the village together on rickety old bikes that Peter had bought in a vide grenier. And we shouted Bonjour loudly at everyone else as they cycled past. And we bought baguettes and when they asked if I needed a carrier bag, I said ‘non j’ai un panier’ and we looked at each other and grinned from ear to ear. In fact, we wanted to videotape the moment because we were living a big french life. Right up there with the time we went into the shop on Rodeo that Julia Roberts gets turned away from in Pretty Woman with armfuls of carrier bags and said ‘big mistake. Huge!’ (Cos those assistants must NEVER have heard that before!) Essentially, we were in one of those scenes that if someone had shown us a flash forward while we were blagging our way into parties just to eat the canapes and drink the free drink, we’d never have believed them. C’est pas bloody possible! We’d have said and then died laughing. But we were. And we had the boys there too and Uncle Ricard would take them to the Tabac and buy them french Pokemon cards and a ten centime mix up. And then come home and have a little Ricard. Well it IS a holiday and all that cycling really works up a thirst!

Meet the parents

Posted on February 3, 2013 by vicawhite

Peter looks v pleased to have some help!

creepy!

And I got to do this!!!!

getting plastered

Our first guests – sort of. My parents. Strangers to roughing it, they arrived fully warned as to just how basic our french home still was. I’m not entirely sure they believed us though (my mum had optimistically packed white linen trousers!) but they were kind enough to make the right kind of comments about potential, one day, blah, so much space, blah… In the end, despite the completion of the bathroom we decided it might be best to house them in a nearby B&B so they could retire at the end of the day to a bedroom with en suite and fluffy towels. They stayed with a fabulous Danish woman in a lovely village nearby called Marciac. I wished i ws staying there too for the breakfast buffet alone! Plus, Marciac is a picture postcard french village based around a square that looks how you imagine a French rural village to look. Think ‘Chocolat’ or those ‘Petit Filou’ ads and you get an idea. As a result, it is swarming with English people. On one of our first visits there i spied an entire english family of curly blonde haired children of varying ages, all in matching breton tops plus a dad in white linen shirt and straw trilby – pete had to restrain me from chasing them down and introducing myself. ‘But they would love me. We could be friends, i wailed.’ They probably live in one of those chateaus i online stalk! So, thats Marciac. There is even a french restaurant run by an english chef called Le Monde A L’envers – an amazing place but only open about twice a week.

Le Monde A L’envers (the world upside down)

Marciac is also home to posh shops that sell shabby chic french home accessories and stripey tablecloths! (Bought largely by english people) Its also home to our favourite restaurant (frquented almost entirely by french people just to prove am not one of those ex pats who track down jars of marmite and mother’s pride) Its called La Peniche and was once a boat but is now a restaurant on the lake complete with resident parrot. They serve a a four course meal with wine for around €15 and the kids get duck and chips./p>

La Peniche – floating food

So, each day, during the parental visit – Mum and Dad would drive over and my dad would help Peter to get rid of the climbing vines that were blocking out all our light. Dad then took up the task of white glossing all windows – to put into context, we’ve now had the house for three years and still have about 80% of them still to do as it takes forever! But we were very grateful for his input. My mum kept an eye on the kids so I even managed to steal some time to read books and bake. And the kids played in a wheelbarrow. It was boiling hot and we could eat outside. And we could begin to see the future. a big table in the sun, laden with cheese, bread and tomatoes so big and juicy they look and taste more like nectarines. The boys in stripey tees and Pete in a linen shirt. What more could you possibly want from a holiday?