It’s nice to be back home in the UK after a month away in France. In France the late summer weather was wonderful and warm and back in England it looked for a while as if we had brought that lovely weather back with us. A few days later though, the temperature dropped and it began to rain and suddenly England was back to its usual default mode: cold and wet.
I’ve often wondered if I could survive away from England, if I could successfully move to somewhere like France for instance. Moving abroad is a bit of a pipe dream for me although I do subscribe to a number of French property pages and Liz and I have visited some potential homes but so far I haven’t found one that I have really wanted to buy.
We looked at a really attractive house near the village of Champagne-Mouton while we were away. It was a little on the small side but certainly big enough for me. It had two bedrooms although the second one was only accessible through the first one. Outside was a delightful garden area and the owners -they were both English- had put together an outside bar area where they entertained friends and neighbours.
Across the road was a barn where the couple had a large freezer and a washing machine. Their old lounge suite was in there and it was clear the man of the house used it as a man-cave. Next to the barn was a huge garden area and a short walk away was another outside area full of fruit trees and vines and where they grew various vegetables. That sort of layout with a garden across the road or even a short walk away is typical of French country properties. A few years ago we viewed a property near to the village of Mouliherne which also had land across the road and as much as I liked that place it was just too far away from civilisation.
There are numerous properties for sale in the French countryside and most of them are really cheap compared to property in the UK. There is a saying though in the property business which is location, location, location and that’s the thing. Once you find a place close to shops, bars and restaurants, all three of which -especially the last two- are high on my list, then prices begin to go up. Perhaps I’ll find a place one day, perhaps not. Until then we’ll carry on renting our favourite place in the village of Parçay les Pins and touring about in our little motorhome.
Why would I want to move to France? Well as I get older I find I really want somewhere warmer to live. I hate the cold, really hate the cold with a passion so I want to live somewhere warmer. France of course is not universally warm, except further south and even there I suppose they must have cooler weather in the winter. I do like the relaxed lifestyle of rural France and I like the food. In particular I like the multiple courses and especially the cheese course. In France we tend to look for routiers or routiers style restaurants. These restaurants are primarily for truck drivers but I’ve noticed lately that more and more of the general public are using them.
We found a new routier this year, it was called Le Maison Blanc. We were able to park in the car park for the night alongside the wagons and for a mere 35 euros for two we had a bottle of wine each (rosé for me, red for Liz) and a bottle of water. Over on the buffet starter table there were cold meats, pâtés and salads and on one side was a section with crushed ice with a choice of prawns, snails, crab and oysters and on the other side was a warm section offering slices of pizza and different pastries. On Thursdays the restaurant has a steak night. Liz had a steak but for me I’ve never really been keen on the way the French cook steaks. They do it with the minimal amount of cooking which is not quite enough for me. Anyway, normally at a routiers there is a choice of about three or four main dishes. Here at Le Maison Blanche the mains, apart from the steak, consists of a hot buffet. I think we visited about three times while we were in the area and I went for the meatballs and pasta one night and on another I had Bolognese with frites. On the third visit I had a mixture of everything and ate far too much.
In the main the French prefer a big lunch to a large evening meal. Perhaps things are different in the cities like Paris but out in the country that seems to be the norm. In the town we used to visit a few years ago, Doué la Fontaine, you can be hard pushed to get a restaurant seat on Saturday lunchtime but on Saturday evenings, in the few places that are open, most of the diners are English tourists.
The pool at our rented gite in France
What would I do in France? Well I suppose my day would be pretty much like a day when I stay in our rented gite. I usually wake round about 9:30 to 10 and drag myself up to make a brew. We always bring a good supply of tea bags but now I think about it, are tea bags available in French supermarkets? Well I’ve never actually looked but I suppose they must be. Well, I hope so otherwise I’d have to take steps to secure a supply of tea bags from friends in the UK. (I can see myself having to send out urgent messages. Tea bag supplies low. Please send urgent PG Tips!)
Usually we’ll have a cup of tea in bed while we check our messages and emails then it’s time for a wash (no point in having a shower as I’ll soon be in the pool). We usually bring supplies of bacon for breakfast but when we’ve used that up or just fancy a change, I’m pretty partial to eggs on toast but a favourite breakfast dish when we’re in France is a bacon omelette. It goes pretty well with a French baguette which is good when you can’t get hold of a medium Warburton’s loaf. (Not usually available in France.)
You can of course get UK style sliced bread in France but it isn’t particularly nice and seems designed to last for ages making me think it’s full of preservatives. It’s ok toasted but that’s about it. Most of the time we’ll just fall in with the French and buy a baguette.
Anyway that brings me to around 12 and it’s time to get out there to the pool and do my first ten laps. After that Liz and I will usually compete against each other to solve a sudoku. I don’t like to admit it but she usually wins. Then we’ll spend the afternoon reading and swimming which is altogether very relaxing. Of course to continue this lifestyle when living in France I’d have to buy a house with a pool or at least a house with space to build a pool.
Various things on the barbecue, Liz’s salad and of course, a glass of wine.
Later on we start to think about food and round about 6pm it’s probably time for me to decant some wine and get the barbecue set up. We have a small portable gas barbecue which when it comes down to it is really more of a grill but it’s really handy and cooks the food pretty well. If I lived in France, I reckon I’d be wanting a proper barbecue, you know, one with real coals. I do like a proper barbecue.
Anyway, we’d be eating pretty healthily, Liz makes a fabulous salad and although we drink a lot of red wine over there, red wine is supposed to be good for you. Later on when our steak, burgers and sausages have been eaten and everything has been cleaned up, it’s rather nice to sit out on the porch and take in the night sky. Out in the country where there is little light pollution, the night sky is a great vista of stars. I reckon that living out in France I’d be doing quite a lot of sitting out on the porch, with a glass of something naturally.
So, I could deal with the two possible issues, the tea and the bread situation. A bigger problem might be getting to grips with the French language but I’ve noticed in places like Parçay les Pins there is a pretty close knit English community so I’m sure I’d get help there and it’s always easier to learn a language when you’re actually in the place where that language is spoken.
The only real problem would be if I happened to want a donner kebab on a Saturday night when the nearest takeaway is 20 miles away and they don’t deliver.
On my 40th birthday, my partner at the time had arranged for me to have a helicopter flight. If I remember correctly it took place at Barton Aerodrome, not far from Manchester’s Trafford Centre. The helicopter was similar to one of those in one of my favourite childhood TV shows, Whirlybirds. It had a big glass bubble cockpit which had no doors, you just entered through an opening in the sides of the bubble.
For my 60th Liz and I had a weekend in Southport, a place I’ve always loved. It has all my favourite things, great bars and restaurants and lots of bookshops. Then we returned home to spend my actual birthday at Ego in Lytham, another of our favourite restaurants.
I’m not sure what counts as a heatwave in other countries but here in the UK it seems to be a run of a few hot days. The recent heatwave lasted for around two weeks and during that time perhaps only five days were really extraordinarily hot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking it, I like the warm weather even though we’re not really equipped to deal with it here in England.
For Christmas the previous year my mother had given my brother and me a shared present. It was a portable stereo record player. At the time neither myself nor my brother were that interested in the pop charts. The first album I bought was a collection of TV theme tunes by composer John Barry. Barry wrote a number of famous tunes for both TV and the cinema. He is probably best remembered for a tune he didn’t write, the James Bond theme tune. There was actually quite a controversy over the authorship of the tune. Monty Norman is credited as the writer of the music although it was John Barry’s jazz arrangement of the theme that most people are familiar with.
The title track from the album is the theme from The Persuaders, a TV show starring future James Bond, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The pair played Lord Brett Sinclair and US businessman Danny Wilde who are recruited by a retired judge to fight crime. Tony Curtis drove my favourite car of all time in the series, a Ferrari Dino 246 GT. Price tag today, anything between £500,000 to a million.
MASH was a series based on a book and film about US army surgeons in Korea who worked in a mobile army hospital unit. Alan Alda played the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce and the series ran for many years combining humour and drama in a most impressive way. It perhaps ran a few years longer than it should have done and the later episodes were not as good as the earlier ones, at least in my opinion.
Those memories and other ones always come back every time I look at that picture. I happened to be looking at it this week as I scanned through some of my old posts looking for inspiration. The photo only took a moment to take but it’s nice to think about that house and all the happy times I had there. Not only that, my Grandmother and Grandfather lived there before us. They later moved to Prestatyn in Wales and my Mum and Dad took over the house when they were first married so it’s almost like a little bit of Higgins’ history, wrapped up in a picture.
Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacing roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brewcan. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the Highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brewcan.
This week I seem to have arrived at Friday with only two partly written posts and one of those is a longer version of a post I’ve done before. I wasn’t sure what to do and then I came up with an idea. What about merging the two posts together?
One day, round about the beginning of our last week there, the heat suddenly ramped up very quickly. It was almost as if some unseen hand had switched on the exterior central heating and things went from cold -we were wearing fleeces and had the inside heating on- to T-shirt and shorts weather, in fact most of the time it was too hot for even a T shirt.
In the evening we would usually have a barbecue, made much easier these days by our little ‘Camping Gaz’ gas barbecue which means we don’t have to wait yonks for the barbecue to get going or have to have it relit (a common occurrence when I’m in charge of the coals). Yes, our little gas barby clips together in minutes, the gas bottle is slapped into place and we are ready for those burgers.
A few years ago a worrying situation occurred when a random warning light appeared on the dashboard of our van. A quick check on Google showed it to be an engine fault. I started to worry that the engine might be ready to conk out so we went to a friendly garage and they plugged in their diagnostic equipment. They weren’t sure what the problem actually was so they suggested we go to a Ford garage as our van was of course, a Ford. The garage wouldn’t accept any money so we went off to a Ford garage and after what seemed like hours they emerged from their garage and told us not to worry, the engine was ok to drive but you owe us 150 Euros!
This last week I met up with two of my old friends, both of whom I haven’t really seen for perhaps thirty years. Carl (names have been changed to protect the innocent) was a lad I first met at junior school. We met through a mutual school friend called Peter as Peter and Carl lived in the same avenue.
It’s cold, in fact it’s bloody cold and it’s no secret that I hate the cold. I could write about the cold I suppose but then 
In the latter part of the book Mia talks mostly about Woody Allen with whom she started a relationship with in 1980. I’m a huge fan of Woody and his films. The two met in 1979 and were introduced to each other by Michael Caine. Woody invited her to his New Year’s Eve Party and later, in April of 1980, Mia received a call from his secretary asking if Mia would like to meet Woody for lunch.
