There's a hint of taste in old chewing gum but it doesn't last long

When we first headed into retirement in France it was an adventure. We had not laid out too much cash on the property and we knew, if it all went belly-up, we could get out of it relatively cheaply and come back to England with our tails between our legs.

We said we would give it six months and then, if we felt comfortable in France, two years to determine if we wanted to move further south. After a couple of months we knew we would stay at least two years and, after six months, we knew we would not be heading back to Blighty.

It was 2005, an English couple had opened a bar in the next village with a novel concept – open until late in the evenings. Anyone with experience of rural France and villages will know that they tend to close down by 8.30 and last one out turns off the lights. A bar opening in the evenings proved popular with the local French who also enjoyed the Anglo-French bistro menu.

I popped down there one Saturday lunch-time and asked if I could reserve a table for two that night. The owner nodded but his wife came across and said “You are English” despite my having spoken in French. Clearly the lady must have seen us in the locality because she was just finding her way with French having never spoken it before.

But I did not know that then, so I was slightly thrown by being spotted as an ex-pat.

They had opened up shortly before Christmas 2004 and we had started our French retirement a little over four months later. It was a time when the French property boom was reaching its peak. We had bought in 2002 and spent three years putting the house into a habitable state. Between 2004 and 2006, several Brits came to that area in The Creuse department and settled. We got to know several ex-pats from our regular visits to the bar and it was a good time.

We were busy spending money on French lessons and others limped on with Michelle Thomas cds for support. It was a period of novelty and discovery for all of us as we battled French red tape, found out where we had to go for this or that service, along with best shops or preferred doctors.

We could bounce discoveries off each other, such as what passed for vaguely acceptable paint in France. The land of artists does not have great commercial paint for house decoration and whenever someone went back to England by car, there would be an order for this or that paint or emulsion.

Friendships were made and we forged one or two, not least with the couple who ran the bar, Nigel and Liz, and also with Dave-up-Road and his wife Donna-Long-Legs, who had been the first English people to buy and settle in Benevent l’Abbaye around the Millennium.

Happy to say they remain pro-active and supportive friends, despite the distance that is now between us after we moved some 400 kilometres further south. It is a move they would have replicated, given the opportunity.

The novelty of things French, such as the amazing brocantes (car boot sales), which included everything you could imagine as well as everything you could imagine throwing away, was a great stimulus.

But there were those who found life boring: the tranquillity, the limited warmth of the neighbours – many of whom would talk and greet you but never have a real conversation – got them down. Added to which the euro, once 1.50 to the pound, sank to around 1.05 so devaluing such things as pensions by almost a third.

At first a few started to go back, then more and more. Houses became vacant, too many for sale. The Brit Bubble had burst.

Of those we knew, within the circle of clients at the bar-bistro, the percentage of those returning to the UK was pretty small. There was an invisible support system, I suppose, built up unintentionally among those of us determined to make a go of the experience.

We do not regret our days in Limousin. They were good times, the countryside is superb, perhaps similar to Gloucestershire at its most hilly, and it worked out well. Yet as someone said, once you have moved from a locality (Sw Herts) where you have spent so many years, moving on does not seem half as difficult second time around.

Nigel and Liz sold the bar, the infrastructure of the support system and the common base was lost and that great camaraderie has dissipated. There have been other changes to the social structure and it is no longer the same. Some fringe couples have fallen out, as happens no matter where you live.

Life goes on but now, when we visit, we look at it fondly but without wishing to return on a permanent basis. It has now become that piece of second-hand chewing gum which you pick up, chew, gain a slight taste of what it once was and then find that hint of taste soon vanishes.

After several decades living in the UK, we experienced something very similar to that chewing=-gum analogy.

We won’t be going back to Limousin and we cannot see any reason nor do we nurture any desire to move back to the UK.

It is funny how little things bring it home about why the UK has changed so much. Visiting a friend the last time I was back, he showed me his garden sheds and explained that he and the neighbour were to spend on higher back fences. It is not a cheap project, but apparently people try to break into his studios and sheds.

I suggested bolting two or three posts to the existing fence and stringing barbed wire between them.

“The police say we can’t do that,” said my friend. “If they cut themselves climbing over to break into our sheds, we would be liable.”

Yes, it is a different country.

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