Five years almost completed but it has been a delight not an ordeal

1:12pm Thursday 11th March 2010

By Oliver Phillips

APPROACHING April, it is surprising when realising that it will be the sixth year we have spent that month in France. We arrived here, having emigrated from England, on April 1 2005.

It is strange to look back and realise, even with both of us the wrong side of 55 back then, we were equally naïve even though we had taken the plunge, done our homework, feathered our French nest before leaving Blighty one Tuesday afternoon in two cars with two dogs.

We thought we knew what we had let ourselves in for. We were to make mistakes, pay over the odds on occasions but, while we hoped it would all work out, the biggest surprise is how really well it has worked for us as a couple and as individuals.

Mind you, we planned to learn French, integrate with the rural community, follow our respective hobbies and muddle our way through.

As it turned out, we had plenty of French lessons over the first three years and have a working knowledge of the language but gain very little opportunity to use it. We have integrated into the community, attended the fuinctions and I work for ten days every year, setting up things for the three-day festival. But French conversations are thin on the ground.

They meet, greet, exchange comments about the weather but show very little intertest in outsiders. Happilly we are reassured by the fact a coupe of Parisiennes and a couple from Provence experience much the same. But then we are in extremeley rural France. It doesn’t get any more rural.

Five years ago, we went to talk to an English-speaking insurance agent in a town which boasts a large Anglo-French club. We shuddered at the knitting and crochet meetings being advertised in the local bar for the benefit of ex-pats. We would steer clear of the cricket clubs and ex-pat syndrone, we avowed.

Well it has not worked out quite as planned. We attend a bar/bistro owned by an English couple, which, because it is - unusual for rural France – open in the evenings, it attracts a number of young French, along with some 20 or so ex-pats.

That is the well-head of our social life. We help each other in all manner of ways, such as move house, put down ready-mix, round up pigs etc. I never thought I would be rounding up pigs through woods!

We attend and throw a few dinner parties but that is a culture the local French do not embrace as a general rule.

We found it very cheap to live here in the beginning but with anything from 25 to 30 per cent knocked off the pension by reason of the exchange rate, it is not so cheap now.

We lead a comfortable life-style and can still afford the holidays and trips on which we planned to spend our retirement. However, we have had to make a few cuts, notably in the number of meals we have out, but as Limousin is not a province noted for its gastronomical excesses, cutting back is not a hardship.

As with our friends and family back in England, we are fed up with the weather. The winter has been colder and has lasted longer than any of the previous five. Mind you, last summer for us was the bbq summer you were promised and never had. If we have to suffer lengthy and cold winters for summers like that, I am game for it.

Yet it is never that simple or relaiable. I remember that first year seeing a dusting of snow on the local cemetry in mid-April, but then two years back, our granchildren returned from a half-term visit in February looking distinctly tanned.

Snow has fallen more often this year but not as thickly as that 24-hour snowfall in 2007 when 17 inches of snow cut off villages and electricity for days.

As a rule the winters are colder and crisper than in England and the summers warmer. But who knows what is happening? My wife, Ellie, set off to Barcelona for a week to stay with our daughter and youngest grandchild. I am travelling down on Friday for a long weekend and bringing Ellie back.

It is cold here. It was minus four today and the wind-chill factor has been harsher because of an ice-cold wind. With the snow, it is a bleak aspect. But I was briefly consoled. Ellie reports that Barcelona is in chaos. Snow has fallen heavily for the first time in 30 years and settled and the roads are dangerous because they do not have any salt, grit or snow-ploughs.

The fact is, they are not needed…. well,usually. But worldwide, the weather is not as usual.