Editor's Blog July 2006

It’s fashionable to sigh dramatically at the start of the long summer holidays and ask: what are we going to do with the kids? But - even though I scream at them half the time - I love having my children back for a whole two months and hate it when school reclaims them at the beginning of September. Partly it is my own memory of those endless summer weeks stretching ahead with nothing more to do than lie in the garden reading books or planning bike rides.

Nowadays we can no longer wave the children off with a picnic and a warning to be “back by nightfall” but this doesn’t mean that the summer has to be an interrupted festival of tv, Gameboy, computer, Playstation & dvd screens. If you were on holiday in Normandy you would be checking out every beach, river, forest, park and attraction, but once you live here it is too easy to slump into the daily shopping-cooking grind and ignore what’s on our doorstep. Don’t! Pretend you’re a visitor and start exploring – use our Going Out guide and Free Normandy. Remember: you came here for quality of life so take a break from that restoration project and spend quality time as a family or couple.

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In this issue we talk, somewhat schizophrenically, about the numbers of British incomers moving to Normandy (on P3) and, in News Bites, (P13), about how many are returning home. It can be difficult to explain why we move here – for that elusive “quality of life” which is impossible to describe precisely - but the reasons as many as two out of three families go back within the first few years are clear: bureaucracy, isolation, the difficulty of finding work, unhappy children and the language barrier. In coming issues of the Rendezvous we hope to help both incomers and those who are about to give up with features on how to get more involved with your local community, learning French, finding work, negotiating the endless paperwork, settling your children into school and overcoming despair. Stick with us and we will try and make life easier.