Editor's blog May 2007

Time pressures prompted me to ask a friend to help with some research this month, including getting the numbers for the French version of the RSPCA. After some thought, she declined: “if incomers can’t speak enough French to find out for themselves what are they doing here? And it doesn’t any of us any good if we get a reputation for marching in and shopping our neighbours?”

Leaving aside the media’s mission to inform and the delicate line that an expatriate treads between respecting the host nation’s traditions and upholding their own values, what we’re talking about here is the sticky issue of integration and a sometimes bizarre “I’m more integrated than you” one-upmanship.

As a generalisation, “immigrants” want to adopt the nationality of their new country whilst “expatriates” have merely chosen to live in a country other than their own.

By this definition, most of us here are expatriates; let’s be honest, few of us move to France in order to “become” French. Equally few of us arrive determined to ignore the fact that we are now living in a foreign country. Some British are keen to meet their fellow countrymen, others go to great lengths to avoid doing so. Either way, the majority of us hate it when drunk, loud compatriots doing bodge jobs illegally and spitting on values that the French hold dear get us all a bad name and most would argue that it is pretty appalling to live in France without making an effort to learn the language.

But as to either “becoming French” or remaining “quite unchanged” by living in France: neither is possible. You cannot live in another country without both changing yourself and changing those around you.

Identity is not static, it is constantly evolving.

For example, I lived in Russia for ten years and have been in France for five. I am still English, but not the same English I would have been had I stayed in England since, inevitably, I have absorbed foreign attitudes and cultures. My children are English and Russian and French and at the same time they are none of these - they are a new breed.

Our French neighbours drink English tea and look at photographs of our previous life in the Welsh mountains or listen to my husband talk about childhood holidays in the Russian forest while their children are introduced to Dr Who. They, like us, are richer for the exchange.
Normandy will be changed by the numbers of British incomers, just as our “British identity” has been moulded by the cultural exchanges of both our colonial past and waves of immigration into Britain (not to mention the Norman Conquest).

Watching the apple trees come into blossom outside the window I feel perfectly at home in Normandy. Sometimes I ache for Moscow. I couldn’t live without Radio 4.
Living in France, you will neither remain entirely British nor become entirely French. You will, however, become a different person.

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Regular readers will notice that My Restoration has been retitled French Project. This is so that as well as your renovations we can also write about your interesting enterprises and business initiatives.