Editor's Blog January 2008

Do you really want to change out of your working clothes, get the car out (in the rain) and spend the evening eating poule au pot and struggling with the farmers’ patois? Is it worth slogging an hour across Normandy for that book swap you said you’d go to? How many times have you flicked through the listings, circled an event, but not got round to going?

It’s always easier to stay in. And with e-mail and Skype you can keep in touch with old friends and live a virtual social life when building a new one seems like too much effort.
If you have been used to a professional, city life it’s easy too to be a metro snob and turn your nose up at parochial shindigs. I remember my horror when, having spent the previous years working in the cultural meccas of London, Paris and Moscow, I downsized to rural Britain (to introduce the children to fresh air) and found myself in a village hall with strip lighting being offered tea and Rich Tea biscuits -at 8pm! Yet through a phone number swapped in this unlikely setting I met a woman with whom I had a hundred and one things in common - including that she had shared university lodgings with my best childhood friend and her husband I had had great fun working together on a BBC documentary. They lived just six miles away and our two families grew inseparable.

"Remember: if it’s not happening for you - make it happen."

And here in Normandy, we recently dragged ourselves reluctantly to a gallery opening where my husband met a fellow Russian through whom he discovered that his best friend from Moscow state school No. 34 is now working as a mathematician in Paris.

Amazing coincidences, surely? But the point is that if you sit at home in front of the telly you miss life’s great coincidences.

Every time you leave the house you will be rewarded: discover a place you didn’t know existed, see a view that lifts the spirits, meet someone who may become a friend or introduce you to another who will.

So if you make just one resolution for 2008 it should be this: accept every invitation. No matter how dull it sounds, you never know what it may lead to.

This magazine, of course, was founded precisely to help everybody get the most out of life in Normandy by letting you know what is going on, where you could be going and bringing people together.

This issue is no exception. Follow the example of our estate agents in the French property feature: they got their jobs by getting out and about. There are more tips on the essential business of learning French or, if your language is good, finding out what makes your community tick. In art de vivre Brigitte takes the fear out of inviting French friends to dinner - or why not join the Normandy bird count? Or follow the example of the hundreds of readers who have already made friends through our Noticeboard: if you are looking for others with shared interests, want to start a local get together or, as one reader has, open your house for an “at home” to meet people in your area, put your announcement here.

Remember: if it’s not happening for you - make it happen.

Read the Editor’s blogs online here at the-rendezvous.blogspot.com
and send us your photos for the Rendezvous Photo Journal (details p.15)