I had this idea while using the car scraper to clear ice from the inside of the bedroom windows

Editor's February blog

During the last cold snap there was a burst mains pipe, in Wales I think. Did anyone see the news item? By the time the TV cameras rolled in the community had lived an entire day without water.

“I haven’t been able to wash or run my dishwasher. It’s disgusting” complained one gentleman in that “something must be done” tone of voice. If he wasn’t old enough to remember the war, he certainly lived through the winter of ’63 and for sure there weren’t dishwashers around in his youth.

In another flat, a mother and kids - all in t-shirts so clearly no problem with the central heating - said they had been forced to buy bottled water to flush the loo. Out on the street a bunch of villagers were clustered around tanks shipped in by the water company (so they weren’t actually without water, only running water). Shivering in crop tops and bare legs, and clutching near naked babies in their arms they complained about having to come out in sub-zero temperatures to fill buckets.

Put a b***** coat on, then, and wrap that baby in a blanket! Do people have no survival skills?
Have they never been camping?

A friend here in Normandy has been waiting two years for her husband to install a kitchen sink - she does the washing up in the shower. Another family is still using the old outside staircase to reach their upstairs. Indeed, half the people I know here are either in and out of caravans or decamping from room to room as they build the dream project.

That’s the answer then: ship these whingers out to spend a week in a half-renovated house in Normandy! Call it a sort of outward bound experience. Turn it into a reality TV show.
I had this idea while using the car scraper to clear ice on the inside of the bedroom windows. Not knowing, obviously, that oil prices would tumble and we were in for the coldest winter in recent memory, we had the brilliant idea of not using the central heating this year.

During the very cold spell we dug out the electric convectors and decided to hell with the electricity bill. Ha! Our “rewired” house allows simultaneous use of precisely one radiator and one other electrical gadget. Go wild and try to run, say, the kettle at the same time as the DVD player and the entire supply trips. You waste 5 minutes of your life: thirty seconds stumbling to the mains switch and 4 minutes 30 seconds waiting for the low energy light bulbs to remember they are meant to emit light.

The cold, of course also sends outdoor creatures scurrying for warmth. Our resident mice no longer wait for us to go to bed before sauntering out to check the cheeses on offer. They fail to understand that, in return, they are meant to wait inside the trap until the door shuts. “Forget cheese” advises a colleague. “We ended up super-gluing Smarties in our traps. The final insult was when we found a mouse sitting in the cat saucer eating the cat food.”

I told our own useless felines that there’d be no more cat food on the shopping list while the house is full of tittering mice. They marched off, disgusted, and dragged back the corpse of one of our French neighbour’s rabbits.

The dogs, meanwhile, are so determined to prevent any heat being wasted on human beings that they press up against the petrol heater and periodically set themselves on fire. We use the old t shirts that we hang over the computers to protect them from falling plaster dust to put the flames out.

Even if you know compatriots with perfect, “normal” homes you can be sure they spent a year or so in a caravan or living in 1 1/2 rooms along the way. Many Brits grow so deranged during this renovation process than no sooner have they finished a house than they sell up and start on the next.

Why we all chose this madcap existence (something to do with quality of life, wasn’t it?) is another question. And when we could be living in a centrally heated flat and pouring bottled water down the loo!

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As many of you are already aware, we are publishing a free supplement to the Rendezvous alongside the main magazine. Consisting of the Going Out and Marketplace sections from the magazine, the supplement continues to be distributed in bars, restaurants, tourist offices etc.
Marketplace advertisers automatically appear in the supplement.

Display advertisers who wish to appear in the supplement should contact Anthea (English) on 06 17 02 24 89 or Raph (French) 06 99 67 30 30.

If none of us has any money, we can’t employ or buy services from each other

Editor's January blog

This should be a cheery column about all those jolly resolutions we make and break at this time of year. But I think we’re all a bit jaded, this January, for such nonsense?

Most of us are vacillating between stiff upper lip, we’ll get through it, heroism and explosions of blinding panic.

The speed of devastation has been breathtaking. One minute we were tittering over the names of US sub-prime mortgage lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - who sounded like a pimp and his hooker. It was all happening an ocean and a channel away. Then suddenly, even here in Normandy, we’re heading for the promo shelves, switching off the heating and living on vegetable soup.

There may be a clutch of lucky readers out there with plenty of money, safely stashed in euros, and good luck to you.

But few of us are immune. A huge service industry here in Normandy depends on a fresh supply of British incomers and the financial stability of the already-resident and second home-owners. Others earn a sterling income or pension which has gone into free-fall, reducing their spending power.

If none of us has any money we can’t employ or buy services from each other, can we?
And spare a thought for the British estate agents - their French bosses can’t offload them fast enough.

Then there are all the French businesses, the food shops, restaurants, supermarkets, garages, DIY stores, garden centres who have benefited from the incomer spending power. They are the next dominoes to fall.

The tentacles of Mac and Mae are long indeed. A recession only reminds us that clever people choose Teflon careers like dentistry, debt-collection and undertaking.

The usual recession advice is stuff like: give up that (second) foreign holiday, don’t replace the car this year, put off up-sizing your house, don’t buy designer clothes etc.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not acquainted with an awful lot of expats who take multiple foreign holidays, drive spanking new cars, lust after a bigger house or even remember what a designer garment feels like.

As the two families on pages 4-5 demonstrate, most of us have already downsized our lifestyle since moving to Normandy and don’t have have much slack left in the family budget.

So, while we may have managed to plaster the traditional smile across our faces for Christmas Day, it’s hard to keep it in place as we contemplate 2009.

But let’s try. Some of us do have mortgages, but probably a good 70% of British incomers do not, so won’t be facing home repossessions. Even if the value of your sterling pension has plummeted - it is still an income. Many of us have already withdrawn from full-on, must-have, consumer culture and learned to live with less. Our gardens are big enough to have a go at veg-growing (see the potager guide on the gardening pages). Trips to the UK are cheap and it’s a good time to move back if that’s what you want.

OK, we’re clutching at straws here and it’s tough to be cheerful when you’re waking up sweating at 3 am. But we (Brits) are supposed to be good at this kind of Blitz-mentality thing and it won’t go on forever. (How long, exactly, my daughter keeps asking? When are you going to stop giving me pocket money in IOUs?)

People will go bust. While some dance a jig when a competitor goes under, others feel a frisson of fear: there but for the grace of God...

So, whilst fighting for our own survival, we should also be kind in 2009. When it comes, recovery will be swift and sweet. Let’s hope that it’s not too far away. In the meantime: as Happy as possible New Year to All.

❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄

2008 ended with sad news in our household: the children’s wonderful Russian great-grandmother died, just short of 100 years old. Baba Valia’s life spanned modern history: born into Imperial Russia, she lived through the Bolshevik revolution. In Siberia, in labour with my husband’s mother, she trudged through frozen wastes to reach a maternity hospital. Having moved to Moscow, she survived Stalin’s purges and during WW2 watched her children run along the rooftops catching Nazi incendiary bombs and burying them in buckets of sand. When I first met her, the country she had lived almost her entire life in, the Soviet Union, was collapsing and her grandson married (me) a foreigner; her grandchildren are scattered across the globe. Throughout this incredible journey she remained calm, strong, kind - and always cheerful.

My husband sneaks about replacing light bulbs with low energy tubes

November 2008
Now that we have entered the dark months when children catch the morning bus by starlight and come home after nightfall, I love nothing more than drawing the curtains, turning back the covers and turning on the desk and bedside lights to make their rooms cosy and welcoming to celebrate their return.

To me, there is nothing more depressing than entering a dark room or returning to a cold, unlit house after an evening out.

I grew up among adults moulded by the post-war austerity years - in freezing houses where ice formed on the inside of windows and face creams froze in the bathroom. “Turn out the lights” was a constant refrain.

I vowed then that when I grew up and had my own home, lights would burn all over the house and my family would never shiver around a sole source of meagre heating, pulling on another jumper.

And I would be wasteful! Chuck left overs in the bin rather than think about the starving millions and throw out perfectly usable clothes; replace rather than mend, buy pre-washed salads and eat strawberries in winter. (This, of course, was the Dallas era)

Now here I am, head of my own household, drifting about turning lights on and the heating up, having deep hot baths instead of showers and jumping in the car because: if God meant us to walk, why did He invent the wheel?

And instead of nagging parents, suddenly there’s a generation of eco-warriors snapping at our heels, checking food miles and tutting because you didn’t put your used Kleenex in the recycling box.

Yes, I am blessed with children intent on saving the planet. I plug my mobile in to charge only to discover - when I need to make a call - that some laudably conscientious child had unplugged the charger. Slump into a chair and reach for the remote only to find that the television has been switched off at source.

Meanwhile my husband sneaks about replacing light bulbs with those awful low energy tubes which take half an hour to warm up and give less light than a dead glowworm.

I don’t care how many times people assure me that they are now much better than the early prototypes and you can barely tell the difference. You can. They’re as cheery as a naked light bulb in an interrogation chamber.

Cheap flights, year round fruit and veg., handy aerosols, 4x4s were all invented to make life more fun but then up pops a scientist warning us that these are the Devil’s toys.

Luckily for the planet, however, we’re now facing a capitalist meltdown that has billionaires panicking, the ghost of Karl Marx tittering over Highgate cemetery and the rest of us counting out the centimes.

One way or another, life is determined to keep us wringing out our used tea bags. Actually, the New Frugality may not be 100% good news for the planet. Replacing the old banger with a green model or sticking solar panels and windmills all over the roof are luxury investments that may now have to be struck off priority spending lists.

But, certainly, we will all be looking for ways to cut down on waste and spending.

Who dares turn on their oil central heating this winter? Who is not now factoring in petrol costs to the children’s activities and heading to Lidl and Aldi for the unglamorous basics like loo roll, and floor cleaner?

Over the coming months, the Rendezvous will be greeting the challenge of the New Frugality and looking at ways to trim the household budget - without, of course, sinking entirely into gloom and despair.

Now, I’d better go and turn on a low-energy tube before the children get home.

Many thanks to all those who completed our readers’ questionnaire at Faire Play and congratulations to Gail Redhead who won lunch for two at the ever popular Le Robbery in Vire (now under new management - bookings 02 31 67 28 43).

Your answers tell us how popular the Noticeboard and, especially, Marketplace sections are; that many readers are living on their own and that you want more recipes, history and advice as well as articles on animals and horses, walks, boating and cheap living.

We are always pleased to get reader feedback and do our best to cater to all requests. Look out for our columns on bargain-hunting and being a small-holder in our even better Rendezvous in the New Year.

Also in the New Year, we will be phasing in a small charge for the Rendezvous. Our costs are rising, just as they are for the businesses who wish to advertise with us, and thanks to whom the magazine has been free for the past two and a half years. Introducing a charge will allow us to cut our advertising rates whilst continuing to improve the magazine, and to increase our print run to satisfy rising demand for the Rendezvous.

This will mean some adjustment to our distribution points but as it will also allow us to be present in local newsagents, this will make collecting your monthly copy more convenient for many readers. See our December issue for a list of where to find your magazine from January 2009.