The baguette from our local boulangerie
The little sailcloth and its sidekick, wind
There’s a fine line between determination and obsession, which Roy has crossed, jumped back, crossed again, and then stomped all over. This is the story of a man vs. a sail. Call me mad, but I happen to believe in the idea that it is possible for a sailcloth to harness the wind in order to do stuff. I don’t know where I got this crazy notion, maybe it was the sailing course I took, or the sailing holiday in Greece, or perhaps it’s just you know, being aware of things in general.
In case you haven’t noticed, the sail has been reborn. Or rather, sewn into different shapes and re-branded. This new generation of sail is for sun protection. It’s no longer a sail. It’s a SHADE sail. Made of sail cloth. In other words, it’s a sail. But for shade. In their new genre, these new shade sails are certainly more beautiful than their old cousin the umbrella and more cosmopolitan than the awning. They are more versatile than that, what’s it called, oh yeah. The SAIL. They are brilliant in their new role in suitable places -- those areas without regular periods of high wind and heavy rain. Because in their new role, you don’t actually want the sail to harness the power of the wind and rain. But it does. Can you guess why? Because it’s still a sail.
When Roy wants something that goes against nature, his solution is quite simple. He ignores the laws of physics.
When we first put up the shade sails in the campsite, they stood for a few days. Then the wind came and disconnected some rope. Roy fixed it. That’s determination. One morning after it rained, they filled with water and one corner on each sail was hanging on the ground. Roy put them back up. Determination. Then came the morning all the posts were lying on the ground and the sails were hanging only by the hooks on the barn and we had no choice but to take them down. This would have been the moment to admit defeat. Sails 3. Roy 2, and I thought the game was over. That was until Roy rocked up onto the lawn with fresh new containers and more gravel, and we find ourselves moving a tick beyond determination. Roy puts the sails up again and he’s feeling GOOD. After waiting just a few hours they have the emboldened effrontery now to fall over right in front of our eyes. It’s important to note that by this time, our guests have long left and we ourselves have only one week left of our two-month stay. Surely this must be the end of it.
But no. Apparently there is heavier rope and more gravel out there in the world, and damned if we aren’t going to use it. I ask Roy if this is a smart use of the little time we have left. I tell him we don’t need them. He looks at me as if I’m speaking Latin and I realise it is no longer about the shade. It’s now a battle of wills between him and the sails. There is no talking him out of it so I tell him he can do what he wants but I’m not getting involved this time. He’s on his own. Next morning while I’m having coffee… “Nicki, can you just hold this for one minute?” And before I know it, I’m an accomplice in his obsession.
As I sit here, they are up again. And we are leaving in 5 days. I don’t know which of us will last longer, and in my head keeps ringing the reputed final words of Oscar Wilde, “Either these [sailcloths] go, or I do”
Guest tent ready for check-in
The pressure is on
Linda said one afternoon, during a video tour of the property, “If Peter and I did this, we’d be divorced by now.” “We may be masochists then, because it’s brought us closer!” I naively replied.
There’s no stressor quite like the coming together of three elements: An inscrutable but crucial task, a visit from friends who have climbed a mountain to get to you, and not enough time. Suddenly Linda’s words applied. Roy was more stressed than I had ever seen him and I was too tired to calm him down in all the ways a partner is supposed to. Trigger pulling trigger pulling trigger, it was a downward spiral we couldn’t reverse for days.
Roy and I designate departments in our household, because that’s what anal-retentive couples do to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. As head of Inventory & Procurement, the task of purchasing items for the campsite fell squarely in my remit. The tent order was one of those things that starts to go wrong and doesn’t stop. As vaccination rates increased by the day, so did news of the virus’ variants, so traveling abroad and hotel viability was in constant limbo. Everyone seemed to have the same idea, and I think I snapped up the last round bell tent that existed in England. When the delivery app told me the package had been delivered, but it had not, I began to worry. I assumed it was lost and with no more round tents to be had, I ordered the oblong model, which was more than I had initially wanted to pay for a tent. When the round one arrived later that day, the larger one went MIA and my new best friend in customer service was practically giving me his home address trying to keep me happy. He set a deadline for the end of the week and had another tent reserved at the warehouse if it didn’t turn up. Friday morning, the second large tent was delivered so I notified my NBF not to release the third. He thought he caught it in time and we heartily congratulated ourselves. The next day, the third tent arrived. I had paid for two tents and now had three, and I was faced with the unenviable task of shipping two very large and heavy boxes back to the warehouse. I couldn’t bear the thought, and found a different solution. We’ll invite friends! Forgetting for the moment that what we would be willing to endure on our property may be different from someone taking a long-haul flight to a two-week summer vacation. Regardless, I asked my NBF to send an invoice for the replacement tent, promptly transferred the cash, and spoke with our good friends in America. They told us that normally they wouldn’t consider a camping holiday, but as this was me and Roy, they trusted it would be comfortable.
I was excited, despite the pressure I had now put unknowingly on Roy. Any warm-blooded interior designer loves a new type of project, and I approached the campsite design starting with ease of use, then comfort, reversing straight into the aesthetics that were pre-defined by the landscape. Mine was the easy task. We had been planning to take cold-hose prison showers ourselves, but that wasn’t going to fly with our guests. We (and by ‘we’ I mean Roy) now had to figure a way to get a hot shower into the campsite with only a basic electrical outlet. Watching him progress through stymied attempts in several directions, this was the first time I seriously proposed a Plan B which basically meant, no camping. Tents sitting in boxes, resources tied up then more resources required for new accommodation. In the end, Roy miraculously pulled it out of the bag at the 11th hour. He produced a fully installed hot water tank, good pressure, and a shower stall and sink console built out of sub-floor boards and pure ingenuity – all just in time to call off the drafting of the divorce papers.
By the time our friends rolled onto our property honking their horn and looking far more refreshed than we felt, we relaxed into a state of pure joy – holding up trays of cold towels and glasses of Champagne – and we meant it.
Hartley was always the more patient one
The "P" Word
Roy likes to re-introduce me to the P word from time to time. This former New Yorker slash American has finally let it sink in. For over three years we have called this place ‘ours’. It’s been just 22 days shy of two years since we owned it. We still had not spent a single night here.
I remember the first couple of weeks after returning to London, back in May of 2018. This was just after the Teyssandier family accepted our offer on their property. The agent told us the paperwork would go to a governmental office in Paris then back again to Duras. We would be signing the contract within ten days. Ten days became a few weeks, then a few months. It’s funny how wildly relative time can be. How the length of a day could feel so different in the pre-pandemic world of individual choice. I counted every day with an entitled impatience. I walked our dog Hartley in the park in Hackney and phoned the agent in Duras. I had already gotten Hartley a pet passport and dreamed about the day I would take him across the border and see him running on the land, freer than he was ever able to be during his six years as a city dog. I asked the estate agent why things were taking so long. “That’s France!” he beamed, proudly teaching me something I already knew. I worked hard at being patient and more ‘French.’ It took exactly a year before we finally received three different contracts for the various buildings and parcels of land, each about 50 pages long and full of French words I hadn’t come across in any of the language books I’d been studying. I cursed myself for not preparing for this after so much time. I sat in my office in London with a candle lit for ambience, translating, drinking tea, translating, scribbling down questions for the agent, translating. During all this, Hartley snored on the sofa in my office while the rain came and went, getting up to press his paw on my leg when he was ready to stretch his.
Then the COVID pandemic hit the world, and an aggressive form of cancer hit Hartley and I started to long for those sunny days in the park impatiently counting days and weeks. We found a vet that made house calls who came by every time we called, at any hour of the day or night. Hartley hid his pain that I only noticed in his eyes while looking at some photos of his last days. Hartley passed on a Wednesday morning in July and the little heart that had been beating next to me for the past seven years (but weirdly as long as I can remember) left a hole that will never again be filled. That very week we went back to France with Hartley’s ashes in the back seat. He never sat in a room on his own and I wasn’t about to leave him now. I was running away from something I could not shake, and toward something I could not acquire. Although we were now allowed to enter France at last, we still would not be staying on our property.
I don’t know when the last inhabitant of the house departed from the hamlet in Grand Truchasson. What I do I know is that there was no evidence of a septic system, nor any sort of bathroom. The electrical wires were from before I was born. There was not a window or door that closed properly. There were only spiders and thick webs covering every surface. It had been a while. We continued to rent gites in the area while we sorted out getting permission and finding builders. The breakthrough came when we were introduced by our new local friends to Monsieur V., a trusted and experienced project manager. M. V. wrote 18 pages of detailed specifications and sent us devis (quotes) for every element of the build. These new costs, if not at the same price point for the French, were still less than half what we had been getting from the architect. It started to feel real.
Now we are here for the summer. M.V. has sent over the electrician for an interim job in the wine barn. We had already turned on the water supply and opened the electrical account. We got compost toilets and bell tents, an actual lawn mower. Roy took a self-administered crash course in the French plumbing system and I learned some new curse words directly from the source.
All of this may not seem much but turns out to be just enough to set up domicile on a formerly uninhabitable piece of land. We knew that once the tents were up, we would not leave them so we worked in a precise order; power wash, rudimentary water supply, wait for the electrician. Kitchen, hot water tank, plumbing. Wood decking to serve as the only respite from the bare ground, sun shades as the only respite from the hot sun. Delivery of some furniture in storage. Tents up. Home.
The growth in the North garden came back, but so did the roses we cut down. So there’s that.
Driven by sheer madness
The metal table where I sit next to the pool at the ecurie shakes with each strike of a key on my computer and I use a paper towel for a mouse pad. Normally I would be annoyed at the constant shaking, but I am both rural and French here and so I literally go with the flow. The wine in the glass to my left is shaking with every strike too. Seems we’re all in this together. As I contemplate what I want to write, I procrastinate and read the label on the bottle. It’s from Saint-Emilion, about 40 kilometers from where I sit. I ask Roy what the wine cost. I can’t help it, the constant comparing of every little detail of life here in France to our life in London. Roy makes his thinking face, never one to give an estimate. It always amazes me that he rarely wonders why I am asking a question, he just wants to get it right. 12 Euros he finally announces. 12 Euros. Now that’s something! And the procrastination continues… What would this bottle cost in London, or worse, in New York City? 12 Euros. 12 Euros? And it’s really good. Roy sits across from me reading, we are both too tired to speak. The plans for the house are finally complete and are now in the hands of Monsieur Verduger, our project manager. Work is scheduled to begin in November, so this summer it’s the bell tents we purchased in London and dragged down on a trailer hitched to the back of the car, marking the first time Roy was forced by a power different and stronger than myself to limit his road speed. Our land is still inhospitable and seems to want to spit us out every time we try to move onto it. The brush we cut down over an entire month last October was back with a vengeance this June, looking as if we had never been there. I have been told by more than one person to appreciate how fertile the ground is, but I think I’ll wait to apply that sort of optimism for when we are not growing exclusively weeds. Our fields have been rich in agricultural product for centuries churning out grapevines, and trees of walnut, plum and fig. This summer, our plan is to stay a couple of weeks in our friends’ renovated ecurie until the campsite is in a state suitable to host humans. We have no water or electricity in the area we designated but it has the best view so we are determined to make it work. As luck would have it, Roy can work wonders with a hose which now runs from the old cow barn, across a field, into and out of the old chicken coup, through a hole in the stone wall into the wine-making area of the barn with splitters sending the supply in three directions; to a sink, a shower, and a nozzle for more practical applications. I had managed to re-establish the electrical account weeks ago from London and we expect the electrician next week to install outlets and some basic lighting. For the 15 days we have been in France, we’ve been setting off for the property first thing in the morning and returning to the ecurie in the evenings. My body aches and my brain is in a state of fog. Roy is still working his real job during the days and pushing harder on fumes than I have ever seen him. Today he whacked his head three times on various corners of things, yelped in pain, and kept on working. If he can keep going, so can I. And while I wonder what all the head bashing will do to his mental capacity in the long run, right now it still seems worth it.
Bon Courage!
“Bon Courage!” is something people say to us A LOT in France. Literally, it means ‘good luck.’ However, in the context of our renovation project, I think what people actually mean is, “you’re going to live to regret this.” The first time I realised this was last Autumn. We had just endured a very long Spring and Summer confined to our home in East London, feeling frustrated and cruelly taunted by the idea that we owned a property in the country where we were desperate to go, but weren't allowed. So when the first lockdown eased in September, we wasted no time booking a gite on a nearby property where we had stayed before, jumped in the car, and crossed the English Channel. The night we arrived we made pasta, opened a bottle of wine, built a fire in the woodburner and dialed in to a weekly video call we had been having with some good friends in America. Despite being in the middle of a global pandemic, things were looking up. The next day we bought tools and work clothes at the Bricolage (builders’ merchant) and set up some shelving in the old barn adjacent to the structures. From the start of the pandemic, work with our architect and her team of builders had ceased to exist so we couldn’t really do anything we would consider useful. But what we could do is try to make the property look like a place where a person might actually be living. We spent two days ripping out the overgrown brush in the little North-facing walled garden. When that was done, we went inside the old farmhouse and started hacking away at the walls in the front room. We thought this room would have been a bedroom at one time, until we found an opening in the back wall that appeared to have been a door or a window. Extension? Pigsty? After several days chipping off decades of plaster one dusty bit at a time and shovelling the debris onto a pile in the adjourning barn, the original stone wall started to reveal itself. Finally I could begin to imagine this place, if not yet our home, at least a house. One day as I was standing in a cloud of dust, head pounding in tune with my strokes, sweat beading up on my face, a car pulled into the East garden. Thierry, one of the sons of the former owner, walked in to a hearty chorus of Bonjours! Earlier that day we had texted him with a question and hadn’t heard back. His vineyard is a few miles down the road and we know now that ‘stopping by’ is an appropriate reply to a text message. We chatted for a while about finding people who could help clear some brush and got information about the electrical account. Finally he waved goodbye and on the way out the door I heard him laugh and say, “Bon Courage!“
Fortune favours the brave
Nobody ever saved up to buy some demolition.
So why do so many people want to purchase houses that are in ‘move-in’ condition only to immediately start a mental list of everything they want to change? OK, I get it. Things are much easier to modify than create. You can better imagine what space would look like by taking down a wall than what it will feel like with an entirely new floor plan. However, with demolition there is a negative return on investment that you get to quite quickly, where the cost goes up disproportionately for things that need to come down. Better to spend your money on the things you want, rather than on stuff you just want to get rid of.
When I view a property full of things I need to change, I actually feel offended. Like someone deliberately set out to make my life more difficult. But not everyone agrees with me. I’ve seen the look on people’s faces when they first set foot on the property. One day the home insurance agent came out to evaluate the condition of the property and assess our monthly fees. He took one look around, waved his hand and told us not to worry about the fees yet. It was clear to him nobody would be living there. We brought over some local friends who were eager to see it, their smiles fading into something between suspended disbelief and pity. The photos we posted online were met with all sorts of encouraging remarks. It wasn’t until we saw friends in person, and only after a couple glasses of wine they came clean. “So, the place in France. Why did you… Um. The actual house. Can you uh, live there?”
Strange to think that when Roy and I first saw the condition of the place all four of our eyes lit up. But I suppose that’s one of the reasons Roy and I are married and have remained so. We loved the dirt floors and deteriorating stone walls, the holes in the roof letting in little rays of sunshine, cracked beams holding up who knows what and for how long. We weren’t left to imagine, but could actually see how life might have been in the early 1800’s. All of our time and effort would be spent creating with none of the guilt of tearing down something historic. And we actually felt grateful to time and to mother nature, who kindly picked up the tab for the demolition.
Roy surveying the property along the West-facing smaller house barn
I've never met a soul who loves London in January
Although Roy and I had discussed it at length, our imaginary country house had no style, no dimensions, or even a location. However, bleak winter days in London do wonders to focus the mind and it turns out that the annual French Property Exhibit in London in January is no coincidence. We enter a warm, bustling exhibition hall and are quickly buried in a sea of property estate agents eager to chat. There were questions to be answered that had never crossed our minds. Roy and I concoct our story on the fly, making up priorities and requirements as we go along, occasionally looking at each other in amazement. Clipboards and questionnaires can entertain for just so long, and delightedly, we spot a wine distributor booth. We take a seat, sip some wine, and wave our hands describing each varietal with all the usual adjectives as if we’d just made them up.
Happily into the grape and feeling empowered, we carry on through the stalls and stumble upon an understated little booth, empty but for some eye-catching photos of an area in Southwest France, located not too far from other places in France that we’d actually heard of. We are invited down — just for a visit — and owing to the fact that the wine had not yet left our bloodstream, we tell them we shall see them in May.
Over breakfast on our first morning in the B&B we meet a couple from Belgium who had been spending the past few years engaged in the same type of exploration on which we were just embarking. They’d been to a dozen different places over several years. They were learning French. They tell us to take our time. Do not rush. Don’t get swept up in the moment and make a mistake. We nod our heads in hearty agreement. Yes, that’s wise. We’ll take it slow, survey the landscape, consider everywhere. Won’t this be a fun few years?
By the time we see them again that evening, they must have thought us mad. Because that morning, after setting foot on the second property we visited, before the clock struck noon — we had made an offer.
The house barns and view of the valley looking East