Dreams of France

Bonjour and bienvenue to my Blog. This is my first effort at blogging and I hope you will let me know what you think as I want this to be something you will enjoy reading as well as being interesting and informative. So here goes……

I first visited France at the tender age of 18 when I spent a summer away from my family living with an elderly lady (an old friend of my grandparents ) in her villa near Cannes. I was captivated by the rugged, arid countryside dotted with flaming bougainvillea, food unlike anything a Yorkshire teenager had ever tasted before and the charming and hospitable people.

Actually that’s not really true – as an 18 year old I was captivated by a young girl I was introduced to called Isabelle, who I thought was the most exotic female I had ever met (given I went to an all boy’s grammar school she may actually have been the first female I had ever met). I spent hours walking with her along shady paths and cooling off in a neighbour’s pool as she lay tanning her long limbs under the Mediterranean sunshine. Way out of my league of course!

Whilst it wasn’t the start of a love affair with Isabelle, it was the start of my love affair with France and in the years to come I would spend many holidays in France and introduce my wife and my children to the Gallic experience. As my children grew up and found their parents increasingly embarrassing to be seen with, my wife and I would spend our gite holidays dreaming about growing old gently, sipping chilled wine in the garden of a pretty stone cottage away from the hectic and stressful lives we led in the UK.

And like so many others, we just carried on dreaming because all the practicalities and commitments of daily life got in the way – job, salary, pension, children’s education, elderly parents, pets…..it all just seemed too difficult to manage and too dangerous to opt out of.

Its not like we didn’t do anything about it – we visited French property exhibitions, we subscribed to magazines that told us everything we’d need to know about life in France, we bought French language courses do on the computer at home, we even looked at business opportunities in France. We were serious about this French thing……but we could never quite summon up the courage to take the plunge.

Then fate played us a hand that seemed to bring things together. I was finding my job, working in Human Resources at a University in Manchester, increasingly stressful and it was beginning to take a heavy toll on my health. I decided it was time to look for something different but the recession meant that the few job opportunities out there were being chased by a lot of very good candidates. I had a birthday – not any old birthday but my 50^th , a milestone that makes one take a long hard look at life. Our eldest had settled into his new life in Oxford, successful with his job and recently moved in with his lovely girl friend. Our youngest was in her final year at University and, having loved her independence, really didn't want to come back home to live .

The turning point was a visit to the France Exhibition at Olympia in January 2012. We came away inspired and that night the decision was made – if we didn’t get our act together and do it now, we’d see this as a missed opportunity and regret it for the rest of our lives. It wasn’t without risk but we had to give it a try and turn the dream into reality.