6) Viewings in the snow

 

A very cold looking Charlie (in the long coat) outside the fist house with the owners

Today we had arranged to see three houses found for us by the scary English estate agent with the Machiavellian cat.  We were to meet at the first one at 10.00 am, which was only about ten minutes from where we are staying.  About 9.15 am we got a call from said estate agent’s husband who had been dispatched to meet us and take us round.  He informed us that there was lots of snow where they were and did we still want to go?  Now I always regard snow as a challenge, and from a glance out the window, there appeared to have been only a powdering overnight.  I told Charlie (the  agent) that we were quite willing to try if he was.  I really don’t think he wanted to go traipsing round obscure (hilly as it turned out) country roads in the snow a few days before Christmas.  However, learning from his wife’s devious cat, I had now put him in a position where he couldn’t really refuse.

It turned out that he had a rather smart Audi A4 convertible and plainly did not want to risk driving it into a ditch, or being forced off the road by a cousin of the barmy Renault Espace driver (female) we met on the way down.  We were able to surmise this with some certainly by the way he drove at 15 miles an hour most of the way (unless this was just to get us back for having made him turn out in the first place).

Serious equipment for countering the cold

The first house we saw was really nice, owned by an English couple who were hoping to buy a house around Kirkby Lonsdale (one of us must be wrong).  Everything had been done, and it had been finished to a very high standard.  It even had what appeared to be a Vorsprung durch Technik type boiler that looked as if it was capable of heating the Terminal 4 building at Heathrow (this had huge appeal having been freezing cold all week in our igloo cottage).

Talking of igloos, we were rather surprised to see outside the Marie in Figeac a Christmas decoration, presumably sanctioned by the Mayor, showing two penguins, a polar bear and an igloo.  Well, surely every schoolchild over the age of about seven knows that Penguins are only found in the South Pole, whereas polar bears and igloos (built by Eskimos/Inuits) are only found in the North Pole.  It is thus quite wrong to show these as part of a tableau, and potentially confusing for young children who are taught that teacher is always right (and at the same time that the Marie, like the Pope, is infallible).  It could be, of course, that the Mayor is trying to make a point that, at Christmas time, even creatures which are poles apart can be brought together.  As I didn’t have the courage to knock on his door and ask him, I fear we will never know whether the Mayor of Figeac was simply an ignorant, failed Geography student or a far sighted visionary.

Official Christmas decoration outside the Mayor's office in Figeac

You may be thinking how could anyone worry about such a trivial matter, but just this morning, on French breakfast TV, there was a discussion programme about whether it was harmful for parents to lie to young children about Pere Noel.  They even had a psychiatrist (though I couldn’t understand what he was saying), as well as parents, one of whom appeared to be breast feeding her baby.

Mas de something or other

Getting back to the smart house we have just seen.....  Having seen so many scruffy and bizarre interiors, with eccentric plumbing, homicidal electrics, kitchens from the French equivalent of B&Q, and taste in interior decor that would make Liberace seem subtle, as we walked round I could see Georgi reaching for our new Credit Agricole cheque book.  I gently pointed out we had others to see and we all agreed to move onto the next one.

Wood store seen from the second house, with Charlie's silver Audi beyond

This too had a lot to offer.  Again it was lived in by an English couple (why is it, I wonder, that they all seem to be returning to the UK?).  He told us he was very upset and rather angry that they were taking the Harrier jump jets out of service early (apparently he’d designed them or built them or something), but as he pointed out resignedly, they were very expensive to fly, because they used x thousand gallons of fuel a minute, and who was going to pay for them, what with the recession and all?  We all enthusiastically agreed with him and swiftly continued our tour of the house.

After viewing this house, which was rather out in the wilds, it was quite impossible to persuade Charlie and his Audi convertible to go on to the final house (and we later found out why), so he suggested we all went back to his office and found somewhere to have lunch.  When we reluctantly agreed to this, you could visibly see him glow with relief that these unnecessarily keen Francophiles had finally seen the advantage of lunch over finding a place to live (which there was plenty of time for after lunch, or indeed at any other time).

Charlie treated to us to a delicious lunch in a restaurant where we were the only customers.  When we arrived he had gone through to the kitchens to find out if they were still serving, and we were waited on by a very attractive young French girl who kept smiling every time she came to the table.  Although I am sure we do make a certain impression on young attractive French girls, it did strike me as just a little bit weird.  When we visited St Antonin before we noticed that practically everyone was speaking English (even the Dutch and the Belgians were speaking English).  It has since occurred to me that perhaps this attractive young French girl was in fact English also.  And perhaps when Charlie had gone through to the kitchens, he had asked the girl to speak French to us in order to make things appear more authentic.

After lunch we went to the office (Machiavelli was nowhere to be seen) and Charlie quite happily gave us directions to the third property we were due to see.  Estate agents in France generally keep the location of properties a tight secret from their clients, and I am sure there have been occasions when the agent has driven us around in circles as a deliberate ploy to disorientate us.  This is because they are terrified that their clients will go round to the house and do a private deal with the seller, cutting out the agent (the French seem to dislike estate agents even more than the Brits).  Having got though a litre of wine with lunch, of which Georgi and I had had very little, Charlie seemed very relaxed about the likelihood of us doing the dirty on him or, indeed, anything else.  

The road Charlie had warned us about

Soon after we set off for the final viewing on our own, we realised that Charlie’s anxiety was not as whimpish as we had thought.  The snow started to come think and fast, and as we climbed higher and higher the temperature started to plummet, and the road became more and more narrow.  There were several moments when we considered turning back, but once we had gone so far, we felt we ought to complete this latest adventure what-ever-may-come.  The road seemed to go on forever, but eventually we got there. 

Very intriguing, but all closed up

It was all locked up because the (Dutch) owners had gone back to Holland for Christmas.  All the shutters were closed so we couldn’t see inside, and it was built round a courtyard to which all the gates were securely locked.  As a result there was very little we could see and we were just beginning to think this could be the "one" when we spied a coiled hose on a drum stored in the barn opposite.  This could mean only one thing – SLURRY.  Having been downwind of this at Gressingham on occasions, we decided to give this one a miss.

Superior spending power of the large supermarket chains

On the way back we called into Leclerc to buy some supper and were greeted by our most extravagant Christmas decoration to date.  Even ignoring the geographical inaccuracies, the Mayor could not compete with the super market giants when they had resources like this.  A sad comment on the balance of power between commerce and state (but at least it was a French supermarche, rather than American)