French Hens And Scrambled Eggs

Which came first the chicken or the egg? It’s a question that is guaranteed lengthy debate around our table at supper. All of our children have strong opinions and know their own minds and no one is shy in making their thoughts be known!

In our garden the chicken most definitely came first; it’s now just over a year ago that we bought our first four hens. Within a month we had added another three and later a couple more somehow sidled in from somewhere to join the fray. Happily though, since then there has been many times when we have asked ourselves why we’d never kept chickens before. They’re a riot! There’s been a lot to find out, with chesty coughs and sore feet to learn about amongst other things, but that’s where our French neighbours have helped so much; there’s not much they don’t know about chickens, although they do struggle to come to terms with how our chickens are part of the family while their’s are part of the larder. Certainly we have a better understanding of some subtle differences between French country animal husbandry on one side of the fence and children’s pets that lay eggs as a bonus on the other.

In addition, Roddy has become a dab hand at administering the necessary potions and drugs in the dead of night with a torch between his teeth – he’s found that the flock are better treated then when they are all half asleep. He’s remarked on more than one occasion that it’s easy to see how a fox could kill a whole hen-house without any trouble at midnight.

As those of you who have followed the blog for a while know, our chickens are often the star of the show.

However, I have to admit that for a time they fell into second place, with our Muscovy ducks claiming the centre of our feathered stage; not because the ducks were ducks or because they were enormous; no, it was because of their antics around the garden. You see it turned out that Penny and Adrian (who arrived as a couple) were in fact, not a couple. No, not for them was there the simplicity of being a male and a female; instead there emerged the complexity of having two large testosterone-laden adolescent males in our quiet rural space.

Now this in itself did not bother me, Penny was still called Penny and I simply forgot my plans for free range duck eggs; I liked them, we all liked them and they were here to stay, until that is, they started chasing each other whenever the urge took them. They hurtled around the garden whenever they felt the need, and anything in their path was sent flying; nothing would stop them, for neither wanted to be caught by the other; whoever made a false move lost and then the loser had to succumb to the other’s, er, desires (let’s just leave it at that). It became known as the ‘sex run’ and it was all quite hilarious until it became really quite dangerous for small creatures and small girls, and that’s when we decided they needed some girls of their own. Luckily we knew where there were plenty; some friends of ours who live thirty minutes away were very happy to have two drakes to replace their aging champion, and now our two boys each reside over a harem of females, extremely content.

That brings me back to our chickens and our two roosters; Fritz, our original bantam has been joined by Falafel, our young Faverolle rooster who hatched at the end of May last year. These two have never fought, the result I suspect of them being surrounded by women. There has been the odd squabble at times, but now it all seems to have evened out – Fritz has the small bantams as his consorts and Falafel has the bigger girls. This just leaves Constance the Silkie, lets just say Constance is a bit of a floozy, and she just hangs out with whoever she feels like!

Our little flock are free to roam where they please

On rainy days they seek out the wood shed

and the barn where we keep the mower.

I am told that several decades ago, when new people moved into the village, they would always be given two or three laying hens as a gift from the Mayor. No one seems to know when this started or indeed when it ceased, but what a wonderful welcome present. Just about everyone in our village keeps chickens, ducks and geese – for the pot.

Talking of pots, we are not going to kill our chickens of course; the only cooking involved is with the eggs, and of course free-range chickens mean fantastic eggs! Ours are really fabulous jewels with deep, dark, rich-orange yolks and hard thick shells. We have eggs of all sizes; tiny ones from the smallest bantams all the way up the size scale to the double yolkers delivered by Chuckles a couple of times a week; she was one of the original four we bought in 2014 and is now the reigning matriarch. We have near white eggs, pale creamy-colored eggs, and deep brown eggs; in fact we have all sorts of eggs.

Lots of eggs means lots of egg dishes and sometimes we have to be a little inventive, but it’s amazing how many different recipes and ways to use them Roddy and I come up with. Eggs are of course the perfect quick lunch or supper; easy to cook whether you fry them, boil them, poach them or bake them; we also add them to homemade pizzas

and we sometimes serve them hard-boiled with a little steamed kale from the garden, which is just about the only vegetable still going strong in the winter weather.

I also love scrambled eggs with a few herbs, a dish that most of our French friends cannot understand; they call them œufs écrasés which literally means ‘squashed’ eggs. It’s a wonderful way of cooking eggs for us, but our friends look at the results with much ridicule, and there is much muttering about the English and their strange ways of doing things!

Of course, our eggs also make the best cakes and our little chefs are slowly turning into egg snobs. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but baking certainly has a different hue when the girls start talking about egg quality from our garden!

Tell me how do you prefer your eggs? and which do you think came first – the chicken or the egg? Have a wonderful Sunday x

January 31, 2016 by ourfrenchoasis

RENOVATING A CHÂTEAU

A couple of weeks ago I talked about future blogposts and how I wanted to feature people who had renovated old French houses. I thought we would kick off with a bang and cover the renovation of an ancient château as a little entrée. How ancient? Well, the earliest reference to this fortified building is some 300 years before Columbus set sail with his little fleet for the western Atlantic, and when the first stones were laid for the château’s walls, William the Conqueror (he who smote Harold with an arrow at the 1066 battle of Hastings) had only just died. It all began in that period of history when people still kept animals in the downstairs room of their houses, lived in fear of the devil at night, and all along the coastline of Europe, men stowed their swords and pikes ready to defy intrusions from the sea. It’s all a long, long time ago.

I have been fortunate enough to meet and spend some time with André Rousselot, who is the current owner of the Château Fort de St Jean d’Angle. The son of a businessman from La Rochelle, André exudes excitement, passion and confidence. A man as at home behind the boardroom table as he is at the helm of a cement-mixer, André typifies the endurance of the sort of person needed to see through and complete a project of some 22 years standing. Although still unfinished, the château is very much alive and well now; a far cry from when his father bought it in 1994. Then, it was a ruin; a mound with a clump of trees and stone walls, surrounded by a stagnant moat. Today it has been almost totally restored and transforms during summer into a magical re-enactment of medieval times, complete with sentries on its battlements, a moat which one crosses at your own peril, battles and jousts on summer days between sweating men in full armor on oxen-sized horses, and a swathe of authentic games and interests for people to enjoy. It is also true to its owners’ vision though, and gives short thrift to the glamour of any Disney makeover. Real artisans make pots, beat out sword blades on red hot forges and stitch saddles and boots as you watch; the only fast-food in sight is a suckling pig on a spit attended to by a pitchfork-bearing man in leather jerkin blackened by smoke.

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Last time Roddy and I visited André it was a cold and wet winter’s day, but there was a huge welcoming log-fire burning in the Great Room, and over a cup of tea he brought us up to date with his plans, and explained why the building was now such an important part of his family’s life.

First, though, the boring bit – some history. This is important because we’re talking about a château fort as opposed to a château, and as a result I need to explain the difference between the two. A château, is a large country house, or a manor house, or sometimes even a castle – with or without fortifications. A château fort on the other hand, is always a castle with fortifications!

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It isn’t until you are actually in the château, looking out across the marais from its windows that one begins to truly understand the importance and significance of the building. Being so close to the original coastline, Rochefort and its islands and marshlands had their fair share of invaders from the ocean – whether they were Vikings, Berber pirates, Anglo-Saxons, Danes or even Celts; by the 12th century all three of the area’s great inland bays were being transformed into areas of marshland, where developing agriculture, aquaculture and the booming salt trade provided rich pickings during occasional incursions by thieves from the sea. As the bays changed from shallow coastal waters into the great marais which are still used today, the ridge-tops provided a sound defensive position for the developing marshes. Perfectly placed on the skyline just above the marais, a fortified castle could act as both a deterrent and as a refuge for those working on the water and in the fields about it. This is how and why the château fort was born – to defend some 6000 acres of considerably wealthy revenue. André took us up to the battlements to demonstrate the significance of the position. I mentioned to André that the English had probably paced the same ramparts. “Absolutely,” he replied laughing. “The same family may have owned the château all that time, but sometimes they were under French rule, and sometimes under English.”

The château fort is believed to have been originally built around 1180 by Guillaume de Lusignan, who was from one of the most powerful families in the region. It remained in the possession of different parts of that family through most of the succeeding centuries. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, it was in ruins, and the land was used as common grazing ground by villagers. Two world wars later, we come to 1994 and André’s father, Alain; driving through the area regularly on business, he became enchanted with the ruins and the thought of restoring the battered old building, whose walls were literally held up by the vegetation that had grown up amongst them. In December of that year, he finally bought it.

But who would take on such a project and why? It had taken Alain, André and other members of the family some 22 years before they were able to officially open the château to visitors. It all began with six initial years of work in January 1995, in collaboration with the Monuments of France. Helped in small part by some grants, most of the restoration has been funded by Alain’s own money and as a result there were periods when little got done, when cash was tight. The château lived for many years enveloped in a nest of scaffolding as the walls were almost totally rebuilt, to rectify massive settlement fissures that had developed over the centuries. Much of this work was done by the highly skilled artisans from the Monuments’ own taskforce, and such was the quality of the work that in 2003, the chateau received two prestigious awards; the Grand Prix of the French houses and the Prix Europa Rostra. Looking around the great room, I could see the new huge beams above my head, and the fresh sandstone pieces in the fireplace and walls. Succeeding bouts of restoration have included new roofs on the Great Hall and its adjacent buildings, excavations of the cellars and dungeons, new floors throughout all the buildings, and a crash course for many in the art of cutting stone; shaping some of it into intricate pieces and shapes, and using traditional and tested techniques for specific architectural contexts, such as mullions for windows, interior archways and exterior staircases.

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André was keen to show us the progress they had made in the upstairs rooms and we followed him through an interior doorway to a screened staircase. Along the way we passed a tableau of mannikins in full costume enacting a typical kitchen scene, and gingerly stepped over a recumbent soldier asleep on some hay in a guardhouse. As we went up the curved spiral stone stairs, he kept pointing out the features that were original and those that has been restored. Up on the second floor above the Great Hall, newly restored floorboards have replaced the hundreds of wood-worm riddled planks. Old windows have been unblocked, and all of the château’s fenestration has received new mullions and new glass, a project all to itself.

Ancient fireplaces have been carefully restored, half-finished electrical wiring and copper plumbing artifacts weaved here and there, testament to the ongoing work and hinting at the plans afoot for the future. André paced from wall to wall, telling us about imaginary bathrooms and spaces for beds, as he outlined his plans for six en-suite bedrooms and weekends for enterprising visitors. He had visions of grand banquets and ideas came pouring forth in conversation; I was amazed at the energy of someone who had spent 20 years looking at what must have appeared at some stages to be a complete mad loss.

It was this final understanding of André and his family’s commitment that finally got to me. It is one thing to pass by the colourful medieval pageant that the château embodies on a summer’s day, but it is quite different to the reality of listening to someone who explains that all of the previous work is but a foreword to a much greater plan, and that the plans also include building a second fort on the site where an 8th century wooden structure once stood, transforming 20 acres of surrounding land into the original ordered and regimented potagers, orchards, stables, outhouses and other buildings.

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However, as with any renovation, budget is always a concern and given the sheer size of this project I imagined it must be a constant companion to André, and so I asked the inevitable question.

“How much has it all cost over the years?”

“Who knows, who is counting? We do not. If we did we would never finish; but it must eventually pay for itself,” explained André with that typical French shrug; but I definitely got the feeling that behind the casual reply he does indeed know exactly how much has been spent and how much more is needed.

One story more than most embodies the struggle André’s family has had to endure during this amazing restoration is the tale of the Tour de Clio. One summer’s day, a decade in the past, he and his father received a phone call from the foreman of the workforce.

“Come quickly,” the terrified man said, “the tower is going to fall down, it is swaying”

In a state of panic they asked what needed to be done.

“We need money, I can save the tower with money,” said the foreman. It needed some urgency, since no one could stay on the scaffolding, but a huge 20 metre baulk of timber was needed to shore up the cracked castle wall while they repaired it. A beam this large would cost a fortune, but there was no spare cash available for it. André and his father desperately searched for a solution all morning and then Alain rang his wife, and informed her that the money they had put aside for a new Clio (at the time the newest and most sort after small car built by Renault) was going to have to be used instead for a giant wooden prop.

“You mean I cannot have the car?” asked his wife incredulously.

“No, I am sorry,” said Alain, sadly, “the château is more important.”

And so the Tour de Clio, the tower at the back of the château, was born and it has been called that to this day.

You can find out more about the Château from their website here, http://chateau-stjeandangle.fr and if you are in the Charente Maritime do take the time for a visit. It is open spring, summer and autumn and you will not be disappointed.

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Lou Messugo All About France

January 28, 2016February 4, 2016 by ourfrenchoasis

Making the Most of the Rain

Sometimes, when it’s bucketing down with rain or just horribly cold and damp, it would be much nicer to stay inside; it would be so easy to batten down the hatches and work in the warmth of the kitchen, never straying too far from the wood-burning stove. But that is not an option when you have dogs. I only have to touch a lead hanging from the door and Bentley and Evie are at my feet, looking at me with that expectancy that says they just know they are going for a walk; by the time we’re in the boot room and I’m reaching for my wellies, there’s a keen sound of excitement at floor level; they don’t care if it’s wet or cold, or howling a gale; they just want to get out there! Our 200 year-old flagstones sigh at the scratching of paws and the wind-banging slam of the door as we go out and brave the elements.

I have walked with a certain spring in my step the past couple of days as the dogs and I leapfrogged puddles and dodged showers. I am extremely grateful for the response to my questions about blogging in my last post and I was naturally happy to hear that you like things as they are. Thank you all so much. As a result I have maybe stopped a little more frequently with my camera, spurred on to share all around me, and I’ve been re-arranging words to better describe what I see and hear. This deep in the country we don’t have any opportunity to have an ‘extravagant’ lifestyle, instead we take extreme pleasure in the most simple things; whether that’s our family life, the animals, the scenery, the fresh produce or just being grateful that we do not sit in traffic for a fifth or more of our waking day. Yes, we’re lucky, and we know it, and we appreciate it; and yes, we know how fortunate we are to live in the online age, where small luxuries can be bought with the click of a mouse too. It’s a magical mixture.

I never tire of the views on our routine dog-walk straight from the house. It takes me just one hundred paces to move from the 21st century and a computer-screen to this old landscape, where an ancient fortress surveys a working landscape it once proudly guarded from the ravages of Barbary pirates and the plundering attacks of British yeomen; where centuries of tears, smiles, births and deaths lie buried deep in the cloying inevitable embrace of the marsh that is the Marais de Brouage.

Looking across at little hamlets, that have stood for centuries, I stand on a path that pilgrims have trod for 14 centuries, and still do today, as they go southwards to the great cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain.

We go past dormant vines, not really enough to be called a vineyard, in fact there are just a hundred or so plants for someone’s private use – some of these ‘house’ wines are very unsubtle, some are little treasures.

Bentley is always content to wait and take a breather while I take photos, he being of a slightly senior age, but Evie at only seven months old cannot sit still; she’s off, on the scent of a rabbit or some purely imaginary smell. Nose to the ground, she follows a translucent path of scent, weaving right and left, her nose twitching like the billion-pixel imagery tool it truly is. Bentley watches with knowing amusement as she scampers around wasting so much energy. However, our dog-training efforts are finally starting to pay off and she now comes back when called (most of the time!). She races back to the track ahead from where she’s been lost in some adventure, far out in the field or deep in a hedgerow, and darts around in all directions before shooting off ahead again, covering ten times as much ground as the rest of us.

The weather has thrown everything possible at us this week, we have had freezing temperatures, gale force winds, torrential rain and beautiful sunshine. One morning we woke up to a rare frost and a thin sheet of ice on the puddles and the pool. Gigi and Hetty had a fine five minutes before school playing in our temporarily frozen landscape.

A couple of days ago I arranged to meet someone I wanted to talk to about three houses she has renovated; this is for a future blogpost next month. The weather could scarcely have been worse. I set off straight after the school-run, the thermometer only just above freezing and the rain battering against the windscreen, wipers on full speed. Heading north-east and away from my usual stomping ground I started to go inland through little villages I didn’t know. On the way home I kept making deviations and stopping to take photos; my return journey taking a good hour longer than it should have done. I passed several small chateaux, the type that look ‘lived in’ by families rather than just being museums open to the public, and I made a mental note of many places I had to return to when I had more time and the school pick-up was not approaching rather too quickly.

I stopped briefly in St Savinien, a small Gallo-Roman town, on the banks of the Charente; the rain had eased finally, which is just as well as the umbrella I had grabbed in my haste to leave the house on time was in fact broken, a fact I discovered with sigh of resignation as I arrived at the house I was visiting – alas the girls had used it once too often for some Alice in Wonderland adventure in the garden.

I stood staring at near deserted streets I had once seen in a very different season, for we had been here before last summer; then, flowers adorned every window box, boats with tourists silently glided down the river and locals and tourists alike strolled along the ancient streets. Now it was almost unrecognizable but just as photogenic, with the streets and houses slick with watery reflections.

A little closer to home and after another quick detour I came across this wonderful farmhouse, with a large Vendu sign, clearly marking that it has recently been sold. I thought what a wonderful home it would make, tucked away off the beaten track but not totally isolated, located in a tiny village with a small church and a clutch of similar houses.

and I also realised that I don’t need perfect sunny days all the time to take photos, as sometimes the light can be magical on grey days, when rain magnifies colours even if it’s cold and bleak.

So whatever the weather where you are today, I hope you have a wonderful Sunday.

January 24, 2016 by ourfrenchoasis

Is There a Future in Blogging?

Where will the road take us?

This week was our 20th wedding anniversary, and it’s funny such a simple thing can set the mind thinking about the most random subjects! I suppose it was looking back and wondering about the past twenty years that led me to thinking about blogging; 20 years ago no one wrote blogs, and according to official data, in 1999 there were just 23 blogs registered on the internet. A lot has happened in 20 years.

Even before I was married I visited France often. I had an iconic French car, a Citreon 2CV. I bought it for a song and sold it for even less. It was a faithful old car I called Nellie; she took me from Paris to Nice and back again, and if only I had known then that she would now be a collectors item worth twenty times what I sold her for.

In that time we have had five children, lived in five countries and visited another fifteen. We have gone from writing letters to sending emails and from phoning people for a chat to instant messaging. We have iPhones, Androids, iPads and iPods. Video tapes and tape-recorders are no longer in our home; we’ve gone through the CD and DVD era, and now we just download our music online and watch instant movies; and as for the TV – it used to be as fat as it was wide, but now it’s a streamlined flatscreen!

And how did we live without social media; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat? The list goes on.

Cameras have gone digital, and our albums which we carefully organized after a holiday are now on computers and hard drives. Remember when we took a roll of film into the pharmacy or photo-booth to be developed?

Petrol is unleaded and we have hybrid cars. Concorde is a thing of the past and the 800-seater Airbus has become a reality. We have successfully sent a robot to Mars and the space-shuttle has flown its last flight.

Dictionaries and reference books are rarely in use on a daily basis, instead we have search engines and Wikipedia to win the dinner table arguments.

Remember sitting in the travel-agency, drooling over glossy holiday brochures and coming home with real aeroplane tickets? Now we get an online reference number, and 24 hours before our flight we check in online from the comfort of our sofa, download our boarding pass to our phones and scan it at the airport.

And who remembers answer-phones? Turning it on before you left the house and coming back to the red, blinking light and several messages, sometimes fervently hoping the right person had called. How did we manage before we were on call, available 24/7, whether we’re in a restaurant, in the car, on a walk, playing sport – our mobile phones are there just in case!

We must not forget Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, and all the free video-calling around the world, face-to-face in real time.

However, walking down any street here in the local villages it would seem little has changed in the past 20 years; of course it has though, and no doubt it will continue to change and evolve, but that brings me back to my original question; is there a future in blogging?

Much has been written on the internet to the tune of “blogging is dead” or “the written word is dead” and it seems sometimes that people only want what they can read scrolling down on their phones in the time it takes to get a coffee whilst standing in line at Starbucks. Perhaps vlogging will take its place; for we can see in a 5 minute video what would take us 30 minutes to read.

Personally I believe the written word will always survive as long as it has something worthwhile to say. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it has been estimated that more than 80% of the activities we do online are text-based. However, it appears we don’t do very well with large amounts of text; we tend to read the first 20% and then scan through the remainder; reading is time consuming and can easily overwhelm us. Many of us read as a form of escapism, so do we prefer to escape with words or do we just want eye-candy; perfect pictures and no text required?

I think blogging certainly does have a future and maybe the human brain can have what it wants – 20% text and 80% photos.

There are millions of blogs online; if we don’t like one we move onto the next, and we can share our lives in a way we never have before. At the same time we can dream of a lifestyle we have never experienced and yet think we know it intimately. We are friends with people we have never met and are unlikely ever to do so. I can’t see us giving this up and so I believe blogging will continue, as long as there is an audience there will always be blogs, and so long as the content is interesting there will always be an audience.

As you can tell I have been doing a lot of thinking this week and I really really want to know what you think.

Do you like long blog posts that you settle down to read with lots of text and lots of photos once a week or do you prefer shorter, punchier posts more frequently, ones that you can scan quickly whilst on the run, with less words and more photos? Or could you be converted to watching vlogs rather than reading blogs?

Don’t be shy, I want to know, and if you have time please tell us, what do you read the blog on? Your cellphone, a tablet, or a computer?

January 21, 2016 by ourfrenchoasis

Dreaming of The Perfect French House

I promised you I’d start a new series of articles this year, and one of the subjects I want to cover in that series will be property renovation. Right now I am meeting people who have renovated their homes and talking to them about the challenges involved; hopefully we will have some fabulous ‘before and after’ photographs to drool over, from both local French people and expats. Many people assume that the French always build new houses and that it is the foreigners who come in and buy up the old houses and renovate them, but this is certainly not the case; many French people do just the same and the DIY market in France is huge – hence the number of ‘bricolage’ shops and super-stores.

I am still going to be continuing with lots of posts about the family, the children, the garden and the animals as so many of you have told me how much you enjoy hearing about our adventures, but to be honest right now the weather is dull, the ground is soggy underfoot and we haven’t done anything remotely exciting since the New Year!

So I’m back to day dreaming a little! Having created our perfect French village, I thought we should create the perfect French house – before we meet ‘real’ people and their own homes. There are always pros and cons to owning a traditional old property; we live with them, we carefully see to their needs and we constantly do the maintenance work. However, I also know some people who would like to build a new house in an old mature setting; and indeed we have friends who are considering retiring at some stage in the next few years and who are in that very same quandary – do they build something from scratch or renovate an old stone property?

However, for the sake of this post I am going to assume we all want to renovate an old French house; it might be a complete ruin that is worth little more than the land it stands on and the old stones that remain

or it might be a neglected unloved house that has not been inhabited for decades but that is just waiting for someone to bring it back to life

Or you might have your mind set on a tiny country cottage; a little bolthole for the weekend

or a village house?

maybe you would like a farmhouse?

or perhaps an important local house of some standing?

or a town house?

or a Maison de Maître?

or perhaps something with far more grandeur?

and maybe it is already for sale?

Once you have found your perfect house (and there are so many styles to choose from in France), let’s just spend a few minutes thinking about the interior. Would you take it all apart, down to the bare beams and add a new modern interior – or would you keep as much of the character as possible, sometimes having to duck to go through low, centuries old, doorways, and except the fact that nothing will ever be perfect but it oozes charm and history?

For me one of the most important rooms in the house is the kitchen. It is the hub of the house; it is the focal point where we all meet, and being a large family it must therefore be of a reasonable size. At any one time there can be someone cooking, someone doing their homework, a dog pretending to be asleep and ever hopeful of a crumb on the floor, and other people will be coming and going; it’s a busy room! It has to be functional but would you stick to a traditional style which might compromise workspace and practicality? Or would you choose sleek and modern whilst integrating some older elements of the building?

a fabulous big range is vital for me

and an old farmhouse table for family meals and kitchen suppers.

I would also want a walk in pantry for storing all my home-made preserves and a big separate laundry room for with five children there is an endless stream of washing!

There has to be a fabulously cosy sitting room which can combine being a family room and also a space where we can entertain friends

the choices are endless, wooden floors or tiled floors? Traditional with dark oak beams

totally open plan with a splash of colour?

Or neutral colours with a slightly minimalist feel?

or a mixture of the two

I don’t need huge bedrooms but I do like some character and I love old French beds.

Of course there are many more rooms and I am sure many more requirements for the perfect house whether it’s a one bedroom cottage or a ten bedroom manoir. But no matter how big or small, for me character and a wood-burning fire are right at the very top of my list.

Let me know your thoughts, your absolute ‘must-haves’ and how you would envisage the perfect house.

January 14, 2016February 1, 2016 by ourfrenchoasis

The Perfect French Village

I have many plans for the blog this year; I want to bring you even more snippets of authentic French life; I really want you to get a true insight into life in France. Of course, I am still going to keep you up to date with our family, the children, the animals, the garden, our trips and adventures, but I am also going to introduce you to new people, new places and new ideas. I am really excited about all of this and I will be bringing you the first part next week in what I hope will be a fascinating new series.

But first let’s kickstart 2016 with a little daydreaming. I thought I would invent the perfect French village for you; or rather – how in a perfect world – what the perfect village would be like. No one village will ever satisfy everyone, but here are a few of the many things I would need in ‘my’ village.

First, there has to be a church, for a village is not a village without a church. It should preferably be centuries old and have resisted both Vikings and tourists, and it should be heavily decorated by the passage of time; these solid but graceful buildings are beacons of history on the landscape and reminders of all that has gone before us.

Then, there must be a manor house or a Maison de Maître. A little history, and perhaps some mystery to add to the charm.

There should naturally be a series of ancient houses and cottages (in the first photo below the cottages date back to the 12th century – they were actually in this village BEFORE the church was built). Some of these may be in ruins and some should be inhabited by welcoming elderly village residents always ready and willing to tell a tale from the past.

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Amongst the ancient buildings there will be narrow winding lanes, with cobbles that glisten in the rain, and cats that snore on window sills in spring sunshine.

Ancient roads will also be part of the landscape, and these should make driving quite precarious in places, as attested to by the scars on the walls of narrow corners from trucks and buses.

and there will be little alleyways

leading to those perfect walks that never demand the use of a car. Cattle belonging to local farmers should graze in the fields, and any dogs we meet will be friendly and generous in tail-wagging welcome. In my day-dream all those farmyard dogs that delight in frightening the daylights out of all and sundry are firmly banished.

The Mairie, or village-hall, is a must. No village is complete without this all important backbone of daily life, which so often seems to incorporate a small post office.

No shops are really necessary in my village except for a boulangerie which is absolutely vital. If you have one that sells, chocolates, wine, beer, soft drinks, jam, preserved fruits and other conserves then it’s all good. If the baker therein also offers the use of their oven for Sunday roasts and those occasions when you have no oven big enough to feed 30 people with half a cow, then even better. Our local boulanger does all of this, and more.

Failing the presence of a boulangerie, a daily delivery of a baguette in time for lunch will suffice.

When it comes to lunch, or dinner, I’d like to go a step further and add a small family-run restaurant and bar; this is ‘dream-world’ after all, so I might as well add everything I want! All ingredients would come from local suppliers and the menu would be simple, fresh and seasonal.

Every village should have a well and fresh water available; it should date back to times gone by when cattle and pilgrims alike would have shared it, so we would have one for ‘our’ village too.

There should be a small primary school for the younger children within walking distance.

and a weekly market would be nice, it could be just one little stand, always there come rain or shine.

Of course to go with the local food should be a domaine so we can get to know our local wine-grower!

and finally the village should, of course, lie in a bucolic setting.

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Let me know if there’s anything you would love to see that I’ve missed out in your perfect village.

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January 7, 2016January 7, 2016 by ourfrenchoasis

HAPPY NEW YEAR

HAPPY NEW YEAR / BONNE ANNÉE

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I just wanted to take a moment to wish each and every one of you, my fabulous readers, a very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2016. Without you, this blog would not exist, it’s been a fantastic year, I’ve “chatted” with so many people, made new friends and learnt from you, I love your comments and feedback – thank you so much, it’s been so much fun.

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We saw out the end of 2015 at the beach on the 30th December on the Île d’Oléron, watching the sun go down, and we rang in the New Year in our own unique style, “Bling meets Venice!”

I have lots planned for 2016 and am really looking forward to sharing more of our lifestyle and more of France with you. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a few more photos from New Year’s Eve. Happy New Year from the whole family xxx