Where it all began…

My husband and I had been banging on about moving to France for ages. I don’t think anyone actually thought we’d go through with it, but after visiting our favourite region in the Pyrenees on numerous recces we finally took the plunge.

Before we bought our house, we decided to spend a few months doing a ‘try before you buy’ in a holiday gité. I envisaged my husband and I going on long dog walks in the rolling hills that surrounded the property, swimming in the onsite pool, eating my bodyweight in the stinkiest French cheese and sipping red wine on our terrace. 

It started off going swimmingly, we found our dream property within a week a real fixer-upper that needed total renovation, and we’d filled our fridge with all of those French delicacies - pâté, goats cheese, roquefort, and Champagne. And then, I found out I was pregnant, very welcome news but it gave us a slap in the face with reality and we begun to wonder - what the hell were we doing? 

The fridge had to be cleared, for me there was no booze, no paté, no cheese - as those lovely goat’s cheeses, blue cheeses and mould ripened ones were all on the banned list -bye bye brie. . . . Those lovely set menus that we’d previously enjoyed on all our house buying recces were out  - as there was always something I couldn’t eat: pâté, goats cheese salads, meat that despite asking for très bien cuit would always come with more pink than brown and probably a bit of blood - all on the banned list. We became herectics buying imported cheddar and going to pizza restaurants instead.

I ended up with pretty bad morning sickness, and I spent a few months living on cheese rolls and Frosties. I had to do a crash course in the French medical system and every appointment or attempt of an appointment bought me to tears. People joke about the French bureaucracy, but it isn’t until you have to sit in a the administration area of the hospital trying to explain your situation with pigeon french, trying desperately to obtain the magic page of stickers that seem to make the medical system go round, that you realise how difficult it is to navigate it is. 

The realisation hit that my husband and I suddenly had eight months to get our house into shape (and we still had to wait two months at least for the purchase to go through). Despite being ecstatic about the impending bundle of joy, I was really thinking we’d made a huge mistake trying to move to France. I’ll never forget the look on my husband’s face when I told him after a month that I thought we should go back to the UK. 

But, when the morning sickness eased, and our house went through, I started to become more up beat about things, enjoying the adventure once more. I got used to the bureaucratic trips to the hospital that saw me going round different departments, referring myself to gynaecologists and spending hours with patient administrators whilst I tried to get registered in the system. I didn’t even get down when my doctor banned me from eating sweet stuff - bye bye patisserie treats! 

It was about that time that I signed with my literary agent and ‘Don’t Tell the Groom’ got picked up by Quercus. All of a sudden I was busier than ever. It was suddenly a good thing that it was the coldest spring/summer in twenty years in France as I didn’t have time to lounge by the pool. I didn’t even have time to worry about the lack of kitchen, or the working toilet in the house that we’d bought, or the fact that I was due to give birth in a hospital with a language that I could barely order a meal in. It was time to stop worrying and get on with it. 

Looking back, it was probably a good thing that everything happened all at once. It focused us (and our builder) to get everything sorted in the house and to get us registered into the French medical system. Things that we probably would have procrastinated with if we’d have had the luxury of time. And by foregoing all those lovely French delicacies I put on little weight in my pregnancy (I had to look really hard to see that silver lining after the ban on cakes).

Those few months in the gité were not quite the relaxing few months I thought they’d be, and they were certainly unforgettable. My advice to anyone thinking of taking a plunge like us is just to do it - as my experience proves there’s never a good time! 

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