I have been safely ensconced in my new home in Chevanceaux for the past seven weeks. The house has three double bedrooms for which I pay €850 a month. This includes all bills apart from water. My house is attached to a similar one which is currently unoccupied and is close to a small group of renovated stone clad houses. We are a a short walk away from the local village. The kitchen window overlooks fields where from time to time a group of majestic looking wild deer appear, much to the excitement of my two dogs. The area is mainly rural with farmland and vineyards, and some small industries that blend into the environment. There is a chicken abattoir which causes me to shiver when I pass but doesn’t stop me eating the produce. On my arrival the weather was like that of a soft Irish summer but being the end of October the leaves were beginning to turn. Over the following weeks I was treated to a blaze of burnished reds and oranges until our daily walk along an old tarmacked railway was through a carpet of fallen leaves and hazelnuts which crunched underfoot. The dogs frolicked alongside much taken with their new surroundings and the myriad new scents of the French countryside.
The fact that my car was still in the possession of the haulage company, awaiting an appointment with the Hyundai Garage in Rennes, didn’t much bother me. My laptop, printer and camera, along with my tax returns which I planned to do on my arrival, had been left behind in the car. But I was happy just to walk around and explore the area and let all the stresses of the past years work their way out of my system. I was pleased that I managed to communicate mostly in French with the haulage company and the garage by phone. The job proved to be more expensive than I had bargained for especially as I had to get George, the handyman, to go to Rennes by train and pick up the car once the job was done. I was not yet ready to tackle the French motorway. He graciously used his credit card to pay for the job when I discovered that I could not do so by phone. This is one of the many surprising things about France, as is the fact that if you use a card to pay for petrol, sums of up to €120 can be blocked on your account for days until the actual amount is processed. The fact that my bank happily went along with that arrangement infuriated me.
The local village is pleasant and has a Marie, a school, a church, a pub, a restaurant, a co-op, a pharmacy, two bakery-patisseries, a delicatessen, a gift shop that includes beautiful fresh flowers and a library. It also has a school of Forestry and the Environment where students get practical experience in the surrounding countryside and at the end of their course have a professional qualification that makes them immediately employable. Axa and Allianz also have offices on an otherwise pleasant high street. I wasted no time in exploring the library and to my delight was signed up for a year- long membership for €8 and little or no bureaucracy, just my mobile phone number and my address. I found a large book about Pierre Loti, a Frenchman whose writings I had come across in my studies of the Art & Archaeology of the Middle East. He was from Rocherford not far north of here and travelled in the Orient in the 18th century. I have set myself the task of reading this biography, written by Lesley Blanche, as a mean of both improving my French and learning more about this fellow traveler.
