ABOUT ME
Here I am, Jane Bond, (yes it really, truly is), at jammerjabber. I make jam and pickles and chutney and piccalilli. Lots of it, around 3000 jars last year.
My husband Dave and I have lived in Northern France since 2007. Sorry, nowhere near Provence, the Dordogne, the Loire valley
nor the Côte D'azur and at least 3 hours drive from Paris. This is not that sort of a blog.
We arrived in October 2007 and were amazed that it was warm enough to sit outside in T-shirts. We didn't take into account the fact that we'd just come from northern Aberdeenshire, where once we had snow in July.
Dave promptly abandoned me to work in London all week and come home on the weekends. I was charged with renovating the house that I had bought without Dave ever seeing it. He later told me that if he had been a crying man, the first time he clapped eyes on it he would have burst into tears. I said I bought it because it had been peeing down all week and when I arrived at the house the sun came out, it stopped raining and a hare ran across the garden.
To me, all sound reasons for spending our life savings on a wreck in a field.
Prior to this I had lived in the same place my whole life. I met Dave, we got married and then we moved house 9 times in 15 years.
The only time I had ever visited France before was on a holiday from hell years ago and Dave had been there just once on a family holiday when he was a child.
But houses were cheap and we thought it would be an easy commute through the tunnel for Dave who was by now an independent software contractor.
In one of our lives we lived in England and were computer programmers. In another of our lives we lived in Ireland and were computer programmers.
Next life we lived in Scotland and were computer programmers. Then we decided to move to France.
Why? Who knows?The only time I had ever visited France before was on a holiday from hell years ago and Dave had been there just once on a family holiday when he was a child.
But houses were cheap and we thought it would be an easy commute through the tunnel for Dave who was by now an independent software contractor.
In 2009, I started my business, making and selling jam on the local markets. Which is way
more sticky than software, but is an absolute HOOT.
I also write a lot, at breakneck speed and talk to myself while I write.
The talking to myself is a long-standing habit so I have to watch out when I make the odd sortie to the UK to buy bacon and Marmite. In a checkout queue in France if I mutter "Nobody cares about you or your children. Just shut up and get a bloody move on", no-one can understand me. In Sainsbury's however I have sometimes been severely punished by being tutted at.
My friends laugh at my emails and not just because of the spelling and grammar, or the fact that if I cant find a word to fit I will invent one. They
said it was time to inflict myself on a wider public.
So ... this is it . . . life in France from someone who doesn't own a B&B a Chambre d'Hôte, or a pool; who doesn't own a chateau which only cost 100 quid to buy and couple of million to renovate; who isn't retired to a bungalow near the beach; who couldn't acquire "Paris Chic" even if you waited 100 years and who lives in the North where we have rain and wind and cold and fog and . . . fabulous, friendly people with a cracking sense of humour and war memorials and battlefields and row, upon row, upon row, of war dead and stories of love and sacrifice that will make you weep . . . . and . . . . . wait for it . . . . hardly anyone speaks English.
Go on. Give it a read. You never know.
