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It happened like this … an English family move to France. Part 6. Red tape in France.

Main picture: back in England celebrating my father’s birthday at Cliveden; me sitting  (in white) with my lovely old daddy, one of my sisters, and my brother-in-law, Brian Eno. It was a cruel irony that during the summer months, when I was terribly busy, friends and family would pour out to see us.  I am […]

Posted 12 years ago

Guest blog – Shelter Box

ShelterBox – Sheltering families made homeless by disasters   Every year hundreds and thousands of communities across the world lose everything when disasters strike. Through no fault of their own and often with no warning, people lose their homes, their possessions and their livelihoods. Every day they are faced with a battle for survival and […]

Posted 12 years ago

It happened like this … an English family move to France. Part 5. Fitting in to France.

Me in the kitchen, holding one of my nieces. Months turned in to years.  We restored our house on our usual shoe-string budget, lived our lives, had streams and streams of family and friends in the summer months and put up with icy, windy and lonely days in the winter.   France – this area […]

Posted 12 years ago

It happened like this … an English family move to France. Part 4. A big old house.

  Me on the balcony of Primrose with our daughter Tonnay Boutonne, 1991. We sold the house near Rochefort at the required profit – or close enough to it.  At the eleventh hour the buyer suddenly wanted to pull out, which would have been a disaster for us.  In France the system is so much […]

Posted 12 years ago

The story of the excellent leaf by Catherine Broughton

Once upon a time a leaf was born on a tree. He was a teeny weeny little leaf, all curled up so that at first he didn’t look like a leaf at all.  In fact, at the very beginning he wasn’t even green, and everybody knows that leaves are usually green.  He was a yellowy-pinkey […]

Posted 12 years ago

It happened like this … An English family move to France. Part 3. Snowy winter.

Our house in Breuil Magne The Charente Maritime, 1990. Our second house was a 17th century stone dwelling, with a huge barn extention in to which an indoor swimming pool had been installed.  There was also an orchard and the derelict vestiges of a tennis court.  The pool was deep and dark and remained freezing […]

Posted 12 years ago

It happened like this … an English family move to France. Part 2. Lost in France.

 1989-1990. As a family, we were happy in our own world.  We were closely-knit and all got along together.  The children joined in, we had little rituals and traditions that we stuck to, and family life was fine.  I am from a very large family, and both our parents and a variety of brothers and […]

Posted 12 years ago

It happened like this … an English family move to France. Part 1. Leaving home.

At the beginning, 1989. Well, to be blunt, we were broke. We had been hit by the UK property crash in 1989 and we lost everything almost overnight. And that is why we moved to France.  No other reason. In the preceding months, before we realized how serious the financial crisis would be, we had […]

Posted 12 years ago

Learning to speak French. Things you don’t get told in evening class.

  Mont St Michel, Normandy I can virtually guarantee that, as soon as I publish an item on the French language, a French person somewhere in the world – as far flung as Martinique and New Caledonia – instantly leaps gleefully on to their computer to tell me I am wrong!  Is it my imagination […]

Posted 12 years ago

People in my books – Peter. “Saying Nothing”

Peter only ever came to Spain because Janie so wanted him to.  Not that he objected, not at all, but he was more the sort of person who’d go to the Lake District or to Cornwall.  He was English, he loved England.  He liked a ploughman’s in the pub on a Sunday lunch time.  He […]

Posted 12 years ago

Books now available on Amazon:

A Call From France
French Sand
Kefani: An African Childhood
The Man With Green Fingers
Saying Nothing