20. The final countdown

Tuesday, 15th January 2008. Readers of a nervous disposition look away now… Between completing on the house and the run-up to Xmas, I had an overnight stay in hospital in Bayonne. I'd needed a minor ‘op’ to remove a stone that had taken up residence somewhere in my plumbing.

While still in the UK, I’d paid for a BUPA consultant and had had ultra sound scans but they were inconclusive. My GP referred me to a consultant at an NHS hospital shortly before we were to leave for France. When this date arrived, they carried out various tests which included ultra sound scans and cameras (but strangely no X-ray), the consultant's advice was that my problem could have been one of three things – the third of which was a tumour!! He wanted – in his words – to “open me up to see what it was”. I thought I don’t think so.. I thought it best to wait until we were settled in France where I’d have time to work through the whole process from start to finish.

So it was that once in France and we’d broken the back of all the tedious jobs and we were approaching Christmas, I finally went to the doctor.. I was quickly referred to a consultant who straightaway sent me for X-ray and 10 minutes later told me that what I had was a stone and definitely not a tumour. (Phew..!) It was as simple as that. With my layman’s hat on I can’t help but wonder why the NHS didn’t X-ray me..? He asked me what I was doing on the following Monday and with that, I was booked in for an ‘op’. I was amazed at the professionalism and speed of the whole process, the modern facilities, the friendliness and approachability of the doctors and the consultants.. It was difficult not to make comparisons with my experience of the NHS.

I went in and had the stone removed and when Madame brought me back home to the gîte, to my amazement Madame D came upstairs with a basket containing a bottle of wine, a packet of coffee, a box of sugar and a large bar of chocolate.. She said it was traditional in the Pays Basque.. and Madame and I were very touched by this kind gesture as they don’t have much in the way of material wealth.

This afternoon, I had my French class again which I enjoy. We all ended up talking as there were only four of us today and one was Vanessa, a new girl from Colombia in South America. The teacher asked me if I'd like to ask Vanessa a few questions? (Ding dong!) Faced with this approach, there was no option but to put my natural English reserve on hold and it wasn't too long we were all freely engaged in murdering the French language in a variety of ways using all available cover. Why didn't we learn French this way at school? All I can remember are endless lists of new vocab to be learnt and death by grammar.

Wednesday, 16th January. We went to Spain this morning to do some shopping and as we approached the border, we were both once again struck by the beauty of the countryside and the mountain scenery. There’s something about the fold and the lie of the land here that we both like very much. Many of the peaks are steeply angled and of course the landscape is dotted with these beautiful white-painted Basque farmhouses that are often situated on top of hills. I think they do this to get the evening breeze when it’s hot in summer. While I do have a soft spot for the Malvern Hills, I'm afraid that they're small pommes de terre compared to the Pyrenees.

We decided to have lunch in Spain while we were there.. We had a tortilla each, which here is like a potato omelette with ham and cheese in it. With that we also had a round of hot bread with a slice of lomo (pork with piment d'Espelette) and cheese on it each. To ease its progress down we had a sangria each followed by an espresso..

When we emerged outside, I looked up at the sky and it was a real dark midday sky – almost black. It was the colour of a gun barrel – a very threatening dark blue-grey.. We went into another shop for some food shopping and while we were in there, there was a resounding crash of thunder followed by the sound of torrential rain on the roof.. The poor pooch was stuck out in the car on his own as they don’t let dogs in shops in Spain, unlike in France..

Thursday, 17th January. Rained quite heavily for most of today.. We went to the house this morning for 9am to wait for the company who were going to deliver the new bed.. They couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us an exact time it would arrive so we had to hang around until they finally came just before lunchtime. The kitchen fitter, Eric, is one of Peio’s Basque Mafia (another one!) and he’s another superb worker. By the time we left he’d done so much and neatly too. Every day we do a few more ‘little’ jobs.. I sometimes wish I’d made a note of them all. It would be quite a daunting list if we’d seen it at the start.

Yesterday, for example, we had a look at what system we’re going to use to get TV, internet and telephones in the new house. There are so many different possibilities these days and the tarifs of the various companies are all subtly different depending on what you want. It’s a real minefield. They make it difficult for you to compare like with like. Also what kind of phones to buy.. And, no, they’re not all the same nowadays.

The day before we’d finally tracked down the right council department – after visiting about four different council departments - that issues wheelie bins as ours had vanished. They said they’ll drop one off at the house this week. Tick VG. Another job done. I think we do about 2-3 of these little jobs every day and we’ve been doing this every day since we arrived here.

Today we’re going to look at renting a small van for the move on 30th January. Plus we’re going to look at another TV/Internet/telephone provider in Bayonne called Numericable. With many of these companies now they offer free phone calls within France and all the EU (including Britain) and N America… And that’s 7 days a week, not just week ends! However, when we arrived there, we were discouraged by the number of dissatisfied customers.. We’re also going to shift all the new bathroom fixtures and fittings from the front bedroom where they’ve been stored for the last few weeks to the back bedroom which has now been finished. Another job done. Once we’ve done that, the painter can get cracking in the front bedroom. Next week, the new bathroom goes in too..

Madame's going to start sweeping out the sitting room and the dining room today as we’ve asked Eric if he can give us a price for sanding the wooden floors in there and refinishing them. He’ll have to get a shift on as there’s only next week clear before the removals men arrive with all our stuff the following week.

Friday, 18th January. We went to the house this morning and Eric's almost finished. He had the fridge in and he was just screwing all the handles onto the new units. And then that will be about it in there.. There’s now very little trace of the previous owner’s decoration evident and the house is very light now. Eric is also an interior decorator and we’ve asked him to do the downstairs wood floors as his estimate was very reasonable. He’s going to sand the floors in the sitting room and dining room on Monday and then he’ll put a couple of coats of varnish down. I asked the painter this morning in a roundabout way what he liked to drink.. He said whisky.. I surprised him (and myself!) by giving him a bottle of 12 year old Glenmorangie on his last day as our way of saying thank you for a good job well done..

It was still grey here today after a couple of days of rain. The river that runs down the valley was running very high and the water was brown..

Saturday, 19th January. We went to the house this morning to meet Peio and two of his Basque friends from the Spanish side who were going to fit the work tops and the sink. They came today to measure up exactly as there’s always a world of difference between the plan and reality. Eric is going to sand the floors in the sitting room and dining room on Monday so we had a major tidying up session. We swept and swept and swept getting all the dust up.. One of the side-effects of the painter's technique is that it produces a lot of dust as he rubs down with sandpaper between each coat. But a determined sweep gets most of it up and we went over it at the end with a damp cloth. We did the upstairs too while we were at it. It really needs a good vacuuming as a lot of dust has got down between the cracks in the floorboards.

The pooch was wandering around in his new garden but he was slightly uncertain of himself. Not quite sure what’s happening. He looked like he didn’t know whether to stick or twist.

After I’d finished sweeping and shifting things around I went outside and sat on our terrace to cool off as I was covered in dust and sweat. Madame reckoned that it was warm enough to eat outside. I’ve always dreamed of living somewhere where you could sit outside to eat..

We went to St Jean de Luz this afternoon and when we got out of the car it was like May… blue skies, brilliant light and the sun was warm on our faces. It was superb - I left my jacket in the car and just had a sweater on. Madame wanted to go there as there’s a bedding shop that she wanted to have a look at. It was open so in we went and 20 minutes later (this is the kind of shopping I like!) we came out with a bedspread and two pillow cases for the new bed and a blanket as ours were getting a bit thin. As a bonus they were in the sales too.

After that we walked along the front and found a bench facing the sun and sat there for a bit like a couple of owld codgers.. Well, why not? It was really just the job and we were reminded how lucky we are to be living here. After that, we found a table outside in a crowded café in the main square where we sat and people watched for a while. It was so warm and we kept telling ourselves that it was mid-January!

Sunday, 20th January. This morning we drove just up the coast to a place called Hossegor in Les Landes. Although it’s just outside the Basque Country it’s very different. The landscape is different – the soil is sandy and so the trees and the vegetation is different – it was thickly wooded with pines. The style of houses is different too (right). Gone are the large white Basque houses with the wood facings painted blood red. We had a good long walk along an inland canal that was less of a canal and more like an inlet that was open to the sea. It became a large lake surrounded by houses that looked wince-makingly expensive. While we were there I saw a young couple getting out of a black Range Rover Sports - a familiar face I thought - it was Dimitri Yashvili (the French rugby international) who plays for Biarritz Olympique.

A white van with Spanish plates stopped outside the house during the afternoon and it was our Spanish Basques with our granite worktops.. The two Basques were quite happy to work away well into Sunday evening so we left them to it and sure enough, the next morning, when we opened up, the kitchen looked magnificent with its gleaming green granite tops. They'd done a beautiful job.

Monday, 21st January. Went to the house first thing (9am) and Eric had almost finished (!) sanding the sitting room and dining room floors..

After this we went to St Jean to go to the bank to tell them of our impending change of address and then, on the way back, we stopped at a Depôt Vente where we bought a wardrobe in cherry wood for one of the bedrooms. It should be a good match for a chest of drawers we already have in cherry wood and it will give us a bit more storage space. It comes apart so they’ll deliver it (on 1st Feb) and put it back together again. It’s 16½C, in bright sunshine and hardly a cloud to be seen..!

A chap could get used to this!

13. French classes and Nantes

I changed French schools a few weeks ago because the one I was at was all self-taught – I would pick up a module that explained a particular point and I would sit there doing the exercises until the centime dropped. It was all a bit soul-destroying so Madame said I’d be better off in a class with a teacher. So I had my first lesson in the new school. After a few minutes the teacher said that I should be in the Woodwork class oops, a higher level group.. But it was a lot better than the previous school.

A few weekends ago we were up in Brittany staying with our friends P and M-A in Nantes. On the Sunday morning before lunch, they took us on a lightning tour around the centre of Nantes. I don’t think Nantes is that well known in England but I think it deserves better. It suffered bomb damage in the war but the old part, which contains a magnificent castle, is still largely intact.

The castle was the former capital of the kingdom of Brittany in olden times and following its recent complete restoration, its stones are now gleaming white and it looked fully functional. Really impressive.

The old part of Nantes reminded us of parts of Paris with its beautiful old squares, elegant public buildings and Baron Haussman-esque apartment buildings. It was much more of a city than I’d expected. It has topped the polls in France for the last few years as being the city with the best overall quality of life. It's full of smart shops and restaurants, antique shops, old book stores and many individual shops that (almost) made me want to stop and have a look.

By comparison, Bayonne is much smaller. But then here there’s Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Biarritz, Anglet and Bayonne all in very close proximity to each other - each with its own distinctive character and attractions – and over the border in Spain there’s San Sebastian which is very stylish. Saint-Jean-de-Luz is Madame’s favourite and, as I’ve said before, I think when we get a bit older, we’ll probably think about looking for a flat in the centre there. We often go for a walk in St-J-de-L and it suits us both very well. It’s flat (unlike Biarritz which is quite hilly), compact (so everything is in within easy reach) and the beach is only at one remove from the centre of town.

We’ll see. Think Nantes would be a good place to work but I think down here is the better place for retirement because there’s the seaside, the much warmer climate, the mountains (skiing and walking), fishing, cycling (lots of cycle paths), golf (must be half a dozen golf courses at least around here), and, of course, there’s Spain just over the border. We also noticed that autumn was a lot more advanced up around Nantes – not many leaves left on the trees – whereas here just a few trees have started to change colour and drop their leaves.

Madame always says that the River Loire (which Nantes is at the mouth of) is the big divide in France as far as climate is concerned – north of it and you’ve got all the clouds, rain and mist and to the south of it you’ve got the sunshine. In theory!

We also went into the restored cathedral in the centre of Nantes which looked as though it was built only last week. There’d been a fire in 1972 which totally destroyed the roof and all the old medieval stained glass windows were lost as they exploded out in the intense heat. The replacement stained glass windows were a bit different too – instead of the usual scenes of saints, Eddie Stobart and co etc, they’d been designed to look like flames – and each window showed a different level of intensity of the fire. Some looked very good but others not so. The fire was caused apparently by some workmen who were working up on the roof with blowlamps setting fire to pigeons or something.

We didn’t have much time to spend looking around as the next stop was the huge Talensac food market. Apparently, this is one of the biggest and best in France and you would just not believe the range, variety, quality and prices of all the food products – poultry of all types and sizes, seafood, all kinds of meat products and fruit and veg on show. I wished I had my camera with me as at one point I spotted a smartly dressed lady in a queue at a till waiting to pay. She had her money in one hand and she was holding two large nasty-looking live crabs in the other.. Can’t imagine ever seeing that in England.

Thinking about that I was reminded of the other day when we had some oysters for lunch in Bayonne. On one side, there was a lady on her own tucking in to a dozen oysters and a whole bottle of white wine (I think I might struggle with that..) and on the other side, there were two ladies having lunch together – again, tucking into a pile of oysters with a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket. I remember thinking now there’s another sight you’d never see in England.. (and why not..?) If you are visiting France and have yet to try an oyster, don't let anyone tell you that they're slimy - they are anything but. Loosen the oyster from its shell, squeeze some lemon juice over the oyster and raise the shell to your lips and slide the oyster into your mouth accompanied by a sip (or two) of Chablis, Muscadet sur Lie or Sancerre.. Mmm! Please, no Guinness or Tabasco sauce - these kill the taste in my view. If you are new to oysters I'd suggest starting with No 4s. The number refers to the size - with a No 1 (close to the size of a horse's hoof) being the largest.

We also stopped briefly to look in the window of a cake shop… Ye gods… you would not believe how good everything looked. But there was not an Eccles cake or a custard slice to be seen for love nor money!

So, back to Tuesday… at my new French class this morning, there were four of us – J (a Sarth Efrican woman), L (a young Mexican hom) and O, a Spanish speaking chap from somewhere in Central America. J has been here since April and her husband commutes from Biarritz to London a few days a week then returns here for a long weekend. Think they’ve been watching too many of these House Abroad shows on TV. Crazy. She doesn’t speak a word of French and even if she could, no-one would understand her. She told me that she didn’t do it at school. Her pronunciation is just about the worst I’ve ever heard – worse even than mine! She pronounced vous gagnez as “vooze gagg nezz” and mieux as “my ucks” – think she has a long way to go. I subsequently was moved up to a higher level class and so I've lost track of how J was doing.. I wish her well!

My new group - a mixed class of around 10 - consisted of Germans, Argentinians, Mexicans, a Pole, a Kosovan and me.

Wonder what the French is for Eccles cake?

6. The house

Every summer for years, we'd base ourselves in the same small village that we'd found in the foothills of the Pyrenees. For us it was an oasis of calm and tranquillity in the evenings after the hustle and bustle of the coast during the peak holiday season. We’d stay at a small family hotel/restaurant that had 3-4 rooms upstairs and some of the best French country cooking I’d ever had. Demi-pension (half board) stayed the same price for years: 235frs each. (or ~£23) Later it became ~35€. For B&B and a four course dinner. And this was in the high season in the Pays Basque! Over the years, we became very friendly with M and Mme Landart and after their retirement, Bernadette & Philippe, the owners (at the time of writing), and were treated like family. The first day we arrived each year, the staff would rush out into the car park and insist on carrying all our bags in.

The style of their restaurant hit exactly the right note for us. Forget about Rubik Cubes of Freedom Fries and clichéd towers of designer food with some poor beknighted chef's signature black pudding, with 2 slices of carrot or whatever the latest fad is (on an oversize white plate, natch) arranged by an interior designer with an artistic 'swirl of jus' around it. No, here it was all brought to the table in serving dishes and it was left up to us how much or how little we took. Portion control was a concept that they didn’t understand. They selected what we were to have each evening for the starter and the main course and so over the course of a two week holiday we would work our way through their menus. Never the same dish twice. When it came to the cheese, they would just bring a 2 tiered cakestand-like affair laden with around a dozen cheeses to our table - only taking it away when we’d finished.

No doubt there are those today who would insist that they were doing it all wrong - but curiously there was seldom an empty table. . 

They kept the same staff year on year too and we got to know them all.. Each year, half way through the holiday, I’d go through to the kitchen and give Jean-Marie (their solidly built rugby-playing chef) a bottle of whisky and he, in turn, looked after us. One final evening he offered us a new dish of his to try - Magret de Canard in an Irouléguy reduction. We still talk about that..

One of the waitresses, Sandrine, had a droll sense of humour. They served a home-made pistachio ice cream that I always found hard to resist. Each evening, I'd invariably order pistache et chocolat, or pistache et cafe, or pistache et vanille in preference to all of the other choices on the menu. One evening, when Sandrine came to our table, after taking Madame's order she looked at me with a dead pan expression and said, "Pistache et quoi..?" before bursting into laughter!

Each day, we'd wonder what we were going to have that evening. For the final dinner of our stay there, Bernadette would give us la carte and tell us to order whatever we liked from her extensive menu..

We once had a memorable final lunch there. We'd planned on driving to Biarritz airport in the afternoon for the return flight home to England - and so we'd only ordered a half bottle of Madiran (a great red from the SW). The starter was an Assiette Gourmande which, when it arrived, we saw would have been more than enough but that was only the first course. Madame had ordered a poulet basquaise as a main course and when that arrived, it turned out that she'd been given half a chicken..! After eating solidly for a while Madame started shimmying her upper body like a limbo dancer. She explained she was making space! Of course, by the time Bernadette arrived with the cheese, the Madiran had inexplicably evaporated. She stood there.. looking at our empty bottle before observing with a laugh, "But you can't enjoy cheese without wine..!" We said yes but we're driving in a minute. At that, a charming couple at the next table turned around and offered us their bottle of wine saying that they'd ordered too much and we were welcome to finish the remaining half of their bottle.. It turned out that they were a couple of teachers from near Bordeaux and we chatted with them for a while. It was a pity we met them on the very last day of our stay.

When we started going there (in '91), they used to charge £3.50 for a bottle of their own Bordeaux.. (I know - “and then the Korean War came along to spoil everything!”) There was even a signed photograph of Charlotte Rampling on the wall in the dining room.. Another satisfied customer.

Bernadette would always offer us either an apéritif or a digestif. There is a superb Marc d'Irouléguy produced from the local Irouléguy wine which comes out at ~44° BV.. and it was this that she offered me once as a digestif. Marc is a pomace brandy that's made from the pressed grape pulp, skins, and stems that remain after the grapes have been crushed and pressed to extract most of the juice for wine. In short, Marc d'Irouleguy is a little-known brandy made from a little-known wine variety. Marc can be fairly rough and is often described politely as an 'acquired' taste but this Marc d'Irouleguy was anything but. She'd filled a brandy glass up the the point where the sides of the glass start to slope in again.. Ouf! After I'd finished it (churlish not to, m'lud), we thought it best to take a precautionary walk around the village before heading off home. Strangely, I had no trouble falling asleep that night. Another example of their kindness was when we would come to leave after our annual visit.. We would have paid the bill, I'd have a suitcase in each hand and we'd be saying goodbye when Philippe would produce a bottle of Irouléguy red wine, from behind his back and he would tuck it under my arm with the words, "Think of us when you drink that..".

If this next clip doesn't set your feet tapping, there's no hope for you! Take a break with some hot gypsy jazz guitar starring Dorado Schmitt (guitar centre left) from the 2004 Django Reinhardt Festival in New York:

Time for another quote – and this is an oh-so-true one from the pen of P G Wodehouse:

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

Meanwhile, back at the house search.. As I said before, we’d gone around all the agents in St Jean de Luz and Biarritz, left our requirements and contact details and not heard from any of them. We soon realised that there was no way that we’d find what we wanted in either of these places as the prices were waay beyond our means so we decided to look at Bayonne (only a 10 minute drive from Biarritz) and there we went into the first likely looking estate agents that we saw.

We gave the lady in the agency our list of what we wanted and to our surprise she said that she had just the place for us and, what’s more, that it was in the most sought after area in Bayonne as well.. The thought “Yers, a likely tale..” did come to mind - but we gave her the benefit of the doubt. She quickly locked up and took us there in her car. When we pulled up outside, we saw that she hadn’t exaggerated at all. The stone built house is in what's known as a 30s neo-Basque style - with the added bonus of a forty foot palm tree in the front garden. It fitted all of our requirements exactly. What’s more, it was only a 2 minute walk to a row of shops on the edge of the town centre.

On entering, there was a tiled hall with a polished wooden staircase on the left. The sitting room was square in shape with a raised fireplace in the corner. There was an arched walk-through to the good-sized dining room which had French windows that opened out onto a terrace. The kitchen - which needed modernising - was large enough for a table. There was also a small balcony upstairs at the front. There were 3 bedrooms. The house had belonged to an elderly lady and it needed re-decorating from top to bottom. There was a downstairs bathroom that could easily be turned into a utility room, and the upstairs bathroom needed replacing as the suite and the fittings were all very dated. There was a good sized garden at the rear and a garage. And a cellar.

Having found somewhere that met all our essential criteria so soon, we found ourselves in the position of having to move very quickly and in doing so, commit ourselves to spending more money than either of us had ever done in our lives. No pressure then! We questioned ourselves - was this the house that we really wanted..? There was no doubt that after that first viewing we both had felt that indefinable sense of being comfortable with the house - so much so that we decided to arrange another viewing for the following day.

There was something of a "Mary Celeste" feel about it.. It had belonged to a lady in her eighties who'd died a couple of months earlier and as her children had moved away there had been no-one on the spot to clear the house - even a little. She had clearly only been living in the downstairs section as there was still a made-up single bed in the dining room with a small bag of sweets on a bedside table, there was food still in the fridge, clothes in wardrobes and wine in the cellar.. and walking through the house we felt as if we were intruding on someone's privacy.

After this second viewing, we both knew it was the house for us.. Madame had inherited a fine English mahogany bookcase (over 2m tall by 2m wide) from her parents and it was crucial that there would be space for it. There was. We mentally blocked in all our pieces of furniture and amazingly there was a place for everything. We decided "Yes" there and then.

The kitchen had obviously last been re-fitted around the early days of the Fifth Republic and was in dire need of replacement. The key theme of the house was pink.. (think Barbara Cartland meets Liberace!) There was pink wallpaper everywhere, there were pink curtains and we found later that every shrub or flower in the garden had pink blossom.. The bathroom was a symphony in pink - with its pink bath, a pink lavatory, a pink bidet and a pink shower curtain with - yes, you've guessed it - a pink shower rail. And pink tiles. Aaaargghhh!

We asked the estate agent lady if she could recommend anyone for kitchen work or for bathrooms. The estate agent lady said she knew a Basque craftsman who had contacts with other 'artisans' who might be able to help us. More about this later.

Meanwhile, I started going to a language centre in Bayonne as they provided French lessons for foreigners. I had to have my French evaluated by a woman there and she said that it was very good! All those years of studying have finally paid off.. (ahem) I went back a few days later to take a 2hr written test (well, it was actually a 10 minute test but it took me – hey, you’re ahead of me!) so they could find out exactly where my French needs improving. I could have saved them the time and trouble!

Right, having adopted a suitably hangdog, furtive and shifty expression I'm off into Bayonne to negotiate the purchase of a fresh baguette...

In the immortal words of Captain Oates, "I'm just going outside and I may be some time.."