21. Farewell to the gite

I’m glad my stay in hospital is behind me.. I’ve just got to go back on 28th January for a final check-up. The staff were really friendly and a cut above the staff in NHS hospitals.. (in my experience)

I remember going to visit my Mum who'd been taken into the Accident & Emergency (A&E) Unit at a NHS Hospital (that shall remain anonymous) in 2006. As I arrived, an ambulance was parked outside the entrance to the A&E Unit and its crew were cleaning out the inside of it – one of them was holding a bloodied stretcher that looked like it had come from a chainsaw massacre while the other chap was hosing the blood off it. I wouldn’t have minded but this was in the entrance to the A&E Unit and everyone walking in or out had to walk through these pools of bloody water..!! I couldn’t believe it..!

1st February 2008. We’d settled on 1st February 2008 with our Hereford-based removals company as the date for the delivery of the bulk of our possessions which had been in storage since the summer of 2007. The New Year came and went and as we neared February the last few jobs in the house neared completion. We had to seek permission from the Town Hall to block the traffic in the road while the removals lorry was unloading.

On the day, we were at the house at 7.15am ready for the removals lorry which was expected at 8.15. We turned the heat on and waited. We cordoned off a part of the avenue with some barriers that the council had kindly dropped off for us. I was half expecting a call from the lorry asking me to direct them here but nothing. Madame was getting increasingly agitated as the witching hour approached with still no sign of them.

At 8.15 I was pacing up and down outside when suddenly the big lorry turned into the avenue on the dot of quarter past.. (with the “Dambusters March” playing in my head!) The driver was the same chap who’d moved us from the cottage into their storage facility in Hereford - so we knew him. Anyway, he and his mate soon got cracking and despite regular pit-stops for cups of tea on the hour every hour (unlike our Basque boys!) they soon had everything unloaded. Where did all these boxes come from I asked myself..? Boxes and still more boxes appeared. I opened one and found they’d packed half a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits we’d left out for them to have with their tea in the cottage five months earlier. I resisted the temptation to offer them to the men..

We managed to position most of the boxes in the right rooms and then we went back to the gite where we were staying for our last night. It was reassuring to see that our old things had emerged safe and sound not only from storage but also the long trip down. I was desperate to read a book other than "Out of Africa" - great though that is.

The next morning we were up early to fetch the rented camionette (light van) from nearby Ustaritz which we were going to use to transport all our things from the gite to the house.. In the end this evolution took 2 trips. We said our final goodbyes to Monsieur and Madame D who in turn invited us for a coffee in a few days time. Then we returned the van and headed off to the house. In the meantime, the last touches were being applied to the kitchen and the bathroom.. When we’d finally created a bit of space around the sofas, we opened a bottle of champagne that a friend from work had kindly given us - with a few bits of smoked salmon.. It felt good to be reunited with all our things again.

On the Friday morning, our new TV was delivered and connected up. We’ve now got hundreds of channels of TV from around the world – including Al-Jazheera which I don’t think we’ll be watching. They also brought round the new dryer and fitted that on top of the washing machine.. Before long Madame had most of our stuff put away and we were starting to see the walls again.

On the Saturday morning at about 8am I was putting together Madame’s old armoire (wardrobe) when I tripped over a piece that I’d put down on the floor and I went down like a sack of spuds - a sack of pommes de terre doesn't have the same ring to it does it? I landed on top of the attachment fittings for the electric radiator which hadn’t been put back up and whose edges were razor sharp. On getting to my feet I found I had a sliced cut across the back of my fingers on my right hand (across the first joint) which I hardly felt but then they suddenly started leaking blood.. Madame patched me up as best she could with what we had to hand and then I drove into town to find a pharmacy that was open because here in France, pharmacists will dress a wound for you as well as - here's a surprise - identifying edible from non-edible fungi.

When I found one, the woman took one look and said “’Opital!”.. When I got there I was whistled through to the Urgent Dept and where we found to our astonishment that the doctor there was a young Welshman.. His parents live here for six months and the other six months they spend in Welsh Wales so he grew up speaking French.. I had my hand x-rayed in case some foreign body had got into the cuts and I got a tetanus jab.. and they tied my hand up like a parcel and said no work for you this weekend. A result!

However, after a few idle minutes though, I started carrying on with the million and one jobs that needed doing, of which one of the most time-consuming was changing 20+ plugs on everything electrical from the familiar old British 13 amp to your basic untrustworthy foreign jobbies.. (I jest) And so the days of that week passed.. each day we’d open a few more boxes and put things away, downstairs in the basement or out in the garage to go to the dump.

One morning we went to the gite for the coffee as promised.. and as 12 o'clock approached Madame D brought out a few nibbles.. then it was time for an 'apero'.. at which point Monsieur D came in from the farm - then a bowl of soup appeared.. next minute, there's a roast farm chicken on the table, wine glasses, and we're having a real farm lunch.. cheese.. then a tarte and then coffee and a glass of Basque liqueur.. When we finally came to leave, they presented us with a porcelain Basque pattern coffee service.. Words failed me at this point. They are two of the most generous people I've ever met - we'll never forget them.

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!

19. The Work Starts

At this point the diary entries that I wrote during the autumn of 2007 came to a grinding halt. I now have to resort to memory to cover the 18 month period down here from December 2007 to September 2009.

As you might imagine, the pace of events became a lot more hectic as the date for the completion of the house purchase approached.

One subject that rapidly took centre stage was the finance. I’d had an endowment policy with the Prudential – a solidly Scottish company (or so I thought) – and the plan was to surrender it to part finance the house purchase. I quickly discovered (to my horror) that the ‘Pru’ used a call centre that, handily for us (!), was based in the Indian sub-continent.. aagghh! At this point, I started to feel more than slightly vulnerable as we had no communications in the gîte, apart from a ‘pay as you go’ mobile phone..Otherwise, we had to walk up to the telephone kiosk in the village and for email, all we had were the facilities of an internet café in Bayonne 10kms away - during normal shop opening hours. So - not handy.

The subject of house finance rapidly turned into my worst nightmare when I requested the Pru in the sub-continent to transfer our funds to an account we’d opened with an offshore savings bank in the Isle of Man (IOM). This they did but, crucially, they neglected to annotate the transfer with the details of our IOM account with the result that the IOM bank sat on it for a while before returning the money to India – an action which caused me many sleepless nights.

Bizarrely, they then left a message on my mobile to say that as they had no details of the target account they’d returned the funds to India - so they clearly knew whose funds they were. Why oh why didn't they call me before bouncing the funds back to India...? All of this was calculated to have me tearing my hair out.. I would lie awake at night in the wee small hours, literally going hot and cold, totally consumed by the fact that neither the IOM nor the Pru in India could tell me exactly where our much-needed house funds (aka our life savings!) were in the international electronic soup that lay between them.. and all the while this was going on, the non-negotiable house completion date was fast approaching and the pound/euro rate was accelerating downhill into unknown territory with all the speed of a grand piano pushed down a lift shaft!

Now imagine, if you can, calling the IOM or India on a “pay as you go” mobile and being held in a queueing system waiting to locate someone responsible at either end who could do something about the foul-up.. We did manage to track down the funds in the end and have then safely re-directed to the IOM but it took some time before my stress levels returned to normal.

Between the initial signing of the Compromis de Vente and the Acte de Vente (completion) being signed 3 months later, Ye Olde half timbered Pound Sterling started to nose-dive in value against the euro and we just managed to convert our house fund into euros at a reasonable rate before transferring it all across to our euro-account in France. With only days to run, our bank in St Jean de Luz then had to prepare a certified banker's cheque for the full amount for us to present to the Notaire on completion day. It really was a close-run thing and so it was just before Christmas 2007 that we convened at the Notaire’s office to go through the paperwork line by line before finally, miracle of miracles, the Notaire handed us a large jangling bunch of keys..

Afterwards, we drove down to St Jean de Luz to celebrate the house purchase with lunch and a well-deserved glass of champagne overlooking the bay. We’d done it! P-h-e-w...

Time for a break with a spot of slide guitar.. and some stunning scenery from the now-legendary Route 66:

We’d already made contact with Peio, our friendly Basque kitchen fitter and he’d put together an excellent plan for our kitchen as well as putting us in touch with other local Basque ‘artisans’ to tackle jobs like the walls, painting, plastering, tiling, plumbing and the electrics. His Basque Mafia (as I called them) contacts extended over the border into the Spanish Basque country from where he had a Spanish Basque mate who would cut, supply and fit the green granite worktops for the kitchen at an extremely competitive price.

Within a day of completing the purchase, we had the house full of Basque artisans all working as I’ve never seen tradesmen work before. Bear in mind that this was the week before Christmas, it was pitch dark at both ends of the working day and, in line with standard French practice, all the light fittings had been removed by the previous occupier (bare wires sticking out of the walls) and the fabric of the house was stone cold. My first priority was to rig up some emergency lighting so that we could see what we were doing.

Meanwhile, Bayonne was quietly girding its loins ready for Christmas. We had Christmas in the gîte and despite it being not that comfortable, the sight of a large jangling bunch of keys kept our spirits up..

In the meantime, our team set to with a vengeance. Basque was the lingua franca and they only spoke French when Madame or I spoke to them. The painter (in his late 60s) was a real find.. he’d turn up at 7.30am, drop his tools off, switch the electric radiators on and then he’d nip up the avenue to the café on the corner for a quick caffeine fix before returning to start work at 7.45.. He would then work straight through until 5pm without stopping. He took Christmas Day off but at 7.45am sharp on Boxing Day (26th Dec) he was back at work. (Imagine this in the UK!) I’d often ask him if he would like a coffee or a hot chocolate but he’d always decline the offer. I went round the house removing all the numerous picture hooks, mirrors and wall fittings while he stripped the blessed pink wallpaper off. Most of the ceilings had quite extensive cracking of the plaster. He just got his head down and started in the living/dining room and appeared totally unfazed by the magnitude of the task before him – filling in cracks and fissures in the walls, and then sanding them smooth before tackling the cracks in the next ceiling.

Meanwhile, the tiler-cum-plasterer (another Basque in his late 60s) was revealing himself to be another master craftsman.. He started work in the out-dated kitchen by ripping out all the old appliances, units and sinks and then he attacked wall tiling with what looked and sounded like a road mender’s pneumatic drill. The kitchen soon resembled a Beirut film set as the floor filled up with chunks of plaster, brickwork and the air was thick with dust. The pristine design for our new kitchen that Peio had created for us on his PC screen seemed a million miles away. The tiler/plasterer started peeling back the paper on the ceiling as it needed re-papering. However, it soon appeared that the paper was actually holding the ceiling up and so he recommended that he put a false ceiling in. After we’d okayed it, the next morning when we visited he’d singlehandedly put up the supporting framework for the false ceiling and he was already busy attaching the plaster board.

Meanwhile the painter was working like a dervish and had made a beautiful job of repairing the cracks in the living room ceiling.

When the electrician appeared, it turned out that he was Madame D’s son from the gîte! It’s a small world in the Pays Basque. Soon he’d channelled the walls for the additional wall lighting and extra power outlets that we wanted.

The kitchen fitter had brought all the kitchen components in from the garage and had started assembling everything. The painter had finished the kitchen and had repaired the cracks in the bathroom ceiling, the landing ceiling and the hall ceiling. He’d also put the undercoat on in the bathroom and was now filling in the thousand and one little holes and cracks in the hall, stairs and landing. What a worker - he was unstoppable.. He’d arrive at 7.30am in time for a quick coffee and then off he'd go to work..

As I write, it’s just going dark (it’s 5.50pm) and the wind is getting up – every now and again you hear a bang as a gust of wind rattles the shutters. It’s been very blowy all day – the weather forecast yesterday was for 70mph onshore winds. I’d’ve liked to have gone down to the sea front at Biarritz to see the big rollers coming in but that will have to keep for another day.

Soon, many walls had been replastered, floor tiles had been laid, new ceilings fitted and skimmed with plaster, light fittings installed, kitchen units built and gradually it became clear that there was more work behind us than in front of us.

This was the first time we’d been involved in a total refurbishment of a house from top to bottom and it was very rewarding to watch it all gradually coming together exactly as we’d imagined it.

The bathroom was the last room to be attacked and it was blitzed! The noises coming from upstairs were indescribable as our tame tiler set to with a vengeance and his trusty four foot long pneumatic drill. Soon he’d chiselled off all the wall tiles and removed the bath, the wash hand basin, the toilet and the bidet.. After removing all the rubble he re-plastered the walls..

I was continually amazed at the pace of their progress when compared to British workmen. We’d spruced up the kitchen of our Herefordshire cottage just prior to selling it and our tiler there stopped every hour on the hour for a mug of tea and biscuits. Here, in Bayonne, they never took a break and just worked and worked and worked. After the bathroom had been repainted, the new shower unit went in, along with a new WC, wash hand basin and the heated towel rail and suddenly the bathroom was finished.

I was becoming a regular at the rubbish disposal centre which was fortunately only a 5 minute drive away and the house started to look empty as I took away heaps of discarded packing material and countless cardboard boxes.

Gradually, there remained fewer and fewer jobs to do as we approached completion. We agreed a date by which it would all be finished and so at that point I called our removals company in Hereford and asked them to deliver all our things from out of storage on 1st February 2008 – which was only 5-6 weeks after we’d taken possession.

The house looked perfect and we were delighted with it. The new TV was delivered – followed by the man from Orange who hooked up our phone, TV and internet access. We had a large wardrobe delivered in kit form and soon that was assembled up in our bedroom. We also bought a wardrobe unit from a depôt vente in St Jean de Luz.

All that remained to do now was to start sweeping up the plaster dust that was everywhere but this little job took us weeks to get under control!