Making New Friends Wednesday 23rd July

Ready to entertain French style

While I was still in Miami, I had started googling sites about the Languedoc, seeking for urgent instructions on how to plant a potager. It seemed to me that it was impossible to be a good French housewife without the requisite number of fresh vegetables springing to life in the back garden. There was any amount of information in French, but that was of little use to me who barely knew my mange tout from my melons. One of the fascinating sites that I got side tracked to was a blog by a British Languedoc resident who had moved to the area some eight years back. I became enthralled with his accounts of settling in and making a new life together with his wife. Like Jean and I, they were clearly not great “joiners” and although they kept a fair number of British links, they were as happy to get to know the local people and integrate into the French way of life.

I emailed Alex to tell him how much I was enjoying his blog and he kindly replied and said that if we were in the area, to give them a call. Well last night we were in the area so we did give them a call which is how we came to be sitting on the terrace of their lovely home in a little village near Ledignan, sipping some extraordinarily nice rosé wine and swapping stories. After spending a few evenings trying to keep up with high-speed French, it was so nice to chat in English, and although we didn’t bother to catch up on current events, I felt as though I had touched base camp and was more than happy to depart with promises to meet again at some stage.

I am fortunate in that both my sisters-in-law speaks fluent English and Jean and I use English as our home language. This is probably wrong and if we had started out speaking French, I would be fluent by now, but we did have to get around the problems of farming in Africa using fractured Afrikaans and broken Sesotho, so hurling French into the mix could have been disastrous.

We were very pleased to hear that on our arrival in Nimes, we would be met by an English couple who are neighbours of Michelle’s. To be able to chat easily during the drive from the airport to the little village of Braggasargues and to be able to ask all sorts of questions that were cooking in my brain was a very gentle introduction to the country. They have built their own house and have become permanent residents like so many other Brits who have made the journey across the English Channel (or La Manche as the French prefer to call it) and have decided that they can live without fish and chips, the local pub, crowded roads and relatively lousy weather.

Although I won’t be desperate to seek out fellow Brits in particular, it would be nice to know a few folks around here, and once we are settled in and have got our possessions unpacked and organised, we must start thinking about doing a bit of entertaining.