You show me yours and I will show you mine....

Tuesday 24 March 2015

Cold and raining 8 degrees

I work in 'partenariat' with another local agent so this morning I showed her one of mine and she showed me one of hers.  This involved an early start as she is juggling the demands of a very young child and an artisan husband who expects two cooked meals on the table every day.  Apparently the 21st century hasn't quite arrived in this part of the world.  

I get there at 9 am and she is just upstairs, cleaning her teeth and 'putting on her face'.  I sit myself down in the kitchen and listen to the heavy chunking click of the wall clock and the periodic drip of the tap in the sink.  There are some fabulous oil paintings of cockerels on the back wall and underneath, a large country style dresser piled up with paraphernalia of daily life; books, bills, wax crayon drawings, greetings cards, keys.  P arrives in a rush and we climb into my car and head out into the morning drizzle.

The first house is just 20 minutes away and the owner lets us in.  He is wearing a waist belt and had a trapped nerve in his back.  His face is pale and he has lost a lot of his habitual bonhomie.  The house is 18th century with interior exposed stone walls and high ceilings with beams blackened by age and many fires.  The kitchen is bright and has lovely railway white oblong tiles running over the thick wooden slab worktops.  A fire burns in the hearth and the immense TV is showing news of the Airbus crash over the French Alps.  Everyone lost.  We finish the visit in a mood of shock.

The next house is 44 kms away and we talk about statutes.  This is how the work regime is described over here.  P says that she managed to go onto auto entrepreneur status but it was very complex.  Her accountant ('a real cowboy - I met him in a bar') advised her that she needed to cancel her status as an independent commercial agent, which attracts massive social charges (see yesterday's post) and then she would be able to re register as AE (auto entrepreneur).  This she did but when she went to see the relevant government dept, she was told she couldn't re register for a whole year.  As she was still working for her former agency at the time, she was aghast.  The fonctionnaire (white collar worker) pulled out a piece of paper saying that there were exceptions to the rules and one of these was registering as a 'presenter of services', so that is what she became until setting up her own agency and becoming a limited company.

She also told me about a 'friend' who is a banker and with whom she opened her new business account.  Her website provider is in the UK and has to be paid in pounds sterling. Her banker friend was charging her 54 euros for each monthly transfer from euros into sterling in order to pay these fees.  Her calls and emailed were ignored.  She is still with him.  I would have fired him off in no uncertain terms.

My phone keeps ringing with the would be buyers of the house in my town.  I have stopped answering their calls.  Ask P for her opinion as to their case and she says they are in a very poor position and the other agent is sitting pretty.  Oh dear, that is what the notary also said.

We arrive at the second house and it is a wonderful farmhouse so far from the road that I may never find it, and ideal for my road averse clients.  The owner arrives with her son, who is autistic, and highly up on all the facts, figures and dates relating to the property.  The poor lady has had a life filled with tragedy, her husband being killed in a road accident and her eldest son nearly being killed in the same spot a year later, and still having problems with infections and relapses.  S is petite and immaculately turned out, her pale chestnut hair swept into a smooth chignon and pale skin stretched over a fine bone structure.  We trot around the house and I really need to pee.  I ask permission, test that the water is on, and bliss, am left to relieve myself.  Alas, discover that the flush doesn't work.  Come back downstairs and the autistic son says, very loudly, did I notice that the flush was broken. Feel embarrassed.

Stop off for coffee on way back.  P asks if I miss my children, far away in the UK.  Feel suddenly tearful.  Yes, is the answer, always and forever no matter how old they will be.

Back home for very quick lunch and then south to a walled bastide town hanging onto a hill above a torrential and pounding river.  The GPS takes me around many roads, none of which are right so the owner has to come and find me.  His property is surprisingly large, with room after room after room and I suddenly feel very tired.  We go into an overheated salon and he serves me luke-warm coffee and tells me that he has no life, the business is exhausting and he wants to sell and have children with his wife.  I tell him that children are also very tiring and they are impossible to sell on....  For the price he wants, his property is also impossible to sell on.

Drive to local town in search of cake and obtain a very large pain aux raisins stuffed with massive fruits and pearls of sugar for myself and a lemon tart for OH.  Back home in heavy rain and have to do lots of emails.

Spend evening with OH watching YouTube videos of men with very strange West Country accents, fishing off the rocks of the Bristol Channel and I start loading details of craft group ladies into the Mail Chimp software.   Easter is coming up fast on the rails and I have promised them a newsletter.  Three ladies have come forward with articles, fortunately, so I don't have to write the whole sodding thing myself.

Dog is looking very tired after spending last night in the outhouse.  He can smell a lady dog in the vicinity and spent the whole night barking.  At his age, he really should know better.

Mothers Day and Floralie

Sunday 15 March 2015

Cloudy with sun later
14 degrees

Mothering Sunday

No contact at all from eldest.  He will have been very busy making lovely lunches for other people's mothers so can't claim he didn't know it was Mothering Sunday.  WF sent card but didn't bother ringing and he only sent card because OH reminded him.  Feel seriously unappreciated.  I should have had girls.

Woke up excited about going to the Floralie with a good friend.  The phone rang at 9 am and my friend is in tears because her former husband has just died unexpectedly.  She is in a terrible state and is going back to the UK immediately.  Give her a big virtual hug.  He is the father of her boys and although a lot of thrashing water has gone under their bridge, she is still very upset and is going back to support her boys during the weeks to come.

Have tea in bed and decide to go anyhow.  I do enjoy going places on my own - it gives me the opportunity to take my own route, stop to take photos or coffee, and spend as much or as little time at the venue as desired.  The motorways are empty, especially the one going to the vast city to the north which opened three years ago, and is so expensive that no one goes on it.  I do 20 kms and am charged 3 euros for the privilege.  If I tell you the full length is 200 kms, you will have an idea.  

Leaving the motorway, the landscape becomes flattened out and the architectural style evolves into beautiful river stone and slate rooves.  The road rises and the village is perched on the top, its tall church looking out over the resting fields and the distant haze of the mountains. 

For a small village, it is crammed with cars and I have to bump up on a pavement.  I ring OH to tell him I have arrived and he says he can't talk long as he has accidentally super glued his fingers together.  That will keep him busy.  Remind him that he promised to cook dinner tonight.

The flower show is spread out in front of the Mayor's office.  The central courtyard is full of plants and shrubs, with a particularly fine display of roses.  Mustn't buy anything big.  I am tempted and plump for some salvia argentii, some medium height echiums and an interestingly ribbed and rampant prostrate euphorbia.  Hats off to anyone who wants to hold the National Collection of that family.  With 7500 species in 275 genera, the spurge family is huge.  If you want to pop along to Oxford Botanic Garden, you can see a mere 2000 of them

http://www.botanic-garden.ox.ac.uk/euphorbia-collection

a euphorbia sort of like the one I bought

http://www.anniesannuals.com/plants/view/?id=907

  Oh no said OH, it reminds me of death.

I also succumbed to some beautiful resin jewellery and treated myself to some wild carrot earrings and a leaf ring.

For good measure, the show also included some small farmyard animals including chickens, cockerels, a pig with a long shoelace tail, some vocal goats and their sooty black kids.

By roads (almost) unadopted and woodlanded ways, I drove back home through the early Spring haze.  Email from my Russian clients saying their want to speak tomorrow on Skype and that they had really enjoyed their day with us, that it was like a breath of fresh air and that the lady and I were soul mates.  After all the (word that sounds like twits) of last year, they are a joy.

After dinner (OH had unstuck his fingers), the seller of the house in town rings me and is at her wits end.  She said her would be buyer (wbb) would not stop ringing and emailing and what was I going to do about it.  Her other phone then rang and she said, Merde its them again and hung up.   Her phone was then engaged for quite some time and she finally rang me back and said that they were insisting on buying because they had made the first offer and they were threatening to take her to Tribunal to force her to sell.  I calmed her down and said I would ring wbb but before I could dial his number, the phone rang again.  I told wbb that he could not threaten the seller, that it was very bad form and that he had no legal grounds to do so as she had not co signed his offer.  I also told him that he needed to up his offer significantly, which he did.  I then rang back the seller, who still sounded fraught, poor woman, and told her the new offer. This cheered her up no end until she spoke to the other agent who told her that, because she had co signed the offer made by his buyers, that they could actually take her to the Tribunal and force her to sell.  I rang various people and no one answered so I googled it and it appears the other agent is correct.  In the eleven years I have worked in real estate, a number of buyers have backed out but I have never encountered a seller who has wished to do so.  I need legal backup from the head office.

Watched the rest of Metropolis and actually managed to keep awake.  It grew on me but the acting is seriously, and I mean seriously, OTT.

Latins and their fags (cigarettes)

Monday 2 March 2015

Clear with drizzle 12 degrees

Woke up dreadfully early.  The night air was alive with owl hoots, shrieks and twoots.  The constant rain must have been a real bind for the barn owls, especially.  Their soft feathers have no waterproofing so they cannot hunt in the rain.  We have a large barn and I imagine them perching on a high beam, watching the floors and walls and twisting their heads at Exorcist angles, their huge eyes glimmering in the faint light.

Any type of rodent eating owl would be welcomed by us in our loft.  Something is gnawing its way through the ceiling above the kitchen.  On a rare sweep past with the brush on Sunday morning, I discovered a pile of chewed wood chips lying on the kitchen floor.  So far, I have put out 12 packets of poison and two traps and it is still running about.  It has heavy feet and I am not keen to meet it, whatever it is.  All of the packets of poison have been taken away from their positions.  Watch this space.  I really, really, really hope it is not a very large rat.  And his mates.  I know for a fact that they won’t be running a restaurant up there.  (à la Ratatouille, a film which I love)

Drove through the morning mist to the notary’s office for completion on a sale which has taken eight months to get to this date.  The parties battled remorselessly even down to the price of the piano, so I was somewhat surprised to discover that the buyers had come over a week ago, and had been staying with the seller.  They were now uber pally and the signature was over in no time.  The seller, who had spent at least six months cursing the buyer to the far ends of Hell, got up and kissed them and said congratulations.  He then said he was very happy with our services and invited me to take on two of his other properties.  Fortunately I was sitting down at the time, in a strange mock Louis XV chair which has recently made its appearance in the notary’s office, or the shock may have well taken my legs out from under me.

I celebrated by going for a coffee and Nutella crepe.  When I first came over to this country, eleven years ago, people didn’t snack.  They ate their main meals at lunch time and soup or cheese in the evenings and they were all slim (apart from the old guys with the huge paunches).  Today, in the bar, I was not the only one tucking into a sugar based snack.  Some were having biscuits, some muffins, some brownies.  Quite a few were having beer.  How on earth do they do back to work in the afternoons when they have had beer at lunch time?  The locals have definitely expanded and, interestingly, the shops have responded.  I used to be classed as extra-large and so consequently refused to buy any clothing over here, relying for years on the internet with less insulting labels.  Now I am a medium.  Young girls in particular have expanded, and happily show their expanses of white and tattooed flesh on every available occasion.

Another big difference I notice in Europe, compared to the UK, is the amount of people who smoke.  In the UK I didn’t know anyone who smoked.  Over here, I know very few people who don’t.

 image Leaving My Normal iPhone 

The fact is that smoking is socially acceptable in France and statistics reveal that the number of women taking up (and dying from) smoking is on the rise.  One in three French people smoke and take it up in their early teens.  This is compared to one in five in the UK. These figures hide the fact that smoking in the UK is more class and age based than in France.  

This is from the Ash website

There is a strong link between cigarette smoking and socio-economic group. Smoking has been identified as the single biggest cause of inequality in death rates between rich and poor in the UK. Smoking accounts for over half of the difference in risk of premature death between social classes.

Death rates from tobacco are two to three times higher among disadvantaged social groups than among the better off.

Long-term smokers bear the heaviest burden of death and disease related to their smoking. Long term smokers are disproportionately drawn from lower socio-economic groups. People in poorer social groups who smoke, start smoking at an earlier age: of those in managerial and professional households about one third start smoking before age 16 compared with almost half of those in routine and manual households.

In France, people of all socio economic groups smoke and most of them have been smoking since their early teens.  The ban on smoking in bars and the raise in prices have had limited effect.  The dangers of smoking and the scary messages on the fag packets have meant that there has been a boom in 'vapotage' or e-cigarettes which now account for 25% of smoking related sales in France.

Serbia tops the list with 2,861 cigarettes per person.  If the population of Serbia is 7,276,604 million people, then that would mean almost 21 billion cigarettes were smoked (20,818,364,044). If a pack contains 20 cigarettes, that would be a little over 1 billion packs of cigarettes (1,040,918,202). If you subtract the 14.9 percent of the population that is under the age of 14, that would mean the adult population smoked 166.5 packs per person. If you assume that the average smoker consumes 1 pack per day, that would mean that roughly 50% of Serbs would be considered regular smokers (46.5%). 

Back home and do update on contacts and email the suspects (prospects who are not answering their phones or my contact emails).  Feel rather tired.  Must not eat lots of sugar at lunchtime.  OH ventures out into the rain with the dog and I prepare squid, mussels and langoustines for his signature chili seafood ragout.  Go for a swim and there are only six people in the pool.  Bliss!