When living on your holidays becomes your life

What I’ve learned now that this new life in France isn’t quite so new anymore. Plus a recipe for slow-cooked pork that would be guaranteed to make one cross woman unsubscribe, if she hadn’t already.

As we skitter through our third year of living here, in this busy village, in this house which caught me by surprise, stole my heart and made me give up a perfectly happy life in London, I’ve been thinking about the things large and small I’ve learned since we arrived. Today, I share with you some of the highlights.

Tackling bureaucracy

When you move to France, people who have trodden that path before you whisper like wise sages in your ear, or, in fact, shout loudly with wagging fingers, “It’s not all 300 days of sunshine a year, with a different cheese for every one of them you know, the bureaucracy is exasperating”. It’s true. You can never be without too many copies of your birth certificate, marriage certificate, and cycling proficiency certificate from 1975.

You need proof of residency, provided by bills from utility companies, to sign up with utility companies. My first brush with this was trying to get a telephone landline (I know, old school) from Orange, who were adamant they needed a landline telephone number for them even to contemplate supplying me with a landline telephone number. Round and round we went. But then I’m struck that many of these rosé-fuelled Cassandras have never been a non-British person trying to negotiate British bureaucracy either. It’s painful, infuriating and exasperating wherever you are. Just as with the house remodelling, I resign myself to it and let it take the time – and the thousand phone calls - it takes. Breathe in, breathe out, keep moving.

If you live in paradise, when do you do the ironing?

I am just a girl, standing in front of a sunset, and wondering when exactly I am supposed to do the ironing? One of the unexpected challenges of moving to the place where you always went on holiday, is that your brain perpetually thinks it is on holiday and this is no good for the state of the skirting boards. When you’re no longer worried about getting your deposit back, it’s tempting to let things slide. There’s always a walk to take, a terrace to sit on, the sea to swim in. And don’t give me the “Ironing, what ironing? You’re better than your pile of laundry” speil. It’s too late for me. One of my joys in life is sleeping on freshly-ironed sheets, and you can only waft about successfully in rumpled linen if you a reed-thin twentysomething. Otherwise you just look like, well, a heap of laundry. So the answer is to set up the ironing board late at night and find yourself a compelling film that doesn’t rely on you being able to read subtitles.

Sometimes what you really want for dinner is fish fingers and oven chips and that's fine

You imagine, before you get here, that every day will hold new gastronomic delights: breakfasting on fresh strawberries, a lunch of pâté and good bread, for dinner, a fat little roast chicken fragrant with tarragon and garlic. And that’s all splendid. But then it’s a rainy Tuesday night and what you really want is fish fingers and oven chips on a tray in front of the telly. Sometimes you yield to it, throwing all fears for the status of your French Housewife Cosplay Certificate Circa 1952 to the wind. There are cooking groups on Facebook for British people living in France. Keen cooks cheerfully post their casseroles and crème caramels, and occasionally their shepherd’s pies and sticky toffee puddings. Inevitably, some self-appointed Dinner Finder General will show up to denounce Goody Smith for her distinctly un-French Lancashire hotpot: why come to France to cook British food? But the heart, and the stomach, wants what it wants, even if that sometimes means eschewing confit de canard for bangers and mash.

How to survive remodelling your house with your marriage intact

They say the death of a loved one, divorce and moving house are three of the most stressful things in life. I would add to that remodelling a dilapidated old house. You never have enough money and you never have enough time. Combined with trying to do this while working and, in my husband’s case at least, travelling back to London regularly, it could tax the most loving of marriages. What I’ve learned is that you have to be on the same page, moving forward together. From the beginning we decided not to put unrealistic deadlines on ourselves and not to let the tribulations of working on the house overshadow our enjoyment of this new life. When the going gets tough, the tough go out to lunch, maybe just for an hour. That fallen plaster will still be there when we get back. And the bonus of taking our time, allowing the process to evolve, is that we’ve avoided expensive mistakes along the way. Whoever would have thought, even for a single second that I contemplated painting the study orange?

My French life

Missing in action

In our first year, when my mother-in-law asked me what I missed about England, I replied probably too quickly, “Nothing!”. I didn’t mean that of course, because I miss my family and friends profoundly. WhatsApping and Zooming are no substitutes for sitting around a table over the last of the wine as the candles gutter in their holders. What I meant is I don’t miss at all those things some British people living abroad fetishise, such as Marmite and Monster Munch, Tunnocks Teacakes and Rose’s Lime Cordial, London buses and black cabs, proper pubs and West End theatre. I’m sure eventually, I’ll get misty eyed over the thought of a Gregg’s sausage roll, but for now I’m looking forward.

Who am I?

When you swap an old life for a new one, your daily existence is no longer propped up by comfortable habits and the ease of familiar structures, or the gentle rhythms of a long-established life. It took me two years to relinquish my Royal Horticultural Society and Royal Academy memberships, even though I knew I would seldom use them now. They were so much part of the life I once had and how I saw myself. You lose yourself for a while, sloughing off your old existence and building a new one. Slowly, you find yourself again. You ease yourself away from the persistent background feeling of being adrift, lose those New-Girl-At-School anxieties. You find your friends. You find your feet. One day, you wake up and realise it’s all going to be fine.

Sunset over Marseillan

Porc au fenouil et au citron

Slow-cooked pork with fennel and lemon

This is a great, big generous dish with pork so tender, you can carve it with two forks. The sprightly addition of fennel and lemon enlivens the richness of the meat. Like many slow-cooked dishes, it improves if it’s served the day after you make it.

I serve this on one big platter, over a mountain of tagliatelle which absorbs the sauce from the meat beautifully. I do this trepidatiously, as I once shared a recipe here for something with a mild Italian accent and I got a very cross email from some American woman living in Italy saying: “Stick to French food! Unsubscribed!” Perhaps she hadn’t had her grappa that morning, I don’t know.

The truth is, there are Italian influences on food in the South of France. In this region, there’s been a large Italian community in Sète since the Nineteenth Century whose influence on the city’s food culture is profound, from the famous tielles sétoises (octopus pies) to macaronade, the stew made with beef and pork in a rich tomato sauce, once served with macaroni (hence the name), though now more likely to be served with penne. We eat quite a lot of pasta down here, and some of it is most definitely French.

Serves 6