With the cold weather we have had a pretty quiet time for last few days. The oil-fired central heating is working well (although the level in the tank is falling too rapidly for my pocket’s liking!) but this is an old and rather draughty house. Ah well, on goes the jumper. I have done some insulation between the cellar roof / house floors, but we do need more insulation in the attics. We had a company come out to give us a quote – they pump a type of cotton fibre in to a depth of 200mm. €9,000 ! Even allowing that we can reclaim 40% of that against tax next year, that’s quite a lot. I’m looking at other possibilities, as I really don’t want to use fibreglass. Sheep’s wool would be perfect, but I haven’t found a supplier yet. There are a number of websites with classified ads and chat forums so I have asked if anyone knows of a supplier – so I live in hope.

We hope we have finished the Christmas shopping – just a couple of perishables to get. We had a bit of snow last night, and the road outside our house turned into a bit of an ice rink – a couple of cars were abandoned for the night at the bottom of the hill. This morning the tractors are out clearing the roads, but I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere today.

Took our tetanus jabs out of the fridge last night (before the snow) and nipped up to the doctors with them. A quick jab, and we have to have another one in a month. He also wants us to have blood tests – so we have to the laboratory in Objat and get them done. A bit of paperwork to sort out to get some of the money we have spent reimbursed, and we don’t have our Cartes Vitale (health cards) yet, but we are getting there.

Returning to UK on Tuesday – so hope that all the roads have been cleared here and there before then.

A happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

Joyeux Noël et une nouvelle année prospère

Quite a busy couple of days – for us at least. Tuesday we were in Objat, with two main purposes in mind. We have received a social security number, but not yet got the actual “Cartes Vitales”, which are the ones you present to doctors, chemists, hospitals etc. Judy discovered that for getting a prescription the social security number was enough – although we should get the Carte soon. Although this pays for most of your treatment, it is recommended that you get top-up insurance which pays the rest and will cost about €1,000 a year for both of us. One rather surprising element was that our new doctor had asked if we had had tetanus jabs recently. We haven’t, so the prescription included two doses for tetanus, diptheria and polio, which we were sternly told to take home and keep in a plastic bag in the veg drawer of the fridge, until we took them to the doctor to give to us.


The second thing we had to do was to change my mobile from pay a you go to a contract. PAYG is fine, but here the cards are time limited – even one for €25 may only be valid for a couple of months. The nice lady in the phone shop told me that if I did take out a basic low-cost contract, I would have to have a new mobile number. To keep my old one would involve a discussion with Orange customers services. After a bit of thought I decided that 1. Only a couple of people have my mobile number so telling them a new one wouldn’t be a problem, and 2. I hate talking to customer services in any language. So a new number it is.

We then went to look in the local wine merchants in the town. What a great place. A huge choice of wines, from the really expensive to, and I kid you not, the draught white at €1.20 per litre (or red or rosé) which comes via a baby petrol pump straight into your plastic bottle or other container. What a lot of experimenting we have to do….

Today we had a drive around looking for a couple of last Christmas presents. (By the way Christmas cards are on their way as soon as the lady in Voutezac post office gets a new supply of the relevant stamps). We first went to Donzenac, a really pretty mediaeval village about 20km away.

 Sadly, and not surprisingly, nearly all the interesting shops have shut over the winter, so we’ll have to keep on looking. On the way back we called in at the vet in Pompadour to check that they can give Bertie the jab for his pet passport the day before we hit the Chunnel for an English Christmas – all OK.

When we went into Brive on Friday we had a really good lunch at a very nice restaurant which specialises in Correzian dishes. So you will probably be a bit surprised to learn that on Sunday we decided to go for a drive into the Dordogne and had lunch in an Irish pub. It was nice, filling, food, and it was enjoyable chatting to the owner, but (aside from the fact we were the only customers), it isn’t difficult to understand why Irish and British food doesn’t have quite the same reputation as the French variety. Mind you we may go back again for the quiz night…..

A pretty quiet week – we’ve written all the Christmas cards, got most of the presents, and gloried in the fact that we are returning to UK for the actual celebration, so someone else can do all the hard work!

I am hoping to set up a small business here, doing property floorplans and photography. To help me with the setting up the local Franco-British Chamber of Commerce arranged for me to meet a very nice and helpful French lady from the Brive Chamber of Commerce, whose job it is to help small businesses start. She seemed reasonably impressed by my plans, and was able to explain the steps I have to take – although the system I want to be under is comparatively simple, there are still a few bureaucratic hurdles to overcome.

I’ll keep you posted.