Two weeks in…

In the space of four weeks, we have lived in 4 houses.

Well, okay.

We have stayed in 4 houses.

Almost immediately after moving in to the village of Prats de Mollo, we went straight to the UK to meet family. It was a wonderful time of reminiscing, renewing contacts and actively being a tourist. No photo-shoots at a red pillar-box, but the customary trip to Brighton and Stonehenge. I think they will be forever etched in my mind as (as one of my children put it) “a place to buy drugs and a bunch of old stones.” Sigh. What has happenned to our teenagers! Lol. I hasten to add before I receive any hate mail, this was only their first impressions of the two places, and were due to circumstances at the time. I must also emphasise that the two places did receive high praise at the end.

Arriving back, in France, the moving-in boxes still have to be unpacked, there are important items missing everywhere and comments such as “did you notice those cracks before?”

Cracks can become the bane of your existence, particularly in an older house. You wake up one morning and while sipping a cup of tea, suddenly notice a mark on a wall that you have never seen before. Squinting through the haze of blurriness of the morning stares, moving closer you suddenly start to panic and think the house could be falling down until you realise it was just a stray hair on your glasses. Emergency over. But realistically, there is movement in houses and you do find yourself obsessing over tiny issues that perhaps wouldn’t even be considered if you had a modern house.

Or would you?

When we were in our rental house, we noticed in the summer, cracks appearing across the floor on the tiles. Perhaps this was due to the particularly dry summer we were having, perhaps it was something more sinister. It juts goes to show that even in the modern builds, there can be issues. Waking up this glorious morning at 6.30am I was able for the first time in years to climb out of bed, get a cup of tea without banging my head on the low ceiling we once had, and was able to look out towards the mountain view we now enjoy. The wind was blowing gently and the light voile curtains were blowing slightly in the breeeze. Sounds very romantic, and for half an hour it was. Bliss.

It makes the stress of moving and once again (yes, you heard me) miscalculating the size of our moving van a vague memory. We did think originally that we had done a brilliant job of gradually getting rid of excess furniture, either by selling or donating to an older woman who had just recently lost everything. Patting ourselves on the back the Saturday before the big move, and then looking at the size of the van we had ordered, we quickly realised that the items we needed to get into said van would never fit. Not in a million years. Not even in the 24 hours we had left. Luckily the dechetterie was still open and a quick calculation meant that a few extra items were taken over. I hasten to add, they were not for the skip but for a specific area where the objects were given the opportunity to have a second life. Confident in our space calculation abilities, Sunday arrived and we started to pack the van. We were supposed to move on the Monday, however it was only when the said Monday arrived that we realised we had forgotten or “miscalculated” the size of the mattresses. These matresses were the very last items to get into the van, which I have to say was by now packed to within an inch of its life. Mattresses I find now are so much heavier and hence thicker now, don’t you find? Well out of four, we were only able to fit one.

Yes, you heard correctly.

One.

Which meant we were stuck in the very early hours of the morning with three extra large mattresses in the parking space outside the now checked and fully locked rental flat, and nowhere to put them.

Luckily my husband suddenly thought to check with the local Mairie who incredibly fortunately for us took them off our hands to give to the local Croix Rouge. Distaster adverted. Now we wait for the owner of the flat to give us a report to let us know if we have to pay any money to him for the wear and tear in the flat after living there for two and a half years.

Fingers crossed!

MidLife Crisis In France