An everyday tale of country folk in deepest Dordogneshire: imagine Jean de Florette rewritten by Peter Mayle, starring Hyacinth Bucket, with overtones of League of Gentlemen and Last of the Summer Wine.
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There are two kinds of expat Brit in France. The first kind is retired, upper-middle-class, patrician, to be found mostly in the Dordogne or Provence, well established for 20 years or more. Public school and university education, very comfortably off thank you on their mandarin's pension or share options, they are to be found discreetly integrating into the prettier villages of rural France. Only identifiable by their UK registered Jags and their Church shoes, they pass unobtrusively, speaking charming Eton-inflected French and ordering wines with an expertise that causes a Périgord sommelier to suck his teeth in admiration. Les Anglais, after all, are the greatest tastevins in the world. The men are tall, broad-shouldered, aquiline-nosed, trim silver moustaches lending them a military bearing, vaguely reminiscent of John Cleese, sporting linen jackets and Panama hats; their wives petite, thin-lipped and copper-bronzed, in Jaeger linen dresses and Pinet shoes. They wash their Jaguars and Range Rovers on a Sunday (owned by who? Tata? Indian? some mistake, surely) and always book a table in advance.
The second type are younger and not quite so well-off, usually couples in their thirties with a brace of young in tow. They are unconditional francophiles, often French teachers, and fit in well, adopting the French holiday uniform of pedalpushers, deck shoes and sunglasses permanently on the head. The children will have French names like Amélie or Ottilie, and Félix or Raphaël, and are being groomed to eat mussels and snails at 9 p.m. like French children. They are unobtrusive and you'd only know they were British by sitting next to them in a restaurant, where the telltale well-thumbed copy of "Rough Guide to France" will be sticking out of the side pocket of hubby's North Face rucksack.
Then there are the people who owned the gite in the Vienne I booked for a week in 2009, the second least desirable department of France after, perhaps, the Creuse, but on the map deceptively close to the Dordogne. The photograph looked fine. In retrospect, I should have paid heed to the fact that they were not affiliated to any reputable French tourist organisation, but they're British, I thought, how bad can it be? We have standards.
It was certainly off the beaten track. There was a reason for that, I later found out - nobody's ever wanted to go there. I nearly missed the half-hidden sign to the village of Royston-sur-Vasey. There was nobody about when I arrived at the exact time I had informed them to expect me. A line of grey baggy underwear was hanging on the washing line. I knocked on the door, and eventually a blonde woman appeared, apologizing that she'd been reading and "Reg" had been watching the Ashes on Sky. Reg emerged, pot-bellied, long greasy grey hair, baggy shorts, singlet, flip-flops. Like a cross between Roy 'Chubby' Brown and Frank Gallagher. His wife, Beryl, was a pinched-faced middle-aged blonde out of Corrie. By the accent from somewhere round Oldham. Or Burnley. Barnsley. BNP country. Gorbals has a theory that as a baby I must have had a terrifying experience with a babysitter from somewhere round there, as a certain kind of trans-Pennine accent can make me foam at the mouth and show signs of epilepsy.
My cottage was dark, dingy, and unpleasantly furnished. But it was late and there was nowhere else to go. The kitchen smelled foul and there were a lot of bluebottles. Because they're cutting the wheat at the moment, they said, which is probably what the French peasant who sold them the ramshackle dungheap told them before he scuttled off to the Crédit Agricole, cackling. We exchanged pleasantries, if you can call them that. They'd been in France 8 or 9 years, and spoke not a word of French. I wondered what they'd done before in the UK, but couldn't bear to prolong the conversation any longer than necessary after Beryl told me - with not a flicker of irony - that they didn't want to go back to the UK as it was overrun with furriners. In the awkward silence that followed, I decided that he'd been either a drug dealer or a professional unemployed. It was as if Frank Gallagher had never made it back from that trip to France. They knew I worked in Brussels. They probably had it in for me already.
They had not offered to provide a meal and left me nothing to eat but a packet of biscuits, but luckily I had stopped off at a supermarket on the way, so made the best of a cold supper - I gave up on heating anything up when I saw (and smelled) the condition of the microwave. Everything in the cottage seemed to be cast-offs or bought from a car boot sale. There was a stack of books (Maeve Binchy, Catherine Cookson - not even Peter Mayle) and DVDs (Die Hard 2, The Grinch) and a huge pile of tourist information, most of it at least a couple of years out of date. A visitors' book was thinly inscribed, the last entry dating back to April said: "Great gite - apart from the flies". Two above-ground swimming pools took up some of the space of the vast garden, which had nothing else to commend it. There was at least Sky TV with 400 mostly unwatchable channels, all in English. I watched something about child beauty queen contests in Milton Keynes and couldn't work out if the programme was for or against. I retired early to bed and spent a fitful night on a wonky mattress, between faded and very worn sheets.
The next morning I got up early, jumped in the car and set off to explore the environs. The "hamlet" was nothing more than a collection of crumbling barns, some of which had been converted. Not a shop, not a café, nothing. It was literally the middle of nowhere. The café in the nearest village was apparently British owned, and judging by what I had seen so far, to be avoided. I found the local Intermarché, which was open on Sunday mornings to cater to the resident Brits, evidenced by the large size and poor quality of the wine section and the cases of beer piled high near the checkout. I spoke French and avoided eye contact with my Primark-clad fellow-shoppers as I presented my can of flykiller, bottle of bleach and scented candles to the cashier.
I drove for miles and miles in search of something French, and apart from one very pretty village, Nanteuil en Vallée, a good 50 km away in the Charente with a preponderance of Type 1 Brits and an excellent restaurant (l'Auberge de l'Argentor, where I treated myself to an al fresco Sunday lunch), found nothing to commend the area. It looked a lot like Northamptonshire, with fields of sunflowers instead of rapeseed stretching for miles. Nothing particularly French about it at all.
The other side of Confolens was a village called Lesterps, where La Fête de l'Accordéon was advertised that very day. After miles and miles of deserted roads, I found a couple of thousand aficionados had assembled from all over France, and even Europe, to judge by the registration of the many camper vans parked in the adjoining fields, to see the stars of the "piano à bretelles" and trip the light fantastic. They had certainly dressed up for the occasion, often in his 'n' hers matching outfits. I am a great fan of the accordeon and couldn't resist dropping in for a couple of hours. I heard some virtuoso performers, although none of it in the whimsical style of Yann Tiersen (who did the soundtrack of Amélie) or any kind of wider world music element - such as Louisiana cajun music, or Eastern European bands. This was pure, traditional bal musette, the sort you get at 14th July village fireman's balls, and each number accompanied a particular dance style which was announced formally. "Et maintenant, tout le monde en piste pour un pasadoble!"
The dancing was fascinating. This was "Strictly French Strictly". Each couple had their own particular dance style which made them stand out from the others. I was particularly fascinated by one couple dressed in matching lime green, whose trademark involved breaking apart shortly after the music had started and twirling individually like synchronised doner kebabs. They didn't manage to stay together for one single dance. I overheard someone ask them, during a pause, why they did it. "Because we like it!" Mr W.Dervish replied happily. The French also seem to have discovered line dancing, which was performed with typical French nonchalance, gazing unsmilingly into the middle distance as if waiting for a bus whilst executing precision footwork. I wished Peter Mayle had been there to see it, he would have painted a scene of rural lunacy, probably with dogs running amok on the dance floor and somebody being taken away in an ambulance.
I returned to Royston sur Vasey, my head filled with more escape plans than Richard Attenborough in The Great Escape. I managed to kill the smell in the kitchen with a combination of chemicals and cigarette smoke, but the bluebottles were proving more tenacious. Sitting outside with my glass of wine, I tried to dislodge one reluctant bluebottle from my arm where he was hosing up my blood from the two neat holes he had pierced. I ended up breathing in so much flykiller that night that I was violently ill and spent a second bad night in the house of horrors, lulling myself to sleep with Scarlet O'Hara's mantra "Tomorrow is another day". Although I certainly wouldn't have been seen dead in the curtains.
The next day I drove West for two hours until I hit the Atlantic coast and was relieved to discover I was still in France after all, in La Rochelle to be precise. The English - and the occasional Irish - were still much in evidence, but in a much more upmarket way, and there were a majority of French holidaymakers in their cut-offs and Vuarnets. I took a decision to up sticks, whatever the cost. I spent a very pleasant day in La Rochelle before returning to the gite to inform Reg that I had, regretfully, changed my plans. He asked if there was anything wrong with the accommodation. Having not yet negotiated the cancellation charge, I lied. He said he would talk to the wife and "sort something out".
An hour later he was back to tell me that they would not refund any of the money I had paid up front. I spent a third semi-sleepless night battling with the bluebottles, who had by now decided they loved me and wanted to move upstairs with me and take turns to sit on my nose all night. I was starting to feel like Pig Pen.
The next morning I was packing the car when Reg and Beryl returned from walking their dogs. She barely acknowledged me, and gave me her best Corrie scowl before disappearing into the house. God knows why, they'd received full payment for the week and now had the place free for the next four days. With nothing left to lose, I told Reg what I really thought about the accommodation. He was less than gracious, even defensive, as I had expected, but carelessly revealed that they had been "kicked out" by the French gite rating system. Hardly surprising. He did at least return my deposit (cheque drawn on a bank in Bury - which was pretty much what I wanted to do to Reg and Beryl) and I departed, taking every last tea bag and tucking the remains of a very ripe Camembert down the back of the filthy sofa. I was £200 out of pocket, but as Keith Richards wisely said, it's the price of an education. That'll teach me to spurn the advice of Gites de France.
It was depressing to reflect, as I drove away, that the very worst of England was now seeping down into my beloved France. They're even broadcasting "Shameless" to the French on a satellite channel. We must be mad or masochistic, or both, to give the French even more reason to feel superior to us - as if they needed one. So when you notice a particularly unsavoury foreigner in your area, speaking no language known to man or goat, with traces of unidentifiable food in his beard and smelling like an old Afghan coat, rest assured that we are exporting even worse examples of our race to foreign parts. If we carry on like this, the French will be paying us to pull out of the European Union.
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