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The first Noël

Writer's picture: Ingrid BurlingIngrid Burling

Oscar Wilde said " We are all in the gutter, but some of us are gazing at the stars". When I think of all the dreamers I have known in the world, whether fact or fiction, we find ourselves in flattering company indeed.



True to the divestitures of Autumn, when the trees shed their old life and welcome in the new, I've been reflecting a lot recently on the nature of human transformation: on what it means to transform, how to do it well and its likely impact on those in one's immediate surroundings and further afield. It is a fascinating subject to address, either in one's own life, or in the life of another, which is what my job is all about.


"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away." Henry David Thoreau


Many people have a common misconception about transformation, believing that it all comes down to a single, forceful decision, but this is in fact far from the case. I think this comes from ignorance about transformation and also from a poor understanding of how to take major transformative steps in life. By 'transformation' I don't simply mean moving house or changing jobs, I mean a change in life that requires long-lasting, permanent belief change. This invariably involves deconstruction of the Self - the psyche and its component parts, as well as all those areas which are related. Beliefs tend to be grouped in clusters, so this means identifying them all and working to void them, while simultaneously developing new ones, which must then be tested, adjusted and run multiple times with matching behaviours in place.


During this immensely personal and intense process, the hardest moment for client and coach is the time when the old beliefs have been voided and the new ones have not yet been ensconced. It can be very a lonely period - there is no shortcut for this and nor can this moment be avoided if the client is in earnest about their dream - and I've seen clients break down in tears during this time. I take my hat off to anyone who is willing to do this. It's a brave thing to do, but despite the popularity of coaching these days, the majority of people don't do it.


Transformation starts with the basic mechanics of how you even aim for it in the first place - which is itself no mean feat - and seeing it through requires more integrity than you ever thought it possible for a human being to have, which can be very tough. It ends with wholesale shifts in your mental, emotional and spiritual outlook, which stay with you permanently. In some cases, this can come across as if you had become a new person, whereby the accompanying change of status quo may cost you colleagues, friends and family - people who you thought were your most loyal supporters and some of whom may have been your heroes.


“A man who wants to lead the orchestra, must first turn his back on the crowd," James Crook.

During my coaching training for example - specifically the Masters - I was told by colleagues who had been doing all the training with me, that the timbre of my voice was completely different, and that I was even standing and walking differently. I had just spent two hours on the rostrum being a guinea pig for the chief trainer, which required me to peel away layers of an inner onion, and they said afterwards they could not believe the change they had seen. Until then I had no concept that the changes I felt inside would be visible on the outside, but I was delighted that they were because they felt so good to me on the inside. I actually felt like a new person, so this feedback meant that I was - finally - congruent.


Back to the erroneous notion of transformation as a single decision: it was 2012 and we were packing up to go to Thailand, seated in an empty house, bereft of its furniture and all the things which had made it our home. We had kept back two deckchairs and a camping table to use as an office, and were throwing out the last few papers we did not need, and getting ready to leave a few minutes later.


As I tore up some papers, a single sheet of lined A4 paper fell onto the desk in front of me, and I gazed at it, mesmerised. As I looked at it, my heart lurched. It was a list of 42 decisions that we had had to make in order to decide whether it was feasible to move to Thailand, and which, if the responses were halfway sensible, meant we could go ahead.


Examples

"Could we rent the house out, and how much would we earn from that?" "What would we have to spend to make it ready for that?"

"Could we find someone to manage the rentals and how much would this cost?"

"Would the rental be enough to fund the house running costs and give us income too?"

"What countries would welcome us and what is the cost of living there?"

"Would we be able to work there and what could we earn?"

"What visas would we need and how would we get them?"


Transformation as an anti-dote to disillusionment

Mark had had a devastating year prior to our going. Due to Government budget cuts, he had been made redundant two times. During this time he lost three stone in weight, developed depression and started having chest pains. After work he would come home and we would sit, drinking tea. I saw him recount his miserable days, with his arms and legs shaking - adrenaline rishes abounding - and thought that he was close to having a heart attack.


I knew in my heart that the only way he would recover from this would be a complete change of reference. Up to that point M had always felt that something was missing in his life. I knew he had not yet found his metier as a professional and wanted to help him do that. I also needed a break and the lure of a tropical country was very strong. I had travelled once to Africa, on an amazing (free) press trip to Uganda, and had found the experience unforgettable. I will always remember the astonishment I felt in every cell of my body when I saw the countryside before me, in all its glory, and was later surrounded by it for some days as we went on a safari to a little-known area of wilderness. As a Brit, you think you know 'verdant' is, but you have seen nothing until you have been to Uganda, the Emerald Isle of Africa.


The other attendees were travel journalists seeking to write features about it afterwards. I was the only business journalist, and set up an interview with the man who ran the safari company, about what it was like to run a business in Uganda - a story that I later sold to Business Travel Weekly. I will never forget the moment, as we sat quietly, on a terrace, overlooking the hotel pool in Kampala, surrounded by tropical blooms dotted with rainbow coloured parrots, and with cool drinks before us. My world was changed by that trip and I wanted Mark to experience the same glorious moment for himself: to slip through that vital membrane on the edge of life and into a new consciousness.


We had not done the travelling we had intended to in the earlier part of our marriage, stymied by a surprise recession which took our breath away and caused us to be trapped in our flat until its value rose - some 15 devastating years. During that time we lost some friends. We accepted it of course; we knew we could not accommodate children in our flat - if you ever visited you would know why - but it was painful all the same. We had hoped that our friendships would persist, as anyone would, but reality was very different.


Moving to Kent was a breath of fresh air as we were so near to the sea and the house was wonderfully large, compared with our tiny flat in the smog. We had good neighbours - they were delightful people, generous and very caring - and we enjoyed their company on more than one occasion most years, but when it came to spreading our wings and widening our social circle beyond that, this was unsuccessful: we invited quite a few people to dinner or garden events, but found they did not reciprocate, did not say 'thank you' or even greet us in the street afterwards. That was hard to bear and a contributing factor to our move.


The importance of death for your health

A psychologist once said to me: "For a human being to be healthy, there have to be lots of little deaths in life" and so there I was, seated at my desk that one sunny morning, in the middle of this tempestuous time, in a pensive mood. I had my coaching hat on, and was reflecting on how I might move us out of this.


I started thinking: we had no children, the dog had died, we had no social commitments in the area at all, and professionally things had been winding down for Mark for some time. My own business could be closed down at any time without too much of a challenge - one of the advantages of being your own boss - and so there was in fact nothing to keep us from making a major move. With each redundancy,M was losing status and taking home less money, with a correspondingly bad impact on his confidence and pension. There comes a point when you have to call an end to such downwards spirals, especially if you have no control over their nature and intensity. I mean, what is the point of staying in that? So it was very much all about finding a new door to open.


Everyone has it within them to overcome some losses in life, but there is a field of devastation into which a human can be forced to tread and which cannot be traversed without long-lasting and devastating side effects, and I sensed that Mark was nearing that field. I was not going to stand back and watch him step into it unawares and without support - that sort of thing leads to a nervous breakdown which is entirely avoidable. M was not in a position to see things this way at the time, but I was on the outside, looking in, and I could.


You should never let your partner go through their struggles alone. Accordingly I felt it was my job to reach in and make a subtle change for us both. I felt it was not too late to make a change, and that if we made the right one, M's confidence would be raised and he could recover completely - and well - and I too would benefit as I was nursing a few new ideas of my own which I needed time to think about. I saw all this as a positive collision of moments and energies merging, and I saw my job as consisting of the need to read them insightfully.


Acting on this, I called Mark at work.


"Don't speak, just listen. And don't make any decisions yet. Just hear what I have to say and see how it sits with you. We can talk about it when you come back from work. OK? I just want to ask you an open-ended question - it's just something for you to think about."


I asked him if he could think of any reason why we could not put the house up for rent and go to Thailand or Bali to teach English for a few years? I said we had some money in the bank for doing up the house, and I had no doubt we could find a letting agent to take care of the place. We were free agents and this was possibly the last time when we could do this as we were still hale and hearty, but in later years this might not be the case. At the time I had no idea of any of this was really feasible, or what he would say, but the question needed to be asked without prejudice - and it had to be looked at in-the-round.


That day Mark came home smiling for the first time in months.


"I can't stop thinking about what you said," he said, stepping indoors, cycle helmet in hand.


'Tea is nearly ready," I said, "....and I've started a list of questions we will need to address if we are going to do it, but it's not finished yet so we have a ton of work to do .."

.

The deal that Mark and I subsequently made with each other, was that if each decision on the list got a halfway decent answer, we could move onto the next item, and so, by the end of the list, we would have already done all the work towards a move. The completion of research to each question, meant that by the end we did not even have to ask ourselves if we were going or not. It would be clear that we would or would not be - simply by the nature of the information we would have emerged by then. In this way a major, potentially stressful decision was made infinitely workable.


Day-dreaming as the sluice gates to transformation

The thing about transformation - and our move to France has been negotiated in the same way as our move to Thailand was - is that it has to be preceded buy what I call 'constructive daydreaming', in which you play and replay various scenarios around what you are looking for, fine-tuning it all the while, so that what you arrive at, as your final goal, is something which is in glorious technicolour and very inspiring to call up in your mind. For this to play the role of a stimulating and motivating force in your life that will drive you forward, and turn your decision-making into a stream-lined and easy process, it has to be utterly compelling on every level and fully aligned with your sense of Self.


“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” Henry David Thoreau.

This requires you to set up - in your psyche, your emotions and your body - sensory cues which must be just 'so' for your dream to be considered a SMART one and something that you are likely to achieve. If any aspect of your dream comes out at less than 10-out-of-10 in terms of how it feels to think about it (and also in terms of its accuracy, congruence and alignment with your sense of Self) - you will not achieve it and so must either amend it so that you can and will, or change it for another dream which compels you more.


Take the man who says he wants to be a milllionaire by the time he is 35 - an example from my coaching practice. This is an exciting aspiration to have. I may ask him 'what kind of car will you be driving?' and he may say 'I am seated in my living room, and when I turn my head, I will see a Rolls in the driveway. A red Rolls."


As a coach one of my jobs during a session is to test honesty levels. This has nothing to do with looking down on the client, criticising them or assuming they are lying - but rather more to do with ensuring there is nothing lurking that could sabotage their plans. If a clent has shown a tendency to appease people in the past, then the questions will be extremely subtle and not discernible to them, so as to stop their brain from saying something to please me, and instead focussing them on saying what they really think. If a conflict or double-bind emerges at this point, I can flag it up gently and we can work to eliminate it, which is all to the good. If a client does not fall into that bracket, the questions can be more open and frank.


In this case I asked the client "So when you turn your head and look at your driveway, how about seeing an Aston Martin there? How would that feel?"


He thought about it for a moment and said 'Nope. It wouldn't feel the same. It's gotta be a Rolls."


On the surface this may seem like a minor materala issue, but it actually isn't. These things count as evidence criteria that you are being a success. They are things, the emergence of which in a person's life indicate that they have achieved what they set out to do. Physical things emerging or being acquired msut all be recorded and avid note-taking about this in advance ensures success.


Why is this? Well, it's because the act of writing requires decision-making about the words you are going to use to say something with - and in doing that you are deciding how it's going to be. There is a degree of certainty which arrives during the act of writing, which simply does not occcur during free-ranging thought alone. Even if you make a monumental decision in thought alone, the further act of writing it down, will quickly enhance your certainty of achieving it, without any loss of the flexibility needed to allow you to factor in any new learing you gain as you move towards your goals. Note; evidence criteria can and should also include family, friends, lovers who you want to find, children, social groups, business partners, mandarins, angel investors and so on.


About seven years into my practice, I did an extensive check on my notes and discovered that those who made written plans achieved their goals and then some, while those who did not (two clients), didn't even achieve their goals, despite multiple opportunities and encouragement to do so, and then proceeded to blame their coach. I subsequently made a commitment to note-taking and a regular review of them a formal requirement of clients in my terms and didn't see this happening this again.


When I work on transformation with a client, they are asked to do day-dreaming (stream of consciousness work) for several weeks, if not months, to elicit all of this information, and every last bit of it is taken into account in the masterplan which they subsequently compose accordsing to a rubric, which I give to them and explain.


It is detailed work and the organised plan which results can span several decades of a person's life. It includes so much information that you can set up an entire business empire with it, if you wish to, but also goes into deep observations of a person's private life, including where they wish to live, how, and who with. It also declares who should NOT be included - that is to say, a description of the kind of people who they consider to be toxic for their plan.


The longest plan I knew of ran to 15 years, and the young woman concerned has so far - 6 years in - been achieving her dream. This is a blissful thing for a coach to hear. She is an anthropologist working out in remote areas of Thailand. I am so very proud of her. She allocates life-transforming grants to local communities in need.


My own plans - I have had several in my life - usually cover around 10 years, but the nature of a well-composed masterplan is that it results in your goals being achieved much earlier. In my case the plan normally spans 10 years but is achieved in 6 years or less. In effect I have only had to work for 24 years to achieve the output of 40 years. In this way I have won back - or liberated 16 years of my life - and that is priceless, especially for someone who has no biological posterity.


This is how we've approached both of the transformational decisions that we've made in our life together so far - going to Thailand for several years and then moving to France. Another factor is the further transformative effects (secondary gains) of the transformation itself - that is to say, the gains you make which lie beyond one's plan and expectations (primary gains). People tend to assume that major life decisions are made on the basis of considering the primary gains that will be made from a decision, but this is not in fact the case.


The primary gains of a particular decision usually have high visibility from the start and so are pretty easily established. It is only when human beings are in the zone of contemplating the secondary gains (the positive knock-on effects of the primary gains) that it becomes clear exactly what route you have to take. Poor decisions get made when this step is truncated or ignored.


Fortunately most people I've worked with do do this step, but in my experience most people do not take it far enough - because they are afraid of finding out that they may have to change their decision entirely, which may hurt, especially if they have been nursing that decision for some time.


On one memorable occasion I was once fired by a client for putting a question to her which asked her to address the very large, white elephant in the room (a secondary gains issue). After the session, it took me 90 mins to drive home, and when I walked into my office, I found her assistant had left a message telling me the contract was terminated. I was a very young coach at the time (2000), and so rang my mentor in a fit of self-doubt and floods of tears. I will never forget what he said to me:


"I am very proud of you because you had the courage to ask your client the one question she needed to hear. This issue has the potential to sink her business entirely and I would bet money she knows this. She has already told you that she is suffering business losses because of it, so she has to get to grips with this, whether she likes it or not, if her business is going to survive."


I expressed doubt again, asking him if I had been too harsh in asking the question at all. He said no and that I was not being paid to ask a client soft, fluffy questions that are designed to make them feel good, especially when they have been getting feedback from various quarters telling them that they need to change - and do so fast. He said I was paid to forward the action, and that this is why coaching is not for everyone.


It was a seminal lesson to learn so early on in my career and his stern reminder to continue to be brave has stood me in good stead ever since.


In terms of our own decisions, another (fascinating) issue is the secondary gains which other people may put to you and which may up to that point have lain entirely outside your world of reference. Widening your peripheral vision to include them may turn out to be a canny decision.


Prior to going to Thailand I made this point to Mark, whereby I am paraphrasing here: "We have a declared goal for our retirement, but what matters the most right now is that we keep an open and a watchful mind on who we meet. When you change your frame of reference as we are doing, you will meet people who are so different from anyone you ever met before, that it will blow your mind.


Our ideas may be blasted out of the window by their ideas and suggestions, and their notions for our retirement may be better than our own - or may augment them strongly. For all we know we could find something there that transforms us both again - for an even better life than what we've put on our timeline now."


This is a universal truth of transformation. Any coach will tell you this. A masterplan opens up your awareness and peripheral vision, as well as fine-tuning your sensors towards influences and possibilities. The orchestration and re-orchestration of ideas, as well as meta-learning - the learning you get when merging your insights with those of others - become very important during this time.


And so it came to pass, and is happening again here, in France. The fine-tuning of our plans in Thailand was very much led by some of the reflections and learning of some of the new and interesting people that we met, and Mark did indeed find his metier - he became a superb and very popular English teacher, beloved by students and fellow teachers alike, and really loves this work - while here in France, we are riding the wave of meta-learning, which is affording us progress in leaps.


On a daily basis we allow an ebb and flow of ideas to enter our thinking, regardless of who they come from and the circumstances in which they are gifted to us. Such is the magic of transformation. It is like walking into a river, and being washed by the gloriously warm waters of inspiration every day. When the waters ebb you see clearly which ideas will work. You get to test them against your morals, values and yardsticks and in this way we find many issues or problems are solved without any actual effort from us at all.


In coaching the first thing you do when someone arrives feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place, is open up their options, on the basis that it is better to have choices than none.

A decision can always be made later.


In our case, we knew we were heading to a place that would give us choices - first Thailand and then France - but we had no idea how many we would have until we actually got there and the richness of the mental and emotional discoveries started to present themselves to us.


Choose your decisions wisely

Since coming to France, we have been learning that some decisions do not need to be made. In France, the more you share, the more you will be policed and possibly unnecessarily. The French like to keep their lives private, and only share things very judiciously. They don't particularly like to police people either, but they will if you force them to.


I realise that of course writing a blog is the opposite of that - it is a platform which broadcasts our lives here - but I am not going to be sharing everything, only those things that need to be known for this to make sense. The rule of thumb is, we find, that you must choose which decisions you are going to make, and how you communicate them to others here, if you even do. We were told this before we got here, and truly, this has been our guiding light ever since we started the planning in 2017.


We arrived back from Thailand in 2017, having discovered that our house's value had more than doubled the purchase price - enough to cover the renovations for a sale and then some.


We moved back in - tearfully in my case as the tenants had moved into an immaculate house but left it with £5000 of damage, including urinating and vomiting on the sofa cushions; urinating all over the walls in the bathroom, leaving a giant patch of purple hair dye on the carpets; breaking the footplate of the washing machine and various other things, and ruining around £800 of garden plants through neglect, which we had been assured they were under an obligation to maintain (a blatant lie from the letting agent, as it turned out). The garden had previously been a quiet little sanctuary and was a scene of devastation when we returned. They also failed to air the place so it stank and had developed mould in some places, which we had to remedy.


Selling the house

We recovered well enough by focussing on our plans to renovate, which included installing a new luxury bathroom. Costing a staggering 10K, it brought much yearned-for luxury into the house, which we greatly enjoyed, and which was to become a major talking (for which read 'selling') point during the subsequent sale. It took us a year and a half to get the house ready, during which prices stayed quite bouyant. M, bless him, painted the entire exterior of the house, balancing 20 feet up a wobbly ladder. I could not look and had to organise being elsewhere in the house during that time so I could not see him through the windows. We visited France to find areas we liked; decided on Charente; appointed an immigration expert; started a papertrail towards our residency there; and returned to Blighty to finish the works. And of course Covid was about to hit.


Below are the pictures taken by Lee, from Phoenix Poperty Services, and which were used to sell the house. On the day the pictures were taken, the light was terrible, and I was worried that they made the house look dull, which it really wasn't. To my delight, the boss, Massoud, kindly accepted some adjustments and so we ended up with a lovely series that served us all mutually very well. This is the beauty of using a family-run business - it's much more personal and you get decisions straight away. Phoenix were like guardian angels throughout the entire process; we could not have asked for a better agent. Pictures courtesy of Phoenix Property Services.


The beautiful stained glass created by Karen Verma of GlassMania in Medway, according to my design, and which married elements of William Morris (the central rose) and Gaudi (the cabochons at the base, representing the earth). The centre of the rose was a piece of striated glass, and the large tulip above it was made of fused glass. I wanted the hallway to just glow with warmth when you come home, and to celebrate the light as cathedrals do.

The view from inside our front door, looking down the corridor:


The living room - always have a beautiful mirror or painting where the eye falls when you enter the room.


Hilariously we had a pink kitchen when we moved in, and it was surprisingly popular, so we left it that way. A good space speaks for itself, if you let the visitors see the dimensions, so the name of the game is get your appliances off the work surfaces.



The famous pink toilet with its Burlington cistern (could not resist the temptation to buy that) which had a wonderful metal pull, and a flush like Niagara - much enjoyed and commented on by all:


The dining room overlooking the garden: the piano and crescent-shaped console with decorative mirror (far left) are in our salon in the gite now, and the sideboard on the right is in the kitchen. Once again, the mirror and drapes drew you forward, so you forgot the dark piano, and the thick cover on it made the room lighter too...


The china blue master bedroom. The large silver mirror was visible from the landing, and would direct you into the centre of the room, from where you would see the Odeon waterfall dresser and mirror. Apart from the bathroom, this was the most loved room in the house with house viewers. In all the other houses in our street this room had been carved in two. We felt this was a mistake and left it to tell its own story.


The light in this room was incredible:


A pared-down version of the Bloomsbury look in the middle bedroom:


The luxury bathroom with its grand Venetian mirror (made of 62 pieces of glass - and a total nightmare to transport - so we sold it to the buyer), retro tiles and octagonal fittings. We even found an octagonal silver clock with the same decorative features as the mirror:


The back bedroom in shades of white, pnk and grey:


A view of the back garden from the yard:


The house seen from the end of the back garden:


Our efforts were very successful. The house sold in two months, and we were ready to exchange by July that year (2020). Unfortunately for us (and the buyer), the buyer's conveyancer strung things along, and failed to exchange until the last day of our life in the UK. By then we had lost three moving-out dates with our nominated removal firm, a house rental in France, and a storage unit in Angoulême. It was worrying, heart-breaking and getting very expensive. We left the UK not even knowing if we had in fact sold the house, which was the polar opposite of how we hoped our move would be.


I had envisaged selling the house and our things going into storage for a week or so in the UK, due to various clashes at the removal firm's end, but at least feeling a healthy sense of closure and satisfaction, and being able to drive down with joy to our temporary accommodation in Aubeterre-sur-Dronne, but this never happened. When the estate agent's assistant called the buyer's conveyancer to ask if he might be able to set a date, he responded with "I'll close when I want to" and continued like this for months. Nobody could explain it and even his own client ended up hating him.


A Parisian welcome

We had booked a hotel for the night in Le Touquet, which I thought would be lovely as it afforded us many happy memories of a past visit there. thought the beach would clear our heads. In reality we drove to France in a state of tension, hanging on to every call, hoping we would exchange and complete the next day - but knowing that if we didn't, I would have to return to an empty house alone, to put it back on the market to try and sell it - again.


We had a horrible trip to Le Touqet.


The train was late arriving, the fog caused us to get lost twice, and the French hotel informed us they would not keep the doors open for us, so it seemed then that we were facing the prospect of a cold night in the car - and it was sub zero that night. We had not eaten for 9 hours and all the local restaurants were closing due to Covid. I asked if we might have bread and cheese or order a pizza to be delivered but they refused to help us. I emphasised that we would pay of course, but the response was still a very Parisian 'no'.


We drove like the clappers, asking a friend of ours who speaks French to communicate with the hotel all the while, and got there 15 mins before they closed. I guess when they saw the state we were in, they repented and offered us a baguette between us, some cheese and a yoghurt each. It was better than nothing, but the unfriendly reception was the tin lid on the apple cart for us, and the following morning, when we were on the beach and had to split up because my back was killing me and I could not walk any further, Mark told me he had been miserable on the beach as he had walked along, and I said I had been crying as I sat on the sand dune, waiting for him.


For me this was one the lowest point in our life together. It was all just such an anti-climax, and that feeling continued for some time, until we got to our temporary accommodation where we were welcomed like old friends and immediately invited to dinner by our then landlord, Roland. That broke the misery for us and allowed us to feel hope that we might find a home here, and we shall always remain grateful to Roland for that. Though I feel Roland does not deserve it, I will spare him a description of what happened to cause the ultimate decline in the relationship, and instead say that we wish him well.


When our things finally did arrive from the UK, we found the removal company (Fontana) had 'removed' an expensive flowerpot (£89) and could not account for its whereabouts (yeah, right) , and that they had damaged around 14 items, including the piano, mostly of them beyond repair. Removals insurance is a complete farce, as it turns out. All the things we packed came out undamaged and intact, and yet they will tell you that these things will not be insured. Anything they pack will be insured up to a maximum value of £40 per box (pathetic quite frankly) and we should never agreed to let them pack anything.


In the subsequent months we negotiated a minefield of paperwork with our immigration expert. With the trail having started a year before with Mark's registration of a business three days prior to the Brexit deadline, the integration work continued with various applications completed on our behalf - residence cards, carte vitale and car insurance, all of them primary requirements for establishing yourself here.


We had hoped to terminate the contract with the immigration expert at the end of our first yearly contract, so that would have been last January 2021, but we missed the deadline due to tardiness on our part, and so this cost us another 2K, which hurt badly - initially at least. On the other hand, as we had bought the Platinum Service, this basically continued, and this meant that they did everything for us, including the utilities paperwork around our move, our installation in our new home, and various other sundry issues. It covers the lot and we were glad of it. Check out www.pleasehelp.eu.


The final handover from them to us will take place on 17th Jan 2022, and then we shall then be our own agents. Our Carte de Sejours (residence cards), Carte Vitale (health cards) and car insurance documents arrived months ago, so we are now only waiting on the land registry document to confirm we own the house we have bought, and I suspect that that will be forthcoming soon. It takes 6 months and we bought it in June.


Interestingly, the thing about masterplans is that they should not be set in stone. They need to be flexible enough to factor in new learning as you go, and it is the latter which can easily hasten you towards an early successful achievement of your goals.


Accordingly, we now look back on our first Noël (Dec 2020) in France and our first Noël in our new house (Dec 2021), and are indeed revising some of our notions. It feels satisfying to do this because you know you are making your plans even better, and so raising the certainty of success.


Our plans include major garden work - we are awaiting an arborist's report as I write this - and renovating the front of the house, which will include repainting the gates in black and gold, and renovating the shutters, as well as cleaning the walls. You cannot pressure-wash the latter during Winter as it will cause the stone to crack in frosts and icy weather.


Aubeterre - a town of cliffs, caves and beautiful vistas

Our temporary accommodation was one of four flats in an old converted gendarmerie. Nestled just below the brow of a hill overlooking a green plateau teeming with wildlife. The entire complex consisted of a 5-bedroom house on one side with a large covered balcony, and four flats on the other side of a shared wall, with their own entrances into a stairwell.


The complex included a pool and, as Roland was an ex car salesman and a real gadget freak, every piece of leisure equipment that you can imagine: two cars, a campervan, several garages full of boys' toys and DIY kit, and a giant inflatable unicorn in the pool.

Affectionately known as 'Les Quatres Gendarmes', the complex was the scene of various indoor dinners and casual suppers in the cold weather as we got to know the other tenants, and a slew of increasingly raucous parties and barbeques throughout the Summer. The other tenants included software engineer Paul and careworker Jenni, who were in the flat next to ours; martial arts expert Tony who lived in the one above, and then Cedric and Charlotte - a chef from a Michelin starred restaurant and a PR specialist respectively - who moved in next door after Paul and Jenny found a house to buy. One flat remained empty as it had not yet been renovated. The large house was occupied by Donna and Phil- an ex-army couple - and their two dogs.


Aubeterre is famous for its subterranean cathedral, built by 12th century Benedictine monks as a reliquary. Boasting epic proportions with giant columns and transepts carved into limestone, and a full catacomb of around 30 tombs, it is completely self-contained, but is slowly crumbling in places, and so repairs continue in order to keep it safe. Well worth a visit, see pictures below.




Our first Noël in France was meagre in that most of the Xmas trees were gone and the only one that we found lost most of its needles when we unpacked it. We had no furniture and only one box of kitchen things. Roland, bless his heart, provided everything, and kept the pool filters running, so I could treat my back and the inflammation in my knees with a strict exercise regime in the cold water. The coldest I've managed to date is 40 mins in 8C in Roly's pool,, and 10 mins in 6C which I did in a lido in the UK regularly during cold days. Warning: do not do this without supervision unless you are very experienced.


I've always been a long-distance swimmer and in recent years learned to handle cold water swimming. My father was a champion swimmer in the RAF and passed the skill onto us kids, and it has stood me in great stead over the years, affording me fitness and joy.


I arrived in France, barely able to walk ten paces, I was in so much pain after packing boxes, and with the most appalling (permanent) cramps in my calf muscles, but I left 6 months later able to swim 25 widths pain-free and able to sleep well afterwards, which was nothing short of remarkable. Considering I would normally swim around a mile, this is not up to my usual standard, but I now have arthritis (right knee) and arthrosis (left knee) so must be grateful for this tender mercy.


La Quotidienne

Much of our time there was spent doing more paperwork, visiting houses in the Charente, where we wished to live, and gazing out of the French windows at the stupendous views to see how much wildlife we could spot. The rest of our time was spent socialising in our bubble and enjoying this newfound energy in our lives.

Cooking for a chef from a Michelin-starred restaurant

One of our favourite memories of life in Aubeterre was an occasion during the Summer, when I cooked for our neighbours, Cedric and Charlotte. Having trained as a Thai chef before I left Thailand (220 dishes), I jumped at the chance to cook for someone who had cooked in a Michelin starred restaurant. I wanted to know how my cooking ranked for his palate.


We enjoyed a lovely dinner on the balcony in gloriously balmy evening air: home-made crispy spring rolls with home-made sweet chilli dipping sauce, Tom Ka Gai on rice (chicken coconut soup with lemon grass and galangal), followed by eton mess. They brought stupendous quantities of wine - since we arrived our cupboard has been getting increasingly packed with ever nore interesting aperitifs so it is now close to bursting - and we got quite merry. They loved the food but it was an expensive meal as we had to get the doorframes widened afterwards....


One of my friends remarked that in her experience the French don't really cook: they tend to assemble dishes which have been prepared by butchers and supermarkets. Most brochures shows stupendous quantities of rolled, scrolled, speared, trussed, and stitched meats, so no labour is required at all.


I am reminded of Egon Ronay and Jancis Robinson. who said they never got invited to dinner by anyone, perhaps out of fear that the food would be subjected to intense scrutiny, but Ronay said they mostly just wanted to eat home-made dishes and enjoy time with friends. Similarly, I found Cedric to be a modest man, who just likes vibrant food. Vibrancy is critical in Thai food, and you would never call my food dull, so I just knew he would love these dishes.


When we were not entertaining, we found that driving through the countryside to shop was blissful as all the roads were so quiet, cutting through gloriously undulating hills - marvellous cycling territory! We would have loved to live there, instead of here, but the prices were 50K higher and so out of our budget. Our situation was additionally challenging as you have to pay tax on a house purchase in France, and in our case, this knocked a further 40K off our budget.


So Charente it was then.


Stepping back in time
When we found our place in St Claud, from which I now write this, it was raining - as it was on all five visits that we made - but as soon as I walked into the (partly medieval) property, and took in the volumes of the main house, I knew that it was The One.

We had long since given up the notion of owning a castle - estate agents told us that every time Dick & Angel aired, there was a spike in interest and a rise in prices, putting this firmly out of our reach (sorry, Angel, but it's actually true...). I wondered, however, if we might find something that had those sorts of leanings.

I knew we could buy land here, and multiple properties, but it was a case of finding something that offered immediately habitable property, as well as something to do up, and long-term flexibility in terms of what we ended up doing with the place. And this place has all of that in spades. You can find out more on the blog post We found it.

The complex comprises 3.5 acres with four buildings: a maison principale, flanked by a renovated gite on one side, where we now live, and a similarly renovated studio on the other side, and which we are furnishing, plus an enormous barn. When Phil visited and he saw the barn, he said "I've got barn-envy" - and I just roared with laughter when M told me this this because I never knew that was even a thing...so funny.


The property we've bought offers many options and this suits us fine. I knew we could live in the gite and rent out the studio, or vice versa, to maximise our income, which we do indeed plan to do, while working on the main house. Meanwhile, the use of social media and launching myself as a food writer and essayist will bring more income in, while Mark runs his EFL teaching business online. You need to think in terms of table legs: you need five clients or five sources of income to be secure so that any of them could fall away and the table will still stand.


Ebooks will abound

After launching this blog, I shall be writing various ebooks and Thai food will feature in them. Having found various local suppliers, I can get most ingredients, but as some are virtually unknown and in any event I want to control the quality of what I buy, I shall be starting to grow my own next year, in a temporary greenhouse.


I've already started a seedbank from various items I bought this year - mainly chilli peppers - but I plan to enlarge this into garlic, ginger, lemongrass, galangal, Vietnamese coriander, lesser ginger, turmeric, tamarind, and various aubergines (pea, golfball etc),and possibly pink and black pepper.


I have made spiced oils for years, and have recently added candied peel and pickled nuts to my repertoire. I am slowly building up an encyclopedic knowledge of curry pastes - or that is my end goal anyway. Who knows - I may even do a competition, in which you can win some!


Steep walnuts in balsamic vinegar and copious amounts of soft brown sugar for a few hours. Then warm the mixture until the sugar melts, and stir until it thickens and the nuts are turning burgundy. Then allow to cool and place into jars. Superb with a cheeseboard.

The hottest dish I ever tried while still being able to discern flavours, was Nam Prik Om - famed in Thailand for its ferocity and something which many Thais will not touch. Containing anything from 20 to 40 chillies - most of which are bird's eye chillies ranking 200 000 to 300 000 on the Scoville scale - being able to eat it will earn respect among those who know how it is made and tastes, but going any hotter than that is pretty pointless.


I discovered that once you reach a certain level of heat, it does not get any worse. My stomach was, funnily enough, not really challenged at all - evidence, I thought, of how flavoursome the dish was - but beyond that level of heat your mouth goes numb and then you can't actually taste anything. If invited, I will not taste chillis hotter than that because then it just becomes an exercise in ego, rather than anything to do with the revelation of new culinary flavours or flavour notes.


To mitigate the heat of a very hot chilli, forget about beer and water - they are useless. Instead have a large spoon of Greek yoghurt on the side, dowsed liberally with lime juice. With this as an accompaniment, even Vesuvian heat will be bearable.

The masterplan we are fostering is to create content that builds awareness of who we are and what we are doing, so that when we are ready to open rooms, or premises for courses, we will find takers coming forward more readily than they would if they did not know us. After the studio is renovated, it will be rented out, after which we will work on the gite (redecorating), renovate the room below the studio as an office for a writers' retreat, and later, after another stage of renovations, turn it into a 1950s style kitchen diner over-looking a terrace on the back of the property and which will run its full length.


This will allow a couple to rent it, with one of them working in the kitchen or outside, while the other sleeps or rests upstairs. or one of them to cook while the other works upstairs. It will then have become a 'maison' rather than staying a studio, and so allow us to maximise what we can charge for it.


During the coming year we will seek the services and support from Woofers (worldwide organic farm workers), and have already got a positive response from a friend, who did the chef's course with me, and a young man who we have known for years and who has stayed in touch with us through all that time since he left home to go to University at 18 (he is now 28).


I would love it if they (and others) came to help us work in the garden - we will be digging our first permaculture bed next Spring, pruning trees, and ridding a stonewall of all its ivy - a massive job that needs doing, and which is not difficult. We found this sort of work to be deeply rewarding: there is something immensely satisfying about doing a day of relatively physical work, and sitting down to a big pot of hearty tea and a traybake, and later partaking of a lo-and-slowstew with a glass of red. You sleep like a baby, get super fit and feel really connected to the earth. Anyone staying here will get bed and board free in exchange for 5 hours work per day, with trips and excursions included now and then for fun. If you, or anyone you know, is interested in this, contact us.


Finally, as I sit here now, looking back on selling a house, moving abroad, buying a house, completely re-organising how we live, and setting up this blog, I have to say it's true: you over-estimate what you can do in a month, and under-estimate what you can achieve in a year.


We are now looking forward to a peaceful and sociable Christmas, with various gatherings and get-togethers in our sparkly house, which smells of pine, clove-studded clementines and woodsmoke from the fire.

Very shortly we will sit down to enjoy home-made chai and lebkuchen, and then I shall prepare a veritable cauldron of white velvet soup with sambals, followed by duck confit, potato dauphinoise and spiced red cabbage, with pear sorbet to finish. All washed down with pineau rose (utterly yummy), and various other local vintages.


This weekend I shall be making florentines and mince pices for a 'kaffee-klatsch' with friends on Monday afternoon; there is a salted ham in the fridge, ready to be boiled, glazed and baked; and I have wild boar on order for the 29th, so for the New Year.


We are blessed bceause the giant butchers on the corner behind our property is run by a Angl0-French couple, so we can get bacon, honeyroast ham and even suet, the best of both worlds, but not at UK prices, alas. The wild boar is going to cost around 40 euros (for 750g of stewing steak). A 3kg leg of lamb is around 61 euros. You deal with it by having these things rarely - and perhaps enjoying them all the more when you do.


We have not had lamb since we've been here, but I plan to order lamb breasts because if they are a good size, they will each feed two or three people, once they have been stuffed and rolled, and simmered in a rich tomato sauce, and are served with dumplings that have been bubbling merrily in the sauce with them. If you sign up to this blog, you will find all of these recipes posted here at some point this year, so they will then come straight into your inbox to try, and will include pictures. Look out for the incredible chicken and veal lasagne. When I made this, we both gave it an OMG -rating!


As I write these last few lines, my heart is happy, but I am also strangely emotional, and there is a lump in my throat. It is something, I feel, to look back and realise what we have managed to do, despite the challenging circumstances that have surrounded us all. We both feel a huge sense of achievement, and gratitude for the love we have been shown by family and friends, both old and new, and which has helped us along the way.


Outside our last garland, finished this morning, now hangs on the gite door, complete with golden baubles and several angels, ready to welcome our guests to a boozy afternoon. It isn't Christmas, if it isn't camp.


And when it comes to transformation and New Year resolutions, I recommend you to start them in Sept, along with the trees when they renew their leaves, and take it one step at a time. Keep it to yourself, do the work of it quietly and wisely, and by New Year you will really have something to celebrate.


Merry Xmas, everyone, and may you stay blessed, happy and safe in the New Year.




*****

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