From winter and endless bureaucracies … into spring
When last I wrote, I had just been welcomed to glorious if tiny C at its Repas des Ainées. Eating, drinking and cabaret – that’s the way to enter happily into old age. Take note.
| The day my everything arrived. |
It grew distinctly colder after that. I became very grateful to my newfound friends – Australian-born N and her husband M, who just love to help. He got my heat pump going just in time, really, and I was able to watch the snowflakes fall outside my window one day with some appreciation of its beauty. Just enough to look rather like a Christmas card, but not enough to hamper movement much. Unless you live in the Alps, or Haut Languedoc, where apparently all sorts of alerts were being announced and
whole villages were being cut off for days.
Sadly, it was only the beginning of the story of the heat pump. This was noisy, and, I was assured by my neighbour, always had been. I would muse to myself at night as to just how to describe the noise. A major international airport is perhaps not very original, but you get my drift. It would also come and go, so it was difficult to turn it into white noise for psychological and sleeping purposes. On the other hand, I wasn’t cold. But on yet another hand, the enormous machine grinding away in my garage/cellar was developing a solid skirt of ice every week, and was also always somehow emitting water all over the floor. There were some opinions that icing-up was normal, but I wasn’t too sure about that. I would turn it off (well, the major functioning part of it) every few days to give it a chance to thaw. I bought a whole lot of sponges (pathetically small unfortunately, as perhaps the French don’t go in for big ones) and bestrewed them about the floor in the puddly area. Risking frostbite occasionally as I squeezed them out into a bucket, I concluded that this was not really remedying anything. The equipment continued to imitate a fleet of B52s.
One day, I ventured up into the attic, where my spare bedrooms are. I discovered that the heater had been, in a desperately confused kind of way, labouring night and day to throw as much heat as possible upstairs where it was least needed. The thermostat up there estimated temperatures of about 30 degrees C. The heat pump, in its increasingly demented way, felt it must maintain Sahara-levels up there at all times, though everywhere else was coasting along at simple comfort levels. I would lie there in bed and listen to the whoosh of hot air hurtling upward, thinking, amongst other things, of electricity bills. I attempted to read the manual – you can tell by this how concerned I was by now (I always avoid manuals) – and various things suggested themselves. Mostly adding up to a desperate need for a technician.
Now, one of the other things I discovered as a newby in a country that doesn’t speak English is that a new language is especially difficult to follow on the ‘phone. You can almost see the eyes rolling with every ‘pardon?’. So I looked in the back of N’s handy local English-language giveaway and found an English electrician. It took two days to get hold of him, but he knew nothing about heat pumps and didn’t know anyone that did. So I found the French for ‘heat pump’ (Pompe de Chaleur, in case you ever need to know) and googled furiously to find anything that mentioned that and the local area in the same breath. There were sites and eventually numbers to ring, though this was an exquisite kind of agony as, of course, we couldn’t really understand each other. Especially when they would ring back later after I had put my prepared script elsewhere. Eventually, however, it transpired that none of these places would do me any good as they were for business premises … until at last someone had some suggestions for places that might actually help. I prepared my script and picked up the phone.
Came the great day, an actual technician and his buddy turned up and tutted over my machine, which is ancient and runs on a CFC-type fluid, which is now banned. So, luckily, one of its problems was not that it had run out of fluid. I’ll spare you the details, but it is now running reasonably well, though one day, I’m told, it will die of old age. What happens then I don’t know, as a new heat pump would be around 10,000 Euros and solar panels approximately twice that. Damn.
Earlier I had had to get the plumbing fixed, so now major appliances are all go.
In the meantime, I received various arcane documents from (I was told) the water board and then the EDF (electricity department), which required some extensive form-filling. Very grateful that I now have handy interpreters just down the street, I filled them in. Particularly as this mail had come with dire threats of things being turned off if I didn’t get back to them immediately. Well, within fifteen days, anyway. The water application seems to have gone smoothly; the electricity people decided they were missing personal identification, so I emailed a scan of my passport. Then had to phone in case an email wasn’t what they wanted. I was told that was fine, but I expect the test of everything is whether I continue to have power ….
I mention the email because ordinary mail is a problem here. Depending on the weather and any number of other contingencies, letters can take anywhere between two to eight days to arrive. Getting the insurance sorted for the car was a case in point. You could grow old and die waiting, really you could.
Ah, the insurance. Here I confess to having been very slack the last few years in Australia over my car insurance, a fact that has come back to bite me here. It is not enough, apparently, that I was insured for around ten years previously with nary a blemish on nor claim to my name. Nor that the police give me a similarly exemplary record for that and subsequent years. The company that insures my house insisted at first that my insurance cost would be at least 1200 Euros ($1600 AUD), which is more than a quarter of what I actually paid for my very cute little Twingo. And that figure would not even give me full coverage. N and I agreed this wouldn’t do. After I pointed out ad nauseum that I have endless proofs of my driving reliability if not of an insurance record, my agent considered reducing the figure to about 800 Euros, though this would be minimal coverage while the 1200 Euro figure could now perhaps entail proper coverage. My shady insurance history, you see, meant that they just had to treat me as though I was a new driver.
I staggered off to Insurer No. 2, where I was told that, while they would be happy to fully ensure my car for 621 Euros, I would need to go to the Sous-Prefecture for some document to say I had applied for some sort of verification of my licence. I trotted off to the S-P, but they looked at me as though I was mad, and then when I had explained, as though the insurance company was mad – because such a document is not obtainable until one has been to the authorities for one’s residency permit (see below) and until one has proof of having lived here for four months.
The impossibility of complying melted no hearts at the premises of Insurer No 2, sadly. I was reminded of stories of people trying to get a working visa in France, but not being able to unless they had an employer, but not being able to get an employer because they didn’t have the right visa. This is a private sector insurer, but has clearly been inspired by the logic of bureaucracy here.
Anyway, don’t tell anyone, but what I did was this. Insurer No. 2, before everything fell so spectacularly in a heap, did print out an estimate for me. Thus I was able to scan and send this back to Insurer No. 1, whose price then plummeted, and now I have full insurance for around 600 Euros. Which, I think, will fall as my reliability as a grownup driver is proved over successive years. I will try to run over no French people.
Perhaps I should just say here that I did expect a lot of pfaffing around, and that I expect this is what happens when anyone relocates to another country. I wonder if there’s a prize at the end.
But is this all? No, of course not.
N and M also found me my car, via a sort of localised Ebay called Le Bon Coin. They were nonplussed that I jumped for joy and bought the first one we looked at – but there it was, reasonably cheap, only five years old, tiny and not a thing wrong with it. Its owners were selling because they were expecting twins, and this car is so small it could just about fit into a matchbox. Given the width of medieval streets, believe me – a small car is a good thing. Incidentally, did I mention how nice it is to live in an area where 4x4s are a rarity? Well it is.
Aside very rapidly acquiring insurance (which gives you a carte verte, the requisite part of which is attached in a little plastic container to your window, like our old registration stickers), upon buying a car you have to get what’s called a carte grise, which is sort of proof of everything to do with the sale. This also has to be done through the Sous-Prefecture in Beziers, though country folk like me get to do this via the Mairie (town hall) rather than trekking into the Beziers queue.
There will be no surprise to anyone to know there is much signing of documents, along with proof of ID etc etc. Which we did, with N and M accompanying me so they could do the joshing with the vendors that you always have to do at times like these. I took everything into the Mairie, where the earnest young women went through everything with an anxious and slow pains-taking. The mail then took its inordinate time, and eventually a letter came back from Beziers which said (sigh) there was a problem. Apparently the young woman vendor had forgotten that actually it had been her father who had bought the car in the first place, and he was down officially as an owner along with her good self.
So I sent the whole dossier off to the address of her father, given me by email via her partner. Eventually it came back again, and I trotted triumphantly up to the Mairie. The young woman went through everything very slowly again … whispering under her breath as she ticked everything off. Désolée! One of the signatures (the dad’s) had been missed out!
I emailed again, got the co-vendor’s phone number and worked out a long and cunningly worded text that would, I sincerely hoped, encourage him to come to me to sign rather than make me go off into the unknown on the wrong side of the road. Which is something, you know, to make a girl nervous. Bless him, he offered to come over, came last night, and it seems all is now well and the documents are back in the post bound for the Sous-Prefecture.
Always assume nothing will work out the first time, and you may occasionally have a pleasant surprise. My advice to you.
In the meantime, a combination of my own lack of confidence and a certain level of unhelpful tension in N and M after I took them for a drive has meant that I decided some lessons may not go astray. Yes, I’ve been driving for twenty years, but not on this side of the road, and never in an area I don’t know at all. Apparently I have developed a bad habit of over-using the clutch.
Luckily, my driving teacher lives over the road from N and M. I call that well organised.
So that’s done. I have taken myself to lovely Pezenas a couple of times now, and frequently to Servian where the supermarket is.
I have also bought a GPS. This is an interesting thing, but very useful. It does have its own personal quirks, though. Apparently, after you’ve used it to go to a particular place a couple of times, it decides you have no more use for voice directions, beyond ‘you have arrived at your destination.’ Also, it will liven things up by taking you home via the tiniest country roads with no explanation, until you can finally relax having glimpsed the local manor house, at last, just up ahead.
And of course my life is now happily full of my own objects, though why I packed so many books is something I really need to ask myself. It took surprisingly little time for my everything to arrive – six weeks – though there was the usual comedy of errors. This time caused, I think, by the driver’s of the truck not being local. I discovered, as a consequence that postcodes are not necessarily unique to one’s village. My poor deliverers went to the wrong village due to misunderstanding what a postcode meant, and of course found a street with an identical name to the one that passes my garage. I got several phone calls during the morning by these poor men, insisting they were there, while I insisted they weren’t. ‘We’re by the church’ they would say, and I would say ‘But why?’ Anyway, enough said. I now have everything of any value (material and sentimental) to me, and nothing broke along the way.
One last thing. Residency was mentioned above, and this is part 2 of the visa process. What you are supposed to do, probably to make things easier for the OFII (no I don’t know what that stands for, though French and Immigration may be part of it), is send off your basic form and id the minute you set foot in France. I, of course, didn’t, having been distracted first by Paris and then by other stuff (see above). I had some notion that that should take place sometime in my first three months here, but had misremembered instructions. I suddenly realised what I should already have done, and emailed the form etc off to N to print out (having a friendly scanning and printing person is a very useful thing and has basically saved me possible mental breakdown). There ensued some tension, unfortunately, because N decided my ignominious departure back to Oz was imminent, because I had not followed directions directly, and that I should have included all sorts of other things in the initial letter to the OFII than I had. This bit though, I had got right. As I explained, but I think what has been proved is that official documents are confusing even to the locals. Anyway, I have sent off the form and photocopied id and have now got my receipt, which is part one of this particular process. Then they contact me for an interview or something – this is scarier as I don’t know if they will contact me by email or by phone (email address is in my handwriting, which has occasionally been misread by people at crucial times). And the blurb does say I will be contacted within three months of my arrival in France, so I do hope they look at all the dates carefully as I now have 2-3 weeks before that time is up.
So folks, you may see me back sometime soon, gearing up to starting the whole process again.*
Oh, incidentally, I now also have all my stuff from Australia – with no breakages! See – sometimes things go right, and if you are always expecting the worst then it just makes the good news better!
Not surprisingly, an attempt to get my new printer-scanner to link itself to the Livebox is not going well. I have ordered a disk reader thing to plug into the laptop in the hopes that this will fix the problem. Having already taken several days watching it not install itself, I think I should take up Zen. It wouldn’t hurt.
Anyway, I’m warm, everything is still working except for the printer, and Spring seems to have come early. Next week I’ll get the aerial fixed and see if I can understand French TV. The local Prunus trees are having their brief bloom all over the countryside, and vignerons and vine workers are dropping by the serried rows, tweaking and digging ready for the growing season. There is expectation in the air.
I’m told that, with a pressing shed just down the road and another wine maker further up, the gutters are due to run with overflow around August or so, with a sour savour of new wine in the air. I suppose there will also be the sound of great vats and presses. I probably shouldn’t actually line up the bottles at the bottom of the road.
There are falcons or hawks perched on fences, and an owl that lives in a tree over the road. This tree belongs to the great mansion that used to be a vigneron’s dwelling, with a view of what was once probably its own estates. No more, though. Now it’s owned by a prosperous pharmacist from nearby S, who is having the roof and walls fixed as I write. Perhaps the family will actually come to live there. They will be able then to more closely oversee the activities of the tenants in the row of little houses that they own nearby. It’s hard not to think of cottages and serfs. It is fitting that locals call the mansion ‘le chateau’, though this is mostly because this is the closest thing little C has to a castle.
In the meantime, Monsieur G, who lives between me and the chateau, continues to chip away at the renovations on his little house. This should take him another twenty years, I estimate. He is a very nice, round man, and we wish each other ‘bonne journee’ several times a week when the baker’s van comes. There’s also M. V who also buys his baguette from the busy woman in her quilted jacket, and a courteous and convivial group we make, too. Courtesy is what you do, around here.
When all of the paperwork is over, life should slow to a gentle and nurturing pace, broken only by jazz and movie nights and brisk walks to the local villages or to the top of little hills where the views are breathtaking. I’ll finish taking out the spiky things in the pots on my terrace, and replace them with herbs and flowers. Maybe take the odd trip by Twingo.
I went for a walk the other day, and with Spring on the way various plants and flowers are taking turns to pop up. And wildlife too. There’s a very strange loony-tunes bird who did a visible double-take on seeing me and then did a perfect imitation of a cartoon (picture long legs and a round body) zig-zagging along the road in front of me. Aww.
* I’m still here, of course.