Living the Dream

It was only when we moved here that we learned our quartier means 'little cold spot' in Occitan, the local dialect. Fraissinet. I had fondly imagined something to do with strawberries.
We have been here seven years now. I keep thinking it is too late to start a blog, all the funniest things have already happened. Then something else does. But it is true that over time you become immured to the most peculiar of habits of, well, even the french, and you forget that you ever thought them strange. You get used to doing everything twice. This is practically obligatory because it's impossible to have second guessed all the all the pieces of identification and counter identification required by the French bureaucracy when you go to - claim health insurance, register a car, sign your child into the local fencing club... whatever. And have you got your vaccination certificate on you? Thought not. Yet you never know when it might be required. You could end up with an extra dose of anti-tetanus or something grosser still.
Do you, in fact, have a vaccination certificate? Nor me. Not sure how either of us have lasted so long.
So our Chateau... not as grand as some but no longer as run down as it was when we bought it. All the cat poo stains have been painted over now and the formaldehyde bomb it was dosed with on our arrival seemed to do the trick with the fleas. A French country house with six acres tucked into a u-bend in the Cevennes hills, bordered by a river where beaver and coypu live, trashed annually by wild boar. Vestiges of grandeur remain like the seven plane trees and the elegant, slightly sad-looking casement windows which you can throw open of a morning and smile at the bright blue sky. The courtyard, once enclosed has a siege-like quality. Yes, we could throw up a huge wooden gate and barricade ourselves in, should we wish. It's an oddly reassuring thought.
So this is the south of France before it turns into serious mountains. We get hot, hot sunshine, cold, cold winters, and torrential storms in autumn. Le climat extreme.
Imagine a huge stone house baked golden in the summer, battered by gales, hidden from the sun for the two darkest months of the year, apart from its neighbours in the crook of the valley, a hill of pine and sweet chestnut rising behind it, well, this is where we live. Chateau Coldspot. Narnia, where the fronds of frost grow ever longer on the lavender drive as the sun disappears behind the mountain.
And then imagine not having any heating for the five years except things that burnt wood. Imagine the wood getting wet so it fizzled pathetically in the stoves. Imagine your bedroom never rising above eight degrees for weeks on end. Picture yourself leaping out of bed in the middle of the night to stick a bucket in the middle of the floor to catch the splosh, sploshes from the leaking roof. And repairing the window with a plastic bag and sellotape because there are too many other things to do to worry about missing glass. This is what we did, myself, le Comte and the two squarking princesses, Princess 1 and Princess 2. This is living the dream, how it really is.