I took this photo half an hours drive from my house and you can see this mountain from my front door. (I had the photo printed on canvas - not for the speech just to have on the wall but was convenient to use)
Mr Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests
My husband and I bought an old farmhouse in France five years ago. I lived there two years full time and for the past three years I have been living there and working in London 4 days a week while my husband renovates the house.
When I said I was moving to the countryside having lived in cities my whole life, my mum said 'WHY!'. I think why is obvious. Look at the mountains, I can go skiing, horse riding, have a dog, live the dream. But generally things aren't all good and no bad, all up and no down, all high and no low. When people ask about our life in France, I generally tell them about the highs. Which results in them saying 'oh I wish I had your life'. So this is me setting the record straight and talking a bit about what I found hard making such a big move.
First the bugs. Spiders don't bother me, I am not a wimp. House flys are a bit annoying, we never got more than a few in London but the house in France has to be covered all over in fly mesh to keep them out. Much worse than this though are the horse flies - giant things that don't politely slip a straw through your skin like a mosquito, but rather have a huge pair of slashers capable of cutting through a horses skin with which they slice through your clothes with a short sharp shock of pain, it bleeds and the itchy lump can last for weeks. There are even worse things that infest the animals such as blow fly that lay eggs on sheep that hatch and eat the animal alive, various intestinal worms and ones called nose bot which lay eggs in the animals nose. You don't see these things in London.
Second the utilities. The phone and electricity aren't so bad, though we have more problems in storms with the connections failing than in London and we have at times spent nearly a week without internet - oh the horror! The worst thing is the water, we are not on mains so our, admittedly delicious, water comes out as a spring below our house and is pumped up in to the house. This means no water if there is a powercut, no water if the water from the spring fails to flow in to the tank and no water when the pump goes in to a sulk. Generally one of these things happens just before we have guests round and means one of us wading through a nettle and mosquito infested swamp to look at the spring/tank setup and then spending time in the dark barn praying to the pump gods. In London I just called the plumber.
The final thing I am going to moan about is the dirt. They say the city is dirty and the countryside is clean. Sorry, but the 'they' are wrong. In London the street cleaning fairies come out in the night and remove mud and dirt and all the flats I lived in had nice communal carpet in the hall that wiped any remaining grot of your feet before it entered the house. Before I moved to the countryside I obsessively read lifestyle blogs where people were skipping around wearing lovely flowery wellies and skirts to do their farmyard chores. I find this is not possible in real life, partially due to the afore mentioned flies and partially due to the mud which is everywhere and gets everywhere. In fact I wear a very fetching farming 'onsie' that I have several of allowing for frequent washing.
We don't have time to cover the language barrier, the effort of laying concrete or the snakes.
I can joke about these things now, but when we first moved I found it very stressful. I think I had culture shock from too many changes all at once. I used to lie awake at night and worry that my husband had stopped breathing because I worried he was going to die and leave me alone with this horror. I was very jumpy and loud noises scared me in to screaming, plus I lost weight - without even trying.
If you had asked me a year in whether I had made the right choice I might have struggled to categorically say yes. Now five years in the lows seems less low and the highs stand out more. Finally - part of the reason we moved, was for a more interesting life, so the moral of this story is not 'don't move to the countryside it is scary and rubbish', rather it is 'move to the countryside for a
Mr Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests
My husband and I bought an old farmhouse in France five years ago. I lived there two years full time and for the past three years I have been living there and working in London 4 days a week while my husband renovates the house.
When I said I was moving to the countryside having lived in cities my whole life, my mum said 'WHY!'. I think why is obvious. Look at the mountains, I can go skiing, horse riding, have a dog, live the dream. But generally things aren't all good and no bad, all up and no down, all high and no low. When people ask about our life in France, I generally tell them about the highs. Which results in them saying 'oh I wish I had your life'. So this is me setting the record straight and talking a bit about what I found hard making such a big move.
First the bugs. Spiders don't bother me, I am not a wimp. House flys are a bit annoying, we never got more than a few in London but the house in France has to be covered all over in fly mesh to keep them out. Much worse than this though are the horse flies - giant things that don't politely slip a straw through your skin like a mosquito, but rather have a huge pair of slashers capable of cutting through a horses skin with which they slice through your clothes with a short sharp shock of pain, it bleeds and the itchy lump can last for weeks. There are even worse things that infest the animals such as blow fly that lay eggs on sheep that hatch and eat the animal alive, various intestinal worms and ones called nose bot which lay eggs in the animals nose. You don't see these things in London.
Second the utilities. The phone and electricity aren't so bad, though we have more problems in storms with the connections failing than in London and we have at times spent nearly a week without internet - oh the horror! The worst thing is the water, we are not on mains so our, admittedly delicious, water comes out as a spring below our house and is pumped up in to the house. This means no water if there is a powercut, no water if the water from the spring fails to flow in to the tank and no water when the pump goes in to a sulk. Generally one of these things happens just before we have guests round and means one of us wading through a nettle and mosquito infested swamp to look at the spring/tank setup and then spending time in the dark barn praying to the pump gods. In London I just called the plumber.
The final thing I am going to moan about is the dirt. They say the city is dirty and the countryside is clean. Sorry, but the 'they' are wrong. In London the street cleaning fairies come out in the night and remove mud and dirt and all the flats I lived in had nice communal carpet in the hall that wiped any remaining grot of your feet before it entered the house. Before I moved to the countryside I obsessively read lifestyle blogs where people were skipping around wearing lovely flowery wellies and skirts to do their farmyard chores. I find this is not possible in real life, partially due to the afore mentioned flies and partially due to the mud which is everywhere and gets everywhere. In fact I wear a very fetching farming 'onsie' that I have several of allowing for frequent washing.
We don't have time to cover the language barrier, the effort of laying concrete or the snakes.
I can joke about these things now, but when we first moved I found it very stressful. I think I had culture shock from too many changes all at once. I used to lie awake at night and worry that my husband had stopped breathing because I worried he was going to die and leave me alone with this horror. I was very jumpy and loud noises scared me in to screaming, plus I lost weight - without even trying.
If you had asked me a year in whether I had made the right choice I might have struggled to categorically say yes. Now five years in the lows seems less low and the highs stand out more. Finally - part of the reason we moved, was for a more interesting life, so the moral of this story is not 'don't move to the countryside it is scary and rubbish', rather it is 'move to the countryside for a
life like the mountains in my view - with interesting highs and lows, ups and downs, peaks and
valleys.
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