WE didn’t choose our first home in France. We found it, almost by chance, after a roundabout route through many countries. I had always enjoyed taking in new cultures, the beauty of different landscapes, their scents and, because I was a freelancer, I’d work for six months or so, save up, then travel. During one of those trips, I met the man who would become my husband. After I got pregnant, we had to decide where to make our family happen and stood in front of a map, our fingers hovering over many countries. After spells in Georgia, US—in an apartment surrounded by horses and mice—Guatemala, where my husband is from, and the Netherlands, we moved to France, via England. We left our eldest child with my parents—by then, I was expecting our second baby—and went house-hunting, only to find that, as foreigners with no bank account and freelance careers, it was almost impossible to rent a house.
After 10 days traipsing up and down France, I was exhausted. We tried one more time at an estate agent’s in yet another village, when a lady scribbled a note and passed it to the agent who was talking to us. It turned out she had a house to rent and had a good feeling about us. When she said we could rent her house, we said: ‘Yay!’ and immediately added: ‘By the way, where are we?’
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 30, 2022-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 30, 2022-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
