Good Life Awaits

Lockdown showed us how lucky we were to be in rural France and why we want to stay, says Adrian Lithgow

- Adrian Lithgow

To say that British ex-pats in France have had a torrid time over the past year or so is something of an understatement. First, we had the uncertainties of Brexit, followed swiftly by the certainty of confinement because of coronavirus. At least we knew where we were for the latter – safe and secure at home.

What a strange dystopian time it was for those of us living in the depths of the Dordogne countryside to be rusticated for two months. But actually, there could hardly have been a better place to be stuck, as far as many of us were concerned.

A client of mine who has lived here for the past 20 years decided before the outbreak to move back to the UK because he wanted to be nearer to his grandchildren. He bought a house in Norfolk just days before the lockdown, so is now selling his home in Dordogne.

“I really don’t want to go back to the UK at the moment,” he told me. “We think we will sit things out here until this thing is really under control. After all, where would you rather be?”

It is a good question and one that a lot of people are now asking themselves, particularly now that Covid-19 has made us so much more aware of our personal vulnerabilities.

COUNTRY SETTING

Our family moved to the Dordogne 13 years ago, just before the financial crisis of 2008. We had many reasons for doing so – not least because we could buy the type of property we could only dream of owning in the UK – but one of them was motivated by a ‘what if?’ question, if the worst came to the worst economically.