It was in February 2004 that, living and working in London, I took a day off work to catch the ferry from Dover to Calais to buy wine with my dad and my husband Mark. It was a bittersweet day. It was our wedding anniversary and my mum’s birthday was the same week. She had sadly passed away two years before and my heartbroken dad drowned his sorrows in whisky. I had an idea that wine would be better for him, so on a glacial, sleet-driven day we shopped for wine in Calais and finished just in time to miss the restaurant lunchtime opening hours! Wandering miserably around a town about an hour inland from the port, we stopped to look at houses in a property agent’s store window. Before we knew it, he offered us coffee and persuaded us, well me really, to look at his three cheapest houses even though I assured him we had no money, and we were not interested in buying a house in France.
I went home later that day having purchased not just wine – but a hovel of a French farmhouse! We spent holidays here for many years but in the end, that old hovel stole our hearts and so did our little village in the middle of nowhere with its quirky inhabitants, Jean-Claude who never knowingly does a day’s work, Claudette, a 90-year-old marvel who bakes the most delectable cakes and is the wisest woman I’ve ever met, Bread Man who delivers the bread to our village and many more wonderful folk. So we moved to France for a rollercoaster new life. It’s a long story, three books long in fact (if you’re interested there are details below!).
And – The Good Life France is 10 years old! When we first moved here, we had a LOT of renovating to do. The house leaked, some rooms had bare earth floors and it was hardly habitable. In order to save time chatting to friends and family who phoned for nightly reports of our progress, Mark created a website for me. I wrote about life in France, the people I met and the places I went. I became the Forrest Gump of writing! Since those early days the website has grown a lot, and I now publish a free magazine which has had a staggering 8.7 million readers in the last ten months (wow) and a fun podcast. And if anything, my passion for sharing the France that I am still getting to know and exploring as much as I can, has also grown.
Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for subscribing to my newsletter, for all your comments on social media (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), for reading the posts on my website, for reading and sharing the magazine and listening to the podcast.
Bisous from a humbled writer, sitting in a little converted pigsty/writing den, in the middle of nowhere, rural northern France who would share her gingerbread cake with you if she could…
Janine Marsh is Author of My Good Life in France: In Pursuit of the Rural Dream, My Four Seasons in France: A Year of the Good Life and Toujours la France: Living the Dream in Rural France all available as ebook, print & audio, on Amazon everywhere & all good bookshops online.
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