LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 51

At the same time, Cook is part of a thriving foreign community dominated by
Europeans who have moved to this Var region permanently and others, like Cook, with
second-home hideaways. The British outnumber all others and publish a community
newsletter called the Var Village Voice , which they began in 1995. (There are roughly
200,000 Brits living permanently in France—most clustered in the south or up north
along the English Channel.)
It is idyllic in the Var and the Var Village Voice chronicles the rarefied expatriate life-
style: news of wine tastings, a citrus fruit festival, art exhibits—often by foreign artists—new
restaurants, choral ensembles, truffle festivals, operas, balls, and appreciative letters like
this one from a man who identified himself only as Graham. He wrote: “We enjoyed as al-
ways the Christmas edition and put the Foies Gras article to good use, much to the amuse-
ment of the shop in Le Touquet as we read each label with care avoiding the tins which
he was keen to move. . . . ”
But some stories about the “ugly foreigner” seep into these otherwise light news items.
Some of the expatriates are more famous than others: actor John Malkovich, Peter Mayle
(of Toujours Provence ) and Ridley Scott, the English film director. Scott made headlines
for launching a “chicken war” against his French neighbors who raise poultry. Sir Ridley
complained that the “chickens cackled offensively and the smell wafted into his property,”
according to the Var Voice , which noted that Christophe Orset, the neighboring chicken
farmer, has lived in the village for thirty years, while Sir Ridley visits only a few weeks a
year. The courts threw out the case and the famous director lost his chicken war.
That battle between Scott and the chicken farmers is something of a metaphor for the
French fear of foreigners upending their lifestyle. The French prefer foreign owners like
Ambassador Cook, who consciously tries to support the French lifestyle in all of its quirk-
iness and not fight against it. But they are looking warily at what is happening to other
European countries to see how to avoid matters getting out of hand.
Recently a British government report on rural living loudly warned that rich foreigners
and British citizens, especially from London, were buying so many second or vacation
homes that local residents couldn't afford to live in their villages. They had become “ghet-
tos of the very rich and elderly” without the working people and families needed to keep
villages alive. The language was more dire and vivid than the warning in France in part
because much of the best regions of rural England have already been ceded to the second-
home world. The report, called “Living Working Countryside,” was published in 2008 and
painted a picture of real estate prices out of reach of locals. The answer, said Matthew
Taylor, the report's author, was not to build more houses willy-nilly, which would destroy
the rural countryside and turn it into a “Costa Brava” of concrete. Instead, the report re-
commended methods to use zoning laws to restrict second-home buyers and to encourage
the construction of “social homes” at low prices for locals. Cornwall, at the southwestern
tip of England, has become an extreme case. It is the wealthiest county in England be-