The Shortlist - Fat Dogs and French Estates - page 25

the style of les idiots étrangers and, with constant help, might eventually manage to pro-
duce one nearly acceptable sentence.
Unfortunately, there are only so many times the indispensable request of “ doucement”
can be rolled out before it becomes obvious that you have no idea at all how to continue
the conversation. And actually there is a real risk of irritating everyone concerned.
My final fail-safe invaluable phrase was “ arrêtez si'il vous plaît! ” (please stop!), spat
out in a Tourette syndrome fashion, followed by the request to use alternative words in case
I recognised them. Sadly, the whole process was mostly unsuccessful and totally exhaust-
ing.
It was during this battle of words that one day I contacted an estate agent who was
excellent at describing things. Speaking very slowly but not too loudly, this lady obviously
had lots of experience in dealing with hearing-impaired elderly people. We got on famously
until she tried to describe the various animals that could be found in la forêt . We made sev-
eral attempts at understanding each other as I vainly thrashed around the dictionary looking
for mis-spelled animals. They were mis-spelled because I still hadn't harnessed the ability
to understand every one of the letters of the alphabet when pronounced by a French person.
For example, the letter 'I' in French sounds like the English 'E', whereas the French
'E' sounds like 'UH'. I eventually concluded that she was telling me the woods were full of
bears and there were herds of squirrels in the fields, but this didn't seem altogether plaus-
ible. Realising I was still vanquished, she neatly solved the problem by emailing several
photographs of the relevant forest-inhabiting animals, with captions in French below. This
exercise could easily have been mistaken for a preschool early education programme. But
I quickly learned from it and, where possible, my early faltering telephone calls were re-
placed by emailed photo-and-phrase correspondence.
The weeks turned into months and my research was still awfully slow, but help was
at hand. Fairly late in the process, I found that there exists a special breed of people who
operate as independent agents. Many of these people are English; they live in France and
are fully bilingual. One such specialist was working in an estate agent's office, covering for
an absent colleague when I just happened to telephone.
From this point onwards I worked almost exclusively with the 'independents', one of
whom hailed quite unexpectedly from a website called Luxury Châteaux in France . I came
across it whilst idly 'surfing' one afternoon and clicked on the website to see how the oth-
er half spend their money. After all, we had no intention of buying a château but, to my
surprise, I noticed they had a category entitled Hunting Estates. This looked promising al-
though still likely to be out of our league.
Closer inspection revealed that I could be onto a real winner here. Whilst most of the
properties were far too sumptuous and expensive for us, the descriptions of some seemed
to tick all our boxes. I read on and became convinced that a couple might even be worth
further investigation. To my delight I then read that English was spoken.