Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And Then There Were Two
For some reason, if you mention 'French builders' to people it seems to strike fear into their
hearts. They go pale and start having 'Vietnam Vet-style' flashbacks, recounting their exper-
iences with a due sense of horror and injustice. I think it's unfair. Just marrying the words
'French' and 'builder' seems to have become some sort of comic shorthand for truculence and
laziness, but in my experience they are no worse or better than builders anywhere. All builders
are tempted by the big jobs and like diva-esque supermodels 'won't get out of bed' for trifling
ventures. They'll generally take on too much work and spread themselves thin enough to delay
your project while at the same time finding hidden extras that bump up the original quote. This
is the same the world over.
We had had a loft converted to a bedroom just after we moved in and invited, as is recom-
mended, three quotes for the work. One of them didn't turn up and one was such a gibbering
wreck we felt sorry for him - just not sorry enough to give him the work. The third, Bern-
ard Butard, did turn up and didn't lack confidence. An enormous, jolly-faced man, he had the
manner of making us feel like he was doing us a favour with our
combles aménageables
(loft
conversion) and that actually he had a number of chateaux on the go but could probably fit
this mere
bagatelle
into his hectic schedule. He did, and it was over-budget and overdue, but
the finished room was superb. Butard was still the only player in town and so, knowing his
lackadaisical approach to deadlines, we had time to play with, time to iron out the details of
what we were actually proposing to teach at our 'school'.
However, before the New Year could properly begin we first had to get through 'January the
Fourth'. January 4 is a special day in our house; it's the day we moved to France, it's Natalie's
birthday and it's Samuel's birthday too. Unbelievably, Samuel was born on Natalie's thirtieth
birthday, in the same hospital she was born in and delivered by the same midwife. That one
fact goes a long way to explaining my personality traits: I am a control freak because the sin-
gular, most important event of my life up to that point - the birth of my first child - felt pre-
ordained, an event guided by something else and to which I was essentially an irrelevance.
Nonsense I know, but it explains why I've tried to control everything ever since.
The feeling, absurd though it is, that they were born on the same day and therefore carry the
whiff of 'sorcery' about them is difficult to suppress. The fact that every year I get congratu-
lated for 'giving my wife a child' on her thirtieth birthday is actually a bit creepy too and makes
