Some months ago, when the financial crisis was just kicking off in the USA, I remember a journalist turned to an investor and asked what should we all do in this situation. The reply came back ‘Take to the hills and buy land’. I expect the Investor was talking about buying up thousands of hectares of prosperous farmland somewhere in East Anglia actually, but, just for a moment, I thought about my home here in the rolling hills of the Gers and the 22 acres of meadow that surround it and felt a mellow glow.
I don’t know how our lives will pan out during the next few years. Will people stop coming on holiday? Will my french students have to stay in Paris and take lessons down the road instead of having a week of pony riding and complete immersion in an English speaking family? Will I, at the very least, have to extend my ‘playing at it’ vegetable garden and start planting rows and rows of cabbages and potatoes to see us through the ensueing recession/depression?
These are not pleasant days for any of us on the financial front, but I am simply glad that we can heat our home with inexpensive oak logs and eat food from the garden and markets and the horses can survive on the grass and hay from the fields. It’s certainly looking better for us than the recession in the early 1990’s which took a great deal of recovering from. Many of the people who have moved to France from the UK had already accepted, before their arrival, that living here would be a world away from M & S food halls, new clothes every weekend (or every year, come to that) and dinner party chat about house prices, holidays in exotic places and school fees. France just doesn’t do that, or if it does, it is limited to the Paris suburbs.
Life here won’t change too much now there is less money to throw about, and if any of us had grown complacent about the good weather, fabulous countryside and easy way of life here, now is as good a time as any to get back on track and appreciate the really important things in life.