I am not well. Following a spate of heavy gardening, featuring my monster mower, my right knee has swelled up again. It does this periodically just to annoy me, leaving me unable to walk without effort. But I have spoken with my nemesis, Doctor Tison, who will see me on Monday morning. In the meantime, he will write out a prescription to see me through the weekend, which my wife will pick up when she has finished leafing through the local real estate ads.
The house opposite ours, though ostensibly neo-Breton (the style most favoured by aspiring couples) is, you would have to say, a wreck, by which I do not mean a romantic ruin. It was built in the early 1960s but never lived in by its owner, who dossed down in the attic, reached by an external staircase, until he was taken away, aged 80-something, by men in white coats, at which point the anti-rodent squad moved in.
Jean-Yves never married and claimed not to have any family. Certainly no one other than a wizened crone from the village ever visited him. But as frequently happens in rural France, his removal from the scene, even while still alive, prompted a property-based feeding frenzy. Relatives, no matter how distant, are said to have materialised from every corner of the country looking to somehow cash in. A gardener has started turning up charged with taming the surrounding wilderness, and a team of workmen spent a day the other week stripping out piles of old tiles and other unfitted fittings and de-lousing the various rooms with chemicals and an enormous industrial vacuum-cleaner.
My wife tells me that the asking price is 65,000 euros, about £55,000, which would be less than half the market value in normal circumstances but is surely a bit steep given the undoubted cost of replastering the walls, replacing doors and windows, installing a new kitchen and bathroom, renewing the wiring and plumbing and, not least, fitting a new roof.
When the house finally sells, I have no idea who will get the money. I can only speculate, basing my presumption on local gossip. The commune, or the department, may feel owed in part payment for the elderly owner’s residence in a care home. And you would think that Jean-Yves himself might get a share, even if he has no idea what to do with it. But then there is the “family” – second cousins twice removed and their progeny – who seem to have emerged out of the woodwork. Perhaps I am doing them a disservice. Maybe they just want to ensure that everything is done the right way, without thought of self. But then I remind myself, this is France.
Speaking of renewals, our new front door, made of good old-fashioned oak, complete with frame, is scheduled to be installed next week, at a cost not far short of three-thousand euros. We ordered it last November, but for reasons I now forget (something to do with Covid), it never arrived. Louisa hates the drafts that blow through our hallway in winter, not unlike the Mistral. She says it will warm up the whole house during the coming months, but I’m not so sure.
What we really need is proper central heating. The electric heaters we had put in seven years ago charge up overnight, but do little more than take the edge off the cold when the temperature outside falls below forty degrees. If we apply the booster during the day, the cost rockets, but if we don’t we end up swathed In jumpers.
Next door, Jean-françois swears by his geo-thermal heat pump, installed by his cousin a couple of years back with much of the cost borne by the French state. But he had existing, old-style radiators to work with. We would have to get an entire new system installed. Besides, I have noticed that between November and March, Jean-françois is rarely to be seen not wearing a wooly cardigan.
This just in. A potential buyer just turned up for the wreck opposite. He told Jean-françois he had looked at a house in Huelgoat – a touristy town about forty minutes from us – that he and his wife could just walk into for the merest €160,000. But he could see the potential of Jean-Yves’s place and would be looking into the likely cost of a thorough-going renovation. He likes it round our way apparently. We are, he says, sympa.
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