Update

The last few days have been rather hectic; however, we have done it.   We are safely installed in our new home.  The telephone engineer turned up at 12.30 rather than 10.00; the energy rating of the house turned out to be "E" rather than the "C" we were told it would be (more of a problem for the winter than the summer) and the gas bottle that supplies the hob was empty, but all in all it was relatively disaster free.

We got one of our first insights into village life when we discovered the reason for the telephone engineer.  There are a number of new homes being built around us by what appears to be an extended family.  It seems that when the house nearest to us was built, the owner paid for all of the cabling for the power and telephones to be buried in the road.  Then, when this house was built, the utility companies simply used the pipes he had installed to supply it with power and a telephone line.

I don't know the rights and wrongs of the situation (are conduits buried in the road a public good there for anybody to use?) but the person who had paid for the original installation felt a bit miffed and dug a "drainage ditch" that went from nowhere to nowhere but, on its way, cut through our telephone cable.  Ah, the joys of village life.

The day after ...

This is going to be a busy week.  Today we are off to camp in our new home so that we can be there to meet the telephone engineer who is going to arrive at exactly 10.00 in order to connect our telephone ... however, this is Provence, it is getting very close to summer  and the village is more or less in the back of beyond.

Yep, it will almost certainly be a case of "what this space" again  (probably for several hours, possibly even days)

The first day of the rest of our lives...

OK, it's terrible cliché, I know, and I would never usually use it without a heavy dose of irony and the liberal use of inverted commas, but it really does seem to fit the bill.

It is difficult to say when you take the first step on a journey, but for all sorts of reasons, this feels like the start. As of today we signed a contract on temporary rental home, so, as of today we own a house, 2000m2 of land and have rented a house to live in while our new home is being built.  Hopefully the final formalities of the sale of our current house will be completed soon and, equally hopefully, we will start to build a new house soon after that, but who knows when it will all finish.

However, for me the thing that really brought it all home was taking down the pictures and moving them all to the new hose.  So I sit here with bare white walls waiting for the next step.  As they almost certainly don't say around these parts, watch this space