One Place de l’Eglise by Trevor Dolby

4.5 out of 5 stars

Travelling and going on holiday to another country is a great way to experience what that place is like. You bring home the memories and a dodgy bottle of something that sits at the back of the drink cupboard. To really experience a place though, you have to move there. Trevor Dolby was one of those who had taken the plunge.

They had been looking for a while spending weekends looking at various properties, but finding nothing suitable until they found this property in the village of Causses-et-Veyran almost by chance. There is the inevitable story of moving in and him and a friend trying to move furniture that four people could barely lift.

The book is full of his little stories of living there, learning how to navigate their way around the French bureaucracy, finding the best baker and knowing who is the best builder to use. They discover the delights of the vide-greniers, and learn just how much rain a storm can unleash on the village in the summer. He swims in the local rivers with a capybara, indulges in the local wines, has lots of lunches and starts to become a full member of the village when he is part of the protests against the Post Office.

I really enjoyed this. It felt to me like he was evoking A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle, the book that got me into travel writing when I first read it many many years ago. (I really must reread it one day). It had a similar vibe in the way that he writes about the place he has settled and the people who live there too. There are pastiches of that book and caricatures of the people around him as well as the inevitable stories of renovating a really old building in another country. There are also parts of his past life as a publisher and a poignant tribute to his son.