Wednesday, 27 June 2012

freckles_and_doubt: (Default)
Jean Dufy, Maison dans la campagne There's been an email reply sitting on my desktop for over a week, my incomplete response to an email from a French house agent: it consists entirely of the quoted email and "Chère madame" typed above it. Beyond that, my invention has clearly run out, stymied by the need not only to construct an entire email in the French language, but to do so in response to a whole sheaf of French property documents and agents' agreements also in French, of the most labyrinthine and bureaucratic kind. I should have found a new agent for my house six months ago; the current one, who wants out, keeps sending me increasingly plaintive emails asking when I'll do this. Unfortunately, the giant mound of translation between me and the object is simply making me tired and avoidant, so there the whole thing sits. French bureaucracy is a thing of terror and awe, and its documents even more so. They render me wibbly and ineffectual, and there are several large ones sitting in my in-tray untranslated because they scare me.

While the house itself is quite happily tenanted and ticking over putting not much rent into my French bank account every month, that money isn't mine; it's owed to my dad's cousin, who loaned my dad money in the last few years of his life, and whom my dad explicitly wanted us to repay. I'd say that if the house remains tenanted for another three years or so and doesn't require any major repairs in that time, I'll clear the debt, but so far the house has only cost me - I haven't seen a scrap of the rent.

The result of all this exhaustion in contemplating the whole thing is that my current impulse is to have done with it all and sell the house - regretfully, because my dad wanted me to have it and a lot of his work went into it, but firmly. It won't give me enough money to buy property here, unfortunately: it's an old house in a depressed agricultural area, and lacks mod cons like central heating and double-glazing. It's actually a moot point whether it'll even sell - I hold out hope, though, from the agent's report that a neighbour expressed an interest in it.

However, another scared Zimbabwean corner of my being is going "oh noes what if SA explodes? A house in France would be a Refuge and a Foothold!" The thing is, on balance, I don't actually think SA is going to pull a Zimbabwe. And if it does and I still have a house in France, all that will mean is that my option is to have a possible option of living rurally in French - as in, speaking the language daily - on no income, which is frankly an even more exhausting prospect.

So my question to you, witterers, many of whom are intelligent people-of-the-world with a firm grasp on geo-political ramifications - do you think I'm stupid to want to sell? Answer on as many sides of the paper as you want.

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