I loved my work in Dublin. I miss the job a lot. I miss my colleagues and I miss the way I could walk into work and instantly become a brighter, more focused, more purposeful person. And I miss the structure of starting and finishing tasks to immovable deadlines in The Irish Times - I was never one of life's self-starters, and I still see housework as urgent only when I should be writing.

But I'm starting to believe we may be more than a couple of eejits who thought they could beat the system. For one, the telecommunications industry has lived up to its promise. With minimum effort and at a reasonable cost, I can produce entire newspaper pages from my desk and send them down a high-speed phone line to Ireland. For another, it is proving possible to balance home life and work in a sensible, sane manner.

It is three months since we arrived at our white-stone haven in Tarn, near Gaillac, in the south of France, leaving great jobs, supportive families and, much less reluctantly, the Celtic Tiger behind. Even as we made them, our plans to come here sounded, well, idealistic. Sell up the overpriced Dublin home and head south, where the heating bills would be lower; get control of our life as a family, swapping the stress of the daily grind of crechework-sleepcreche for the challenge of a new life and a new language.

Nobody is more surprised than me to find it's working. I haven't regretted our move for one minute.

Starting again like this, we are designing our life as we choose - this amount of family life, that amount of work time, this amount of money. I work evenings and early afternoons, while my two-year-old sleeps, or while she is at playgroup three mornings a week. It takes a bit of planning and discussion, but it is proving a lot easier to combine work and a family than a job and a family.

With bills fewer and lower, I simply don't have to work so hard. Houses here are - to us, anyway - cheap. A four-bedroom house on nine acres costs £150,000. Childcare costs £1.50 an hour. The house, the car and the new cooker are all paid for: no credit, very novel! And with the south of France outside the door, the rewards for not working are high.

What work is done has to be done well and on time, however - I can't stick my head round the door to apologise for late stories or a misplaced picture - so we need the best communications we can get.

Our equipment is sophisticated, and France Telecom is impressive. It takes a day to get a telephone line, a week to get a high-speed computer line. As well as the household phone lines, we have two mobile phones, a high-speed computer line, two Internet service providers and two satellite television services. I can read Irish newspapers every day; I listen to Marian Finucane and Pat Kenny on RTE Radio 1 in the morning and catch the main news bulletins. .

And all of this living in the countryside, which wasn't part of the plan. A true Dubliner, I never envisaged living without street lighting, 24-hour petrol stations and public sewerage. But this is very tame countryside - rolling hills in a patchwork of vineyards and fields, full of bird life - and it seduced us. It is well populated, too: there are houses within holler in every direction of most homes I know. Also, only as I have lived here for a while have I come to realise how the weather plays a more important role than distance in isolating people. In sunshine, everyone within sight is a neighbour, and we get a lot more sunshine here.

Life has been seductively easy, and I have to admit to a certain amount of survivor guilt after the winter you've had in Ireland. It's not just the better weather, the better infrastructure, the better views; it is also the fact that people are friendly and helpful and that we appear to be interesting to them. I don't know if that's because they are country people, because they are French people or because they are French country people.

If I were asked to pinpoint the biggest difference between Irish society and French society, I would point to the way France is aware of its own nature. We've had fetes, flower marches, classic-car rallies, community omelettes, pan-village tripe breakfasts, and officially organised car boot sales in the surrounding villages in the past week.

Everything attracts funding from the mairie, the local administration. And everyone joins in, because everyone believes these things are important.

I have long believed the French instinctively put people first and let business or foreign interests follow. I see evidence at all levels of life. France is leading the way in reducing working hours in the EU. Before- and after-school care is free in our nearest city. Our hamlet is too small to support a shop, but it has a committee to organise fetes.

As for us, we begin to see the same faces every day. We have a favourite baker, we ask for Paul in the France Telecom office, we have made friends, we know both doctors at the local surgery, we know the names of the staff at the playgroup. This makes me feel a lot more settled.

And my French is, well, perhaps not improving, more stretching. There have been ample opportunities to feel stupid and make daft mistakes, but none so far has proved permanent, and every small success lends me even more confidence.

a.macsherry@wanadoo.fr

Maev-Ann Wren is on leave