My French is now fluent in house-hunting. I know the French for load-bearing wall. I have words in French that I have to look up in a dictionary because I don't know them in English: crepi, says the Oxford Condensed, is render. I can discuss the differing advantages of various sorts of roof-tile with architects.
But those are just words. More hard-won is the local knowledge. The rules of house-hunting in a foreign country are the same as those at home - location is all. But how do you know what's a good location? Who can you ask? Whose opinion is valid?
Your own, is the short answer. But a trustworthy estate agent can help enormously. The French prefer to ignore them and buy from their friends and relations, but with no introduction to such networks, outsiders may need professional assistance. Otherwise, how can one discern the dynamics of the market and the population, or whether the local schools are any good? I've been here three months as I write, and I've been up and down every village in a 40-mile radius, putting in the legwork with a series of estate agents. Ironically, we're now buying a house five minutes from where we now rent, not least on the principle that you don't mess with a good thing.
It was bare-faced luck that landed us here, in our old, white-stone house with swimming pool, 200 metres from the village, right in the middle of what is known locally as the "golden triangle" - very salubrious turf, to you. We simply followed the letting agent out of Albi, the capital of the Tarn region.
I didn't even know there was a golden triangle for the first month, but what we stumbled upon was a friendly village, good playgroups and a good school, friends for us and for Sarah, our two-year-old, and a French teacher who comes here Monday afternoons. All within an hour's drive of Toulouse.
Of course, when I started out I didn't know my crepi from my carrelage (tiles). Yet there I was in the estate-agents office, explaining in school French that we wanted something with three bedrooms and an office, and maybe an extra house out the back, and definitely a garden, and in a nice area, not near a busy road, but not isolated, within 3 kilometres of a village with services. For about £150,000(#190,460).
Some of them tried. Others simply dragged us around the same five properties they had been flogging for months.
The market here is not like Dublin in that people don't usually move house to find a bigger place. On the whole, houses come on the market because their owners have died, because their owners have been widowed, because their owners are divorcing, because their owners have been transferred. So every front door opens on a story. We saw perhaps 30 houses, all speaking volumes.
One, I remember, had a big bag of footballs in the downstairs garage, a rake of trophies in the bedroom, a personal gym, and a full-size snooker table because the man of the house played snooker competitively. The couple had divorced, and the home was to be sold - perhaps she had spent too many Sundays on the sidelines? Another, one of those houses that haunts you, was filled with the detritus literally of generations. Draught-horse harnesses worn out from work, Victorian perambulators, children's school projects. Nobody could have thrown anything away in a century. I was tempted to buy the place just to rifle through their memories.
Forty miles south of this one, another haunting house. Once, it was a home more beautiful than any I shall ever own. And given 20 years and many tears, it could be again. Built for a lawyer perhaps 150 years ago, it was full of soft light and parquet floors. And dangerous staircases and probably every sort of damp known to man. But every time I opened a door I expected to see a maiden daughter at a writing desk, sketching flowers in the afternoon sun.
Another commune, another prospect: a big, rambling, uninhabited barn of a place, with no plumbing, but a good roof and good timbers, and sound-enough walls. And a hand-painted For Sale sign which I took as evidence of worthiness. Even to the initiate, the house was clearly in a top-notch location with stunning views over rolling vines. And the land and building were cheap.
For a week I dreamed of pools and rooftop terraces, wondering where to site the kitchen and whether a suite of offices was a good idea. It was going to be stunning. Then the architect estimated the cost of building work at 6,500 French francs (about £850) per sq m. Even if we were given the house for free, we couldn't manage it.
Walking through peoples' homes, we walked through a looking glass to France. Grieving families, greedy families, cataclysmic events, flashes of unexpected generosity and hospitality, families that had simply died out, romances in decline, villages in decline - we saw them all. Watching how they lived in their houses, seeing how and where all these people built their homes, picking up estate agents' asides and casual observations helped us begin to piece together an idea of what actually makes a workable home in this country.
We found most estate agents friendly, courteous and a mine of information, which was as well, because the buyer in France pays the fee. And French estate agents are ridiculously expensive. Some, I have to stress, are excellent, but the rest seem to spend as much time watching their backs as looking after your interests. For instance, they don't usually put up For Sale signs in case you just ring the doorbell and buy the house straight off the vendor, depriving them of their fees. Also, each house may be on the books of several estate agents, so each agency requires you to sign a chit saying you visited it with them first. That's to prevent you buying through another agency and depriving them of their fees.
If you're not into visiting every estate agent in town, you start with the property magazines, which are distributed free. These have pictures of hundreds of homes, and brief descriptions, and are a useful guide to which agency is working on your kind of market. Or you can browse the Internet, which if nothing else will reaffirm your suspicions about the shortcomings of the Web. I found that many of the houses on the property sites had been sold months before, or that the prices advertised were either ridiculously high or ridiculously low. And since French DIY and its close cousin, German-blow-in DIY, are hard to spot in those little pictures, perhaps the Web is best used to look at the kind of properties available.
Now, we are buying the other French way - the proverbial friend of a friend knew someone selling a house, and doing it person-to-person, without an estate agent and the attendant fees. The French, a parsimonious lot, will go a long way to avoid any party having to pay any charges. Most houses change hands person-to-person, and its a nerve-racking business involving much thrust-and-parry. In the end, we settled on a stone house of indeterminate age - over a century, certainly, but that's young for these parts - which will be ours next month. The local school is good, the neighbours friendly, nobody tried to cut corners while refurbishing, and every time we visit it we like it more. What more could you ask?
