My French lessons when moving abroad: don't buy a horse that hates you and look at property in the winter

I’ve never been the kind of person who likes to hear the sentence, ‘that’s very brave of you!’ It’s happened over the years as a stand-up comedian. I remember a fireman coming up to me at the Edinburgh Festival once, and he said, ‘I couldn’t do what you do! Very brave.’ A fireman even?! I tried to point out that my bad days at the office were never going to be as bad as his bad days at the office, but he wouldn’t have it.

So when people pointed out to my wife and me that we were ‘very brave’ for selling up in the UK and moving, lock, stock, young child and aged Jack Russell to France, it made us nervous. Up to the point when people were calling, heralding our courage, we had had absolutely no doubt whatsoever, no nerves, it was the right decision, a no-brainer. We had a plan. My wife, as a fluent French speaker, could find work locally, while I would travel wherever I was performing at the weekend and commute. It was foolproof.Up to a point.

The first time we had any jitters at all was the night before we moved in. It had been six months since we had found a perfect place in the Loire Valley, and that had been a glorious summer’s day. We fell in love with the place, the countryside, the beauty and the price and over the next six months we worked hard to sell our small box on a new estate, managing to do so just before the deadline. It was now deepest winter, tomorrow we would get the keys, and we drove down what we had seen as a charming, narrow country lane leading to our rural dream home. Only the charming, narrow country lane was much, much longer than we remembered; it was dark too, shrouded in a freezing winter fog. The house itself was dark, empty, foreboding.We looked at each other. What had we done?

Hens Lola, front, and Victoria, are part of the menagerie

Looking back now, 20 years on, it was best insane decision we ever made, but it’s been far from plain-sailing and most of that is due to greed. Ours.It was the price, you see? You get suckered in; and you start the doing the maths, asking the questions. ‘So, I can sell three-bedroomed detached house in the UK, buy a château in France and live mortgage-free? I’ll take that village over there, s’il vous plaît!’ We didn’t buy a château or a village, but we did act like kids in a sweetshop and maxed out to the limit.

‘This will take a lot of hard work,’ my wife’s French grandfather said, nodding doubtfully as he did so.‘Ha!’ I responded heartily. ‘I am a man of the soil, and this is my kingdom!’ Well, it is my kingdom, but I am no man of the soil as I have proved time and time again since we’ve been here.I shrieked again as I continued testing the electric fence.

If you were to define the word ‘stubborn’ at a level that everyone understands then adjective: behave like a French horse would pretty much nail it in my opinion. We had owned Junior for about two years and he was still as truculent as the day we got him: wilful, moody, almost un-rideable and seemingly determined to escape at any given opportunity. Our relationship is on the cool side, we are not close.

He arrived in a mood of optimism on my part. Since we’d moved in I’d been mowing the land on a tondeuse (a sit-down mower) which is every boy’s dream, until you actually use one. They are, in practice, bone-shakingly awful things that throw you about so much that by the time you’ve finished, in my case four hours later, you feel like you’ve been in a cocktail shaker in the hands of a jittery barman on a kicking bull. When the tondeuse, due to a lack of upkeep and maintenance from me, finally gave up it seemed the ‘green’ thing to do: give over most of the land to a horse, then sit back on the terrasse and watch Mother Nature mow the lawn.

Ian advises looking at property in winter

The first time I met him I knew there would be trouble. He bit my arm.‘He bit my arm!’ I squealed.‘He’s just being friendly,’ Natalie said.‘But, he bit my arm!’‘You probably upset him.’‘How? By having arms?’I knew then that whatever this creature did, whatever damage he wrought, whatever mayhem he caused, he was staying. In Natalie’s eyes he could do no wrong.

I built him a stable and he ate the grass – that was the deal. But he never relented in eating the grass.Then he ran out of grass and wanted the grass on the other side of the fence. Then he demolished two apple trees and a walnut tree. He just would not stop eating. Nothing seemed to satisfy his hunger, and he couldn’t be exercised because he didn’t want to interrupt his constant eating. And he was always getting out of his paddock; he learnt that if he rolled a certain way he could slide under the fence. Is that natural horse behaviour? I was beginning to suspect that he wasn’t a proper horse at all, but two escapologists in a pantomime horse costume.

Looking back now Junior the horse was the least of my fauna problems. Animals have come and gone, though mostly come, with alarming regularity. A whole army of feral cats took my wife under their feline wing and when I complained that I wasn’t a ‘cat person’, they – the cats that is – dismissed my objections out of hand. We’ve got hens, goats, more dogs, nursed baby mice, briefly owned a damaged rabbit and my children – yes, their number grew too – tried to adopt a lizard’s tail. Not the whole lizard you understand, just the tail which was still angrily flapping about having been separated from its body by a cat.

The whole experience has been a learning process and I was slow on the uptake. It took me ages to learn the language because I spent so much of my time on the road. It took me even longer to learn the intricacies of the French meet and greet. Is it one kiss? Two kisses? Three, four? A handshake? And even that’s nothing compared to the loyalty you must show to a particular boulangerie, a decision as life-defining as deciding between the Sharks and the Jets.

Ian’s nemesis, Junior, to the rear

It has, and continues to be, a glorious adventure for all of us, but never make the mistake of thinking this is paradise, that it’s easy. More and more people tell me they wished they had done what we did, take the leap as it were. Well, take it from me, there are amillion pitfalls to fall in by moving abroad, even more so I suspect in France. And it’s fair to say I’ve fallen in most of them. Think of Vive le Chaos as less of a memoir and more of a warning how not to do it.

Ian Moore is the best-selling author of the Follet Valley crime series which began with Death and Croissants. He is also the author of The Man Who Didn't Burn, the first in the Juge Lombard series.

Vive le Chaos his memoir of moving to the Loire Valley in France is published by Summersdale, £9.99