Getting bored is not an option as I age. I recently came back to the UK from running a travel business in France. When I say running first we built our small hotel ourselves and then ran a tour business from it. When converting a three hundred year old farmhouse and barns into a small hotel the most difficult bit is finding the right bits in the builders merchants to slot in to make the place. Short of a few minor problems like my wife catching fire doing the plumbing and me finishing up in a French hospital with an hernia it was a very successful operation – the hotel as well as the hernia operation. One thing to bear in mind if you are rushed into a French hospital in the middle of the night is to remember that the plastic things they give you are to put on your feet not on your head. I entered the operating theatre with a plastic shoe on my head and the last thing I remember before being ‘put out’ was the surgeon complementing me on my choice of head gear.
Even putting a staircase in is achievable if you can master the art of buying a staircase speaking no French. If you are considering ever putting a French staircase in here are a few tips. First you cut a hole in the floor where you going to insert the staircase making sure you are not standing on it as the cut out portion crashes to the floor below. Then you get a very strong French man to stand with the new staircase on his back and hold it place whilst you screw it to the wall.
One of our fireplaces was ten foot across and in the winter it used to snow in the lounge; you did not need to go outside to determine what the weather was you just looked at what was happening in the fireplace.
One of the more interesting confrontations with the denizens that inhabited various parts of our property was with the rats. Rats are extremely cunning creatures and do not take kindly to being poisoned. The opening round in the struggle involved leaving a small open tin of poison in a strategic position in much the same way as a General would have deployed his artillery in battle. Both the tin and it’s contents disappeared. Our next effort was to use one of my daughters Frisbees upturned as a receptacle for the poison. This would be moved seemingly effortlessly into another part of the loft. Next we nailed the Frisbee to the floor and the rats carefully tore pieces of paper and placed them across the poison. What finally finished them off was a scattering of poison across the floor and we could then sleep without the constant noise of seemingly hob nailed booted rodents holding nightly war games in the loft.
Death is also dealt with in a slightly different way to England. In the French countryside the population is ageing and you have a lot of elderly people. Our neighbour who had been a prisoner of the Germans in World War 2 had been released on grounds of ill health. He was fine man and if a village has a soul he was that soul. He lived in the heart of the village and his window was always open so everybody would stop and talk. He died after a village dance and in the customary way the undertaker brought round a refrigerated slab and they laid him out in his lounge for everybody to visit and have a drink. I used to say to them that there was no way I was going to be laid out for the French villagers to come round and make jokes about the English.
Starting our business we tried several ideas before our travel business got going. One of the more problematical experiences related to giving English lessons to the French. My wife tended to be a reticent in agreeing to some of my business ideas especially where they involved her. She had been a teacher so I put an ‘ad’ in the local paper offering English lessons. I worked on the assumption that if we got any replies I could explain the matter away retrospectively and if we did not get any replies it saved me the problem of trying to convince her in advance of the soundness of my plan. I made a terrible miscalculation which is recounted whenever members of my family get together. English lessons is apparently the words used to describe forms of sexual bondage services in France. The phone rang and a look of extreme puzzlement came over the face of my wife as she spoke to the caller. The chap at the other end of the line must have been very encouraged by my wife asking him to repeat what he was saying a number of times. It would an understatement to say that I had extreme difficulty in convincing my wife that placing the ‘ad’ had been solely done as it were to test the market.
Of course you could tell endless funny stories about life in France but after twenty years of owning the property we came back to the UK. Lizards in the bath were just a minor hazard of French country living.
We got tired of running our tour business which was a seven day a week job and sought pastures new back to the UK.
Our web site http://www.euro-traveller.com underwent a change of direction. We looked around for a new interest and thought about some of the old artisans still making metal products in Sheffield in the North of England. Families many of whom have survived through generations making fine products such as scissors and knives preserving the old handed down skills.
Sheffield as early as the 14th century was noted for it’s production of knives and by Sixteen hundred had become the main centre of cutlery production in England. Sheffield was involved in major innovations in steel making and a few workshops still exist producing fine quality items in much the same way as they did in Victorian times. The city itself has seen better days and the bulk of the mass produced cutlery manufacturing trade is now in the hands of Far Eastern producers.
Actually finding some of the artisans still producing Sheffield made items has been a bit of challenge but we are putting together a portfolio of small manufacturers who still make some of the finest goods of their kind in the world.
Our scissor maker has a superb range of quality products and we have just finished putting the bulk of his products on our web site. Sheffield is some three hundred miles away from us and some of the producers of our wares do not actually publicise their existence even to the extent of not bothering to list their phone numbers in telephone directories. They have dealt with the same retailers for generations and see no need to change. So now we set off on six hundred mile round trips on the off chance of meeting a little known knife maker tucked away on an old industrial site.
Mind you I remember Sheffield when the steel mills and foundries belched out smoke from hundreds of factory chimneys but Sheffield today is a much cleaner place. It’s people are just the same and off we go tomorrow to find another producer of the items we need. Perhaps the chap will be in but maybe not but you have to be phlegmatic about these things and I know the products that we do find are the finest of their kind. Looking for left handed scissors of a particular kind have a look at our web site. Want a Scottish dirk made by generations of a family that has been in business for three hundred years we have that and they will be up on our web site shortly.
It’s all a bit different from France but at least I speak the same language as the natives.
