Val_2

Do you not have a regional paper like Le Telegramme and Ouest France for here? All the deaths are put in their daily and you can access them online too usually in the afternoon. We also have a regional weekly paper too but no deaths are put in it unless its a nécrologie article on someone well known in the area.

I would contact your local DDE office and take it up with them, they are the ones who have the final say not the Mairie! (Direction Départementale d'Environnement)

Cremation in this neck of the woods is becoming more and more popular especially amongst the generation of people in their 50's/60's these days plus the cost too is considerablycheaper than having the full works and a family cavaux to pay for. As for no chimneys, no there are none, all the heat is re-cycled back as energy and the same with any smoke. You would not know that our nearest one is a crematorium as it looks just like an industrial unit from the road and back. Normally funerals here take place within a couple of days after death, we took a week to hold ours as relatives had to get here and the limit to the hospital mortuary is only six days but there was a bank holiday on Nov 1st that was excluded in our limit. I went to many of relatives and friends back in the UK before we moved here and have to say they used to be so cold, unfriendly and un-nerving with the smoke bellowing out of the chimney stack, here it was more sedate, calm, no rush and no smoke and only €500 for the cremation and all it entailed whereas my aunt paid £3500 in the same year for my cousin in the UK.

My husband was cremated here after an obsequies civile in the village hall which was overflowing with people. At the crem we had to wait our turn for the previous lot to finish andleave although the coffin was already taken inside. Eventually we were taken into the hall which had wooden benches arranged in a fan shape and music played whilst we sat and contemplated the deceased.Then the man in charge read a little in both English and French about OH and we went one by one and put more rose petals on the coffin whilst music played. No religious intonations at all. After all while we were invited if we wished to do so to view the coffin going into the crematorium from behind a viewing window. The children and I went plus my brother and our close friend and it drew a line under all the events of the day and the previous week for us. We then left and later that evening the undertaker who is in the village phoned to say the ashes would be ready to put into the village columbarium on Monday morning. We received a written report showing the temperature of the oven and how long the process took and the weight of the residue which was in an urn we had previously chosen. Due to the law of 2008 at no time we were allowed access to the ashes and they remain in the granite repository now. After the ceremony we were shown into a kitchen and rest room at the front of the crematorium and told to help ourselves to coffe and other drinks which we gratefully did. No flowers were taken to the crematorium, they came to the house later and we put them in the cemetery.

I suggest your wife goes to the local Impôts and speaks with a conseilleur there. Its not hard to do, you go in and ask the receptionist for someone to help you and then you take a ticket like the supermarket and wait your turn to go into a "box" where you talk in private. The impôts here were kindness themselves when OH died and I had never filled in any forms as it had always been the accountants who did it from day one but the head man down there filled it in and even got me a rebate too from overpayment previously. He also took all the forms there and then and deposited them for me. If you don't ask, you don't get and its all completely free. Better do soon as possible as they will begin to get really busy. Any problems such as a possible delay will be notified and you can sleep easy too!

Something important I forgot to mention is that should someone else touch this problem even just poking around with it, they then are then deemed responsible being the last to touch it and not the original artisan or his insurers - that was made very clear by a court appointed expert in our case and people make this mistake very often of investigating problems before an official can and do more damage than good!

If he decides to go the legal route via avocats and tribunals etc, he will wait years for any sort of judgement to take place plus a court appointed expert would have to make a visit and do a report which costs from €2500 and he will have to pay this possibly at the outset and then claim it back if he wins.The original artisan is no longer in the frame nor liable now but there should have been insurance details given by him to the client so to be honest, first port of call is his own property insurer to get the ball rolling and take it from there before going very very very expensive legal route. Hopefully it will be a simple remedy which to be honest would be worth paying out for rather than pay thousands and thousands and wait years for what would probably be a non-goer with litigation!

Yes, I know a fellow brit who went to one of these preparation seminars and ended up being frightened to death by their so called advice.On her return she spoke to her family Notaire who re-assured her with the official French information as written down by law.She swore she would never listen to anyone again regarding legal or financial matters unless they were French and this was a lady who had lived here since the 70's,married a French person and had all her children here too!

To be honest after watching Ramsays Kitchen Nightmares both the US and French and Spanish ones I have been completely put off eating in any restaurant now unless you can actually see the kitchen and preparation as part of the experience. At least with the all you can eat Chinese buffet places you can see what you are getting and cook your own from fresh ingredients! Half the time, some of the so called cooks or chefs have no real training and just microwave stuff.If you want a decent meal, make it yourself!

Idun, let me know if you get my email and you will understand the situation a bit better. In the case of my late OH because he was an only child, the next in line are his direct first cousins as there are no parents or siblings who would have been the inheritors. Originally the half of the property that belonged to OH would have come as 25% to me and 12,5% to our children making in total his 50% ownership.

parsnips, glad you bought the item up and I read through the Hague convention (you can google to read it in an easier form) and discovered its really for recent marriages or civil ceremonies.Luckily I married in 81. One thing too I have noticed recently with references to items on vosdroits websites, it does not give the exact information and people are better off actually reading the real article on the official code civile as the vosdroits is quite misleading really. As said earlier, I feel anyone buying French property with another person and who is not married to that person or anyone buying really who is not a French national should consider protecting themselves and eventually their heirs. I have just refused inheritance coincidentally and have caused a nightmare as OH was only child and many cousins who are next in line are scattered worldwide which will prove very costly to get geneologists and translators involved.

Parsnips, just to complicate things further, our Notaire dealing with the inheritance things at the moment told me that an official UK marriage certificate is recognised as a binding contract and the ten year thing was never mentioned, considering we have owned the property for over 25years now.

Well my son is moving down to Perpignan next weekend to start his new life, will ask him when he has been there a few months how it compares to back home here in the NW and you wouldn't know he is originally English either by his accent as he has been in France since he was little and is now 28 already. His girlfriend who has been teaching down there for well over a year now has had run-ins with different cultures at school, the worst being the gypsys who,the head warned her, would kill you as much as look at you should you single their kids out! Thankfully she transferred to another primary school a few weeks later but she was on the phone crying every night from being scared to death.

My car was registered in both names but only the CHRISTIAN name of OH appeared so after he died and I decided to trade the vehicle in for a new car, I had to get written permission from my children and from the Notaire to do so. Therefore if both names on Carte grise, make sure BOTH Christian names are on it and if only the name of the deceased appears, the survivor has to re-register the vehicle in their name costing a fee, new number plates if old style and of course, again permission to do so from other inheritors.

From current personal experience if we had not had a French will and donation act, I would now be up sh*t creek but our UK marriage has been officially accepted as Séperation des biens which is also good. It is very very very dangerous to live in France as a couple without any sort of protective regime where jointly owned property is concerned when a simple PACS can offer protection if marriage is not an option. We heard this week that our local Boulanger has everything in his name only including the business and home and even though he and his wife are separated, the moment a divorce starts she gets absolutely nothing at all and you can see how worried she is by all the weight she has lost over it and she has also given the last 25years of her life to working as a slave to the business as well! Being under the radar here will only catch up with those folks one day either by inheritance issues or health or tax problems, not worth the risk.

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity!

ebaynut - xenophobia here in Bretagne is mostly directed at the Arabs and Africans here and I have Moroccan and Senegalese friends who have suffered much verbal abuse from locals whom they came to live amongst here in the sticks. White Europeans are more acceptable to their faces but behind the local façade there does exist anti feelings to all who migrate here. I came here 25years ago and it has got slowly worse but as the locals say,we are not now regarded as foreign incomers any longer.The FN vote was a shock in the commune to most but the alternatives were just not attractive enough and as you know, the French citizen prides him/herself on the right to vote and will do so. What happens to the FN in the future remains to be seen and what happens in government, something we can't do a lot about.

Yes I read about this too and heard it on French TV,but I will never feel sorry for Monsieur as he is all that I hate. My own commune voted heavily for the FN a few weeks ago and this is a staunch socialist region but Hollande has ruined things locally with the agriculteurs in many cases but they still came out on top and in the second round, the FN completely disappeared from the whole of the region. It is all very fickle depending on the voter's grievances at the time but xenophobia is rife here in Bretagne, homeland of the LePenn family especially amongst the ignorant and older generations who have never left their own communes let alone travelled abroad or even met a person of another ethnicity - seems many are afraid of being overrun by "furriners"

When we lived in the UK, Skip hire that we used weekly cost around the £25 mark, its been over 20years since we last hired one over there as have been in France and found the cost dear

The bennes here are different to UK style "suspended and drop" ones.Here they slide off a low vehicle on metal rollers which is why they are not sited usually inside a property as the vehicle has to be physically involved like a towtruck and needs lots of room.You also have to get the local maire to authorise road siting as I said and we got very well known so often the secretary did it on the maire's behalf. On average the last one we hired came to a total of around €350 for four days use and was for concrete only to be taken away which going to the local déchetteries would also have cost as professionals have to pay to dump here.

OH used to hire a 10m3 benne quite often but the price was horrendous plus he always had to get written permission to site it on the road and then usually it was for only a limited period and it had to be lit at night and warning panels placed each side. You normally can only put one type of rubbish in a benne such as all gravats or all timber or just metal and they charge for collection and sorting too if it is messy. To be honest unless you are business, the price is prohibitive and you can usually find a way round getting rid of rubbish here such as gravats to local farmers to use as field entry for the winter mud, tyres the same for holding down a bache, timber rubbish for industrial burning or for greenhouse furnaces, the list goes on and to be honest a good trailer is an investment whilst dumping at the déchetterie is free!

Just so that people also understand. If you were married in the UK and have never changed to an alternative French contract of marriage you are considered as "Séparation des biens" by law and the rules of French inheritance apply. Hence why if you are a conjointe collaborateur with your spouse in the same business and pay cotisations you are equally liable for any of the business debts should your spouse die unless you have a protected business regime as SARLetc.

Just seen this thread and I would add that you should be very careful about whom you get involved with should you return to France. As the business was in your name as the registered owner and social charge payer you will still be on the radar as you have not officially resiliated it and the charges will have continued probably resulting currently in Huissiers being appointed by URSSAF/Impôts etc who are able to access any and all bank accounts you hold here. Anything you owned here will probably have been listed by them as seizable assets too but if your ex-partner/wife or yourself never paid any actual contributions as a conjointe collaborateur or registered partner in the business she is not liable and you still are for all outstanding debts there may be. In this day and age, debts can follow you overseas too with reciprocal exchanges so to be honest,if you are well camouflaged as to speak identity and address-wise currently, coming here is definitely very dangerous and yes, there well maybe your name on a computer at all points of entry in France when passports are checked!!

We get huge caulis here, in fact one will do four meals for my son and I.When I walk across the field behind the house I usually end up with two or three given by the farmers so have to carry a plastic bag usually and these same products are packed in the fields and then taken the local Dépôt des legumes in the next village for sale onwards to the supermarkets etc. Leeks at the moment are 2kg for €1,40 in Leclerc but if you go to the depots you can buy veggies and salads at very very low prices, so low it does not make sense to grow any yourself, same with tomatoes in the summer from the local greenhouses.

Well it is here and I am living proof to it as are others in the commune I aksed.The maire showed us the act forbidding the ashes to be held on domestic property or interred there and the local PF stuck rigorously to the law bringing the urn himself two days later for us to put in the box and he to screw it down. If you wish to take the ashes abroad then permission is also needed. Perhaps some areas don't know or follow the rules and as we all know from living many many years here,nothing is uniform here at all. What I do know is that it is the most horrendous experience you can have, losing someone without any warning and young!