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weliveinhope

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Everything posted by weliveinhope

  1. [quote user="Craig"] You can not catagorise all British people who have moved to France as people who no longer have any means and can not afford to indulge themselves. I think you will find there are Brits out there who have researched their move to France a bit more fully and continue to have the means to live in a similar manner to which they did in the UK. Mind you they are not as likely to post regularly on forums stating how hard it is so I guess you are going to pick up on a lot of negativity. Why do people have the attitude that if they can't do it nobody can? Why do they think if they can't run a business then nobody can. If you wanted to start a business prior to relocating to France you should have researched it before hand and had enough common sense to realise that the French government were not going to change the rules to make it easier and less expensive for you. The rules in France are the same for everyone, even French people have to pay cottisations and tax. [/quote] You can say that again! The theme in relation to disposable income is pretty downbeat on here which leads me to assume that if you can't afford more than the occasional night out then regular trips to the beautician would be right out of the question. Not sure if your final paragraph is aimed specifically at me but I'm not yet in France and certainly wouldn't move to France without having a source of income firmly fixed in place and the realities of what that income will get me firmly fixed in mind.
  2. Re Harry Potter, I was involved in publishing children's books for a long time. I read our own books and I read the books of the competition, including Harry Potter, and it irritated and infuriated me that good, well written children's books (not just ours) were selling a few thousand copies whereas the Harry Potter hype meant that those damn books sold millions even though the quality was far inferior to dozens of other books to have been written/published at the same time. At this point JK Rowling could publish her weekly shopping list and there would be millions of people out there who'd be queuing up at midnight to be the first to buy it. The argument that is frequently used in support of Harry Potter is that it introduces a whole new audience for books, a new generation of reader. They don't. Sales figures of children's books in general haven't risen. There's a phenomonen in place now where the kid buys and reads the newest instalment and then sits and waits for the next one, or rereads all of the others while waiting for the next one. Publishing children's books is tougher now than it was 10 years ago before the Harry Potter 'revolution'.
  3. [quote user="Dotty0"]  Thank goodness there is only one left to go. [/quote] Do you honestly think she'll stop there.......?[Www]
  4. [quote user="Tresco"] Sorry to lower the tone even further, (Sorry SF lovers) but PG, have you read the later Harry Potter Books. Does she even have an editor? [/quote] Having worked in that business for more than a decade I can tell you that when an author becomes as commercially succesful as shes has it becomes harder and harder to say 'no' or 'enough' to them. The last thing a publisher wants to do is risk losing a cash cow over a hundred thousand words here or there.
  5. [quote user="PossumGirl"][quote user="weliveinhope"] Before reading Labyrinth it was No 1 on my worst book of all time list. Woeful. A triumph for hype. [/quote] Surely you haven't forgotten The Celestine Prophecies from a few years back???  Talk about bad. PG [/quote] Ah well, not having read it I couldn't possibly comment but if it's worse than either Labyrinth or The Da Vinci Code then it's unlikely I ever will!
  6. [quote user="Tresco"] Star of the Sea is excellent. It's a proper book, not one of these awful Sebastien Foulkes  Dan Brown made up type books. [/quote]   Star of the Sea is really good storytelling. I was suspicious of it because prior to that Joe O'Connor's best writing was non-fiction and he had one novel in particular, The Salesman, which was pretty poor fare. Star of the Sea has a few cringy moments too but it is a great yarn.
  7. [quote user="Clarkkent"] I know I'm sticking my neck out here, but I think that "The daVinci Code" is about the worst book I have ever read and constitutes a new form of experience I have called ChavLit.[/quote] Before reading Labyrinth it was No 1 on my worst book of all time list. Woeful. A triumph for hype.
  8. [quote user="SaligoBay"] [quote user="weliveinhope"]Maybe it's easier to uncover a sense of community elsewhere when you're rich and famous?[/quote] It's true that the British are generally regarded by the French as being pretty well-off.   So you must be right.    [/quote]   I was actually referring to David Soul's experience![:D]
  9. Maybe it's easier to uncover a sense of community elsewhere when you're rich and famous?
  10. [quote user="Russethouse"] The Labyrinth won Richard & Judy's Book of the Year prize, so no doubt another boost for sales. [/quote] Oh dear God. That's truly shocking. I finished it the other day and I have to report it as one of the worst written, worst edited books I've ever read.
  11. Makes the thoughts of a move to that neck of the woods even more appealing.[B] Although I have to say that I used to live 10 minutes drive from Guinness' Park Royal Brewery in London and the Guinness produced there was undrinkable. The fact that they've gone so far as trying to get a similar water source in Gard is encouraging though. Now they just have to teach Frenh bartenders how to pour a pint properly![:D]
  12. [quote user="KathyC"]But what about the number of hairdressers everywhere, even in quite small villages? I've always assumed that having their hair done wasn't considered a luxury in the way it is in the UK. Perhaps I'm wrong?[/quote]   Jeez I dunno, KathyC being a male of the species I'm not probably not the best person to comment  - you're probably right.[:)]
  13. Might be worth your while checking out the reader reviews on amazon.co.uk - it gets 3 out of 5 on average but I suspect it that high  because you're not allowed to give '0' star rating on there.
  14. [quote user="KathyC"] Weliveinhope Perhaps the original poster was planning to offer this service to the French as well as to the Brits; or hadn't you thought of that? [/quote]   Indeed I had and should've mentioned that in the previous post - the abiding impression is that, in comparison to the UK, while the general quality of life is better in France for natives and blow-ins the disposable income available for such fripperies as beauty treament is not readily available.
  15. [quote user="vickybear"]Might be tricky....true, but BOY will you have a list of clients.   Good luck!!...much needed service![/quote] I don't mean to be sarky but having spent the last couple of weeks compulsively reading hundreds and hundreds of messages the impression I get from a lot of the messages posted on the forum is that so straitened are circumstances for most people choosing to settle in France that such services as beauty treatments would be unaffordable luxuries.
  16. I'm still ploughing through it and to be honest it could've done with a stronger editorial hand. I'm over 500 pages in and she could have told the story, as effectively, in half the words. Her descriptions of the area are good but her desire to be micro-descriptive about seemingly every object and person gets the better of her. So much of the prose is flowery blather I'm now 'skimming'. She's not a great writer in my opinion but a very marketable one in a priviliged position in terms of her PR options.
  17. Possibly a useless addition to this thread but it sounds like the situation that pertains in Ireland. If you have the means to receive televisual transmissions then you're liable for the TV licence. This includes, for instance, having a tv and vcr/dvd player in the workplace for showing training videos etc.
  18. Some interesting stats about Ryanair, BA Connect (I think) and EasyJet in today's Sunday Times. Ryanair comes ahead of the pack in most areas. We all moan about them but what I tend to keep coming back to is the fact that before Ryanair there wasn't much in the way of options when travelling to anywhere outside the major European cities and even then travel to those destinations cost an arm and a leg. I lived in Ireland when the most expensive route in Europe (if not the world) was the Aer Lingus flight to Paris from Dublin. Ryanair forced the fares down and opened up parts of Europe that people never would've thought to go previously because it was just too difficult and expensive to get there.  
  19. I think the tourist effect will wind down after a while. I used to live quite close to where Ballykissangel was filmed in Ireland and while the series was being broadcast and for a couple of years afterwards it was busy all summer with tour buses, etc., mainly from the UK but when the series was cancelled the tours also dwindled until nowadays it's pretty much back to 'normal'. I suppose the difference with Carcassonne in terms of people permanently relocating to the area is that there already is a predeliction among British people to move to France and 'trends' like the Labyrinth book drives them to a specific area changing property acquisition and demographics in the longer term in the way that A Year in Provence did for that region.
  20. I read The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars, 1290-1329 by Rene Weiss a few years ago. Unfortunately I found it pretty heavy going,  very dry but it was before I'd been to the area so it didn't have too much familiarity for me. I may go back and read it again now that I have a little knowledge of the area.  
  21. I'm currently reading the novel Labyrinth by Kate Mosse which is set in and around Carcassonne (currently No 1 in the bestseller lists in the UK). Someone mentioned to me that it had been featured strongly on Richard and Judy on C4 and that it was predicted that it would have a huge impact on the number of British people moving to that area of France. Has anyone living in the area noticed that effect yet? Just wondering.
  22. [quote user="le bouffon"]Just found this out,some of the more self important of the brits down(66) here want to start up a boycot of all shops that do not offer the customer service level of the UK,laugh nearly fell off my chair,where will she shop?[/quote] Seriously? That is atrocious. Why move to France, or anywhere else for that matter, to replicate your former life and, worse, try to force that on the local people? But le bouffon from your posts in this thread I'm assuming that you too are British, and if this is the case are you not part of the problem of escalating house prices? You may have been lucky enough to get in earlier than others but does that totally absolve you of any responsibility?
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