KathyF

I was told that the pneumococcal jab is a one-off, John.  Interesting how the advice differs from doctor to doctor.  Off to have the H1N1 jab on Monday. If you don't see me again, you'll know why........[:)]

[quote user="krusty"] Have you never lived through poverty yourself  ? Ice on the inside of your windows , wearing hand me downs ? [/quote] That was quite normal when I was a child in Lancashire in the 50s, Krusty.  No central heating or double glazing meant ice on the inside of the bedrooms windows in winter and hand-me-downs were a sensible way of using up clothes in a family with several daughters. We certainly didn't think of ourselves as poor.

Hallowe'en is the Eve of All Hallows or All Saints Day (Toussaint in France) on November 1st. Tradionally thought to be the night when evil spirits roamed before being banished by the saints. The Day of the Dead is All Souls Day on November 2nd, when people commemorate those who have died, especially over the past year.

We have travelled on it many times and have no complaints.  Mind you, we get a free cabin with our membership of the Property Owners Club, which means we use few of the other facilities, but it really does look OK to me.

Our NHS dental practice in the UK is staffed entirely by Polish dentists and they are extremely good.

You could try www.afactp.org which is based in southern Manche.

Well the Times article may ring true for some, but I found it a load of rubbish. [;-)] I had two foreign exchange partners in my mid-teens. The first (an only child) lived in Hamburg, and I visited and was visited by her 2 years running and am still in regular contact with her 46 years on. [:D]  The second was in France (Allier to be precise) and she and her large family (8 children, if I remember rightly) were delightful and extremely welcoming, though sadly we lost touch a few years later. In both cases the visits were at least 3 weeks long, long enough to make a real difference to my language skills at that stage (6th form). In both cases too, the exchanges were organised through school and we had had some correspondence with our partners before the actual visits, which helped a lot.  Speaking personally, I found my exchanges interesting, enjoyable and enlightening and wouldn't have missed them for anything.

[quote user="Shivy"]home is either over here or over there depending on where we are!! I guess some people also think of the place where their families are or where they were bought up as home.[/quote] My sentiments exactly. [:)]

As I'm in the high risk group (lifelong asthmatic) I have the seasonal flu jab every year and has the pneumoccal one last year. I'll be having the H1N1 jab as soon as my GP gets supplies this week. It's just another flu jab after all and the seasonal vaccine is new every year in any case.

[quote user="Russethouse"] We have just had a discussion regarding Oxfam with my daughter - we do go in there and this week my daughter asked us to drop in a bag of clothes. Last week we noticed some 'Bohemian'  ( OK - not outstanding) cut glass whisky tumblers at £30 for the set of 6, my husband likes them but thinks they are pricey for a charity shop, this week they are still there. My daughter says we are forgetting what the money goes toward and we say if the goods were more reasonably priced they'd be sold and the money would be helping someone a dam site quicker. In our local Oxfam paperbacks are often more than I pay in Tesco ! Given the fact that most of the staff are volunteers and the goods are donated I am beginning to think they are a teensy bit greedy..... [/quote] I think the problem is that under charity law, charities have a legal duty to make the most of their assets, which in Oxfam's case includes the donated items. They can't just give them away for peanuts. My BiL works reguarly in a Red Cross charity shop and says a lot of his time is spent sorting and valuing the things they have been given,

I'm another who has had to have a new debit card after an attempted fraudulent transaction on my card while we were in France this summer. Our British bank's fraud detection system picked it up straightaway and nothing showed in our account. Their vigilance is reassuring.....[:)]

[quote user="Quillan"] So immigrants going to the UK should be perhaps 'sponsored' or at least have proof of a job on arrival and yes to protect UK jobs they should be jobs where the skill-sets are in short supply or non existent. Don't forget that for immigrants that are successful under such a scheme are also getting their job protected from immigrants as well. They should also be made to take UK citizenship and the use of dual passports/nationality should be banned.[/quote] I take it that what's sauce for the UK goose is also sauce for the French gander, Quillan?  Hands up the immigrants to France on this thread who had job sponsors when they arrived or who have renounced their UK citizenship.....[Www]

[quote user="plod"]Are you suggesting the UK is better off without us? I agree with your other sentiments.[/quote] Well, certainly suggesting that it is better off without the unrelieved negativity and prejudice of many of the posts on this thread.....

Well, all I can say is that almost all of you who have posted on this thread have already helped to fix broken Britain by leaving it and living in France! Living both in France and the UK as I do, I see them both as great places to live - both with faults of course, but both with so many virtues. I'm not going even to try to convince you of this as "information cannot argue with a closed mind".  Can't remember who first said that but they were right. [:)]

Crazyfrog, we filled in the form H1 in October 2006 and our taxe fonciere didn't go up to reflect this until 2008. In our case it doubled.

Well, if the boulanger has school age children, s/he probably wants to have holidays with them, rather than when they go back to school. In our small area of southern Manche, the boulangers seem to come to some arrangement so that they aren't all closed at the same time.

Have you by any chance finished a renovation project and reported the fact to the tax authorities?  When our major renovation work was basically complete and we filled in the H1 form, we had a 2 year period of grace and then our taxe fonciere doubled.  For us that was last year, not this.

We have had a second home in France for 6 years and now spend all summer there. We are still on a 3 KW supply, though we have to be careful not to use two or more higher-powered machines at the same time. [:)] On our more occasional out-of-season visits we still manage with the wood-burner and an electric convector heater, but being hardy souls we're not worried about having very warm bedrooms.  If you are you'll need a bigger supply for all those heaters.

We have a Navman (maps at least 3 or 4 years old now) and we've never been sent somewhere inaccessible and we always get where we're going.  Very good at showing all the lieux-dits in our area.

One of the really sad things about this terrible story is that they felt they had to bring their car at all for such a short distance (under a km = half a mile).  If only they had walked it wouldn't have mattered (within limits) how much any of them had drunk. So sorry you're still being haunted by this, Tony.

Only too true here in the UK too. We live in rural Mid-Wales and our PO/shop closed last year when the Post Office took away the PO side of the business.  The shop just wasn't profitable without it and we're 5 miles from the next nearest shop. In France our tiny commune (200 or so inhabitants) lost its shop/bar 3 years ago when the last owner retired. It had been on the market for some years, but no-one local wanted it and it was finally bought by a young British couple who spent a lot of time, energy and money doing it up with a view to continuing both sides of the business and then had second thoughts.  No-one else wanted to take it on, even in its pristine state and it's now a holiday home. Sorry if we all sound negative, but there is so much to lose if this kind of business venture doesn't work out.

If you had to have planning permission for your work, you'll have been, or will be, sent form H1 which you have to fill in and return now the house is habitable. You will get 2 years grace at the old tax rates before your house is revalued to take account of the improvements and your taxes will go up. [:(] It happened to us last year, but the rise wasn't as bad as we'd been expecting.

Our taxe fonciere bill is issued in August and payable by mid-October at the latest.  Our taxe d'habitation bill is issued in mid-October and payable by mid-December. I'm presuming that this isn't just departmental but national practice. Both taxes are for the current year. If you are billed for them, you must pay by the due date or an automatic 10% fine is added to the total.  We found this out by bitter experience, when our tax bills were sent to the wrong address after we'd moved within the UK and we finally received a reminder showing the fine. [:(] We now pay by direct debit, which is so much easier. I understand that if your house was unfurnished and therefore uninhabitable on January 1st this year, taxe d'habitation isn't payable, but as far as I know you need to be able to prove that by means of an official attestation. We had to get the Maire of our commune to give us a letter saying our house was undergoing renovation before we could get an exemption from taxe d'hab. Taxe fonciere is always payable, whatever the state of the house and whether or not it is lived in. To be honest, I would ignore the advice of your builder an his friends and get your tax status sorted out properly.  It's not worth getting on the wrong side of the tax office. How long have you owned the house?  If it's more than a few months, have you had any bills for previous years?

Not nit-picking at all, Sweet, just a difference of opinion. [:)]  Whether it's one space or two doesn't really matter, compared to jon's habit of not using any spaces at all after punctuation, which to my eye makes what s/he writes rather difficult to read.

jon, One very easy thing you can do to make your posts and website more legible without a spell-checker is to remember always to put a space after a comma or full-stop, before continuing with your next phrase or sentence. It will quickly become a habit and will make a real difference.