Malnoueans

Thanks all for your help - and Angela particularly for referring me back to a long thread that gave me chapter and verse on the rules, ably condensed by Pickles into a few bullet points which said it all. Husband has been in France this week and has bought the "capervan", so at least we now have the wheels. The French insurance broker claimed to have never heard of the law regarding re-registering of foreign vehicles by UK residents and tried to tell husband that he was wrong  - after all she had many British clients insured to drive their French registered vehicle on British roads! She took some convincing that just because she could insure a vehicle wouldn't actually make it legal on UK roads. In fact, I think she still thinks we are talking rubbish! We have decided that we can't risk bringing the van across the channel, so will work around it. Maybe one day we will bring it across and do the re-registering - OR we may actually be bona-fide French residents at some point, in which case the problem goes away. In the meantime we will be heading into other European countries during the Summer, all perfectly legally. How bizarre that we can do that, but are not legal, even for an hour, if we were to bring the vehicle into the UK!!

We have owned a maison secondaire in France for over ten years, and in fact have owned a French registered car for much of that time which we just use while in France. No problems there - we have been stopped by french police a couple of times on routine checks and no issues, produce paperwork, our UK passports and on our way. Now we are hoping to take life a bit easier, and have a "silver gap year" which may well turn into full blown retirement. We will base in France for that time and are planning to buy a mobile home and do some travelling around Europe. We were planning to buy a LHD vehicle in France, and drive it across to UK to bring back what we need. However, it seems from reading various posts here that our plan has a flaw..... as UK residents we can't drive a French registered vehicle in UK?!!! I have seen this in various posts, but want it to not be true as we are about to sally forth to France to purchase said mobile home.  Aggghhhh! Assuming these rules still apply, we may now have to buy a UK registered van, and re-register it in France, then possibly re-register it in Uk at some point in the future? Additionally, we have never been resident in France. How long can we base in France before registering as resident? Any help gratefully received!        

Yes we are on Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7. We have Norton 360 as the virus protection and I do suspect that something in the daily 'mise a jour' has something somewhere..  I am sure the problem lies somewhere in one of the Internet settings, I just can't find where it is though. Albert the InfoGipsy : Good idea to do a copy/paste on the passwords as a short term fix, I shall do that to save me tearing my hair out.  

I am having problems logging into several of my internet accounts as when I enter the password, instead of getting a neat little row of asterisks like I did until a day or two ago - one for each letter or number - my machine is now entering a space per entered character instead. It is therefore impossible to tell how many characters the machine has accepted - and I have got it wrong on two different bank accounts already resulting in me being 'frozen out' and having to call up for a password reset! Remember having this problem before but haven't a clue how we put it right. Can anybody help? It's driving me potty and costing me a fortune in 'phone calls to call centres!

We have just discovered that that nice Mr O'Leary has decided to fly the Stansted/Poitiers route on Mondays and Fridays thru the Winter. Hurrah! [:D] Last winter he abandoned us on that route altogether after the October half term. We think two flights a week, at reasonable hours and on days that will accommodate the commuters and facilitates long weekends here is not a bad compromise. Hope he doesn't go and change his mind now we have got all excited!

We would like to make an offer to buy a small piece of land forming a small corner of our own land. It's only about 100 sq metres, but it would be useful to us for various reasons - not least of all to resite the large gas tank which currently sits right outside our back door. The land is currently owned by an elderly widow and our nearest neighbour with whom we are on good terms. She has a small dilapidated garage on one side of the land, which is across the lane from her house. She still drives, and houses her car in the garage but she is becoming more frail and we wonder how long she will be able to continue to drive. There are also a handful of fruit trees and a massive Walnut tree on the land. I have read elsewhere here that often the Notaire's fees and associated taxes can be well in excessive of the value of the land, but can anybody give me any ballpark idea of what the cost of those might be? We thought we might offer 5 euros per square metre for the land and wonder if we could have an arrangement for Mme B to continue to have rights to the fruit and to keep her garage until such time as she no longer owned her own property across the lane. We then wondered what would happen if we ever wanted to sell our own property and she still had some rights to use this pocket handkerchief of land with the gas tank on it? Could be complicated? We don't want to broach the subject with her until we have thought it through, particularly as our spoken French isn't marvellous and we don't want to offend or have any misunderstanding. Neither do we want to set her asprirations by saying we are interested in buying only to find the other costs to be prohibitive. Any advice and/or thoughts welcome. Malnoueans        

I am a fully qualified accountant - qualified in the UK that is, with a lot of experience. My French is OK; I am working on it but I could hardly say I am fluent quite yet. At the moment we are living a few months in France then going back to the UK to do some work to pay for our next French leave. People always seem to be looking for an English speaking accoutant here to look after their tax returns etc.  I would dearly love to be able to work over here, but inevitably the French way of doing things isn't the same as the UK. Would it be feasible and legal to attach myself to a French accountants office, if anybody will have me, perhaps offering a couple of days a week work without pay (I can crunch numbers in any language and learn fast!) in return for learning the French accounting ropes, or would I need to get really fluent in French and then struggle thru the French accountancy exams before anybody would consider me?

I successfully froze a load of our Bramley apples in the UK last Autumn. Sliced them, dropped them into boiling water for two minutes, then dumped them into iced water with a few slices of lemon, fished them out after five minutes or so and dried them as best I could on kitchen paper, then laid them out on trays and open froze them. Then the next day we bagged them up and put them back in the freezer - no problem at all and we used them for all sorts of things right thru the winter.

We haven't noticed it at dusk yet Chris, but will keep an ear out for it at dusk from now on. Will research Little Owls and see if it sounds right. Thanks.

Thanks Russethouse, but I don't think that's it. I am going to sleep tonight with the digital recorder alongside the bed, so if it is about tonight I can leap out of bed and record it. I have been around our hamlet describing the sound to our French neighbours, but the only outcome is that they now appear confirmed in their view that les Anglais are everso slightly cracked!

In the last couple of weeks we have noticed a most bizarre birdcall in the middle of the night. My husband has christened it 'the bedspring bird' as part of the call is indeed a sort of twanging sound a bit like how a bedspring would be portrayed in a cartoon! The first part of the call is rather like the call made by what we used to call 'peewits' when I was a girl growing up in the countryside in England, not sure if that is the correct name for that bird. So we get two or three 'peewit' cries followed by two or three 'bedspring twangs'. This bird seems to be about just as it is first coming light. Admittedly we had had a couple of brandies before we went to bed last night, but we have both heard this calling several times now so don't think we are hallucinating! Any ideas Chris pp or anybody else please?  

Thanks for that J.R. I will give it a go and report back. Sorry for going a bit off topic folks!

[quote user="jc"]SAGA credit cards are also commission free in the EU and have an excellent exchange rate but you have to be 50+.[/quote] That's interesting jc. We are in the right age bracket too! We are 'getting along' with the Nationwide card, and as I say, are learning where it will work OK and where it doesn't. It's just a tad embarrassing the first time you try it in a new shop or restaurant only to have in handed back to you - people tend to stare as if you were trying to commit a fraudulent transaction. The exchange rate is just so good though! Is SAGA rate close to current HIfx interbank rate too?

On a related note, we have taken out Nationwide credit cards following advice picked up from the various forums, but are finding curiously that they 'work' perfectly well in some shops but not in others. Does anybody else have this problem? I have to say that when we are able to use them the exchange rate going thru the statement is really good, and no commission charges. Their web site is really clear and user-friendly too. They get a definite thumbs up from us, and we are gradually establishing a list of where they work and where they don't.

Perfect - thanks Suze! Have a production line underway right now and so far so good - 1 lemon drizzle cake out of the oven, 1 coffee and walnut in the oven and a cherry and almond in the weighing stage. Better get back to them. If anybody is in the area, they are for the 'water-mills open day' in the Moncoutant area tomorrow!