Finding home

Do you really chose your home, or does your home chose you?  How many times had we taken the Armorique from Plymouth to Roscofff and the Brittany countryside and coastline to find our ‘wreck’? How many Breton estate agents’ doorways had we darkened? How many desperate sellers’ hopes had we raised so unnecessarily in pursuit of our dream?

Summer, autumn and spring, we’d embark on each of our Brittany Ferries’ crossings confident that this time we’d find ‘the one’ - the architectural answer to the perfect partner, the stone-built soul mate we’d never leave unless we were carried out feet first in a box.

Friends in rural Brittany consoled us.

“Don’t give up hope,” said Trevor, raising a glass of rosé. But it was easy for him to say: with his wife Jan he had discovered a longère in three beautiful, lush-green acres - a little corner of Brittany that can only be described as paradise.

So we’d return to the UK, deflated, a little low, wondering if our chance would ever come.

It had become clearer with every new series of the X-Factor that life in the UK wasn’t for me. There are many reasons why people leave their homeland; for some its work or family, for others its financial, sometimes even political. For me it was cultural.

I no longer understood the UK. I was part of a society with a rich, cultural heritage, but one in which the majority of people appeared to be counting down their year by the start, finish and reappearance of reality TV shows. TOWIE, Snooki, Kardashians - friends and colleagues told me I was totally, embarrassingly, out of touch and all I could do was nod my head and agree.

As the Daily Mail homepage got in a spin over backstage tales from Strictly Come Dancing, as it revealed another drunken British poplette had sent another drunken text message and another teen Premier League player had dumped another teenage underwear model, I knew it was time for me to stop complaining and leave.

We’d lost heart in our Brittany property search, but France, after all, is a big country.

“Poitou-Charentes is a lot warmer,” said my partner, smiling encouragement as if a cartoon light-bulb had suddenly been switched on inside his head.

So, from Nantes we took the pèage to Niort. And then the landscape just came alive. The fields got bigger, roofs turned from grey slate to red tile; the buildings from grey to mellow ochre stone.

The countryside alongside the toll road stretched for miles; gold, green, burnt-toast brown and russet prairies made more beautiful by the dazzling light of the spring day.

We’d made a week of appointments; five days of viewings that took us from tumble-down fermettes and ancient hamlet homes once inhabited by hermits, to impossibly large, but beautiful restoration projects. Without exception the agents were friendly, helpful and full of advice.

And then in what appeared to be the most unprepossessing of villages, next to a quiet road and alongside a dusty, tree-lined farm track we fell in love. The barn was not the largest or most breathtaking we had ever seen, but even in its neglected, rundown state, there was a nobleness to the stone, a gentleness to its presence.

A week later, I tried to describe its attraction to my parents. Although deep down I’m sure they thought we were both mad, they loved us enough to humour our rather embarrassed description of our future home.

“Well, it just feels kind,” I said. And it was true; after years of searching, after so many ‘almosts’ and a handful of disappointments, I could think of no other word more appropriate.