Читать книгу Our House is Not in Paris - Susan Cutsforth - Страница 18

This brings us to the decision regarding our pool. When we look back, the adrenaline that fuelled us and the pace we worked at seem beyond belief. What would have taken months at home, we often achieved in a few hours. Even more astonishing is that my French was virtually nonexistent but I was very expressive and, as a teacher who tends to be very dramatic, I think this quality may have helped on many occasions. So, with just a few days left, we decided to look at piscines. The plan was to maybe one day, way down the track, put in a pool — again, in the ‘dream’ category. So off we went to Brive-la-Gaillarde, just for an initial reconnoitre: one pool place and one appointment that afternoon, then ten months later, across the other side of the world, we had a pool going in. Well, we did try to go to another pool company but it turned out to only sell pool supplies. Not our usual style at all to do so little research, especially for such a major undertaking. Our rationalisation? Let’s enjoy it now rather than in the future. Second rationalisation: It will help us to relax every year and not just simply have an extended working holiday that would stretch on ad infinitum. As anyone who has ever renovated knows, it simply never stops — turn around, and there’s another task waiting. As we have also come to know only too well with all our renovating projects, every job always takes much, much longer than anticipated.

The pool truly has been in the ‘surreal’ subset of all that had been unfolding. The company had someone available that very afternoon who spoke English and could come to our house to look at the site. By now we had our table from the fabulous Troc in Brive and so Nicolas set up his laptop, inspected the site, did his calculations and, voilà, printed a quote. If we had been so inclined we could have signed there and then. Not quite our style. I must say, though, that our usual considered, meticulous approach seemed to be flying out the window. Perhaps we were starting to live an altogether different life. I didn’t think it was really our style to go ahead and make the momentous decision a mere few months later, either, setting the wheels in motion to actually have a piscine the following year.

What was exceptionally fascinating about the entire process was that there were not any phone calls at all to make the arrangements, very few emails exchanged with the company and, at the end of the process, no emails at all for weeks.

In fact, we were almost entirely in the dark as far as the company, Piscine Ambiance, was concerned — which shows either a huge degree of trust on our behalf, or a staggering degree of naïvety; I’m not quite sure which. Without Jean-Claude, our ‘man on the ground’, we would simply have had no idea at all about what had been happening. So he became our de facto manager (without the pay) and it was simply sheer good luck that he and Françoise returned to Cuzance exactly when our pool started to go in.