The good life

We've all wanted to do it - up sticks and live in the sun. But most of us never seem to get round to it. Except half a million Brits have, actually. But is it really like a Peter Mayle book?

PICTURE the idyllic holiday scene: a land of warmth and sunshine, olives and cheap wine when, like Shirley Valentine under a cloudless Mediterranean sky, we think: why not just stay here for ever and ever and ever? Why go back to that bleak weather and humdrum British nine to five? Couldn't we just sneak off for a new life in a palatial Roman town house, a Spanish villa on the beach, a French country farmhouse?

The answer is probably not. The thought of uprooting everything is just too much for most folks who convince themselves that they could never cope with Lipton's teabags on a permanent basis. But for others that relocation fantasy has them checking out house prices (yes, your ideal 19th-century 16-room villa in Spain is the same price as your city-centre studio flat at home), and toying with the idea of trading in office life to pick oranges off trees all day instead (which they will then of course store beautifully in jars for winter months away in our perfectly preserved ancient stone cellar). So some of us do very, very seriously ponder the possibility of a whole new life altogether, far away from never-ending rain, grey skies, greasy chips and dodgy sitcoms.

But for those of you just dreaming about it, it seems there are plenty of people out there right now living your olive grove-blessed vision, walking through their country farmhouse in Provence, yes, indeed, even picking your very own oranges. And it's not as if there isn't enough of a precedent - does the name Peter Mayle mean nothing to you?

The man who brought us A Year in Provence followed by Toujours Provence and even Encore Provence is probably responsible for the 500,000 plus of his fellow Britons upping sticks and just leaving their cares behind. By the year 2000, more than half a million of us had spent an average of (pounds) 237,000 each on property in France alone. Dordogne was the first and most popular region, quickly followed by the Alps (ten per cent of all properties bought by Britons in France are located there), Nice and Cannes. The Cote d'Azur has built nearly a million new homes to cope with the sudden influx of wannabe Mayles, and in some French villages, up to 80 per cent of the inhabitants are from abroad.

It might seem all to easy to pin the blame on one man alone, but Mayle's books extolling the virtues of life renovating a Provencal farmhouse spent three years on the New York Times bestseller lists and have been translated into 20 languages. One attraction for relocating to France, he claims, was his love of the food - "exotic and tantalising" compared to what he'd been used to at home - and that the country as a whole seemed "wonderful, civilised. I liked the way it smelled, the way coffee tasted, the green open spaces".

And he's not the only one. Not put off by the grilling Mayles got later (he has been called smug and accused of turning the native inhabitants of Provence into one-dimensional caricatures), whole olive groves of eager young (and not so young) relocaters have been popping up with their own stories to tell of amusing natives, dilapidated buildings and struggles with the elements.

Garden designer Alex Dingwall-Main (The Luberon Garden: A Provencal Story of Apricot Blossom, Truffles and Thyme) knew he wanted to go somewhere, he just wasn't quite sure where. Somehow, he too ended up in Provence but not, he assures us, because of the ubiquitous Mayle. Still called les Nouveaux by the villagers six years after he and his wife moved there, his account of life in Provence is all disastrous plumbing and shambolic renovations.

It does help, though, to have a wife with you, apparently. Probably even if you're a girl. Dingwall-Main's wife Nicky knocks up lamb in red wine, "accompanied by some lightly buttered noodles, coated with the juices of the 'daube' and sprinkled with a mixture of Emmenthal and Parmesan" - in the midst of architectural chaos - just like that! In Spanish Lessons: Beginning a New Life in Spain , Derek Lambert's air-hostess wife is transformed into an "adventuress of history, more Amelia Earhart than stewardess" by the mere matter of keeping house and cooking in their wreck of a Spanish country home. It's amazing, Lambert says of her "seamless transition from serving packaged meals and duty-free booze on aircraft to primitive expediency".

When not being unintentionally hilarious in this way, most who write about their move to the promised land of cheaper house prices (France is still the most popular, with Spain and Italy running a close second) and warmer weather, do tend to do it as a pair. Susan Loomis (On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town ) did initially head out for France as a cookery student toute seule, but it was only once she'd met husband Michael that the decision to move there permanently was taken. Fortunately, Loomis being a professional chef, husband Michael was able to rely entirely on her talents for producing a delicious meal from nothing but ashes. With both Chris Stewart (Driving over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia) and Annie Hawes (Extra Virgin: Amongst the Olive Groves of Liguria) storming the travel charts with their accounts of - yes, that's right - restoring dilapidated old houses to their former glory - which they bought for a pinch of course - and comical villagers who try to con them/pretend to misunderstand them/are just plain rude to them, the genre, much like the desire itself, is unlikely to go away.

Why, though, in the end, did they really do it? Dingwall-Main gives a host of reasons - better work prospects, cheaper property available, a turning-40 need for a change.But the most straightforward explanation may be the biggest of them all. "If you're going to move," he asks simply, "why not move closer to the sun?"u Famous Relocaters Muriel Spark, writer; TuscanyGore Vidal, writer; Tuscany Stephen Spender, poet; Provence, where his widow Natasha still lives Robert Graves, writer; Majorca Meg Ryan, actress; well, only on celluloid - French Kiss, where Kevin Kline played Hollywood's archetypal Frenchman complete with stubble, rough cooking skills and a perfect taste in wine Shirley Valentine, bored housewife; another fictional relocater but one of the most influential Peter Mayle, writer; the daddy of them all Gerald Durrell, writer; Corfu, Greece Johnny Depp, actor; south of Paris Alexander Trocchi, writer; Paris

Copyright 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.