I keep promising both myself and a bunch of more important people to write to them, get back to them, post something here, reply to that e-mail…you get the idea. I don’t write nearly as much as I’d like to these days. In fact that’s an exaggeration, I often don’t write a single word from one week to the next; days fly by, weeks zip along nearly as fast and then it’s next year.

I still remember very clearly looking forward to the year 2000 with trepidation because I’ll be 40 that year. This year I’m 50 for doG’s sake. Eff me. Please. Talk about living in the future, I just don’t understand why my car doesn’t fly and I’m not holidaying on the moon.

Still. 2009 was an interesting year; started with me having quit a job I didn’t really like that much back at the end of 2008 and start looking for one which would bring us closer to Sauve and Delphine’s family, with us coming back to Avignon after a fantastic Christmas in England with my family where Scarlett delighted us all by almost walking properly.

She did start walking properly this year, of course, that is what children her age do. There’s a bunch – OK, over a thousand – new photos lurking between the digital camera (how long will we go on saying ‘Digital Cameras’ instead of just ‘Cameras’?), this computer, Delphine’s computer and flickr. They will onwardly progress soon.

As I did in the end, finding a job, eventually and after a number of promising but false starts, in Lunel. Second de Cuisine. Full time. And it allows us to live in Sommières which is one of the most beautiful towns in Languedoc. But. Well, this is what I wrote recently to someone I like:

So the new house is great, albeit expensive to heat – oil boiler has
just received its second 1,000 litre delivery which we hope will last
the winter. November/December was especially cold for here, down to
minus 10 some nights. The decor isn’t to our tastes, a bit ‘Clown
escaped from the circus turned decorator’ for my tastes but you can’t
have everything. We have good landlords who are doing all the little
jobs at their expense that normally I’d expect to have to do like
painting shutters and so on.

We have a great garden, not too big or small, room for a small
vegetable patch and we have several herb bushes already – rosemary,
lavendar and so on. And an olive tree – the olives are soaking right
now.

Scarlett is great, always curious and interested in everything, and
learning more words every day. Delphine is well but tired, new baby is
due end of July/beginning of August. She’s currently going through the
very complicated official re-education program to find a new
profession as her carpal tunnel problems mean she can’t cut flowers or
carry buckets of water any more to be a florist.

Work is very successful for me; Chef and I had a moment or two back in
October when we didn’t get on and I think we both wanted out – he was
having a hard time converting from Second to Chef and took it out on
me. He went on holiday for a week which went fine, but when he came
back he picked up one small problem (a friend of his claimed his duck
was overcooked although he’d said nothing at the time of his meal) and
blew it up into the end of the world. Now he’s fine, he’s just had 10
days off without any problems while he was away and he seems happy as
he’s been confirmed in the job.

Me, I like the work well enough and am lucky that we have Saturday
mornings and all Sunday off – except when, like this weekend, we have
to work Sunday which means we all only have half days off this week.
Can’t have everything of course.

But honestly the hours are getting me down, particularly having to
work evenings and spend so little time with Scarlett and Delphine;
every job I’ve done before has been for a limited period, albeit of up
to 9 months. As this is a permanent contract   there is no end, and
French law requires me to work a year before I can take any holiday. 3
days off last weekend is my longest break before next June.

So I’m seriously thinking about alternatives; a move to a traiteur or
a collective kitchen in a school or a retirement home or similar, or
even a move away from restaurants all together; there’s currently a
recruitment drive going on for English (among other) teachers and I’ve
filled in the papers to see what happens there. But nothing hasty at
all, I’d be content to stay where I am for a couple of years or more
even. This may just be the seven-month itch.

So yeah, I may not be a cook for the rest of my life. Or even the rest of this year. I wished, at the end of last year, for this year to be completely unexciting; that ain’t gonna happen, none of my years are ever uninteresting it seems. There’s already going to be a new baby in August and perhaps a new job now too; we’ll see.

We went for a great long walk this afternoon, through town and out along the Voie Verte, the old railway line which has been tarmaced over and turned into a decent walk from here 19 kms towards Nimes, and we really enjoyed it. We’re just starting to get to know Sommières – previously, like most people, we knew the Saturday market and that was it. Now we’re meeting, slowly, some of the people and finding the interesting corners. We do miss Avignon a lot but, as Delphine remarked this afternoon, people here say ‘Bonjour’ as you pass them in the street which they didn’t do in the big city.

And it’s great that we don’t really have any worries or major problems; yeah, more money would be nice and the washing machine appears to have given up on us after four years, but they’re not really problems. We’re all well and very happy and, as the cliché goes, that’s what counts.

Me, I haven’t been this happy in a long time, if ever. Certainly it’s the happiest I’ve been since moving to France, probably the happiest since the early ’90s, which is a long time even when you’re fast approaching 50.

So, how are you all? If we’ve lost touch, which we obviously have, I’m sorry. Email works two ways, even if it’s sometimes not evident from my lack of replies, for which I’m again sorry.

Cheers.

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2008 was a real roller coaster of a year. It started going downhill after a hoped-for cool job in Ireland with A Famous Celebrity fell through when he and especially his wife turned out to be complete and utter lying tossers. Lesson learned.
The year went back uphill with the proposition of working back in Ireland for a member of the country’s richest family – and downhill six weeks into the job when it turned out that he didn’t intend to actually pay me any wages.
We were still going uphill with the birth of Scarlett on May 1 and were literally three days from moving house to Ireland, all three of us, when the wages bombshell dropped. Scarlett was a month old and we were in the throes of packing up the house in France to go spend a month in Ireland and then move over lock, stock and barrel when I learned – accidentally – that my erstwhile employer had no intention of paying me any wages while he was away from home. And since he spends six months a year abroad for tax purposes, my salary started looking very paltry.
Coupled with the fact that Ireland had really disappointed me as a country, this was a real downer. We were prepared to accept the country’s third-world health care – it costs €70 to visit a doctor, non-reimbursable, and you pay for children as for adults – and being out in the wilds of nowhere because, firstly, I actually loved the job; cooking for the old man was a joy, he was a real pleasure to work for personally. Unfortunately those with whom he chose to surround himself were wankers of the first order, bent on destroying me quite possibly because they saw me as ‘competition’ for his favours. And secondly, the offered salary would have allowed us to save up enough money to return to France in a few years and establish our own business. Well, wages are easy to promise but harder to pay, so that one stopped dead there.
It dragged on, of course. I had to return to Ireland to collect my belongings, fortunately when there was no one in the house. I had 75 kilos of luggage, all my cooking equipment and books; when traveling over my employer had paid the excess baggage charge but there was no way I could afford that myself, so I had to get a ferry from Dublin to Hollyhead and then a train across Wales and England to London and then up to my parents’ house near Bedford. There I left most of my belongings and brought the rest home on Easyjet – 20 kilos in the hold and who knows how much stuffed into my carry-on rucksack. A real nightmare 48 hours which all but did me in, both emotionally and physically. We had really invested in the idea of moving to Ireland, even being prepared to take our one-month-old daughter there to live, only to have the idea destroyed by a lying tart. Still, lesson learned – never, ever, ever go anywhere to work without a signed contract specifying everything you want. Old men make promises their staff have no intentions of keeping.
I quickly found a job in a restaurant in Avignon which was fine, a post as Chef de Partie in a gastronomic restaurant 10 minutes by pushbike from the flat. The salary was Enough and the work interesting, although some of the characters working there were jaw-droppingly weird. The Second who managed to get fired after serving rotting fish to one of the place’s favourite clients and sending off a sample to the analysis laboratory that was, literally, full of his own shit (permitted level of the bacteria you leave on food after not washing your hands following a bathroom break: 500; actual level of shitty bacteria in sample: 30,000); the cook who was a ‘mythoman’, as the French call them, a Walter Mitty character who had, variously, a dead daughter or a daughter who was studying to be a doctor; a daughter so poorly she was helicoptered to a brain specialist in Marseilles or who was doing well at school; a collection of vintage Ferraris and Bugattis or who drove a broken-down old Alfa Romeo. Then there were the control freak managers who wanted one, not two, slices of toast served with the foie gras and the portions of salad accompanying starters to be weighed, and who refused to replace the flood-damaged and filthy kitchen floor six years after it was ruined; waiters who spent, literally, hours chatting up female customers and shagging them instead of serving food. A chef who gave me a final, written warning (with, naturally, no preceding warnings at all) when he found one spot of tomato juice on a wall in a part of the building I’d never worked in. It goes on. All restaurants are special, but this one was Special. That place was a roller coaster ride all on its own, a funfair of excitement and disappointment on the Montagne Russe, as the French call them, that was our 2008. Lesson learned: everyone who works in, and especially who runs, restaurants is Mad with a capital Flibble.
On the up again. We got married in August, a truly splendid weekend of fun and partying with many of our favourite people traveling from all over France and the UK to have a good time with us. It makes you want to get married more often just so you can see them, really one of the favourite weekends of my whole life. And especially getting to work with the marvellous Steve and Caroline preparing Sunday lunch: thank you chaps, without you none of that would have been possible, I love you dearly. Lesson learned: Friends are great, cherish them.
My contract finished at the restaurant in October and things were fine for a while. The Irish Problem had been dragging on all through the summer, with them refusing point blank to pay me the wages they owed me. It was only a couple of thousand euros, but they would have none of it. So I was forced to take them to the Prud’Hommes, the Industrial Tribunal, the Commissioners as they’re called over there. The money would have been nice but the real problem, it turned out, was that they hadn’t given me an end-of-contract bit of paper I needed to be able to claim unemployment benefit in France. Well, they hadn’t ever given me a contract either, but the e-o-c one stopped me getting any unemployment benefit money at all from the start of November until it finally arrived in February, which made for a very, very difficult three and a half months for us. The Irish turd who had fucked everything up, the old man’s secretary, had apparently had my contract on her desk all the time – well, that’s what Sources Close To… told me, sources who had no reason to lie. Why she simply didn’t give it to me I can only guess, not know. Lesson learned: trust no one.
So I had to travel back to Ireland – four flights and a car hire, thank you – to attend the Commissioner’s Hearing in a town just down the road from the old man’s castle. The Commissioner, a retired judge, listened to my story and then started on their version. They had the Lying Secretary, The Lawyer and The Barrister in attendance; the Barrister had prepared a two-inch-thick brief which the Commissioner didn’t open. Their version of what happened was incredible, a real work of fantasy, but still. I listened patiently until The Commissioner stopped them, half an hour in, and asked them to leave the room. “This will go on all day today and probably tomorrow, if the size of this brief is anything to go by,” she said. “And they’re going to lose. How about I propose to them that they give you €2,500, they can beat it down to the €2,000 you want and we can all get home for lunch?” Fine by me, but it took another half an hour to persuade Them.
So they got off with a small fine for not having given me a contract in the first place and the €2,000 I wanted all along. Plus, and I’m guessing here, probably €10,000 in lawyer and barrister costs. I liked the old man and he deserves better advisors than this, and I’m sorry he ended up losing a chef he liked. No one won this one, although I lost less than the others. Lesson learned: get it in writing no matter how sincere the promises.
The Commissioner hearing was in late November and we spent two weeks over Christmas in England with my parents, a marvellous time for them and Scarlett who adored all the attention they gave her. It’s a real joy seeing the pleasure they give to each other, this was a real Up after the Downer that Ireland had been for me, but our money worries were mounting and becoming a real problem.
When I’d taken the P45 the Irish finally sent me into the French Unemployment office, they waved it away: P45? Here we want an E301, Monsieur. Now, an E301 is a P45 with the ‘P45’ name scratched out and ‘E301′ written over the top, but that doesn’t matter. The Former Employer should have furnished me with the E301 but, obviously, that wasn’t going to happen now, so a lot of research turned up another form to fill in and send to Ireland to turn a P45 into an E301. And that didn’t arrive until mid-February.
I gave the form to the French unemployment wonks and they promptly decided to pay me half the benefit they should have done, so another 10 days passed while they fixed that one, and we finally got some money – but only after incurring I Really Don’t Want To Know How Much in bank overdraft charges and interest. Essentially all the Irish settlement money. Lesson learned: Don’t work for the Irish, don’t trust anyone, check the bits of paper you need in advance, be nice to the French bureaucrats, have an understanding bank manager.
And of course, all this time I’ve been applying for jobs. At the end of last season no one was hiring as the economic crisis started. Then, as detailed in my last post, I applied for a couple of hundred jobs between January and now and had a really bad time of all that. I was offered and accepted a job just down the road from Delphine’s parents’ home in the Gard, but an innocent e-mail from me to the employer turned out to be a threat to drag her off to the Prud’Hommes/Industrial tribunal and she refused to hire me. Lesson learned: sort out everything before you’re hired. I thought I was just confirming something already promised, but in fact I uncovered a thin tissue of lies about wages and conditions and am glad I did – I’d have finished working 6 days a week for 3 days’ worth of wages.
It has been an extremely difficult 18 months, starting back in October 2007 when we first thought we’d be moving to Ireland to work for The Famous Irish Celebrity. People, it turns out, are simply not as nice as me. They lie. They cheat. And they smile while doing it. We’ve had some terrible moments and some fantastic moments and are now hoping, sincerely, that the next 18 months will be a lot smoother and easier. We’ll see, and hope for the best. I’m lucky that Delphine has been so understanding and supportive through all of this, I really couldn’t have coped without her or with a lesser woman, so thank you very much Chérie, mon amour, sans toi je serai rien. Lesson learned: marry a good woman.
Now I’m off to Uzes to work in a new restaurant. There’s a trial period of 14 days and, if it works out, we’ll be moving over there. But it’s all in writing now, we’re not buying plane tickets or house hunting until it’s certain, and there are back-up options waiting in the wings Just In Case.
Lessons learned.