One dark night I was watching French TV when I saw a light bobbing around outside in the orchard. I looked again, more closely this time and yes, there was definitely someone out there in the utter darkness in my orchard late at night armed with a flashlight. Now, in France you have to be careful because in the country anyone can, and everyone does, have a gun.
When I first went there I popped down to the local town and strolled into the gun shop and asked them what I could buy. They rolled a Tomahawk cruise missile out of the back of the store. No, not really, but it was a bit like that. I could have had a pump-action shotgun. Now, what would you want with one of those in rural France? Or anywhere for that matter...
Anyway, the torchlight bobbed about and I went out and took a deep breath of that silky night air. So clean and sharp, it went down into my lungs slick as good wine rolls on into your stomach. And it had the same effect, making me light-headed and happy, despite the fact that there was a serial killer out here who seemed to be roaming my fruit trees. Briefly I turned my head up and looked at the sky. Until you’ve seen the night sky out in the country you’ve never seen anything. It is so amazing. So vast, so large, so deeply black you feel you could be sucked right up into it and become one of those stars. There is just so much light in amongst the black, there’s just got to be so much life out there. How could there not be? Anyway, on that night I swear to you I saw my one and only shooting star flash across the heavens trailing a sparkling tail of glory. I don’t know what it meant but on that cool winter’s night I hoped it didn’t mean I was going to meet my maker.
I walked on ground as hard as iron, grass crackling as the night frost crept in. I cocked my head to see if I could hear anything. I squinted into the darkness and yes, I could see the torchlight. At least I thought that’s what it was. I wasn’t sure anymore. What with the darkness and the fact that the orchard backed onto miles of open fields, it could have been a light the size of a planet way, way away and the trees making it quiver as they moved in front of it. But then the wind that was rustling the skeletal beech trees reached me and it made me shiver because I heard a voice muttering. This wasn’t looking good and for a moment or two I thought of running back into the house and locking the doors and trying to work out the French for, help, I’ve got a nutcase serial killer in my garden, to which they would have replied, is he English or French? and I would have said, I think he’s French! and then they would have said, okay monsieur that’s all right then, and put the phone down. But I didn’t do that. Trouble was, my imagination really took over and I imagined doing just that with the phone and then hearing someone walking slowly up to the door in the pitch black and then banging on it, probably with the butt of a pump-action shotgun, one long bang after another and me whimpering inside, and then the door splintering and smashing and some French nutcase coming in and killing me and nobody would ever know what had happened because I was English and they wouldn’t bother trying to find out! I was going to die!
I would have got in the Citroen and driven it up and shone the lights out over the orchard but the battery kept going flat, something to do with the copious amounts of water that were flooding around inside its body (sometimes when I drove and then braked hard I could hear water sloshing around. I don’t know how it got in there, or actually even where it all was, but I suspect by now it will have corroded the whole car). Anyway, I decided against that. The only thing worse than being caught in the house by a French nutter would have been being caught in the car by a French nutter, with me feverishly trying to lock the car doors. The Citroen’s central locking was temperamental at the best of times and in fact, once on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, the horn started to toot of its own accord and at the same time one of the electric windows wound itself down and the central locking popped on and off. The culmination of all this activity was a snapped clutch cable. Apparently the French designed it so that it ran through or around some electric junction box. No, I don’t know why either, but the AA man told me that apparently it could have had something to do with the copious amounts of wine the French drink at lunchtime.  
The AA man replaced the clutch cable and then I was on my way. Unfortunately the horn wouldn’t stop tooting and as I drove through Streatham later that night I tooted all of the prostitutes as I went and was then pulled over by the police who said, “Now then sir, what’s all that about then?”
Anyway, out in this French orchard in the dead of night I decided that something had to be done, it was no good hiding, so I started to walk on the crisp winter grass towards the bobbing light which now seemed to be going around in circles. As I got closer I could hear more muttering and I realised that whoever it was out here was probably drunk. As I got closer I could see someone and he was thin and though he was muttering like a senile old man he sounded quite young. I figured then that this must be one of the boys from the hovel next door, one of the sons of the man who seemed to be on first name terms with the local gendarmes.
When I walked right up to him I saw he was looking at the ground and seemed to be stumbling in wide circles. Clearly he was very drunk and I guess he must have lost his way, probably when he popped out to the little boy’s room. I tapped him on the shoulder and he screamed and snapped his head up, the torch suddenly up vertical, lighting his face so he looked like a ghoul and I screamed and he stared at me with wide open eyes and then he screamed and ran off into the darkness in the general direction of the hovel, his arms up in the air, the torch still held in his hand, waving around like a firefly on speed, his screams echoing off the surrounding hills.
I went back to my house and locked the doors and went to bed. In the middle of the night I heard what sounded like a shotgun going off.

******
When I was first handed the keys I quickly discovered that due to the peculiarities of the French electricity system if you had more than four lights on and then tried to watch TV you’d be suddenly plunged into darkness. The first time it happened I thought it must have been a power cut. In fact, The General had warned me about this. He’d said, “Old chap, the power system was designed by men who...” well you know the rest - but because there was nothing to do out here in deepest and often darkest France I eventually walked up the road in the gathering dusk and found that other people in the scattered hamlet had their lights on. So I returned and after a bit of a search I found the main power switch, which had automatically tripped. I put it back on and the power of four small candles returned to the rat-infested place.
At first I did wonder what I’d done, buying this place in the middle of France, a country whose language I had despised when I was a schoolboy. Actually that’s not strictly true - I just didn’t like the French teacher, Mr Bell, or as we preferred to call him, Monsieur Ding-Dong. He never raised his voice, always spoke softly, almost a whisper, and it drove us mad. If he’d lost his temper every now and again it would have been simply great, and it would have made sense. As it was he just softly whispered and it made us all mad. Anyway, that’s another story.
I began to ask myself the big questions, like what the hell was I doing with my life? It reminded me of one of my friends, back when we were at school. One day John came to school and he said, “You know what, I was sitting on the bog this morning doing a number two and I asked myself, what’s it all about? I mean, what is the meaning of life? And you know, I thought about it for a good while and then I said to myself, what the fuck’s it got to do with me.”  
I could understand that. It seemed a good way to look at it. Here I was, in my thirties and I was single and there was no doubt I was running out of money and that soon my house in Reigate would be repossessed. About the only asset I had was an old house in France. Well, let’s not forget the rats, I had a whole extended family of those. And just across the way there was a house full of nutcases. In spite of all this I was asking myself a big question. Did I want to move out here and try my luck?

to be continued...