Forms, forms, forms

Saint Anthelme
Yesterdays weather: I don't want to talk about it (18 degrees). Currently stair rod rain!

It is imperative that one of the first things you do when you move to France, or a new area within France, is meet the mayor. So after 8 years of holidays and 5 months of living here we did just that today (procrastination being one of our character traits since we moved here). Monsieur le Maire is a very nice chap, talks a bit too fast for me to keep up with but as long as I get the main substance of what he is telling me, if I miss a word here and there, it isn't too much of a worry.

We went to see him to find out whether we need planning permission for the shed/garden house. In France you need to fill in a form to exempt you from filling in a form, so we have to complete a declaration de travaux so that we don't have to complete a permit de construire.

We will have to submit forms for both the pool and the shed, separately of course. They are both completed in triplicate with plans of the village showing our location, plans of the property showing where we intend to build the pool and the shed and plans of the shed and the pool separately. Apparently this will take 3 - 4 weeks to be approved but it will be approved, no question. I suspect that it will be normalement 3 - 4 weeks but we will go ahead and buy the shed anyway as it is on a 4 week lead and all should come together at the same time (probably in November).




The mayor gave us some news - apparently the village is absolutely crowded with anglophones..... English, Scots, Irish and we haven't met one of them, so I don't know where they are hiding. But then, they haven't met us yet either and I know where we have been for the last 5 months. He also tells us that there is a soirée quiz held in the village store/bar which is well frequented by the Anglo-Saxons. He then went on to tell us all the social activities planned for this coming season, starting with the big fair for all the local villages in two weeks time. It seems we could be looking forward to a lot of late nights this summer.