Taking Poochie or Tiddles on holiday to France has got a whole lot easier

Last year the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (or DEFRA for short) announced a simplification to the Pet Travel Scheme that now means that it's now even easier to take your Pet Dog, Cat or Ferret to/from the continent.

The revised rules that came into effect on 1st January are laid out on the "what Pet owners need to do" page of the DEFRA website, but boil down to:

1. Ensure that your pet is uniquely identifiable either by microchip or tatoo. This is a a fairly cheap process that most vets can carry out, or if your pet came from an animal rescue centre they they are quite likely to already have been microchipped.
   The nightmare scenario is if the microchip fails because you then face the whole quarantine process on your return, so worth getting your vet to verify that the microchip is still working before you leave the UK.


2. Vaccinate your pet against rabies at least 21 days before the date you are due to return to the UK.
   Prior to 2012 there used to be a requirement to wait 6 months after vaccination and then have a blood test to verify that the rabies vaccination had worked. This requirement has now been abolished as long as the vaccination is at least 21 days prior to entry to the UK.


3. Collect ther pet passport which your vet will issue. This records details of the unique identification number (microchip or tattoo), Rabies inoculation and bi-annual booster dates, tapeworm treatment, etc.
   Our dog's pet passport even has space for a photo of him but we've not been able to get him to sit still for long enough in the photo booth !


4. Tapeworm treatment for dogs is required to have been completed before you return back to the UK, and this must be between 1 and 5 days before your UK arrival time.
   So if you're going for a short trip you could have the treatment done in the UK before you depart, but for most people this will mean a trip to an overseas vet before you come back home.
   For pet guests to our Brittany Gite we provide details and directions to a local vet in Loudeac that we use, its about €20 for the consultation and tablet which you can administer yourself.
   This is another area where the rules have changed in 2012; the treatment can now be up to 5 days before travel (it used to be 24-48 hours beforehand) and tick treatment is now no longer mandatory, although is recommended.


5. Finally ensure you are travelling with an approved transport company on an authorised route - all the ferry routes from France are, but only the more major airlines that fly into large airports like Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, etc - so if you are using a budget airline best to check beforehand.

And that's it.

We're very happy to take pets at our quiet holiday Gite and the garden is safe and secure and fully fenced in. Our only request is keep the pets off the furniture and ensure that the garden is cleaned up afterwards.

We usually have about one Dog visiting the Gite each year. It's too early to tell if the relaxed DEFRA travel rules will mean that we get more pet guests; but do drop us a line if you'd like to come and stay.

New Year Guests and the house threw us a Christmas electrical present we didn't want

In between Christmas and New Year (on bank holiday Tuesday 27th to be precise) we received a booking enquiry from a couple and their young son that wanted to take a New Year break in our holiday Gite from the Friday before New Year Eve through to Friday the following week.

Yes the Gite was available, yes our agents were available to do the cleaning and changeover to prepare the Gite beforehand, so we quickly arranged the rental and payment straight into our bank account, I sent the guests travel directions from Eurotunnel, and everything was booked.

The afternoon before our guests were due to arrive Shirley and Geoff (our agents) went over to the Gite to prepare it ready for their arrival and to put the heating on, but 5 minutes after they'd arrived the lights in the lounge and the kitchen "blew" out and the bulb in one of the lounge lights actually started to burn! Geoff replaced the bulbs and fuse (twice) but to no avail, no lights in the kitchen or lounge.

Unfortunately the downstairs lights are also on the same circuit as the central heating boiler, so no heating or hot water either!

Shirley managed to get an electrician they know, Russell, to meet them at the house the next morning to try to diagnose and fix the problem, and other than leaving a note for the incoming guests in case they arrive early, there wasn't much else that could be done.

Next morning I kept nervously phoning Geoff and Shirley to find out what the news was, and fortunately by lunchtime Russell had found that there was a wiring fault in one of the two metal lights in the lounge that was causing the short-circuit. He removed the light and problem solved, lighting and heating restored again.

Phew.

What caused the problem I have absolutely no idea. These lights (which you can see in the photo above) were in the Gite when we moved in but several years ago I had replaced the wiring in them with brand new 2-core lighting cable because I didn't feel that the previous "bell wiring" that the French owners had used was really up to the job! So why this went wrong and what caused it to suddenly fail I don't know but a big thank you is definitely due to Shirley, Geoff and Russell for sorting out the problem and doing it quickly before the guests arrived.

For those with longer memories of the Blog will remember that this story has a very familiar echo to a posting I made at Christmas 2008 when the main EDF circuit breaker failed and we had no electricity in the Gite at all, resulting in me having to try to telephone and explain to EDF (in French) that I needed them to come and fix the problem on Christmas Eve.

These things are sent to try us I suppose !

Hohoho - Personalised Santa Greeting

It's been a while on the blog (I know, I know); blame it on work and more work.

However, as the festive season draws near and dreams that I can put the laptop aside, here's a couple of Christmas websites I thought I'd pass on that is definitely in my Cool Websites category.

First up if you've not seen it is the Google-Earth supported Norad Santa. Run in conjunction with the USA defence boys who normally spend their time looking out for Johnny Foreigner sending missiles at Uncle Sam, they use all their radar technology to track Santa on Christmas Eve as he flies around the globe delivering presents. I first showed my kids this one a couple of years ago and they loved it.

Secondly is one I've never seen before, run by Portable North Pole (PNP) it's a website where you can create your very own personalised child's Christmas message from Santa. It's an absolute hoot of a site, you fill in some details of your child, their age, where they live, what they've done this year, whether they've been naughty or not, and then let Santa's magic do the rest.

The resultant video is then emailed to the lucky child and you can also buy a permanent HD quality copy if you want as well.

I've had a go for our youngest child Jack who is 10 and you can take a look at Jack's video for yourself, I just couldn't stop laughing at it.
Unfortunately I forgot to upload a picture of him so at one stage there is a gingerbread man icon but never mind, its all part of the mystery of Santa.

Enjoy!

Mixup over holiday booking dates led to a stressful day

If you believe in Karma or destiny, then it was bound to happen one day and there was nothing I could do about it to avoid a mixup over rental bookings for our holiday Gite.

I'm slightly less fatalistic and do believe (despite what my wife thinks) in being methodical and organised when it comes to administering the Gite booking process.

But regardless of all my care, and maybe Karma took a hand, but the other week I had a rather concerned phone call from Shirley our agent in Brittany to tell me that something had gone wrong. She'd been to the Gite to do the changeover between two sets of guests and the prior guest family were clearly still in occupancy, but were nowhere around, and it looked like they'd gone out for the day!

I checked and double checked the original Gite booking request and confirmation emails for the two sets of families and confirmed that yes the bookings were sequential with one group due to leave at 10am on the Tuesday and the second group due to arrive at 4pm the same day, but these back-to-back bookings are quite normal in peak periods, so there wasn't a mistake there. Unfortunately I didn't have mobile phone numbers for either set of guests so I couldn't phone them to try to resolve the issue, and I knew that the incoming family were already on their way down to the Gite from the Calais ports so would be arriving later that afternoon.

Fortunately Shirley had the solution, one of her neighbours also had a holiday Gite that Shirley was sure was empty that week, so Shirley went off to ask her neighbour if she could open up her Gite for the night and we'd at least have somewhere for the incoming guests to stay when they arrived if the outgoing guests were still there.

And that's in the end what happened. Shirley and her husband went over to our Gite in the afternoon to wait for the incoming guests to arrive, which they eventually did, and whilst Shirley was explaining what the problem was the guests that were still occupying the Gite arrived back and the problem was explained to all parties.
It turned out that the first family had booked their return ferry for the Wednesday and had booked the Gite up to the Tuesday - not realising the difference in date - and then hadn't even read the booking confirmation that stated that their booking was up to 10am on the Tuesday departure day. If only they had read it then the error would have been realised and avoided much earlier. The outgoing guests were very apologetic about the problem and the incoming guests were quite understanding as well; they stayed one night in Shirley's neighbour's Gite and then moved in to ours 24 hours later.

We've been renting out our holiday Gite for over the 7 years now and in that time have had over 100 different sets of guests staying with us, so it was kind of inevitable that one day we'd have a problem like this. I'm pleased we managed to sort it out in the end but it was a bit stressful at the time.

Moral of the story is please please do read the booking confirmation, that's what its there for!

Save5 - an inspirational campaign to make a difference and save lives

This blog posting is unashamedly not about our French Gite, but about something much more important, about saving lives.

Here's a simple question for you; if you were seriously ill or dying and needed an organ transplant to save your life, then would you accept a transplant if one was offered to you?

What if the same situation occurred with a close family member, your parent, your wife or husband?

I'm sure most people would say that they'd accept the transplant for the chance to live a little longer.

The reason I ask is all because of the Save5 campaign to give everyone the chance to save 5 lives - despite 97% of the population saying they'd accept a transplant if they needed it, only 28% are currently on the organ donor register; this is a massive imbalance and Save5 is trying to change this situation.

Let me explain more.   Just before we went on holiday to France I was at my Rotary club meeting and the speaker that evening was 'T' Sandeman-Charles who told us her own personal inspirational story and how she has created the "Save 5 campaign".

T's story is quite amazing, from simple beginnings of becoming a legal secretary straight out of school, she then worked then for Thames TV and progressed her career up to working on some of the major shows of the 80's and 90's, and then she went on to form her own business selling Pampered Chef cookware, and over 7 years grew to a multi-million pound team turnover; and then last year she gave up the business and walked away, taking nothing out of it.

The reason for this dramatic about-turn is that T found out she was diagnosed with not one but two incurable lung diseases and one of them (idiopathic pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis) is so rare that only 7 other people in the world have been diagnosed with it. These diseases will eventually mean that the lungs will find it harder and harder to breath until she either lucky enough to receive a lung transplant, or she will die.

T decided not to dwell on her illness but instead to focus her considerable energies on making a positive difference and she set herself the goal of getting 10,000 more people to join the organ donor register before she dies.

Nobody wants to talk about dying but the amazing thing is that your kidneys, heart, liver, lungs, pancreas and the small bowel can all be transplanted - literally saving the lives of 5 people. Tissue such as skin, bone, tendons, cartilage, heart valves and corneas can also be donated to help others such as in reconstructive surgery after an accident, heart valves can help children born with heart defects, skin grafts can help burn victims, and corneas can restore the sight of people that have suffered eye injury or disease.

Unfortunately many people put off joining the organ donor register, or if they have registered they don't keep their address details up to date when they move, and of course some people die in a way that means that their organs can't be used, so T's campaign to encourage 10,000 more people to join the register was I thought a fantastic personal mission that could literally change the lives of thousands and thousands of people.

For more details of T's life-changing campaign see her Save 5 website and please please do join up. It costs nothing but could make a real difference to someone else.

PS: Long standing readers of the Blog may remember my own personal account of my Mum dying from a massive stroke in May 2005. We gave our consent for her body to be used for organ donation and I think her corneas, liver, kidneys and heart were all used successfully to help other people. The people at the hospital and the transplant coordinator were very good and afterwards we were touched to receive letters from the families of those we had helped.

PPS: As at today T's Save5 campaign has resulted in an extra 2,748 people joining the organ donor register. Please do pass on details of the campaign and help to reach the 10,000 target.

French Heating Oil Prices

For both our Brittany Holiday Home and the house we live in in Bedfordshire, UK, we have an oil boiler for the central heating and hot water. The French system is slightly different in that it has a flash (on demand) boiler that switches on to heat up the water when you open a tap whereas the UK system is a conventional hot water cylinder in the airing cupboard, but other than that they're pretty similar.

And the heating oil which is 28 sec Kerosene is the same.

But what is really different is the price we pay for our heating oil in the two countries.

Just before I left for France I decided to order 1500 litres of heating oil for the UK as I wanted to buy before the prices started rising in the autumn and winter, so the day before I left I phoned around, got the best price I could and asked for the oil to be delivered whilst we were away in France.

When we were over in France one of the first things I did was to phone up a local supplier and ask him to deliver 1000 litres of heating oil for the holiday home as we were getting down to the last 300 litres or so and so it was time to refill the tank. The French tanker driver arrived on the Tuesday, quite by coincidence the same day that the UK delivery took place.

In the UK we paid 54.95 pence per litre - which is incidentally the highest price I have ever had to pay for heating oil in England, but economic conditions, prices of a barrel of oil, uncertainties in the Middle East, etc all conspired to make this the price it was.

So after 5% VAT the bill came to £865.46 for 1500 litres.

In France I'm not sure whether there is any TVA tax charged or not, I'm only ever quoted a single price per litre, and I paid 88.6 cents a litre, making the total bill for €886.00 for 1000 litres, or roughly £782.

So for only 10% more money I got 50% more heating oil in the UK. This works out that French heating oil is a wopping 36% more expensive than back at home.

Ouch.

Fortunately we don't use anywhere near as much oil in France as we do in the UK and we only have to fill the tank every couple of years or so rather than once maybe twice a year in the UK depending on how cold the winter is, but the price differential is really noticeable when you see comparative numbers like this.

Goodbye France Magazine

New Horizon media who are the owners of both the popular frenchentree.com website and the highstreet French Magazine have announced that on 27th October 2011 following 10 years of French Magazine they are bringing the two publication avenues closer together and rebranding French Magazine as 'FrenchEntrée Magazine'.

There's no details of the new magazine look and feel on the current French Magazine website section but in the press release I received the magazine editor Justin Postlethwaite says: "The magazine has been receiving great feedback from readers and advertisers this year. So rest assured that the new name is the only aspect that we will be changing. Once they turn the cover, readers will still enjoy all of the same high-quality articles celebrating the best of France, brought to you by the same team of journalists and designers."

Plus ça change?

There's been lots of prior company mergers of online and offline business models (some with really dire consequences as a result - AOL/Time Warner as the biggest example), and personally I suspect there really will be more to this than just a name change over time.

Moncontour medieval videos

Following on from my earlier posting from the Moncontour medieval festival, here are two short video's to give some further flavour to the day's entertainment.

I tried more than once to upload these video's from McDonald's when I was in France but just couldn't get enough bandwidth over their free Wifi - so had to send these separately when I got back home to the UK.
(and sorry again to my family for having to sit around in McDonalds, twice, for over an hour whilst I tried !)

The first is of a procession coming up the hill for a "mock religious interrogation:

And the second is of some musicians walking past us:

Very colourful Breton home

[Warning, this is the very first time that I have ever tried the
Mail2Blogger interface of emailing my Blog posting to Blogger, so if the results aren't readable or are badly formatted, blame Blogger not me!]

Across much of our part of Brittany there's a real mixture of properties, the traditional stone-built ex-farmhouses with steeply pitched slates roofs, and the newer block construction properties which are also tiled in slate but are pretty universally rendered and then painted with a near-identical shade of buttermilk or pale-yellow exterior paint.

Most of the Breton population seem to prefer the newer houses than the cost of renovating and maintaining an older property (so us ex-pat's get to buy a lot of them!), and I can kind of understand the logic of wanting to live in a more modern double-glazed and centrally-heated home, but whilst you don't get the "housing estate" effect of rows and rows of identical houses as most new builds are built to order once the owner has bought the land, you still can't get over the uniformity of exterior appearance.

I guess there is no local planning regulations as to what colour to paint your home, it's just convention that causes everyone to stick to buttermilk, but for one house owner we drove past on the way into Loudeac to go to the supermarket for food shopping the other day, the owner is definitely bucking the trend with their brilliant orange home.

We just had to stop and take a few photos: