Cheap foreign currency transfers, 2018 update

Back in 2013 I last wrote about using peer to peer providers to transfer money from the UK to France, and in particular I looked at Transferwise and CurrencyFair in comparison to Moneybookers (now Skrill) that I had used up to then.

I concluded that the peer to peer services provided a better rate of return, and that I would be using them going forward.

Earlier in the month I needed to transfer £500 to my French bank account in order to pay the property insurance. In the last few years both Transferwise and CurrencyFair have introduced mobile apps to make it even easier to convert and send your money, and when I found that the Transferwise app on my iPad wasn't working I uninstalled it and reinstalled it to fix the problem.

Once working I thought I'd look to see what other iPad money transfer apps were available, I'd give them a spin, and see whether any of them offered me a better rate or transfer amount.

So here's my experience of this very limited test.

Remember, the requirement was to transfer £500 into Euros. I decided that if there were any fees on top to be paid then I'd reduce the amount I was transferring as needed, so in all cases I would be spending exactly £500.

First up Transferwise, their iPad app is easy to use, for my £500 I was offered a rate of 1.251 and £3.54 of fees, meaning I'd end up with €558.57 in my French account.

Next, CurrencyFair. They don't have an iPad app, only an iPhone app, so on my iPad it has to be stretched and I have to tilt the screen 90 degrees to be able to use it (I have a cover with integrated keyboard on my iPad so this is a pain to use). They offered a rate of 1.1198 inclusive of fees, resulting in €559.90.

Then I looked for some other companies to try and found 3 more:
WorldRemit. Their iPad app enabled me to check the rate before I created an account (nice, not everyone did this), and their rate was 1.1162 with £2.99 fee on top meaning my £500 gave me €555.88 into my French account.

Azimo. I couldn't do anything with their iPad app until I had firstly registered with them (boo), but they did offer me the first transfer fee-free. Their rate was 1.11307, the transfer fee would have been £1 (but first one free remember), so I'd have ended up with €556.54.

And finally, Small World. They have a proper iPad app (hurrah), but it's stuck in portrait mode. As my iPad in its cover is permanently in landscape this means a cricked neck when you use it - Grr.
Anyway, next to one side, I didn't need to register first to get a quote (good), and it was a healthy 1.12 exchange rate, the best so far, mind you there was a £5 fee on top of that which would have evened things up if they too hadn't had a first-transfer-free policy as well.
So with them I was getting €561.84, the best overall.

And so tempted by this offer I registered with Small World and made my transfer through them. Of course for money laundering requirements I had to upload a photo of my passport which was easily done through the app, and I waited. Next day they verified my documents, the transfer went ahead, and 2 days later the money was in France.

In summary for £500 to €:

Transferwise	€558.90
CurrencyFair	€559.90
WorldRemit	€555.88
Azimo	€556.54
Small World	€561.84

So not a massively scientific test, but it does show that there is value in shopping around.

Two weeks later as I write this Blog post, I've just been through all the apps again to see what they now suggest I would get. Here's the second set of results, again for a £500 transfer:

Transferwise	€565.62
CurrencyFair	Couldn't give me a quote as the markets close at 8pm Irish time on Friday's
WorldRemit	€561.45
Azimo	€559.27
Small World	€563.20

My conclusion is to probably remain with TransferWise and CurrencyFair as my preferred options, although I have used TransferWise the most over the last few years. I will try the others maybe one or two times more and might keep Small World as a 3rd transfer option.

The Brittany folded baguette

Just read an amusing article on the Daily Mail website announcing that a Brittany bakery has invented the folded baguette that fits easier into your shopping bag.  

What do you think, clever idea or not?

     

Port of St Malo

Arriving in at the port of St Malo.  Slept on the floor of the recling chair lounge as there was more room than being in a reclining chair (that I paid £5 for the privilege of having), but actually slept quite well.   Croissants and coffee for breakfast and now I'm here in France.

Misty still morning

Driving to Pontivy this morning we sped through misty lanes as the sun shone through.

It was an absolutely still morning, the windmills were static and the smoke from this industrial building was rising directly upwards.

Beautiful

Dodging the French wildlife

Toby and I are over at our Brittany Gite for the half term holiday week.

We took the 9.10pm Friday evening MyFerryLink crossing from Dover to Calais for a very reasonable £70 return. Of course the M25 was as lovely as usual, an hour's queue for the Dartford crossing, but I'd allowed enough time and we were able to call at a Dover chip shop before we checked in, and drove straight onto the boat with no queuing on the quayside. Hurrah !

Got my head down to sleep on a bench for the crossing, and other than a few bits of rain on the journey (sophisticated French rain not boring old English rain) it was almost a trouble free drive through the night to the Gite.

I say almost, because whilst driving along one road I saw something grey standing on the edge of the road. As I got nearer I realised there were about 6 somethings beside and in the edge of the road. I swerved round them as I realised it was a pack of what I think were wild boars - grayish brown, about the size of a large dog, only more stocky and round.
Phew, good job I missed them as I am sure the car wouldn't have been happy if I'd hit them.

15 miles from the Gite I managed to take a right turning too early and ended up down a network of country lanes. Thankfully Sat nav put me right and we were soon at the Gite.

Only in France - pub fined after guest takes glass back to the bar

I thought that this article I initially read on Times of India about France labour laws was really amusing.

According to the article (which is repeated almost verbatim on The Independent and Connexion France) it was a polite tradition for customers of the Mamm-Kounifl concert-café in Locmiquélic, Brittany to carry drinks trays and used glasses back to the bar after they had finished using them.

However the social security agency URSAFF saw it differently, and claimed that the customers returning trays and glasses was an infringement of labour laws because "customers were acting like waiters".

The authorities initially fined the pub owners €7,900 and briefly placed them in police custody. Customers vouched for the owners and they escaped charges, but URSSAF are still pursuing a social case and are now seeking €9,000 due to non-payment of the original fine. A URSSAF spokesperson told France Bleu they refute the owners’ account of the incident.

Read the full article on any of the above links.

Only in France ?

Bonne année et bonne santé.

(Happy new year and good health)

What time is the déchetterie open?

Unfortunately the garden doth grow at the Gite and so it was out with the hedge cutters and secateurs to bring the bushes back under control.

One bush in particular in the flower bed behind the swimming pool was really large this year and looked as if it was trying to climb into the pool!
After pruning it back I realised that it wasn't something we had planted and it was in fact a self-seeded sapling, so it had to go. Toby set to it with his axe and an hour or so later the errant bush was gone, as was a fair amount of the flower bed and retaining stone wall as we pulled out some 10 linear feet of roots that had grown through the bark chippings.

By now the sapling, its roots and all the other branch,  flower and shrub cuttings from the garden were making a rather large pile so I decided to take it all to the déchetterie (i.e recycling centre) in nearby La Cheze.

Unfortunately I then remembered that I couldn't remember what days of the week and times the déchetterie was open. Several times in the past I have loaded the car up, driven to the déchetterie, only to find that it wasn't open that day of the week.

Ah, but last time this happened I took a photo of the sign with the opening times on and wrote them down so no such mistakes next time.

But where did I write down the opening times??

10 minutes later I remembered, I had written the déchetterie opening times on a plasterboard wall in the unrennovated half of the Gite - thinking that whilst I might have lost a piece of paper, I couldn't possibly manage to lose a wall!

But quelle surprise, I had managed to lose a wall for when I went to read the times I couldn't find them on the wall.
Turned out that the piece of plasterboard wall in the upstairs corridor that I had written on was one that I'd then taken down to change the wiring behind. Fortunately I still had the plasterboarded sheet ready to be put back up when I had finished the wiring, but it turned out to be near the bottom of the pile of plasterboard sheets so I had to move and lift them all up so I could find the opening times written on the wall!

Success, the déchetterie is open today so I could fill the car up and take all the garden waste away at last.

Phew, what a palaver.

And, note to self, in case I lose the wall again, the La Cheze déchetterie is open every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 9am to 12pm.

We're talking about money, money

Musical introduction
Paraphrasing the lyrics from "Money's Too Tight To Mention" from the great Mick Hucknall of Simply Red (who my wife Liz has a real crush on -- I think its the red hair), "We're talking about money, money", or to be more accurate, "We're talking about money transfers, money transfers", but since this doesn't have quite the same rhythmic structure to it, I doubt that anyone has written a song about transferring money from one country to another.

Moneybookers the story so far
I wrote in 2007 about the benefits of Moneybookers for easy (and cheap) foreign currency transfers, giving step by step instructions as to how to use their service and I've used them now for many years to transfer money from the UK to my French bank account, and I've stayed with them when Moneybookers increased their transaction fees in 2008 as they were still cheaper than the high street banking alternatives.

But I think its now time to change allegiance.

The internet world moves on and Moneybookers rebranded themselves a couple of years ago as Skrill, but the domain name and the service all remained the same so all was good.

However in February 2012 Skrill/Moneybookers wrote to me to advise of changes to their terms and conditions. Most significant of which is that they've introduced an 'inactivity fee' of €1 per month if you haven't logged in or made a transaction using your Skrill account within the previous 18 months. This inactivity period was then reduced from 18 to 12 months in December 2012 so I can see the trend happening here ...

OK, so I have to regularly login to my Skrill account to avoid the inactivity service fee, but is it still good value for money?
Last month I needed to transfer £1000 to my French bank account so I thought I'd review whether I was still making the best choice for my foreign currency transfer.

First up, I bank with Nationwide Building society, so I thought I'd see what Nationwide would charge for an overseas Swift transfer, but the website didn't actually tell me, and I had to phone up to find out what the interest rate applied would be!

Nationwide would charge £25 for the transfer and offered me a transfer rate of 1.191, meaning I'd get €1161.23 paid into my French bank account from my £1000.

Next I looked at Moneybookers/Skrill, Skrill offer the wholesale exchange rate minus 2.49% and then charge £1.48 on top to withdraw funds into a Euro account.

I had to do a bit of math to convert the Skrill exchange rate from Pounds per Euro into the reverse Euros per Pound, take off the 2.49% exchange rate loading, and the withdrawal fee and I worked out I'd get €1192.14 for the same £1000 - i.e. €31 more.

Better, but can I improve on this exchange rate?

The new big thing in the world of money transfers is peer to peer
The principles of peer to peer money transfers are dead simple, instead of using a bank to transfer your money from one currency to another, you find someone who wants to transfer money in the reverse direction (from Euros to Pounds in my case), and just like you might do in and old fashioned marketplace you swap the money between yourselves. In truth this is no different to how the financial institutions emerged from the Coffee houses of 200 years ago, but now accomplished using the internet to bring buyers and sellers together to swap money between themselves.

There's an article explaining how peer to peer money transfers work over on the Quidco blog, but since the article is written by TransferWise who offer a peer to peer service, you can also read a less biased report on 5 ways to transfer money abroad on LoveMoney.com.

So trying them out for real, I looked in more depth at CurrencyFair and TransferWise, both of which offer a very similar service.

TransferWise is the simplest, you enter how much of what currency you want to convert, the recipient bank account details to transfer the money into, you're given an indicative exchange rate, and if you accept it your conversion is 'booked'.
You then transfer the money from your bank account into your transferwise account, and once your money arrives the transaction is done.

Last year I tried TransferWise for the first time and it worked pretty well. There was a slight hiccup because when the money was transferred from my UK account into my TransferWise account they couldn't associate the deposit with my account because my transferwise account had been created in my name whereas our bank account is in joint names. I guess its due to money laundering regulations that they check that the account names match, but a quick email giving the full names on all the accounts sorted the problem out and the transfer was done.

TransferWise now accept debit cards for payment so it's now even easier to transfer money in just one step.

For £1000 TransferWise offered me an exchange rate of 1.2146, there was a fee of £4.48 to transfer the money into my French bank account, so in total I'd receive €1209.16 - an increase of €17 on top of Skrill, a welcome improvement.
(NB: Looking today on TransferWise the transfer fee now seems to have increased slightly to £4.98 so the difference will be less)

This time though I thought I'd try the other big peer to peer transfer service, CurrencyFair. CurrencyFair offer a very similar 'QuickTrade' service whereby they do the matching, or they offer a 'Marketplace' service where you can actually see what other currency swaps are being offered and either accept one of them or request a different rate, hoping that someone else will decide to take you up on your offer.

CurrencyFair's QuickTrade offered me a rate of 1.2114 with a €3 transaction fee to deposit the money into my French account, so I'd receive €1208.40, but as I said you can try to better that in the Marketplace so I thought I'd give that a go.

First step in the process was that I found that I had to record the different currency holding accounts in CurrencyFair. I needed to create GBP and EUR accounts and then deposit the required GBP with CurrencyFair before I could try to do a transfer, but it didn't take too long to do this, setup the transfer details from my bank, and thanks to same day transfers the money arrived at CurrencyFair within about an hour.

With the MarketPlace you can nominate what rate you want to convert the money at, so I thought I'd ask for 1.2160 which was slightly better than the QuickTrade rate and would have netted me €1213 if it had matched successfully.

15 minutes later my trade was matched, but unfortunately not for the full amount, I was only partially matched but at least my first £204.97 was now converted to €249.25.

Result!

Unfortunately I then watched for the rest of the day as the market dropped and the rates offered on CurrencyFair slid slowly downwards, until at 8pm when the market closed and my conversion request was cancelled.

Next day I tried again, requesting the same conversion rate of 1.2160, but by then this wasn't a competitive rate and my trade sat there all day unmatched until 5pm in the afternoon when I cancelled the request and booked the best rate on offer at that time, 1.2000, converting my remaining £795.03 into €954.03.

So over the two trades and after paying the €3 transfer fee I managed to receive €1200.28 into my French bank account which duly arrived a day or so after initiating the transfer out from CurrencyFair.

So in summary ...
Firstly its clear that TransferWise and CurrencyFair offer a better transfer rate than my previous favourite Skrill/Moneybookers, although in my case it wasn't a massive difference - €17 or 1.4% more currency, but its worth remembering that all of these still beat the high street banks hands down.

Secondly you have to look carefully at the fees and exchange rates offered. TransferWise charges you a fee in Pounds (£4.98), CurrencyFair's fee is in Euros and is lower (€3), but when I was doing my transfer CurrencyFair's exchange rate wasn't quite so good, so this eliminated the fee difference.

Thirdly, by using the CurrencyFairs's Marketplace that shows you real time exchange rates offered by other customers you can get an even better rate, or if the market is sliding away from you, you won't, and locking in to a guaranteed rate earlier in the day could have been a better option.

With both companies your money should be safe, CurrencyFair is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and TransferWise by our own FSA.

In conclusion I suspect I'll continue using CurrencyFair and TransferWise for my foreign currency transfers, and will close my Skrill account if I'm not going to use it.

PS: Here's the full lyrics to Simply Red's "Money's too tight to mention"

Panda Power brings a touch of French language

For 8 years now we've been renting out our holiday Gite to anyone that would like a tranquil holiday in our lovely little corner of Brittany. In that time we've had the majority of our guests from the UK, a smaller number from Ireland, and a few from America, Canada, Holland, Sweden and even Australia!

But the one country we've never had any guests from is perhaps the most obvious, i.e. France itself.

Obviously never having had any guests from France I'm not sure of the precise reasons for this, but one thing I have considered in the past that may put potential French guests off is that our holiday rental website is written entirely in English.

So hence on my "wouldn't it be a good idea to do" list for some time is the idea of having a small sub-set of our Gite website pages written in French in order to make the property more accessible to French speakers and residents of France itself.

Unfortunately like many of my well meaning ideas the French site has just never got done. Although I can "get by" in conversational French I don't think the quality of my written French is good enough, and similarly using an automated service like google translate comes up with a passable conversion, but again I don't think it would look professional enough to put on my website.

So the only remaining option is to find someone who can speak good French and good English and ask them to do the translation.

There are plenty of professional companies that will translate anything you like - for a fee - but its the size of the fee that has put me off. Fees vary quite a lot but are typically around the 10 to 15 pence per word mark, so even translating a core subset of our website (which has 20 plus pages) would be a few thousand words to translate ... and a price to match.

And so there the task has sat.

Until last week when I read an article on lovemoney.com about taskpandas, a new way to make money from doing odd jobs. The idea of taskpandas.com is brilliantly simple, it acts as a marketplace to match people who have a bit of free time and skills that others might want, with people that need tasks doing. So if you need someone to assemble some furniture, to do some dog sitting, to deliver leaflets, to paint a shed, or simply give you a hand with something around the home, then taskpandas can help.

Since you generally need most of the requesters and taskpandas (those that offer their services) to be local to each other the service launch has started off in major UK cities (London, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh & Glasgow), although is spreading quickly.

Simply post what you want done, when you want it done by, how much you are prepared to pay, and then wait for panda's to offer (bid) their services to you. You can review prior feedback star ratings and comments (ebay style) from the pandas that bid for your task, and then accept and pay for whoever you like. Payment is taken by paypal and once completed the panda is paid into their paypal account (minus a 15% commission that the website takes for acting as intermediary). According to taskpandas.com there are 1,500 registered users and some £50,000 of work has been offered since the site was launched earlier this year, so its growing quickly.

So I thought I would give it a go. Taskpandas offers CRB checks for their more active pandas as a measure of trust, but for what I needed help with this wasn't a deciding factor.

On Monday evening last week I posted my task on taskpandas, asking for a virtual task (i.e. didn't need someone local), with a 'due by' date of mid January as I'm in no immediate hurry:

Translate some web pages from English to French
I would like a fluent French speaker/writer to translate a small number (circa 6) pages from a website from English to French

Tuesday afternoon I received my first bid, the second came in on Wednesday afternoon, and then on Thursday morning I assigned the task to one of my two bidding pandas.

My winning panda has taught French for over 25 years and is a senior A level examiner for two examination boards so I am very very happy with finding the kind of skilled person that I don't think I could have found easily otherwise - and in less than 60 hours from raising the task to agreeing who to do it.

I'll let you know how I get on with the actual translation.

Flap, flap, we've got a flat; necessitating a French garage trip

Friday morning I got up and decided that I really needed to clear the big pile of rubbish from our second (renovation project) house. The heap of broken bits of plasterboard, broken kids toys, bits of swimming pool, etc was in the way and it was time to take it to the local waste recycling centre (déchetterie) so I loaded up the car and drove off.

Unfortunately I'd once again forgotten the opening times of the centre and when I got there I saw the sign that said they were open only on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. So drove back home with all the rubbish in the back. Liz asked me where I'd been so I told here I'd "taken the rubbish out for a drive in the country!" She was not overly impressed especially as the car was now full of stuff.

Made the point of going and writing the opening times on a spare bit of plasterboard wall in the old house so that I didn't make the same mistake next time we visit.

Next morning (Saturday) I also got up first thing and this time I knew that I would be able to empty the car. Drove off out out of the Gite and down the lane leading to the Gite to be greeted by a flap flap noise coming from outside of the car.

Stopped and got out to look, and rats, the front passenger side tyre was completely flat.

Fortunately I knew that there was a garage in St Etienne which was not that far from our Gite, I'd never actually been to the garage and wasn't even sure if they were open on Saturdays and did tyre replacements, but it seemed the best option to carefully limp the car to the garage.

Along the way I tried to guess what the French words for 'I have a flat tyre', but couldn't remember the words for tyre or wheel so gave up and just went for a limp J'ai une problem avec ma voiture, and pointing to the offending part which did the trick and I was sent to wait in the office.

After a very brief wait a service technician arrived, whipped the wheel off the car, inflated it and found the nail-sized hole in the tread that was gushing air out.

I have to admit I was fearing that we could be in for a multi-day problem trying to find a replacement tyre in France that would fit our UK car, but no, he got what I can only describe as a large hooked needle, threaded through the eye of the needle something that looked like hemp covered in a pliable material, inserted it into the hole in the tyre, twisted to remove the needle, and then cut the excess hemp off.

Job done. He inflated the tyre and to my surprise started putting it back on the car. Over the years every time I have had a flat tyre it has resulted in having to buy a new tyre so I was quite impressed that he'd been able to repair it so quickly.

C'est bon pour l'autoroute? (it's OK to drive on the motorway?) I asked, Oui was the reply.

I then managed to miss-hear the price I was asked to pay, muddling up quarante (forty) with quatorze (fourteen) so they were very confused when I handed over way too much money, but we sorted that out and I was pleased to end up only paying €14 for the repair.

Car all fixed I drove off to the waste tip and emptied the car before I got into any more trouble for being late.

So thanks to the garage for a super job, the tyre's been fine ever since, and I've added the opening hours for the garage to our "Gite Guide" so the benefit of our guests.

Beautiful crossing to France

On Saturday we set off for a 2+ week holiday in our Brittany holiday home, and it looks like we've found the summer sun at last.  We crossed over with DFDS (a very reasonable £74 for a peak summer return trip), and as we stood on the deck of the ferry it was Toby who noticed it first that we could see the hills of the French coast opposite on the other side of the channel.

I can't think of when we last crossed over in such perfect conditions, there was hardly any swell at all and as we sailed over both the UK and French coasts were visible all the way.
It's a bit small on this picture taken as we were disembarking in Calais, but if you zoom in to the harbour entrance you can see the famous white cliffs of Dover some 22 miles away.

So far in our holiday the weather has held and it's been really hot and sunny. I'm even getting a sun-tan!

And FYI, this is how the photo got uploaded with the Blogger Android app direct from my phone - yuck !

"Here's my alcootest", officer

It's been pretty well covered in the UK news, on TV, radio and the press (even my father phoned me up to warn me), but just in case, you may have missed that one of President Sarkozy's parting acts was introduction of a new breathalyser law that came into effect on Sunday last - 1st July 2012.

Craig over on This French Life has a link to the official French decree and warns of the incoming requirement, which is that by law you must carry an unused single use breathalyser in your car at all times and be able to produce it on demand.

Because the requirement is for the breathalyser to be unused, the general advice is that you should carry two breathalysers with you, in order to be sure that one hasn't been used.

You can of course pickup a breathalyser on the ferry on the way out to France (I think they were circa £6 each), or you could buy one on ebay UK (for about £4), or when I first looked they were on sale on ebay France for about £3 - but repeating the search today I couldn't find any at this price - just search for ethylotest or alcootest.

Alternatively you could wait until you get over to France and pick one up in a supermarket. You will probably pay around €1 to €1.50 each.

The French Police have advised that up to the 1st of November they will not be enforcing the new law and will just reminding motorists of the new obligation, but it does make sense to buy one (or two) soon to protect yourself from the Gendarmes.

Finally a reminder that this law and all other details of what you need to carry in your car whilst driving in France as well as helpful hints and tips for motoring in France is on the updated Driving in France page of our website.

Waiting for the boat, but do I know where I'm going?

I'm sitting here on the quay side at Dover ferry port, waiting for the ferry to unload before we can drive on.

It was another "rapid" drive down to the port to get here in time - combination of being late because I wanted to see the kids after they finished school and rush hour traffic on the motorway.

Anyway got here with 45 minutes to spare; only to find out that the ferry was delayed by 30 minutes due to fog in the channel. Sigh, I needn't have rushed.

But whilst I am sitting here waiting I've just realised that I haven't got a map of France or Brittany with me. Well I've done the drive down to the Gite about 40 times now so hopefully I won't have a problem and get lost - but just on the off chance that there is a diversion or bad traffic then I really am without a proverbial paddle!
Hey ho, all part of the adventure I guess.

P.S. This is my first ever Blog posting with the Blogger app on ?y new Android Sony Experia phone. I've finally joined the rest of society with a smartphone and have put the trusty Nokia 6310i out to retirement. Mind you, having to charge the phone every day is a chore - the Nokia could last up to a week with care!

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:

Moncontour Medieval Festival

After visiting the car boot sale around La Cheze's lake we carried on to the medieval city of Moncontour for their medieval festival.

The Moncontour Medieval Festival is held every 2 years as the clock is turned back on the whole of the town with the streets full of jugglers, magicians, street entertainers, sideshows, knights and armourers, and everyone is turned out in fancy dress - apparently if you arrive in suitable medieval clothes then you don't have to pay to enter but at €20 for the family of four of us it wasn't exactly breaking the bank to pay.

We've only visited Moncontour's fete medieval once before in 2005 as we've managed to take our holidays either just before or just after the festival so we really enjoyed our visit this time, wandering around the streets and seeing the sights and sounds.

Unfortunately 'rain stopped play' prematurely as the heat wave broke and we were treated to a torrential downpour which caused an early retreat back home to the Gite.

And even the rubbish bins were suitably dressed up for the medieval fete:

Free tickets to A Place in the Sun Live (Birmingham) 2011

Here's a quick and easy way to save some money if you'd like to visit the Place in the Sun Live show at Birmingham's NEC from 30th September to 2nd October 2011; the tickets normally cost £12 on the door but if you use this special link you can print your own etickets to enter the show for free.

There'll be lots of properties for sale, information about how to buy your own dream place, plus expect some guest appearances from the Channel 4 TV presenters Amanda Lamb et al.

Enjoy !

Our Oak Tree gets a serious haircut

In the back garden of our Gite we've a large oak tree with a 3 or more feet thick trunk which must be well over a hundred years old.

In the photo above which is taken from the bottom end of the garden in winter you can see that the tree is behind the barn (to the right) and the main house which is to the left of the picture. We've not "done anything" with the tree since we bought the Gite 7 years ago and have been quite content to let it grow; apart from once when I put my ladders up the tree and went up and cut off a couple of smaller branches. It was then that I realised just how big the tree is as my double extending ladders only just reached up into the main crown of the tree where the branches all split off from the main trunk.
I realised that I was going to need some help when it came to pruning the tree ...

In August last year I decided it was about time we gave the tree a haircut as several large branches were now overhanging both the barn and the house. I wasn't particularly worried about the tree being unstable but all the leaves, moss and small twiglets from the oak tree would fall down each year onto the house roof and block up the gutters so I was keen to stop that annual job, and also I was concious that if ever a dead branch did fall off the tree then it could do serious damage to one of the buildings when it came down.

So I phoned Dave Robbins a British ex-pat tree surgeon that lived the other side of Pontivy and he came over and we agreed a price for "part-pollarding" the tree.
Dave would remove all the branches that overhung on the barn and house side, taking them back to 4 feet or so up from the main crown of the tree. I didn't want the tree completely pollarding as it would then look like a large stump until it started growing again, and there was always a slight risk that more major surgery could damage or kill the tree. No, a haircut on one side was agreed to be a good idea.

Dave advised that he'd need to do the work in October or November when the tree growth had ceased for the winter and so we agreed a date in November when he would do the work and I could come over as well.

Unfortunately the November day that we'd arranged turned out to be heavily overcast and dismal and as the day went on the rain came and came and came. I was quite impressed that Dave was happy to continue clambering around the tree with his chainsaw in the rain, but other than tea breaks and one period of torrential rain the two of them just kept on going.

Interesting to see how Dave climbed up the tree, he doesn't use ladders but instead he threw a weighted rope over one of the upper branches, then pulled a heavier rope behind it, and then using mountaineering equipment and carabiner's he climbed up into the tree.

Down below Dave's mate, also chainsaw equipped, was busy cutting all the large branches up into half-metre or so long logs which were then stacked in the wood store. You can see the woodstore in the background, the left-hand side we use for drying wood and the right-hand side is for wood that's already dry and ready for the fire.
At the start of the day the left-hand wood store was quite empty.

Most of the time Dave actually used the ropes to support his weight and he walked along the branches with his feet to get into position to cut the next branch back in sections. Larger pieces were lowered to the ground by rope, all the smaller stuff was just allowed to fall down.

The guys worked a pretty full day and it was just about going dark when they finished the work and tidied up the ground underneath. Next morning it was of course a beautiful blue sky day and you could see much clearer just how much they'd taken off the tree.

And as you can see in the picture below taken from the patio side of the garden, there was still an awful lot of oak tree up there !

The wood store was very very full afterwards with all the cut and logged oak brances. It'll take 2 years or so for the wood to try out properly and some of the sections will need to be split before we can put them on the fire, but we've got an awful lot of wood now.

All the smaller branches, twigs and leaves went through a shredder onto a tarpaulin in the garden and when we were over at the Gite at Easter we wheelbarrowed it all onto the flower beds. We had enough mulch to cover the 8m by 4m flower bed that's behind the swimming pool to a depth of several inches. Will hopefully keep the weeds down.

And this final picture was also taken at Easter this year when we had some scaffolding up so that Geoff the plumber could re-point and repair the chimney stacks on the main Gite roof. It's still an awfully large oak tree, but now with a suitably well groomed hair-cut!

 

Anyway I couldn't finish without passing on details of the Tree Surgeon we used, Dave Robins, take a look at Les Bocages, Brittany arborist. Definitely recommended.

Flash bang, oops

Following on from my last blog posting, travelled over to France via DFDS Dover/Dunkerque where I talked about the time and cost difference of taking the longer drive down from Northern France to Brittany.

In fact it didn't cost me anything in autoroute tolls as I took the N roads that run roughly parallel to the autoroute and were of course the original main roads before the autoroute's were built. There's two sections of tolls on the route we take from the Northern ports, one section from Boulogne to Abbeville, and the second from South of Rouen to Caen. The N roads took a little longer but it was a pleasant drive ... right up to the point when I went past a speed camera (Contrôle radar) at mumble mumble slightly too fast, and flash bang and I was caught on candid camera.

Well I don't know whether the camera had any film in it or whether the French highway authorities have arrangements with the UK to pass on details of speeding British cars or not, but it's been a few weeks now and so far I've received nothing in the post so fingers crossed. Having said that though I have nervously opened every letter I've had that has been obviously posted in France, so far two bank statements and a new cheque book which arrived by registered post - so I was doubly worried at the sight of it !

And just so you don't do like me, here's a useful link to locations and maps of speed cameras in France.