Dream house

Louise is planning her summer holidays and mentioned a house swap. This made me smile when I tried to imagine anyone wanting to swap their house for mine although one might feasibly consider swapping a garden shed for it.

I am fed up of not finding anywhere decent to live in Grenoble. I will spare you the stories of my present lodgings apart from telling you that for nearly six years now, my furniture and books have been rotting quietly in a damp garage three kilometres up the road while the four of us (once it was five) jostle about in our little box like irate sardines.

If you want to rent a house or a flat in France you need to have a job and because it is extremely difficult to evict tenants - even if they don’t pay their rent - you need to be on a long-term contract (CDI). Even if you do have a CDI, landlords will still ask you for all sorts of guarantees and will even go as far as asking that your parents stand as guarantors, which has happened to us several times. En plus, your rent must not come to more than a third of your salary.



As I’m disqualified on all counts, I thought perhaps I could build something myself. Wouldn’t it be fun if I could use my imagination like Ferdinand Cheval? He was an eccentric postman who, between 1879 and 1912, built his own Palais Idéal in his back garden. Facteur Cheval – as he is known – was obviously quite bonkers. As he did his thirty-two kilometre round in and around the village of Hauterives, he was wont to daydream. One day, he tripped over a stone, picked it up and pocketed it thinking it may well come in useful (he really was that bored). The following day, he collected more strangely–shaped stones and decided to build the palace of his dreams. It became an obsession. The locals - and no doubt his poor wife - thought he was mad as he spent every moment of his spare time carting stones to and from his masterpiece. From these stones he made an edifice quite unlike anything you have ever seen – a petrified fantasy of mythical animals, angels, shellfish, Hindu and Egyptian gods, spiral staircases, swirling turrets and secret passages. He was forty-three when he started and seventy-six when he finished.

His desire was to be buried there but French law would not allow it so he promptly set about designing his own tombstone in the local cemetery. It took him eight years and he was buried two years after he had finished it.



It's true that I'm mad but not that mad so actually, I’ve applied for a council flat. I’ve filled in all the forms, photocopied all the relevant documents, begged, pleaded and generally abased myself but I’ll still have to wait two years before they give me one. Still, it doesn't hurt to dream, does it? Or as they say here “bâtir des châteaux en Espagne…...”