Running a B&B in France turned me into Basil Fawlty

Showbusiness wasn’t meant to be like this; this was not what I’d had in mind at all. I’d driven in a daze for four hours back from a mediocre stand-up gig in Leeds to our tiny, Victorian semi in Crawley. It was now three in the morning. There had been a stroke of luck as I’d managed to find a parking space within walking distance of our house, but then I tripped over the dog as I stepped through the front door, waking our young son and with it my sleeping wife. I was not popular and not happy.

Fortunately, we were going on holiday soon, and it would be our annual chance to spread out a bit in the bucolic, freeze-framed Loire Valley where my half-French wife, Natalie, had family. It meant long, lazy afternoons and the food of Gods. 

But I wanted more.

“Seriously, Natalie, come and look! Look at what we could afford over here.” As usual, I’d been drawn in by the windows of the local estate agents, with their catnip-like offers of space and value. “We could buy a village!” 

OK, that was something of an exaggeration, but at the time the pound was massively strong against the euro and I was making a point. Natalie carried on walking. The plan had always been that we would retire here one day, much later in life and just soak up the pastoral tranquillity of the area; I would write light, undemanding comic novels and Natalie would tend to her future horses. It was a pipe dream; an ambition, and one that seems a long way off when you’re in your early thirties. But, I thought, what if..? 

I’m not necessarily a persuasive person, but I am infuriatingly relentless, and eventually, later that summer, I wore her down. As I flew off for a weekend of gigs in Birmingham, Natalie looked for a property. I came back on the Sunday, we signed for our dream home on the Monday, and we’ve been here ever since, 20 years later. “But how will you work?” my agent asked, mentally deleting me from his roster. “I’ll fly back every weekend,” I replied blithely. “There’s a Ryanair service from my local airport.”

Looking back now, the thumpingly naive notion of relying on budget airlines for your working commute is akin to thinking spaghetti would double as an effective walking stick. But on such gossamer-thin whimsies are life-changing decisions made, and we sold up in the UK and made the move. If nothing else, it would provide me with a wealth of material and, more importantly, I would be able to park my car outside my own house.

The bare truth of it is, we were like kids in a sweetshop. For the same price as our tiny box in the UK we could get land, outbuildings, an orchard, a pond, a pool even… and with those things a whole heap of back-breaking maintenance, which everybody warned us about and we ignored. “So what?” we said, “we’re young!”

We aged very quickly.

The main thing about having lots of space is that you fill it. A couple with a young son and an ageing Jack Russell became, in a few short years, a couple with three sons, a pack of dogs, a succession of cats, two horses, numerous short-lived hens and the world’s unfriendliest collection of goats. My wife, keen on rescuing any passing stray, became the local go-to for abandoned fauna, an unsupported charity for the care of animals with behavioural problems. One goat arrived while I was away. Natalie had been flagged down by a man on the short drive into town.

“Do you want a baby goat?” he asked. There was apparently no preamble.

“Not really,” my wife replied. “We have two already, and they don’t get on with my husband.”

The man’s face fell. “Shame that. I’ll just have to eat this one then.”

“Put him in the boot,” Natalie said, without hesitation.

I complained about it, railed against it, laid down rules that were routinely ignored because, despite French law claiming laughingly that I was “head of the household”, I was actually only a constitutional monarch, wheeled out for ceremonial purposes. I was embarrassingly inept at the complicated French fan dance of meet and greet because mainly, and I will swear this until my dying day, they keep changing the rules! It’s never just a handshake or a kiss on each cheek; everyone and every area has subtle variations laid like traps for the man the wonderfully giving and friendly locals were beginning to call “Monsieur So British”. 

The life of a touring comedian – late nights in city centres, living off fast food and in a constant blur of fatigue – couldn’t have been more different from the country-living, chutney-making, goat wrangler of home and, to be honest, though I didn’t say this on stage (where good news doesn’t get laughs), I thrived on it. It was everything I had always wanted. Returning home after every stint away was like going on holiday, and how many people returning from work can claim that?

Brexit changed things, inevitably. It added a mountain of stress and bureaucracy to a life that was chock-full of those things already as it became clear that our security depended on me being in the French tax system. The decision, then, to convert one of our barns into a chambre d’hôtes (a posh B&B), was not taken lightly, and when I informed friends that I was moving into the world of hospitality, they laughed. As the old joke goes, they’re not laughing now. There’s no way to dress this up: 20 years as a stand-up comedian is no training for being polite to people. Being woken in the middle of the night because “there’s a spider in our room”, is bad enough; complaints that there is “too much grass in the garden” elicited a fairly intemperate, though fully justified, riposte. The invasive demands and inevitable, incessant and sometimes impolite hectoring of families from all over the world turned me into a kind of even angrier Basil Fawlty. To give you some idea of my state of mind, my first crime novel, Death and Croissants, is centred around a B&B owner in rural France whose guests begin to die off… 

My chambre d’hôtes closes its doors for the final time at the end of this summer, for the good of my sanity and for the benefit of the hospitality world as a whole. It will then become a full-time Writers’ Retreat for quiet types who can make their own breakfast and know when to stay out of my way. After that, our home will return to normal. Normal being a constant roller-coaster of animal husbandry, overloaded bureaucracy, eye-wateringly expensive utilities; a remote, sometimes lonely existence with brutal winters alleviated by wonderful locals, stunning countryside, family and a driveway I can park half a dozen cars on. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ian Moore is a stand-up comedian, husband, father of three boys, farm hand and chutney-maker in France, where he owns a Writers’ Retreat. He is the best-selling author of the Follet Valley crime series which began with Death and Croissants, and the author of The Man Who Didn’t Burn, the first in the Juge Lombard series. His memoir, Vive le Chaos: My So-Called Tranquil Family Life in Rural France, is published by Summersdale, £9.99.