A busman's holiday

We were back in the UK last week - after a year of renovating a house we went back as Adam and Charlotte had just bought their first house and we spent another week intensively renovating. I installed my second IKEA kitchen (unplanned - the existing one was just too terrible and dirty), put in a shower mixer and painted all the tricky long reach parts above the stairs. A&C took the sensible approach of knocking everything out and starting from new - Adam's seen us do that enough to know things turn out OK in the end.

Being back in the UK allowed me to reflect on some of the differences - and similarities.

As always I was really struck by the volume of traffic on the road, our corner of France doesn't have many cars as soon as you get out of the summer season or away from the coast. I was driving a French registered car and I found a lot of drivers left me more space and time than I remember having before. I continued my one-man crusade to improve the image of drivers of French-registered cars by signalling early and frequently and letting other drivers through whenever possible - it's always worth it for the strange looks and double-takes - "A frog; letting me out? What's the world coming to?". I suffered the same thing in reverse when I moved from UK to French plates; the previous gaps and time disappeared in a flurry of eager drivers trying to see the tread depth on my rear tyres at 90kph!

The other thing that was really apparent was the much more dynamic commercial process in the UK - parts we ordered for our Dyson machine turned up the next day with free postage, Sky arrived on the day and at the exact time promised to fit the dish and Waitrose and Argos had our shopping ready for collection when specified. It's not that you can't do this in France (Super-U offer in-line shopping for example) but every service like this is charged for as an extra. I also bought a trailer in the UK at a much better spec and much cheaper than anything I'd found in France - when I explained that I'd need to insure it in France and I'd need a manufacturer's specification and certificate, Karl at Trailertek said "No problem, I know exactly what you need - we sell loads of trailers to people in France". But France's economy is doing better than Britain's ........ ????