Can you make friends near your holiday home in France and do you want to?
We had avoided making friends with other english people in France until we met the owners of a local camel farm
After a year or so of owning a house in France we had been pretty adamant that we didn’t want to spend our happy times and holidays seeking out fellow Brits. We had bought the french house to get away from central London and show our kids a slice of rural life. But as the blog post below describes - then we met The Bird Family and their camel farm.
The end of this story is pretty sad or rather makes me feel a bit melancholy. Reading this blog post and seeing the photos (there are millions more photos of not just our kids feeding lambs and goats but also dozens of our friends’ kids who came to visit when they were young with the various inhabitants of the Maison Des Chamaux.) Sarah and Paul alway gave us a special welcome, and for kids coming from London being able to run around unfettered with pigs/goats and llamas was a magical treat. However, as I’m now telling this tale in modern time I can reveal that we ended up losing touch.
As with the ending of all friendships it is hard to pinpoint why it happened but I suspect the reality was a slow drift. Partly as our kids got older and the idea of spending time feeding chickens had less allure. But mostly, when Peter and I separated for a year or so and I didn’t visit France at all I let the friendship with Sarah dwindle from afar. I think also when we got back together I was a bit embarrassed about our situation - this happened with friends in the UK btw. It was easier to disappear than to confront what had happened with someone I didn’t know well enough to have frank conversations about something quite complex.
I hear that Paul and Sarah recently sold their Camel Farm after many years of flooding and financial stresses. COVID I imagine had curtailed a lot of their income not least as they made money from having vet students from the UK come to live and learn. I have no clue where they went or what happened to those camels but knowing Sarah she’d have housed the camels first before worrying about where she and Paul and her boys would end up.
We had some really fun times with them and I wonder if some friendships are always meant to be just for a snapshot of time when they are most needed (certainly when we had an infestation of mice in our house and Sarah went over with humane traps she was a godsend!) Let this post be a thank you and a happy reminisce of the years of fun in their rambling, ramshackle farm and those giant glasses of red wine.
Enter the Camels - first published February 26 2013
Its amazing the cast of characters that weave in and out of your life at various times offering support, fun, mischief or simple friendship. Over the years, I’ve collected some AMAZING friends via school, uni, work, randoms I’ve met and can’t even remember how I met them. No story of our french house would be complete if I didn’t around this time bring in some eccentric and wonderful new friends – ‘The Birds’ - people whose surname is Bird but they own a CAMEL farm! Yes I know – I will explain all as we go along…
I desperately wanted to avoid being one of ‘those’ english people in France. The ones who seek out fellow Brits to chat about marmite and Hellmans mayonnaise or lack thereof. In my early twenties I lived in Australia and made the fatal error of only befriending only english people. As a result, we sat around bars in Sydney, moaning a lot about how rubbish Australia was - I know right? It was only around the time I was leaving that I made an Australian friend (hi Kelly if you’re reading this) and got to see Sydney through some optomistic Aussie eyes and it was WAAAY more fun. But then I had to leave – I had a new job in LA and Kelly and I moved to Melbourne for a month (I don’t even remember why) and had a ball. And I’m facebook friends with Kelly fifteen years on. She has two boys too. And the point of all of this is that you should seek to make friends with people from the country you’re living in not just jaded ex pats. However…
Back to The Birds and their camels. You want to know why there are english people living in rural France running a camel farm? Well sorry to disappoint you, but to explain away the Birds and their wonderful existence in Castlenau Rivier-Basse would be far too simplistic. Suffice to say – WHY NOT?
I had heard of an animal park La Maison Des Chamaux about 15 minutes drive from our house and decided to take the kids there while Peter messed about with the septic tank or some such. I had no idea it was run by english people and expected nothing more than killing a few hours encouraging my children to take an interest in animals beyond Patrick the starfish in Sponge Bob.
The park is tucked away off the main road and has jolly signs showing you where to park and which way to go. We arrived a little late for the demo which involved a lady wearing an ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ style hat and waving a stick at some llamas while children could lead them around the park and feed them. There were dozens of kids transfixed by her and the llamas. Sebastian couldn’t wait to have a go at ‘training’ the llama whereas Arthur had already established that he ‘didn’t like animals’ and wandered off into the wood to do a nature trail. There were goats, pigs, sheep, llamas and the jewels in the Camel farm crown – three enormous camels wandering arms reach away. Their comfort in their surroundings making it seem perfectly normal for them to be living in rural France and not in a desert with Lawrence of Arabia on their backs.
And as my kids learnt how to spin wool, make a goat jump over a fence and what the French for camel is, I got chatting to a nice Englishman called Paul. It turned out, he was Mr Maison des Chamaux and the lady with enthusiasm you could bag and sell, leading the llamas around in the IACGMOOH hat was his wife Sarah. He mentioned that he was an electrician and as I currently had two sockets servicing my entire house, my ears pricked up. Paul ended up coming over to help Peter with our wiring, then inviting us back to sample the joys of the local ‘cubivin’ (a giant box you fill petrol pump style with red wine at the local vinyard). It was then I got to properly meet Sarah when she wasn’t knee deep in llama poo and we loved them right away.
They have pet pigs who sometimes live in their house, a plentiful supply of red wine for the grown ups and a cheery voice at the end of a phone every time we arrive in France. The Maison des Chamaux has become somewhere we visit early on during each trip to our french house. The kids are desperate to see Jah Jah the goat, who they fed from a bottle when he was born and who is now is a large goat with horns.
The Birds are totally immersed in local French life. Their kids go to local schools, their animal park is famous in the local area (Sir Terry Wogan has a house nearby and goes about his Intermarche shopping without anyone noticing but Sarah gets stopped because she is ‘la femme de la Maison des Chamaux’) and they’ve built a fabulously unusual life for their family in this rural part of SW France with the camels they rescued from slaughter somewhere in Russia. So they’re not ‘those type’ of English people looking for Brit friends either but I’m glad they made an expat-ception for us!