A tale of refugees from ‘Brexit Britain’

In the New Year I was introduced to a couple who had fled Britain impulsively on New Year’s Eve with just a suitcase each to escape ‘Brexit Britain’. They rented a terraced house in our quartier of the village and had us round for supper, and I also went there to watch football on the laptop. They appeared to live modestly and frugally, wore the same clothes every day, and spent their days walking ceaselessly in the blazing countryside armed with shepherd’s crooks.

Had they done the right thing, we privately wondered, fleeing their native land merely to prove their allegiance to the ideal of a politically and culturally united Europe? And if it was the Union Flags that they were so afraid of, there are far more proudly displayed tricolours in republican France than there are in Blighty. Surely they would wake up one morning, having come to their senses, and return defiant but chastened to their home and two cats?

Not a bit of it. The next thing we knew their house in the UK was sold and the effects auctioned off and they had bought a house in the Lot department of western France, which is just underneath the Dordogne.

Last week the foreign correspondent and his wife and I drove there from the Var to have a look at the new house and have a gander at a different part of France while we were at it. Those we knew who had been to the Lot characterised the area as raining all the time but the honey-coloured building stone was reminiscent of the Cotswolds. Which, if true, was a far cry from the emergency water regulations and still smouldering bush fires in the Var.