Low life | 22 March 2018

During the past three years I have spent quite a bit of time in a rented house in Provence. Volets Bleus is a rectangular breeze-block bungalow perched on the side of a hill. In front of it is a tiled south-facing terrace resting on concrete pillars. The terrace looks over the tops of the trees that grow out of the valley floor, and further out over a commercial vineyard, and then to a distant line of oak-forested hills. Our nearest neighbours are a Dutch couple who live in a pretty old property a quarter of a mile away and high above us, currently on the market for €1.2 million. Kukor and Ezzard refer to our breeze-block shack as ‘the ugliest house in the Var’.

Previously, Volets Bleus was owned by a wealthy Scottish couple who used to drive down from the UK in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. The chauffeur thought the property beneath his dignity, so while his employers camped out in the house, he stayed in the best local hotel. This unusual state of affairs became a folk memory among the indigenous French. The first question asked by the first local to make a courtesy visit was: ‘Are you Scottish?’ Catriona is in fact Scottish. But she had to disappoint him by going on to say that sadly she was unrelated to the couple with the Rolls-Royce and the haughty chauffeur and that she was only renting.

Catriona lives here all year round; I come and go. I like the house, she doesn’t. Indeed, she has a ready list of grievances for summer visitors who tell her how lovely it must be to live here. In winter she is frozen and in summer she almost boils to death.