The morning before he was due to leave, in desperation he parked his car by the Place Colbert in Rochefort and went round estate agents collecting magazines in the rack outside each door. Settling into a chair at a café with a coffee he set to work. It took an hour to cull through the properties and by the time he finished it was nearly lunch-time and he still had nothing to show for his efforts. Looking up, he saw an agency on the far side of the square he had missed. He paid for his coffee and set off across the cobbles.
The estate agent gathered some particulars of properties that fitted our requirements. Two of them, my husband had already visited, and his heart sank as he scanned the rest. As he did so, the agent fussed with a notepad, and looked up; "I have some-thing else, but I don't have any particulars for it, I'm afraid. It came on the market two days ago and we already had someone to see it. Would you like to have a look, maybe next week? It is within your price-range, and it is in a village..."
"Yes," laughed my husband, "but it will have to be today!”
The man across the table scowled at the difficulties this was going to present, but he picked up the phone and made a call, and then asked, "This afternoon, after lunch?"
That was when I received the message I had been hoping for, a simple text which read
"FOUND SOMETHING POSSIBLE WILL CALL LATER XXX"
It was in a village, it had a large garden, outbuildings, grapevines and a fig tree and the village had a school and a bakery. It met just about all of our requirements. It belonged to a very old lady, and his heart quailed at the thought of finding something in a perfect situation, but in complete disrepair as the asking price would leave little change from the budget for much more than a new coat of paint.
Our dream of moving to France grew dimmer and dimmer, we couldn't find our dream house... and then I got the message "Found something possible"