Ten things I wish I'd known before moving to France...

So in no particular order, here are my personal top ten. Feel free to add your own...

1. Dealing with the RSI is a complete and utter nightmare and likely to drive you to drink.

2. Venturing outside if you are blonde and live south of the Loire, without wearing factor 50 sunscreen, will result in thread veins all over your cheeks. As you will now look like the local wino, you may want to admit defeat at this point and hit the bottle before dealing with the RSI.

3. Ducklings 'imprint' on their (human) mums. This means that if you hand rear them in the sitting room, they will think that they should live in the house, with you, for evermore.

4. Never try the andouillette. There's a limit when attempting to embrace a culture and its cuisine.

5. Be prepared for your teenagers to suggest they see a 'psychologue' - all their friends will, whether they need one or not. If they do mention this, knock it on the head by telling them that they are British and should be displaying some stiff upper lip.

6. You will get stopped randomly by the police on a more frequent basis that if you were of ethnic extraction and carrying a backpack on the London Underground. Hopefully they won't shoot you.

7. Nothing can prepare you for the horror of French customer service. There isn't any.

8. If you have a wood burning stove, your life will revolve around buying, chopping, stacking and carting wood inside for six months of the year. Your house will be covered in a fine layer of ash throughout the year.

9. You will develop sudden and weird cravings for foods that you would have turned your nose up back at in the days when they were readily available in the local shop - salad cream, sandwich spread, Branston pickle.....

10. Over to you....?

And the award goes to...

Well its not actually me and the award in question is the much coveted 'World's Worst Blogger' which I am going to hand on to my friend and co-blogger Yummy Mammy as she is far, far worse than me. Mind you, the tales of her disastrous love life make for good reading when she does get around to posting.

But I have been a neglectful blogger as of late and when I stopped to think about why, two main reasons stood out. Firstly, since we started the network I've lost any anonymity I might have had and secondly (again since we started the network) I seem to have far less need to vent. Interesting...

I think that is partly due to having 'met' so many nice, kind, interesting and funny people. And I have been hugely impressed by the generosity members have shown, in terms of the time they are prepared to take to help others. Makes me feel quite warm and fluffy inside.

So I will be back to blogging on a regular basis and I promise not to be too warm and fluffy.

Now I need to crack on with running my media empire, chasing the bloody ducks out of the kitchen (they are inside again and if the husband returns before I remove them, they are liable to end up as crispy fried ducks) and preparing the kids tea (tinned alpha betti spaghetti, turkey twislers, served with blue fizzy drinks and a Raspberry Mivvy for dessert. That's the fruit bit.) so I shall see you all later once I've had my 5pm bottle of rose. Ah - la vie est belle.....