Par le nez

Now that our Grand Designs re-visit has been broadcast, Debs and I can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

When we tuned in last Wednesday night, we clung to each other like monkeys in a laboratory for fear that the programme would be slanted in a way that would depict us a pair of airy-fairy nerds. In the end, we were relieved that Kevin’s verdict on the Sampsons was favourable. Not guilty, m’lud.

Apart from the unnerving experience of seeing how you’ve aged in six years, one moment in particular made me cringe. Admittedly talking back in 2004 when the original programme was aired, our Kevin gaily suggested that you could eat and drink like a king here for next to nothing.

I’ve long maintained that the cost of living in France is noticeably higher than it is back home. OK, so you can still find ‘white-van restaurants’ that offer an ‘artisan lunch’ for around €12. Frankly, though, you could eat more cheaply, more nutritiously and much more interestingly at Wagamama’s in the very centre of London.

The exchange rate doesn’t help matters, but – once you’ve bought a house here and saved on what you’d spend on property in the UK – everything from food and clothes to electrical goods and (particularly) building materials costs significantly more in France. For something like a new boiler, it would be worth it to drive all the way back to the UK, buy the product and drive all the way back again. Besides, you’d get some kind of customer service as part of the package.

But it’s the taxes that hurt the most. I once sat beside a young student from Limoges on the train to Paris. She asked me about the expat experience in France and I told her that one of the pleasures for me was the French code of politesse. Being civilised and decent to one another (except on the road). Ah yes, she said, but it’s quite banal. She meant, I think, that ‘it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sin-zerrity.’

It’s the same with the fiscal system here. It seems to me insincere, even fundamentally dishonest. In the UK, one pays income tax, council tax and your TV license – and that’s essentially it. You know where you stand. Here you pay income tax plus a plethora of incomprehensible stealth taxes, both local and national. And if you survive all those, there’s a wealth tax – for Johnny Halliday and others of his kidney to avoid by de-camping to some foreign tax haven.

A few years ago, for example, the government introduced a not insignificant social charge designed to chip away at the national debt. It was, we were told, for a limited time only. Hurry, hurry, hurry, citoyens! Pay your social charge and help to make the motherland solvent again. However, the citizens are still paying – in steady annual increments – for their government’s profligacy.

Our diminutive president, who professes to espouse the Anglo-American economic model, probably felt it anachronistic to tax the self-employed for any subversive entrepreneurial instincts. So the taxe professionelle was phased out with great hullabaloo – and replaced, once the hullabaloo had quietened, with something still more incomprehensible.

Space + natural beauty = quality of life?

Recently, some friends moved back, reluctantly, to the UK. Steve is as good a plumber as you could find – and everyone knows that a skilled, honest and reliable plumber doesn’t come cheap. He worked his socks off to service more clients, French and British, than he could shake a length of copper pipe at. Yet he found himself unable to pay his cotisations and ran into problems with the bank. He was shelling out thousands per year on pension, health insurance, unemployment insurance, this and that insurance. There was no way out but to sell up and go back to the land of the NHS and everything else we tend to take for granted in the U.K.

In certain Scandinavian countries, I’m told, the natives pay 50% of their income towards their excellent welfare provision. We would throw up our hands in horror back home. 50%!? Achtung, Gott in himmel. But they’re happy enough to do it because they know what they’re getting in return. Here you pay at least that much, but because the official stats are massaged, you don’t always realise it – until you find that you can’t pay your winter fuel bills. Moreover, what you get for your money diminishes annually in direct ratio to what you fork out. It’s called chipping away at the national debt.

I shouldn’t carp: we have some very artistic floral roundabouts to show for it all in nearby Brive. This must be part of that renowned quality of life that Kevin McCloud also mentioned. It does exist; it’s not a myth. Much of it, however, is due to the natural beauty and a sense of space that comes from living in a bigger country than our cramped little ‘sceptred isle’.

I don’t wish to dissuade anyone thinking of swapping ‘the green, green grass of home’ for greener grass across the water, I simply want to warn you that you pay for your quality of life. Par le nez. Through the nose.