The story continues

Some time ago I started narrating the story of Les Lavandes, our holiday home in the Loire valley. You can (if you are feeling sufficiently masochistic) read the first few instalments starting here. Or maybe you would prefer me to recap briefly.

On retirement, I had commuted my pension and my wife and I decided to buy a small house in France. We had friends living in the western Loire valley and, while staying with them, had spent time looking round without success. The story continues from here.

After our first tentative foray into the French property market it was to be some three months before we could return to the area. By that time our announcement that we were looking for a property in the Loire had produced some unexpected results. Wendy and Gary had moved 100 miles away and their local bar had gone out of business. I hadn't realised that they relied so much on Gary's custom, nor that Wendy and Gary had such a dread of actually living fairly close to a house owned by Mrs S and me. In fact, Wendy did assure us when we telephoned that they had for some time been looking for a smaller property following a serious operation she had undergone at the beginning of the year, so maybe it was all just a series of coincidences.

What it meant for us was that we no longer had a home from home in the area, a friendly voice to advise – in a language we could understand – on local customs over a glass or two (or three or four) in the evenings. On our next trip we would need to find a hotel each day.

This in itself proved to be quite an adventure. Not finding the hotels, but staying in them. In one very elegant looking auberge we discovered that our bathroom was in the fitted wardrobe. I have never seen a wash basin and shower unit of such Lilliputian proportions outside a doll's house. And for those looking for a modicum of privacy when availing themselves of the sanitary facilities (using the loo, in plain English) it would prove to be quite a trick to shut the wardrobe door behind them. Being a contortionist would help. Another thing that would have helped matters slightly was a light, but when did you last see a light in a wardrobe?

At another hotel I was threatened with arrest when I refused to pay the full bill as there had been no hot water available. Mrs S had not appreciated her cold shower and had given me a severe headache which I was determined to pass on to somebody else. In the end we agreed to settle for free breakfasts. Then we were told that the hotel's credit card machine was out of order, they had no manual back-up machine, and they wanted cash. Luckily I had taken the precaution of opening an account with a French bank and had sufficient funds to issue a cheque which was accepted with surly reluctance.

There is something about those hotel chains in France which has puzzled me for years. It doesn't matter whether I stay at a Campanile, Ibis, Marmotte, Formule 1 or any other of the cheaper chains. There is only ever one bath towel in the room. Two hand towels, but never, never more than one single, solitary bath towel. If I am on my own this is no problem, but if Mrs S is with me – and it is never anybody more exciting – I have to drag all the way back to reception (we have always been allocated the most distant room) and coax the girl away from the latest episode of an appalling soap opera on her television to attend to me, and ask for – nay, demand – an extra towel. Having repeated the sentence so often, this is probably the only time when I am completely fluent in French. Anyway, I usually return with a promise that another towel will be delivered to the room tout de suite. I then wait half an hour before starting all over again. By this time there is always a different girl on reception and a different soap opera on television. What causes this reluctance to provide a bath towel for each guest? Do the French not bath as frequently as us? Are they content to dry themselves with wet towels? Or is it just an attempt to save on the laundry bills? I shall probably still be pondering the question when I arrive at the Pearly Gates.