All being well I should take posession of my new property tomorrow, it's been a long drag through the Notaires despite me not needing a mortgage and there being no complications.

I made contact exactly 5 months ago and was ignored so doorstepped the agent, viewed the property and made my offer 2 days later, I had actually found it while searching 4 months beforehand, abandoned, the worst house in the best road of a village that I had sought out as it ticked all my boxes and was even better when I got there. I had decided to try and trace the owners on my next visit but when I got there there was an immobiliers sign hanging from the gate, €7K loss to the heritees!

It will be years and not months before it is suitable to live in, I have lived in some right hovels but this really is a health hazard so I will be living in a caravan on site, in fact I'm already in it on a friends land having bought it the beginning of January, that too was/is leaky rotten and mouldy but infinitely preferable to the house, fixing the front end was not too bad aside from the sub zero temperatures but now I have started stripping the frame of the rear( bedroom) I am either sleeping breathing in mould spores or 13.5% pool bleach fumes like tonight, it is the height of luxury though compared to the house which was squatted by an alcoholic heritee for 10 years.

Cutting our way through the jungle of the once garden & potagère with a parang yesterday I came across a very large sunken pond or bassin retention d'eau, full up with 10 years of rotting rubbish in decomposed bin liners and hundreds of spirit & wine bottles, I did not even know it was there, peering through the impenetrable jungle I had seen what looked like the remains of a building and one area looked to be a lower level, I had no idea it was a pond with a forest growing out of it, good news though as it means much less material, soil excavations etc will have to be removed from site.

Many of the neighbours are of a minority group that do not have toilets in their living accomodation if you get my drift so my caravan will not look out of place, I was talking to one of them when a Locost flight from Bergerac airport climbed right over at low altitude, he said "you will soon get used to that!" I hadn't even noticed it having lived all my life right next to International Airports and indeed it is why I chose the area, what with the neighbours and being under the flightpath it is a home from home!

Top property tip, if you need to sell a house that is blighted by aircraft noise there is no better time than during a global pandemic