Little England

We are warned by an English journalist propping up the bar of our hotel in Castres that Eymet in the Dordogne is full of expats, but we don't imagine that they will be quite so thick on the ground as they are. My friends from England have bought a house in Queyssel about 15 minutes drive from Eymet, and turned half of it into a gite which they let in the season, and in which we stay for a few days. Eymet has a night market on Tuesdays and a morning market on Thursdays. We go to both and as we walk around there are people speaking English on all sides. For some reason this part of France is in area much favoured by Poms escaping from the weather or the general malaise of the English middle classes, and it is also a favourite holiday destination for those who haven't yet made a permanent move. The presence of the English hasn't yet totally corrupted the local eating habits, but I am amused by a young English girl going into raptures over takeaway moules marinieres and frites: they were good but not that good, unless you've been eating hamburgers and fish and chips all your life. We find all this a bit disappointing - not much point in going to France to be surrounded by Brits. One compensation is that the market bookstalls are run by Poms selling English books, so we can restock our light reading for less than the purchase price of new books for our Kindle.
The gite itself is in a minuscule village, very quiet and with all mod cons, allowing us to catch up with our laundry, laze in the pool, watch some television. We spend our days visiting the local bastide towns, very attractive and generally with at least as many French as English people in the streets. We drive to Castelmoron on the (lower) Lot one day to look at the harbour there and the canal boats therein, gathering more useful information for our current dream of buying one in a year or two. In the evenings we generally eat with our host to keep him company as his wife is in hospital in Bordeaux, having exploratory surgery which results in her being operated on for a tumour, so he is understandably anxious and in some need of company. It is also disappointing for me as I was looking forward to seeing her again. We hope that early detection will enable her to make a complete recovery.
From Queyssel we drive north east, back roads the first day to see a bit more of the Dordogne, stay overnight in Saintes, then take autoroutes and routes nationales to La Baule. As we go north the towns are more industrial, less picturesque and charming, and we do see some very mundane suburban architecture, although it is just boring, rather than seriously ugly. As usual, it rains as we make our transit from the warmth of southern France to La Baule on the Atlantic coast. La Baule is quite different from any of the other parts of France visited so far - more in the next post.