As we drove down through France over the weekend from Calais to our new temporary home just north of Cannes on the French Riviera, we were greeted by bands of protesting ‘gilet jaunes’ at varying points – usually roundabouts – along the way. As their initial grievance had apparently been about the increased tax on diesel fuel and we were in a diesel-powered Toyota campervan, I was happy to raise my fist in a solidarity kind of way when we first encountered them, to be greeted by smiles and regal bows, and despite the additional sarcastic shouts from some of them of ‘Vive Brexit!’ we felt at one with these people we would now be living among. However, from about midway down, our feelings of unity were somewhat tempered by the long queues we began to find at the gilet-jaune-controlled roundabouts, and soon we were cursing the very sight of them as they told us we couldn’t take the turn-off we wanted to, or drunkenly accosted us, telling us to wind down the window and then leering into the van at the sight of two females in a campervan. As a result, from 70km north of Lyon, we decided to switch from the much cheaper roundabout-strewn rural roads to the much more expensive, but roundabout-free and much quicker, toll roads for the remainder of our journey south. What a great decision that turned out to be, and how the gilet jaunes went up once more in our esteem when we came to the pay booth after the most expensive leg, from Lyon to Aix-en-Provence, to find it (in an initially heart-sinking moment) swarming with gilet jaunes, and consequently… FREE!!! Vive les gilet jaunes! Except, of course, when they’re drunk, leering and anything but politically motivated…

We are now just about settled into our lovely new abode, and from here on I plan to be writing about my attempts to discover whether there is any sort of live music scene I can break into here on the French Riviera. I’m confident there will be. Time will tell. Or, as the French might say (but I’m sure don’t, in the same way that they don’t say ‘la nuit est jeune’), le temps dira…

With three months to go before we were due to move to the south of France – myself, Carol, and two miniature dachshunds – it seemed there was plenty of time to decide what to keep and what not, what to sell at the car boot and what to take to the tip – time, too, to stash what we did decide to keep in an orderly fashion in 75 cubic feet of storage space, with not a curse or a bruise to say otherwise. In the event, we were stuffing must-have items into the Toyota campervan at the very last second and cramming bags of rubbish into the green bin right up until I slammed the driver’s door shut and we finally drove off to begin a new life abroad.

What we discovered that meant in practice was that we had not had a second to plan our first week in France, when we had imagined ourselves idly ambling along the northern non-toll roads, stopping off hither and yon, and generally having a relaxed first few days of freedom as we made our way to our new home just north of Cannes. As a result, we found that the campsites we had assumed would be open in the winter were firmly shut, and whenever we stopped for the night it was not a question of simply flopping down on the bed at the rear of the van, but instead we had to move all our copious boxes and bags of belongings off the bed and stash them on the front seats before even thinking about turning in for the night. In the morning, before we could get back on the road, the reverse arduous procedure had to take place. So by the time we reached Le Mans, not very far south, but our main stopping-off point in the North, we were totally exhausted and shuddering at the prospect of another 1,000 kilometres before we would reach our new home…

As if that wasn’t enough, we inadvertently timed our trip to coincide with the burgeoning of a 21st-century French revolutionary spirit, and came across a number of fuel-tax-protesting gilet-jaune roadblocks at roundabouts, complete with mocked-up blood-spattered guillotines. As it turned out, the yellow-vests were very friendly towards us – which seemed strange with Brexit and everything, but very welcome too, and we took to raising our fists in solidarity as we passed them, bringing smiles to their faces, as well as (possibly sarcastic, but never mind!) regal bows. More violent demonstrations by young people against education reform brought the lovely medieval quarter of Le Mans to its knees the day I was due to play at a scène ouverte there, so instead we sat in a bar in Huismes and planned our route south.

Over two and a half days we would be driving from the Loire Valley right down to Mouans-Sartoux, a village just north of Cannes on the French Riviera. As Carol had managed to fracture her foot a few days before we set off from the UK, I was doing all the driving, so we knew we would only manage a few hours on the road at a time, and the first stop on our push south from Huismes, we decided, would be at one of the very welcome and spacious French Aires, or lay-bys, close to a town called Roanne. That itself was a first, for up until then, we hadn’t planned any of our overnight stops, and as a result, ended up staying next to a building site in Samer on the north coast, as well as in an on-street parking slot in the very heart of Alençon when we found that the ticket we had paid two euros for, thinking it might last us thirty minutes while we downed a beer at Le Celtic bar opposite, actually covered the whole of that afternoon and night, and took us to 9.48 the following morning!

​Anyway, as we get ready to embark on the road to Roanne, I’ll leave you with a pearl of wisdom gleaned from telling the woman next to me at a music and raclette party last night that there was plenty of time to order another glass of wine: there is, it turns out, no such expression in French as ‘la nuit est jeune’... Of the French language, I have much to learn...