Foreign Perspectives

Or rather, it SHOULD be a commercial loan.

The problem is that for it to be a commercial loan rather than a personal mortgage, the business would have needed to be created no later than the day that I signed to buy the place. After all, if the business didn’t exist before then, it wouldn’t be possible to make the loan to it, would it?

Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t obvious to either our former accountants nor the bank. Net effect being that the accountants didn’t register the business ’til about two months after we’d bought the hotel and therefore the loan is a personal one and we can’t count the loan repayments as business expenses.

Actually, we can but only if I rent the hotel to the business so I’ve started billing myself rent each month.

This is a bit of a nuisance as I need to write out a cheque from the business account, deposit that, wait a week for it to clear then write out a cheque to the business account. So, I thought I’d ask the bank if we could set up a standing order to the personal account and move the direct debit for the loan to the personal account.

As it’s France, that requires a meeting with our counsellor so three weeks went by as I was off in the UK and he was on holiday.

Nope. He won’t do it. He insists that it’s a commercial loan and that can’t be paid from a personal account. The only way he’ll do that is if I set up a company to run the hotel and do it that way. Unfortunately, that’s rather expensive and besides it won’t work so I’ll just have to continue with the cheques each month.

Of course, the reason that he insists it’s a commercial loan is that, if it is a personal loan (and it is) then he and everyone in the bank associated with granting it will be suspended from work by the Banque de France for providing an illegal personal loan. So, for once, we understand his reasons (even if he won’t state them).

So, if you are getting a loan to buy a business here, make sure that your accountant has actually set up the company before the day you sign to accept the loan.

Naturally, they’re all in French so when I was over in the UK recently, I bought a heap of books for him to balance the French with the English and we’ve been reading to him from each of them pretty much every night for the last month or so. All those little books seem very light but buying 20+ of them does make for a seriously heavy case. Still, I have enough to keep him going for the next 2 or 3 months.

The strange thing is that although I’ve degree level French and the books are for up to 5 year olds, I don’t understand all of the words. I guess that’s a side-effect of me learning French mainly as an adult and kids use a slightly different vocabulary. Certainly I noticed that a few years ago when I was able to chat to Wendy’s French cousins but found it really hard to understand the kids (of around 9 or 10). It is odd though when you can understand quite complex vocabulary and grammar yet can’t understand what should be much simpler language spoken by children.

One other thing that we notice each Thursday is that James seems to understand French quite well now when the librarian speaks to him. He doesn’t say a whole lot in French (just a few isolated words) but I’m sure that’ll come in another month or two.

PS… if any of you have books suitable for 2 to 5 year olds that you don’t need anymore, I’d be more than willing to take them off your hands. Don’t worry, you don’t need to post them to France as I can either get my parents to collect them or pick them up myself next time I’m over.

The problem living here is that you can drive to an enormous number of places within a day or so.

I thought of Geneva first but I think it would be a little cold this time of year and it’s a little far to go for a short break I think (about 6 or 8 hours drive).

Northern Italy would also be nice and has the advantage that we could drive a little further south until it got warm enough for us but it too is around 8 hours drive.

I’d quite like to see more of northern Spain but to get beyond the Basque Country (which is very industrialised), it’s over 8 hours drive. Also the weather is pretty similar to here and we’re looking for somewhere a little warmer.

So, it’s looking like it’ll be in the direction of Barcelona. Not the city itself though as that’s a pain to park in and we’ve seen a lot of it over the last couple of years. Sitges (a little south of Barcelona) sounds interesting and I’ve seen it on the videos for the Spanish course. Again, the advantage is that we can go further south ’til we get the temperature we’re looking for. We might even manage a visit to Port Adventura whilst we’re there.

What is it? Well, it’s the French response to CNN and BBC World ie it’s a 24 hour French news channel. The thinking seems to be that the anglophones have had it too easy for far too long and it was high time that the French view on world affairs received a wider audience.

Initially, it was to be primarily a French language channel but seeing as the objective was to spread France’s world view to a wider audience, they bit the bullet and it will initially be offered with French and English on equal footing. Knowing that France often sees the English language as “the enemy”, I’m sure that was a far from easy decision to take but it just goes to show how seriously they are about getting this channel onto a the world stage.

At the moment they’re supposed to be starting broadcasting towards the end of the year but that date will probably slip.

One thing that we’ve noticed here is that the world seems a whole lot more violent in French than it is in English which is a side-effect of France concentrating more on their ex-colonies which are mainly in fairly violent African countries. It’ll be interesting to see if this view is reflected in the English version of France 24.

Unlike in the UK, you can’t just lift a leaflet, fill it in and post it. You have to queue up at the customer services desk and most of the time they require proof of ID and often proof of address before they’ll issue you with a card.

Although they have the cards, they don’t use them to promote the various shops nearly as much as they do in the UK. For instance, whereas when you get your Tesco statement, there are perhaps a dozen different offers on products, in Carrefour you just get a voucher to spend in the shop. Leclerc and Auchan don’t even send a statement as the money accumulates directly on their cards (which therefore require a PIN).

In fact, to date the only shop that seems to actually use the information is Auchan which managed to issue us with a credit card based on next to no information.

At least this is one area where we’re quite grateful that the French are a little backward!