The little gite on the prairie. This is a really nice little house. 5 rooms. The kitchen/diner and lounge are on the front with 2 bedrooms and the bathroom on the back. My only gripe is the shower cubicle which is a bit small. Or maybe I’m a bit big? Behind the gite is the ‘longere’. A long single story building containing the English owners’ house and another smaller gite.
So far we’ve been to Moncontour (meh), Lamballe (OK, nice lunch), Josselin (beautiful, mussels for lunch) and Dinan (very beautiful, gallettes for lunch)
Josselin is on the Nantes-Brest canal.
Dinan has very steep streets down to the Rance estuary.
It has been a bit grey and cool today so we went out and did a bit of shopping and are having a day chilling at home today.
There has been little evidence of the elections here. Despite the lurch to the right in the first round, this is still a very pleasant place to be on holiday.
The retirement age is still 62 but there is a proposal to raise this to 64, hence the protests last year. They have got essentially a state earnings related pension scheme which everyone contributes to via their taxes with an element contributed by the employers. This means that the average pension is about 1400 euros per month but it is taxed at 10%. Health care is part paid for and part free as I understand it.
It’s a bit strange watching France ellect eurosceptics when we are still suffering from the Brexit fallout and moving slightly leftwards.
Due to the timing of our hols, our postal voting forms didn’t arrive in time for us to vote. However, given that Starmer has come out and said categorically that he doesn’t support any form of proportional representation, I’m not sure who I would support. Starmer was quoted as saying that our current system has given us years of stable government. If he thinks that the last 14 years have been stable, I worry. Of course, all of this may become completely immaterial if Trump wins in the USA in November. God knows what happens then!