Now it can be told

Precious little wargaming content again I’m afraid, though we do now own the house out here and thoughts have finally turned to decking out the games room… so stay tuned (he said desperately).

Now, despite Nundanket’s previous warning that all the cool kids are doing AWI I’ve begun to dabble in that period a tad myself. Hopefully the cool kids won’t give me a Chinese burn and take my tuck money off me when they find out that I recently purchased these:

Pendraken AWI 10mm wargaming click bait. 

A proper wargamers tome.

The AWI is something I hope to explore alongside my Elizabethan pike and shot project; flipping from period to period as I slowly create two sets of opposing armies.

So then In lieu, once again, of any decent toy soldierly content let me regale you with a quick kafkaesque yarn about French bureaucracy in the hope it keeps you vaguely entertained for a mo.

Followers of my old blog will recall that the then ongoing Brexit shenanigans pushed The Current Mrs Broom and I into selling up and returning to Blighty in 2019. We moved to Wales and had only been there a couple of months when a very ominous “Avis de Reception” letter from the French tax authorities arrived. Although we had been solely resident in France for over 5 years someone in the bureau des impôts (tax office) had convinced themselves that it was a holiday home we’d sold and that we jointly owed the French government 6k in capital gains tax.

Mmmm.

It was an easy assumption to make I suppose since a lot of half here and half there Brits were fleeing their French nests around the same time as us. But in our case they were wrong. In my bestest French I wrote back explaining that it was not a holiday home and they were mistaken. A month later a second letter arrived but this time the sum owing had risen to 8k due to the addition of several late payment penalties. 

Cripes. 

A further explanatory letter was swiftly sent with copies of adhoc documents proving we were resident in the property full time…and then… 

Nothing. 

Two years of nothing to be precise. Two years of nothing in which nearly all of our accumulated French bills and paperwork were chucked away as no longer being relevant.

Two years of nothing  …until surging UK house prices made a financially impossible return to France suddenly possible. 

They say that if you want to make the gods laugh you should tell them your plans, so it was with impeccable timing that three days after putting the offer in on our new gaff, and getting it accepted, a third and entirely unexpected letter from the French tax guys flopped onto our Welsh doormat.

This time it said we owed 16k. 

Gulp. 

Now I’d not lost any sleep about the previously alleged 8k charge because they were in the wrong, and anyway what the hell were they going to do about it when I was safe and sound in post Brexit Britain? That said, owing 16k to an uncaring and inflexible bureaucracy when I’d just committed to moving back into their manor was another thing entirely. 

An urgent email was sent to madam Javayon in the Gueret tax office stating my case. She wrote back advising me that if I could prove that we’d been full time residents by producing five years of EDF (leccy) or Veolia (water) bills for the property then they’d drop the charge. 

Pah! Easy peasy. 

It was only when I dragged the box files down from the loft that I recalled the mammoth chuck out session TCMB and I had indulged in only months before. Of debt clearing documentation…we now had…erm…precisely nothing.

I called the lady at EDF who seemed uninterested in searching their archives and put the phone down twice rather than deal with a language mangling étranger asking her to do something slightly difficult. The lady at Veolia was nicer and more than happy to send out the required hard copies, but she could only send them to the address listed on the invoices, ie the property we’d actually sold up and left.

Aargh.

I was on the point of tearing out what little hair I have left when she asked why I hadn’t accessed our internet client space at the company. All the documents I needed were apparently there to download and print off if I just logged in to get them.

Okay, now I was getting somewhere. The web site was vaguely familiar but I was buggered if I could remember our old password. Guessing it three times got me locked out. Two days later when I tried again I went straight to the « generate a new password » option which the computer did, pinging it straight to my phone, my old French phone that is…the phone that I no longer had but was the only one their computer had on file and which I couldn’t gain access to to change.

Double aaaargh. Everything I needed was there…just out of reach.

Plan B - I sent a copy of my Carte Vitale to madam Javayon. Something I’d only hung onto for sentimentalities sake. The card allowing you full access to the French healthcare system, the card only issued to me in 2015 after giving up my NHS healthcare rights and which I’d naturally only do if I lived in France. No that was not good enough.

Plan C - I sent a copy of my Carte de Séjour obtained in 2016. This was only issued to those who could prove they were financially self supporting and were permanently resident in France. Not really necessary at the time but hey I’m a belt and braces kind of guy. Nope. Not acceptable to madam Javayon either.

Plan D - Bank Statements…the ultimate clincher. The lovely folks at Credit Agricole sent me five years of bank statements. The statements showed regular bill payments to EDF, Veolia, Orange, hell even the monthly tax d’habitation paid to madam Javayon’s own department and only levied on those adjudged by them to be actually living in France. Nope. Not acceptable. Her criteria was fixed…proof of residence could only be provided by the actual bills from EDF and Veolia - not indications we might have paid some that we’d received.

My final punt was to walk her through 35 or so randomly selected extracts from those same bank statements. They painted a clear if somewhat mundane picture of daily life, small cash withdrawals in Aubusson shopping at the Intermarché in Felletin the next day and so on.  Ahh, said madam Javayon. That proved nothing, I could have given my bank card to someone else to use while I slipped back across the channel to my other residence in London.!

So, I enquired sarcastically, how do the bills you want me to produce showing electricity usage in my old house prove I was actually there? Could I have not in fact have arranged for some local chap to go in and turn the lights on and off once in a while - while I luxuriated in my imaginary London pile?

Email silence ensued; if there is such a thing.

Desperate to resolve the matter I decided to go over the head of a mere fonctionnaire, only to discover that she was in fact the head of the self same recovery department!

Damnation.

Further emails went unanswered. At night I imagined the extra late payment charges she’d be slapping on out of spite. The sheep I counted while struggling to get to sleep all had little euro signs on them.

Then we moved…and this massive unresolvable black cloud moved with me. 

The world turned.

Four weeks ago, give or take, I met a guy who lived in a yurt in some nearby woods. Don’t ask. It’s the Creuse. That kind of shit happens here all the time. Anywhoo it turned out that his sister worked at the Veolia accounts department in Aubusson, the place where our water bills used to come from. He confessed that he’d had his eye on some old oak beams currently residing in our barn, so we cut a deal.

Yesterday he rocked up with a flatbed truck for the wood and a bundle of our old water bills printed off by his sister. Within the hour they were scanned and on their merry electronic way to madam Javayon’s office. This morning I received verbal confirmation that the matter was being dropped. No apology mind you. 

So then I suppose that’s proof, if proof were needed, that what my old fella used to tell me is true. It’s not what you know it’s WHO you know that counts.*

****** LATE EDIT ******

This just in… Jeremie said I could take a picture of his mysterious yurt in the woods!

The yurt in the woods, it’s got a stove and everything!

* along with his other invaluable advice - “trouble wears a skirt” & “never eat yellow snow”