Mark and I met in Crete in the 1990s. In the early days of our relationship, we followed the conventional path. We both had good jobs and nice cars. We bought a house together in a beautiful Kent village, drawn there by its lovely pub, which served fabulous home-cooked food! We enjoyed West End theatre trips, visits to National Trust properties, short breaks in the UK and Europe, and our annual long holiday to Southeast Asia or Africa.

Life was pretty good!

However, our daily commute (each of us spending hours sitting in traffic jams going in the opposite direction around the M25) and family illnesses made us question what we were actually doing.

We had no ties. We both had a yearning to do something different.

Over twenty years ago, we sold our house and belongings, gave up our jobs, bought a caravan and a 4×4, and travelled to France in search of a new adventure. After a fun-filled few months house hunting (lots of weird and wonderful stories for another time), we bought a run-down 17th-century water mill in the Auvergne and set about restoring it.

For the next two years, we spent every waking hour working on our house and land. We fashioned gardens out of the wild landscape, cleared streams, replaced roofs, installed fosse septiques, and rebuilt and renovated the tumbledown buildings. The result was a chambres d’hôtes with three letting ensuite rooms and a working water wheel, one of only three examples of its type in the whole of France.

We were set fair.

Then, disaster struck in the guise of our neighbours suing us for a right of way through our newly restored kitchen and dining room. They assured us that their argument wasn’t with us, but with our only other neighbours in the hamlet, the people who had sold us the property. The two families had been feuding for over 200 years.

Perhaps I’ll put some more flesh on the bones of this story at a later date, but, for now, that’s all you need to know.