One Place de l’Eglise: A Year in Provence for the 21st century | Trevor Dolby

One Place de l Eglise

by Trevor Dolby

Escape to Languedoc in this poignant and transportative true account of life in a beautifully restored house in the south of France.

One day a Londoner and his wife went a little crazy and bought a crumbling house in deepest Languedoc. It was love at first sight. Over the years these Londoners gradually turn the house into a home. They navigate the language, floods and freezing winters. And eventually they find their place - their bar, their baker, their builder (ignore him at your peril). Slowly the family and the locals get to know one another and these busy English discover slower joys - the scent of thyme and lavender, the warmth of sun on stone walls, nights hung with stars, silence in the hills, the importance of history and memory, the liberation of laughter and the secrets of fig jam. One Place de l'Eglise is a love letter - to a house, a village, a country - from an outsider who discovers you can never be a stranger when you're made to feel so at home. Old houses never belong to people. People belong to them.

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Driving the Trans-Siberian 

Ever had the desire to jump in your car and keep driving. To wave goodbye to routine and commitment, and drive into the unknown hungry for adventure? Well, that is precisely what The Raven Brothers decided to do whilst stacking boxes of frozen oven chips in a -30 degrees freezer. Not being petrol heads and having zero knowledge of the internal combustion engine, the travel writers fired up their rusty Ford Sierra Sapphire and headed east. 

After clocking up over 11,000 miles, quite literally living in the car, the pioneering duo miraculously arrived in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok in Siberia on the Sea of Japan. What they had in fact done was to drive the entire length of the new Amur Highway before it was finished, which crosses Russia and the notorious Zilov Gap in a 6,200 mile swath of cracked tarmac and potholes. Along the way our trusty heroes drink vodka with Chechen criminals, escape highway robbery, trade banana flavoured condoms with Russian cops, meet the eccentric and plain weird at truck stops in darkest Siberia, endure torturous road conditions and have a race to the finish with the Germans. Surviving this insane journey by the skin of their teeth the brothers are forced to confront their worst fears in this toe-curling comedy of extreme road trip adventure.