EYMET

Thursday May 14th

EYMET



There are two hundred thousand British passport holders registered living in France.
A big slice of these live in the Dordogne. In the old market town of Eymet, south-west
of Bergerac there are nearly 2000 Brits living there.

The town even has its own cricket team, a shop selling everything from baked beans to Darjeeling breakfast tea, an English bookshop and seven estate agents; all of whose staff speak English. We are told that there’s a Farrow and Ball paint shop in Eymet. We set off in trepidation. How many of our fellow ex-pats are we going to bump into in this little corner of England? We find the Farrow and Ball shop in the Rue de Veau and it’s owned by a charming English lady called Michelle who has lived in France for twenty years.

We call in at a bar called La Gambetta in the town’s Square. It’s 6.30 pm. They are already serving fish and chips and we see several English couples tucking in. We talk to a friendly French barman who trained at The Alverston Hotel in Stratford-on-Avon. The owner of the bar is an Englishman called Rupert. He is smartly dressed, charming and urbane. It turns out he speaks fluent French, has lived in Aquitaine for years and is married to a French girl. Very soon the place is packed out with English beer drinkers.

We decide to try the Italian Pizza restaurant on the other side of the square. This is a pleasant surprise. Smart, fresh and modern, the place has a cosmopolitan atmosphere and is packed with English and French alike. We could have been in a trendy London trattoria.

We are given a table in a quiet corner of the restaurant. The two couples on the next table are happy to put up with our border terrier, Bertie who is tugging at their shoes – one of his favourite tricks. It turns out that one couple; David and Diana Wormwell live close to us when not at their house in the hills above Malaga. The other two at their table are their friends who live in Eymet itself. The lady, a French Canadian, met her French husband in Montreal and persuaded him to come back to France and live in the Dordogne.

After dinner we took Bertie for a walk along the banks of a pretty river called Le Dropt which runs though the centre of Eymet. It was sad to notice that many of the fallen trees upended by the January storms were still floating in the river.