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TO start a hedge fund, I'm told, you need several millions of pounds of seed capital. To put together a five year market beating track history will take a couple of hundred million pounds.

You have to know what you're doing and have an intimate knowledge of your subject.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a client who was looking at property for sale in the Dordogne. He had just started a hedge fund in the UK. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. So, I listened.

He made the "you mark my words" point that the British government were desperately trying to keep the lid on the fact that the British economy is in a lot worse shape than they let on.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, Alistair Darling the British Chancellor, assures the people of Britain that they can look forward to the worst recession in 60 years. That's doubtful in reality. I can't imagine that ration books and three day work weeks are likely.

But that doesn't matter. The point that struck me was that my client was bang on the money. The government came clean and attempted to tell people the truth.

So, I tried to recall the other gems of wisdom he shared with me that day on our travels in the Dordogne countryside.

There were many. But there were two in particular. Suddenly, everything he had said carried more weight. He was now an authority in my mind.

His first prediction was that the euro-sterling exchange rate would reach parity within a year.

For lots of people thinking of buying a house in the Dordogne this doesn't really pass the "So what?" test. Over the past year they have been watching the euro soar . One euro to the pound is looking more likely by the day.

And for the first time, we're seeing sterling slip against the dollar.

His second was that we can look forward to three pounds to one euro within the next three years.

What if he's right ?

FOR years journalists and film crews have decended on Eymet in spades to expose the bastide for what they'd like to think it is, a British ghetto.

In the words of Sherlock Holmes, " It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist the facts to suit the threories, instead of theories to suit facts."

And so they leave for the UK having bagged the scoop, hatching such ill-conceived sound bytes as "Dordogneshire" and "Eymet-on-Thames" en route.

Invariably those poor, cunningly seduced, English residents quoted in the resulting articles spent all their time angrily explaining to anyone who would listen that what they said and how it was reported were two completely different things.

Eymet is a village of around 2,700 inhabitants. About 200 of them are British. They're not as anonymous as they may have been back home.

So, when a national newspaper or television crew arrive in town from Blighty they're quite happy to grab their 15 minutes of fame.

And who can blame them. Naturally, most people would see it as a golden opportunity. Free advertising. A way to promote the business that they work so hard at through media renowned for their integrity.

Some of the British residents who have been quoted feel bitter at how what they said was twisted. But let's face it, good press is bad news.

Yes, there's a cricket club and an English grocery shop in Eymet but does that make it a ghetto?

Aquitaine was once part of England going back 700 years and bitterly fought over in the 100 Years War. That's how long the English have been coming here.

It's a bit like a 700 year marriage. We don't always get along but we can't do without each other.

Accept it. The English are accepted in Eymet.

According to the 2001 Census in the UK there were 300,000 French nationals living in London alone, about 4.2% of the population. That's more than the Irish population of 3.07%.

London is the 7th largest French city. It has a bigger French population than Lille.

Now there's a scoop.

But I don't imagine that it has nearly the same appeal as the chance of a boondoggle to the sunny, safe Dordogne where the cut and thrust of city life is but a distant memory for its British residents.

Then there's the story of the two Eymet residents from the Isle of Man. Both ladies had lived in Eymet for several years but had never met until recently.

Janet, a close friend of one of these ladies, was on the flight from Bergerac to Stansted and got chatting to the lady in the seat beside her.

As an opener, she asked the lady if she lived in France and where she was from. The lady replied that she was originally from the Isle of Man but had been living in Eymet for several years.

Janet was surprised to hear that her friend and the lady beside her had never met. Afterall, they only lived three streets from each other, it transpired.

The story has a happy ending in that both ladies are now good friends. They wondered why, in such a social village, they had never met. But they simply had different sets of friends, both French and English.

They reasoned that they didn't meet sooner because, contrary to what the press would have us believe, the Brits in Eymet don't actually live in each others' pockets.

The point is that you can live your life in any way you choose in Eymet or any other foreign community.

Sure. If you shut out your French neighbours you can exist but I wonder how happily.

So, to the British national press we say, the next time you come to Eymet, stay a while... it's on us. Live a little of our lifestyle and form your own opinions over time. We've got plenty of that here.

They were the crunchiest, fattest carrots we had ever tasted. What made them even more tasty was that we didn't buy them and we didn't grow them ourselves. They were a gift. Not from a neighbour but from the birds that come and go in our garden. I'm afraid there's not much by way of update on the work on our property in the Dordogne in this post. But I have to tell you how we happened across these carrots. Throughout last winter and for much of the spring of this year we hung some fat balls for the birds until the weather started to warm up. We usually hang the bird feed from an ash tree beside the well in the garden. Under the tree is a compost bed that we had prepared for planting this spring. About a month ago I was weeding the flower bed when I noticed some "weeds" that just seemed out of place. On closer inspection I could see several little orange heads peeping out of the ground underneath their leafy green foliage. They were carrots. There were dozens of them. Neither my wife nor myself had planted them. So, where did they come from? Of course, there was a very simple answer. The birds that fed all winter and spring on the fat balls had "deposited" them while they munched merrily away. The thing is, I checked the list of ingredients in the fat balls. There were no carrot seeds in them. The birds had obviously raided somebody's vegetable patch for starters and moved onto ours for the main course. No doubt, there's a very frustrated gardener somewhere in the Dordogne scratching his head, wondering where his carrot crop is. Maybe it was the birds' way of thanking us for helping them through the winter. So, here's a top downsizing tip. Don't buy vegetable seeds next year. Instead, hang fat balls from as many trees as possible in your garden and make a bed of good soil a couple of metres wide from the base of each tree. Unfortunately, this won't work in the case of the potato. The poor things would choke on seed potatoes. So, these you have to buy. We import ours from the UK or Ireland. Don't get me wrong. French potatoes are very nice. But they're different. In France, potatoes are used in stews or sauteed but usually served in a sauce. Wet. We're used to eating boiled potatoes, for example, on their own with our meat and other veg. However, the French spuds don't make great boiled spuds. They just never seem to dry out. So, we grow our own imports and they're like balls of flower. The climate in the Dordogne means that we can grow dozens of fruits and vegetables that we could never have grown at home. For this we are truly grateful. But the French palette is quite different to most others. The French, in general, don't like to eat very spicy food. We do. Curries are a particular favourite. We love to make curry and for the most part ingredients aren't a problem. But I challenge anyone to find a good source of hot fresh chillis in the Dordogne. So, last year we ordered several packets of chilli seeds of different varieties and origin from a garden centre in England. None rated less than 900,000 on the Scoville scale. The nice thing about chillis is that the more you pick from the bush they more they produce and they grow like triffids in this climate. In fact, I heard talk recently of several cereal farms in the Lot-et-Garonne who grow chillis, not to harvest for food, but as, so called, green manure or fertiliser for their crops. When ripe the plants are cut down and left to compost. I'm not sure whether this is just a rural myth but I'm certainly going to have a go at finding them next year before they're hacked to bits. No curry would be complete with out coriander. Again, I challenge anyone to try and find a good, reliable source of this fantastic herb in the Dordogne. Ironically, you can buy coriander seed by the barrow load in any garden centre in France. Growing coriander in a kitchen garden is easy but you need to keep an eye on it. It always seems to want to bolt into seed after which time is useless. Other than these few simple pleasures we want for nothing.

With regard to the renovation of our Dordogne property we really did things back to front. Even before we unpacked our bags we had ordered and put a deposit on a 10 metre by five metre swimming pool.

After all, the house was perfectly habitable. It didn't need anything more than a lick of paint. How wrong could we be.

We were adamant that we wouldn't change things with the house too quickly. It beggars belief that we were more than happy to part with 30,000 euros of hard earned cash for a swimming pool with a barn to be renovated sitting idle across the yard. As one friend said "When I got on the plane to France I left my brain at home."

Our first summer was superb. The pool was filled on the 30th of June and the hordes of friends and family arrived from the 4th of July until the end of October.
We wintered the swimming pool in November and looked forward to opening it up again the following year.

There was a nip in the air as I walked back to the house. It was then that it dawned on me that maybe we shouldn't have demolished the glass fronted porch on the front of the house.

Now that it was gone, it meant that the kitchen door, which originally led to the porch, was an external door. We tiled the porch during the summer and had to shave the bottom of the door which meant that even Peter Rabbit, having gorged himself in Mr McGregor's garden, could fit under it.

One cold December evening, sat at the kitchen table after dinner, we worried that our heating wouldn't be sufficient to keep us warm. The house is on three floors with no insulation between them.

We prioritised the work and totted up the estimates. Then we heard an enormous bang from the woodburner. The firebricks inside had disintegrated. We added another 800 euros to the estimate.

The kitchen floor tiles would have to come up. That was the only solution. The guy in the shop told me that the same tiles we used for the porch could be used in the kitchen. Atleast, that's what I thought he told me. With the wet winter weather and no porch we mashed mud from our wellies into the kitchen floor incessantly.

They were impossible to clean, even steam clean. So, we made the 1,800 euros decision to pull them up.

Having learnt the hard way, I would advise people never to rush in and buy luxury items on a whim when there are more pressing improvements or repairs to be done.

Don't buy the swimming pool when the house needs to be insulated and well heated. Take your time.

If you're moving permanently to France spend all four seasons in the house and notice the things that need the most attention before forking out.

You'll find that you fork out a lot in the beginning. You'll need a car and a ride-on mower because there's no such thing as a small garden in the Dordogne. You'll need a trailor and maybe even a tractor. Remember that in France you buy a house as seen. So, it may happen that you will need to replace a tired old boiler.

Of course, everyone will want to put their own stamp on a property they buy to make it their home so if you buy your paint in France, for example, just be aware that it costs a hell of a lot more than at home.

And learn some French to avoid ripping up the new kitchen tiles because you misunderstood the man in the shop.

Finally, I get the time to write about our experience of renovating our barn in the Dordogne and life in France in general. I should say that this is the story of our experience, the trials and tribulations of our renovation project and that others may have differing opinions.

Of course, any good advice for other would be home owners are all welcome too.

Although we tried our best we certainly didn't get everything right. This is partly why the guys at premier french property have asked me to share our experience. Hopefully, others that come after us won't make the same mistakes we did.

I'm probably not going to get everything in one blog post so I plan to do a series of articles that will cover several different aspects of the project and tell you about our new life here in France.

So, let's start at the beginning. We spent two years searching for our french property. As often as possible, we would fly into Bergerac from Stansted on a three day whistlestop tour and cram as many viewings in as possible on each trip.

We spent our holidays in every corner of France before finally settling on the Dordogne. Much to the relief of our exhausted estate agent we finally bought what is now our home. We packed in our jobs and made the permanent move to France.

Being in our late thirties at the time we came to France meant that we needed to generate an income. We thought a gite business would be the just the ticket. We couldn't afford to buy an established gite complex so we decided to build one. In hindsight that was our first big mistake. But more about that later.

Our four bedroom stone farmhouse and barn sits in two hectares, roughly five acres, on the edge of a very quaint little village. It's just south of the town of Bergerac in the Dordogne. The land has a two acre acacia wood and some wild walnut, cherry, plum, fig and quince trees. The rest of the land is pasture. To the south We have the most gorgeous views for miles over the beautiful french countryside with church spires and chateaux standing proud in the distance.

When we moved to France from London just over five years ago there was just the two of us. Now we are 10.

Our son was born in the spring of 2006. Then came our fist donkey a few days later. She was a gift from a friend who thought it would be nice for our new born son to have as a pet. Growing up we both had family dogs and cats but never a donkey. We had notions of setting up a smallholding in France anyway. Our new arrival was just the push we needed to get started.

We needn't have worried. Donkeys are hardy animals with great character and temprament. They're also surprisingly clever. But they're also very social. For the first few weeks she brayed continuously. She was lonely. So, we went about finding her some company.

A friend of ours from Monpazier mentioned that a neighbouring farmer had a couple of eight week old lambs for sale. They would be ready for slaughter in a few more weeks. So, we bought them feeling good that we had saved them from the chop but not knowing how donkeys and sheep would co-exist. The risk paid off. They all got on famously.

A year later we rescued a young male donkey who, through our naivety and inexperience, managed in no time to become a father. Then came our two feral tabby kittens given to us by a neighbour. I thought for a time about building an ark instead of a barn.

Then followed a very steep learning curve in parenting and animal husbandry that has never let up. We learn something new every day. Of course, for a time in the beginning we took our eye off the ball, the renovation of the barn and starting our business, but we quickly got things back on track.

We're now over five years in to a six month renovation project but more about that later.