The Waiting is Over

Well. The 17 June arrived and so did the postlady. No post again. Nothing from the Notaire. Nothing from SAFER. Could it really be that this had all been a storm in a teacup?

Whilst beginning to believe that maybe our hopes and plans for the Big Land of our dreams might actually come to pass, I still could not entirely shake off the feeling that it wasn't over yet. My brother-in-law had warned us about the Last-Minute tendencies of French bureacracy (he had waited the regulation month to find out whether a planning application would be successful, and then received a letter on the very last day of the deadline informing him that it had been turned down), and the continued cheerful greetings of our land-purchase competitor had left me uneasy.

We occupied our minds with other things. We practised getting the breeding llamas in our smallest of small catch-pens, one at a time, as part of a desensitising process aimed at getting them to accept us haltering and unhaltering them.

Fatma didn't like it at all, and tried to get underneath the wooden gate construction to join her pals. Knowing that we had fixed the hinge problem, so that she couldn't just lift the gate up like Valentine had, so spectacularly, a few weeks ago, we waited for her to accept the inevitable and settle down. She didn't. She put her head under the gate, barged forward, broke the wood in half with a gut-wrenching cracking sound, and escaped to the relative freedom of the larger catch pen. She looked at us with a smugly smug expression on her smug llama face.

Foiled again. My god, these damn llamas are strong! And Fatma is the smallest and lightest of the adults! We looked in dismay at the destruction in front of us. It had taken a fair bit of time and effort to create that gate, and it had crumpled in a matter of seconds. We sighed. We tried to envisage our Plan B. I had a feeling it was not going to be a good day.

We returned to the house to nurse our emotional wounds and to wonder once again whether we could actually DO THIS. If we can't even keep a flighty llama in a small pen to halter it, how on earth are we ever going to trim their toe nails, or move them to another field? Cue another crisis of confidence....

Then ..... an insistent bang at the door. It had to be our friend and neighbour Giles (anyone else would ring the doorbell). Sure enough, there he stood, with a face full of thunder. "I come with the bad news..." he said. He had telephoned the Notaire, and had been told that they had just received (via a Court Bailiff) notification that SAFER was exercising its Droit de Preemption. They had had to deliver the notification this way, as they had left it too late to use the post. The Notaire's secretary had never known of such a last-minute intervention. (Hard to believe that somehow....).

A few minutes later Giles' father arrives. Yes it is true. SAFER are buying his land, and they will decide what happens to it. Giles is fuming. We try to be reassuring. "Never mind. It's not over yet. There will be a consultation process. We can still present our project". It feels as if the news has affected Giles more than us. Afterall, we've sort of been expecting this, and were surpised only that it hadn't happened earlier. "C'est la vie!" I venture, with a Gallic shrug, pleased at the opportunity to appropriately use one of my few French phrases. Giles is not impressed.

After they leave, we briefly contemplate the situation, before deciding not to think about it any more today. We'll let our underminds work away at it, while we enjoy a bit of gardening and bird-watching. It'll all be fine.

The next morning, while driving to the airport for Simon's trip to England, I confess to a childish sense of disappointment and resentment. I know that both are irrational, and also that I only feel disappointed because, having got right up to the deadline, I had started to believe that we might actually end up buying the land after all. And even though I had tried not to, I had started to plan how we would arrange and fence and use the land. I had begun to expect something. And therein lies suffering. Clearly I am a slow-learner in the Art of Living Happily.

However, I also know that there will come a time when we will look back and be pleased that things turned out the way they did. Because one lesson I have learnt is that blessings very frequently come in disguise.

So, for now we will explore all the options Mme Burgat's land has to offer, momentarily scale down our plans for our long-term llama breeding enterprise, and enjoy what we have here and now. And at the same time, we'll research the SAFER procedures from this point, decide what sort of case we want to make, and think about how we might do a deal with Mr Winemaker to at least try to keep the use of the Rough Land where our small herd of Walking Llamas are currently (very happily) spending their lazy days.