There’s no way to put this that won’t seem vaguely irritating: we had a bit of extra money floating about. To be coy it was less than £250,000, which doesn’t go far in London, but it was enough to buy a surprisingly large farmhouse in rural France.

Lots of other people were doing it. In that year — 2003 — in our street alone, there were two other families in the process of buying French holiday homes. Like them, we were convinced that it wasn’t simply a sensible but a joyous investment; it could pay for itself if we let it out to tenants while we weren’t there, and guaranteed us relatively inexpensive holidays for ever after. We bought the third property we looked at.

It seemed ideal. Twenty minutes’ drive from the beach, and halfway between the lovely cities of La Rochelle and Bordeaux, the old stone house had been renovated by the previous owners, who also happened to be British. After five years spent trying to live the French idyll, they were, um, returning home. Of course, my husband and I didn’t think anything of it at the time. In any case they must have spent a fortune on it, poor things. The place was in perfect nick. All it needed was some well-chosen furnishings (what fun) and a swimming pool (an easily justifiable expensive expense).

We envisaged spending long and languorous summers out there, lazing in the sun with our amusing friends. We planned to spend Christmases there too, and half terms, and in the early days we even imagined nipping out for occasional weekends. It was going to be a private paradise: a perfect contrast to our frenetic London lives and an ideal place for the children to build campfires and learn French and so on.

I remember the day reality began to nibble at the edges of our fantasy. It was August, about four months after we had bought the wretched place and about two weeks into our first holiday in situ. France was in the throes of a terrific heat wave. The six-bedroom house was indeed filled with our friends, the cellar was filled with amazingly cheap wine and the air was filled with the merry sounds of innumerable children frolicking in the crystal-clear waters of our newly installed swimming pool. Not only that, we had some bona fide French neighbours dropping in for drinkipoos later on.

Everything was exactly as I had envisaged it. And yet. It was approaching five o’clock already. I had not quite finished clearing up lunch for 14 people, which itself had merged pretty much seamlessly with breakfast. First-shift supper, for the children, loomed imminently, followed by dinner for the adults, and the fridge, so recently stocked with at least €400 worth of food, was looking depressingly empty. I was gazing at it, searching hopefully for something to feed the horde, while simultaneously listening to my husband, Peter, on the telephone, trying to explain to the plumber that the downstairs lavatory was emitting a “mal et horrible, er... Daisy! What’s the French for stink?”. He looked exhausted. I was exhausted. Possibilities for languor seemed distant.

When we invested in the dream, neither of us had taken into account quite what a preposterous amount of time, money and effort would have to be dispensed in the facilitating of it, and how little time we, the owners of said dream, would get to sit back and truly enjoy it. The most obvious problem, or so it seemed in those innocent early days, was the endless catering required when having friends to stay. Holidaymakers eat a lot, especially when they’ve come on a short break to France, where food is meant to be the highlight.

Anyway, on that afternoon, that sad afternoon when the light began to dawn, I was listening to my husband yelling valiantly into the telephone: “Et aussi, monsieur, je pense il y a un leak au dessous le, er, er, washing machine...” One of our guests wandered in from the pool — slop, slop, slop — dripping water all over the floor, looking infuriatingly relaxed. He asked what was for dinner. When I told him, he looked quite crestfallen. “Don’t want to be a nuisance, but, you know, last night in France and all that. I don’t suppose you’ve got anything else?”

I didn’t. And it was a Monday, which meant, this being rural France, that almost all the shops were shut. Getting my guest “something else” for his last supper would involve a half-hour drive across country to the hypermarché, which temple of hell it was proving impossible to escape without spending several hours and at least €500. On the other hand, I had another long shopping list of essential things to buy for the house, and the fridge was looking empty.

It was while I was in the hypermarché, piling my trolley full of essentials — a garden scythe, a hosepipe attachment, protective varnish for the shutters, a tub of swimming-pool chlorine, a plastic container to hold petrol for the lawn mower, which was broken, a new vacuum cleaner, plastic glasses for the pool, duck breasts and foie gras for a suitable last supper — that I began to wonder at the wisdom of our joyous investment. This endless round of unaffordable shopping trips, cooking chores and conversations about broken loos, I wondered, were they teething problems? Or were they, perhaps, the true nature of the beast?

They were neither. Actually, they were a gentle break-in, a mere taster of the relentless expense and aggravation that lay ahead. I speak French quite well — or so I thought — but I had yet to discover the full horror of dealing with paperwork in French. Nor the extent of the impossible demands made by our hard-to-acquire tenants. We had yet to learn of the havoc that can be wreaked by an owl (which I think must have died of diarrhoea) when it is trapped inside an empty open-plan house all winter. Nor could we begin to comprehend, until it happened, the difficulties involved in getting rid of a hornets’ nest or reporting a robbery from abroad.

Back in London, the subject became so stressful, we tried to pretend that the house didn’t exist. But there was always some sort of a problem to be dealt with; always a bill that needed to be paid.

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