Complete guide to moving to the South of France for British and American Retirees

About the Author - Peter J Sumner

My first visit to France was as a 12-year-old on a school exchange. I stayed with the Bertin family just outside Toulouse but remember very little of the formal structure of it now - the timetable, the lessons, the organised activities - but I remember everything that mattered. The smell of fresh bread in the morning. The sound of a language I could barely follow but somehow still felt drawn to. The sense that daily life, even in its most ordinary moments, could, indeed did, feel totally different from anything I knew at home.

At that age, you don’t analyse those impressions. You simply absorb them. Although I did also have time to watch Neil Armstrong on his walkabout on the Moon! And I'd never seen a sunflower before! In the Tarn there were fields and fields of them! What did the French do with them all?

Over the years that followed, France remained present in the background of my life. Holidays came and went, always returning me briefly to that same feeling of community, space and, of course, food that I first encountered as a child. Like many people, I think I carried a quiet assumption that this was just part of travelling - a pleasant contrast to everyday life, nothing more.

But something changes when an idea doesn’t disappear and, half a century after that first visit, I made the decision to move to the South of France permanently.

What I discovered in the process was that the reality of living here is both more practical and more complex than the version most people carry in their minds. It is not simply a place of sunshine, scenery and long lunches. It is also a system - legal, financial, administrative and cultural - that needs to be understood properly if, as a retiree, life here is to work smoothly.

Noting the subtle, sometimes significant differences between a UK and a USA retiree, that is what this book explains, all the things you don't pick up on when you're simply on holiday, business or just passing through for a few days.

With 20+ years years of toastmastering and MC experience, Peter is now a professional speech coach helping grooms all over the world deliver the perfect wedding speech. He lives in the Tarn with his dog Maigret.