We often wonder, where did we get the courage to turn our back on the Celtic Tiger and leave Ireland? But here we are, one year on, getting a bit reflective. The sun has just come out after a month of cloud, we went skiing at the weekend, and Christmas is coming. Life is good.
It'll be our first Christmas away. I' m trying to get le chef to produce a Provenτal Christmas Eve meal, the Gros Souper - meatless, with all the bounty of the sea and the goodness of the land and, more to the point, with 13 different desserts said to represent Christ and the 12 apostles.
As with any great festival, the French too are mainly planning to celebrate with their stomachs - the country is awash with foie gras, molluscs, fish, meats in sauces, champagne and fine wines. The local supermarkets will be cooking dinner for a lot of people ¡ you order your menu from a brochure and collect it on the day. It actually looks inviting.
Meanwhile, the kids in school are singing about pine trees and suchlike ¡ the separation of Church and State in France means no nativity plays, no carols, just snowmen and Santie.
No restraints exist on interaction between Church and commerce, of course.
One of the specialities of the religious-ephemera shop in Albi is crib sets from around the world - gorgeous and incredibly expensive. These include santons - traditional Provenτal crib figures including, among others, a village idiot and a wetnurse. Doubtless Baby Jesus would have welcomed them all but (even in France) nobody really thinks there was a French knifegrinder in Bethlehem. During the French revolution, when churches were closed and church cribs inaccessible, these little figures appeared: once everyone had accumulated Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the usual wise men, shepherds and beasts, the manufacturer just kept going.
Our own santons stretched hardly beyond three kings and the Holy Family. We ran out of modelling-foam after one shepherd, alas. Meanwhile, I've been chasing down toys on the Internet, posting off big, brown-paper-wrapped parcels and receiving big, brown-paper-wrapped parcels. Some family traditions remain as usual across the miles - intense discussions about children's clothes sizes, my brother's elaborate flight-plans (Christmas in Dublin, pop down to France, back to London for New Year with his girlfriend), and presents for the cat.
The neighbours have invited Sarah up to decorate their tree and sent down an Advent calendar, but most locals seem more worried about the weather than the season - it's been getting colder and colder. It's minus six this morning. It didn't cost much to heat a two-bedroomed terraced house in Ranelagh, but here there's a knack to staying solvent while keeping warm in our big, stone-walled farmhouse. It seems to involve wood-burning stoves, opening the windows and shutters to follow the sun and never letting the temperature in the house fall below 12 degrees.
Workwise, I'm chasing down seasonal subplots in Fair City and pictures of Dale Winton in a Santie Hat, just like I did last Christmas in Dublin. Even from the south of France, TV supplements must go on.
What a year. I'm flicking back through e-mails received and sent as I write this: my mother saying the Paddy's Day parade was cancelled due to foot-and-mouth so I'm not missing much; various colleagues buying houses, rearing goats, having babies; my whole family arranging to come for Dad's 70th birthday in June; lots of people I've never met congratulating us on our move; voices from the past likewise, the boss arranging training dates for me in August, then a rush of reassurances from friends in New York in September.
It has been an intense experience, with tough patches and wonderful times. It's taken us a year to establish ourselves but we're starting at last to feel the ground under our feet. I am increasingly confident in my French - to the point where I'm using words I didn't know I knew, can chat on the telephone and can lose my temper in the shops - and we're finally starting to remember that everything for miles around is closed on Monday and to buy double rations of bread on Sunday. We've had unique experiences such as helping our friend Daniel to sell wine, sitting around a dinner table talking in three languages, watching the pride our Sarah takes in speaking French. A few times, I've had regrets, but not many. And this Christmas, the feeling that the world is our oyster is as strong as ever.
Back in Ireland everyone we work with - clients, contacts, complete strangers - continues to be wonderful, broadminded and adaptable, and so the teleworking is a complete success. Actually, people seem delighted to see a computer doing something besides lining the pockets of dotcom drones. We have had more work than we'd anticipated, which is just as well since living here is more expensive than expected. We're not as good at modest living as we had hoped to be! Work is vital. Not just for income, but for my sanity. We didn't work in July and while the other two kicked back and relaxed, I chewed the walls.
We'd just moved into our new house and it certainly didn't feel like home; it was hot and I didn't much like weeks and weeks of heat.
I was bored, unmotivated and extremely tetchy, adrift without the adrenaline-fix of daily deadlines. I can't for the life of me remember why the walls didn't get painted and the floors didn't get grouted, but they didn't.
In August, we went back to Ireland and some of it was brilliant. I loved being among my own. I loved fluent conversations and familiar faces and places: I loved having things in common with strangers and going to work every morning.
But gradually, the thrill of using my brain at work, not to mention the satisfaction of having someone else fill my day, gave way all over again to horror at the paucity of choice for young families, the cynicism of the system, the sedentary lifestyle and the disenchantment of the citizens. And the traffic - God, the traffic. And the driving! People in cars in Ireland are horrible to each other - do you realise this?
How could I have been homesick for this? Actually, what I missed is gone. And it's as gone now for everyone still in Dublin as it is for me here in France. God knows how many of us ever believed in the comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, but the new myth we've spun for ourselves, in which identity and prosperity are hopelessly entwined, is a poor substitute even for that.
I caught glimpses of the land of my youth. Like in Galway, with old friends and our offspring on an All-Ireland afternoon, we bathed in the sea and had pints, vegetable soup and toasted sandwiches afterwards looking out across the sun-stroked bay.
It was effortless, timeless, precious. We hadn't seen them in four years, living in Dublin.
It was an instructive month. By the end of August, it was time to go. I was now sure again that I didn't want to be in Dublin, but still unsure about the alternative. By the end of September, I had fallen in love with France all over again.
We came back to the most beautiful autumn you can imagine, weeks and weeks of balmy weather, vines heavy with ripening grapes, new friends who had missed us, and for Sarah (and for me) school, four mornings a week. We had plenty of work, and the house started to feel like home. Gradually, the unremitting delightfulness of it all won my heart.
The urge to be continuously up-beat about life here has been hard to resist.
I gave up a lot and left a lot of people who love us. If I'm having a bad time, I look like a patsey; if I'm having a good time, I'm a pioneer. But in truth, we couldn't have been much luckier in where we've landed up. Our commune here is tiny and rather elderly - about 80 families, I'd guess - and though they'd rather have young French people buying up the houses here, any young family is welcome. Especially those who wish to integrate. We're included in every village event and lavishly praised for our improving French, charming daughter, etc.
School is free, health-care is cheap, social security is high. We've had to set up as the French equivalent of sole traders, which involved paperwork and red tape. In return for running your own business here, you pay higher social security and receive lower benefits - yes, I know that's not fair.
And it may have to change, because farming here can't support the community any longer. Our neighbour, Alain, sweeps a hand across the horizon and says that when he was a boy there were 40 farms here - now there are four.
Maybe there's a future for rural life in what we're doing - and certainly France Telecom, though cursed and lauded in turn in this house, provides a good service in this deepest countryside. The ISDN line may be a bit slow at times, but it was installed within a week of asking.
Our own future is barely more assured than it was when we got here - the progress we have made in establishing the teleworking has been counterbalanced by worries about the world economy. The impact of the downturn is less dramatic in France than in Ireland - the French economy is very inward-looking - but to all intents and purposes we don't work in France, we work in Ireland. And the downturn is expected to hit the local economy, because it will hit wine prices.
My favourite thing about living here: if I had to pick my greatest joy, it's not wine, cheese or 70 different kinds of chocolate in the supermarket, it's not even getting to spend more time with Sarah, or my husband's cooking.
It's not those moments of farce, like when the local hunting club turned up with a gift of a live pheasant to thank us for letting them shoot on our land. It's having time to think.
Not that I shall be avoiding all 70 varieties of chocolate, of course, though it won't make up for not seeing my nieces and nephew, brother and sister, my parents and my in-laws, and I'm sad that they will all miss Sarah's Christmas.
But on Christmas day, we shall get up early and stoke up the stove. We will walk up the hill behind the church with our inherited cat, Gaston, keeping a wary eye out for wild boar, and maybe call on a neighbour. We'll take some pictures of Sarah with her presents in the outfit her granny has sent, and e-mail them to the family gathering in Dublin. On Stephen's Day, we'll drive to the snow with my visiting brother.
We might go out to dinner on New Year's Eve and enjoy the St Sylvestre menu like everyone else in the district.
And on February 2nd, it'll be the anniversary of our arrival. We'll drink a toast to year one and turn to year two of this life.