John Lewis-Stempel sets off from the UK to the rural far west of France - la France profonde - where he and his wife settle to a farming life in a draughty house with a small menagerie of pets and farm animals and a few acres of vineyards. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Although it began as a practical enterprise, it quickly became an affair of the heart: of learning to bite the end off the morning baguette; taking two hours for lunch; in short, living the good life - or as the French say, La Vie .

For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. But as three species of lizard emerged from hibernation to join the party, he realises that’s how you know winter has passed in Charente-Maritime. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Highly descriptive, going round the year in the life of a newly arrived English peasant farmer's perspective who is hard working and accepted by his French neighbours because of who he is.He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.

After calming the terrified animal, Lewis-Stempel leads him back to his field where the cause of the alarm is revealed: a fire salamander, basking in the sunshine. He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit . The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Readers of his many books and his Times nature columns will know how easily Lewis-Stempel's writing marries the lyrical with the descriptive. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The book is in effect a year's journal of John and his family moving to rural France, (an area I have visited as I have friends who live an hour away from this place).

The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow . Over that first year, John falls in love with the French countryside and living the good life – or as the French say, La Vie. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. What I have particularly enjoyed is re-learning French word and slang which I only remembered when reading the book, things I learned at school over 40 years ago came back to me (the fables by Jean De La Fontaine were learned by rote in "conversational French" back then. The descriptive writing of his walks in the area, the local wildlife, the local people and customs (and the attitudes of the French rural resident! A clear-eyed and unsentimental, yet utterly beguiling immersion in La France Profonde, keenly observed and beautifully told.