Lately, I've been escaping to the chateau. All I want to do is put the fire on in the sitting room, light the candles, slump on the sofa, and watch back to back episodes of Escape to the Chateau on Channel 4. What’s the big attraction? Dick and Angel mostly, the couple who bought the crumbling pile in January 2015 for the bargain-basement price of £280,000 (Chateau de la Motte-Husson, in France). Dick is so capable. Angel is so creative. They’re both so positive and happy. He adores her, and why wouldn't he? She's always smiling and giggling. Then there’s the chateau itself. I love watching it transform as they bring it back to life. She created a wallpaper museum in a turret! He devised a heating system and helped install a lift! And I love the walled garden; I love watching those vegetables grow. I think it’s the combination of Dick and Angel’s pre-Covid lifestyle and the beautiful countryside around them that’s making it all so appealing right now. Dick and Angel renovate and decorate and cook and clean, all seemingly harmoniously while also bringing up two children. Their life is so different from life here in London that watching them means there’s little to feel wistful about in terms of what we've lost, except for the wedding parties they host. The wedding parties do make me cry. A lot of the programme makes me cry. Tears welling up out of nowhere. I imagine I’m not alone in this.
I’m fearing for the future. What’s going to happen to our children? How will they find jobs in a collapsed economy? When will I see my parents again? Will our lives ever get back to normal? I'm trying to keep these thoughts at bay, to find something positive to mentally tick off every evening, however small. I managed to clean a bathroom, I tick. I cooked a nice meal. I sorted a shelf. I wrote this blog post. Most importantly, I looked after our new puppy. Our new puppy is a great distraction. I walk her, then I bathe her because she’s covered in mud. The whole world has turned to mud. Every patch of green space around us is overused, trampled to death, sticky as toffee. We squelch through it, the puppy and I, with lines from Michael Rosen's We’re Going On A Bear Hunt running through my head. 'We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it…' Just like a global pandemic. 'Squelch squerch, squelch, squerch...'
In bed at night, my mind spinning off like an out of control Ferris wheel, I find Angel and Dick’s chateau to latch on to. It really is my escape. I think about their life there. I long to free myself from London’s clutches and the chateau seems the perfect place to go: a huge house in grounds in the Loire valley in France. What bliss! I’d go there. Or to Yorkshire. Or East Sussex. Or Suffolk. Or retreating back to my childhood again in my head. Anywhere that’s not London. London is packed with people I can’t mix with. I think that’s where the chateau comes in. I see Dick and Angel as friends who've welcomed me into their home. They're taking the place of real friends and real interactions so alarmingly curtailed during this winter lockdown. A friend on Zoom the other day, talking about her mother’s obsession with her neighbours’ misfortunes, called it ‘secondary experience empathetic gloom’. Perhaps that’s what my obsession with Escape to the Chateau is? Except without the gloom. I love watching Dick and Angel because my mind needs people to connect to. And there they are on the telly whenever I need them, busily doing interesting and varied things… imagine that!
I have stuff to do, but none of it varied and only a fraction of it is interesting. Each day is alarmingly similar to the one that went before and the one that will come after. It’s strange what our minds will do under pressure. We all need escape valves. And mine, at the moment at least, is scrambling up through a mental submarine hatch, out through the back of an imaginary wardrobe, and into a fairytale dream. Not surprising, perhaps, when I think about what I was into as a child: castles and handsome princes and beautiful princesses living their happily ever afters...
I hope Angel and Dick are living their happily ever after in their beautiful chateau in France. I googled them the other day and discovered they have a whole devoted Facebook fan club of envious Brits (I am NOT ALONE), and a website including lots of home movies. When I get to the end of Escape to the Chateau on Channel 4, I’ll switch over to watching those.
Keep making the programmes and the home movies, Dick and Angel! Right now, in this time of national crisis, your countrymen need you.
E x
https://thechateau.tv/about
