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THE STORY SO FAR
Once upon a time, former night club bouncer,
seamstress and professional bed-tester George East and his wife Donella fled to
Normandy to escape their creditors and try to live off their wits in a foreign
land. Eventually, the couple arrived at The Mill of the Flea, a long-abandoned
water mill on ten acres of fields, woods, ponds, streams and mud in the heart
of the Cotentin (Cherbourg) peninsula. 
There, the Easts set about restoring the farmhouse
and tiny mill - and trying to restore their financial fortunes. Over the coming
months and years, they struggled to survive with a series of doomed schemes
including bottling the polluted waters
of their stream, marketing the first-ever garlic-flavoured car
deodorisers, and even setting up metal-detecting competitions to try and find
the long-dead miller’s buried hoard. Having failed at every attempt to make a
living at The Mill of the Flea, George East wrote a book as a dire warning to
other would-be settlers who dreamed of living the good life in rural France. To
the amazement of the author, his wife and (especially) their bank manager, Home
& Dry in France (A Year in Purgatory) was an instant success.
Writing School But financial disaster soon threatened again when
yet another of George’s hare-brained money-making schemes went awry. The
author’s not very well thought-out solution was to sell La Puce and borrow even
more money to buy a rambling manor house where he and Donella would set up a
writing school and holiday centre in the tranquillity of thousands of acres of
brooding marshlands. Unfortunately, it was not until the couple moved in that
they discovered they were the proud owners of a manor house right next door to
a very busy and noisy dog kennels. After dreaming up and opening and failing
miserably with what was meant to be the first of a chain of anglo-pubs, George
had to face the facts as well as the music, and retreated to England to find a
proper job and lick his wounds.
French Impressions
But it was not long before the lure of France and all
those interesting people, places, bars and restaurants proved too strong to
resist. The Easts were on the move again, and this time to half-way up what
counts as a mountain in Brittany. From
their rented Finistere farmhouse in a tiny hamlet surrounded by enchanting moorlands,
the Easts sallied forth to all parts of the region for the material for a
completely new type of book. The mixture of town reviews, Breton recipes, facts,
myths and legends and, of course, strange adventures and encounters with locals
and expatriate Brits combined to make French Impressions: Brittany a very
different travel book. Again and much to the East’s surprise, the formula and
style proved popular, and the creaking bandwagon
moved on to the Loire Valley for the next book in the series. Now the Loire book is finished and has been
published, the Easts will be investigating the delights of the Dordogne region.
Or at least, that is Plan ‘A’... 
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