This morning, I recycled my recycling box. It’s a lovely bright yellow plastic box in the style of a Habitat 1970s plastic box, probably because it dates from 1976 and I bought it in Habitat. Anyway, I recycled it.

I didn’t mean to recycle it. It was at the recycling poubelles, and I set it to one side, full of bottles, while I put my household waste into the other bins. After lunch, I looked around and thought, “Where’s me plastic box?”

It’s been a five-day run of pain and disaster. On Monday, builders arrive to start work, and not unreasonably they’ve asked me to clear the upstairs floor where they will begin the process of tearing down every wall, tearing out every wire, and tearing off all the attractive 1980s tongue-and-groove Swiss Army-surplus ski-chalet cladding that the Dutch people who sold me this place left behind.

When they’ve finished doing that, they will tear down the ceiling, tear out the staircase, rip out the kitchen and chuck out the lavs. Then they’ll probably disappear for a month, but that’s alright because three days later the motor-home will be delivered. If the suppliers can get it up my entrance drive. I’m thinking of selling tickets to that one.

At the moment down here, it is mostly raining. When it’s not raining, it is blowing a hurricane. Sometimes it does both at once. On the rare days it does neither, I go out with a wheelbarrow to shovel away the mud from the entrance road and put some more stone down. The result after three weeks of doing this is a ready-mix quicksand of mud and stone, and a path that doesn’t quite follow the route it used to. Driving down it is like kyaking rapids. Driving up it is like scaling Everest in a Reliant Robin.

Part of the pain has involved moving interior stuff from one level down to another. Have you ever noticed how trying to get a mattress to proceed in an orderly manner is like lassoing ether? They give you these handles to use, but the bloody things wobble about in all directions until you might as well be wrestling a pregnant Manta Ray.

But the major proportion of the pain is yes, as usual, French bureaucracy. You cannot buy a vehicle until you can show an address to which at least two utility bills have been posted with your name on it. You cannot write a cheque to clear in less than 21 days unless you go into the branch and pose a probing question as to the customer/bank relationship while heavily armed. And if you’re a foreigner, you cannot get insurance on a vehicle until your English insurer supplies 13 years of evidence about safe driving. (Unbelievably, there is a company rule at Saga that states no employee can post such evidence abroad.)

You really would never know we live in a place called the European Union. I’ve often wondered over the years what it is a union of, and where the examples of unity are hidden.The only real union 18 out of 27 EU member States have is the currency…..and that is rapidly turning into a union nobody but the Germans want.

In the meantime – despite all the hurdles and obstacles put in one’s way – every which way kind of pain is worth it when I step outside into a clear night with no City lights to spoil the view of A Starry Night. Or when I awake in the morning and the only sound is the half-hearted crow of a cock in the distance.

All this is the next step in yet another reinvention of what I’m doing on the planet. I’ve been easing into the new phase thing pretty regularly every fifteen years or so; and as I enter the second half of the seventh decade, it’s a bit scary to be doing it again – but a lot better than doing nothing in a rut I might know rather too well. If I think about it, I’ve been racing ahead of boredom since I was eleven years old. For better or worse, I’m still doing it today.

Earlier at The Slog: Why there is no longer any reason to look up to our leaders