I saw a wonderful documentary on TV last night. It was about Michael Reynolds, and entitled Garbage Warrior.

Reynolds is my sort of bloke. Resolutely alternative, mad as a hatter and highly visionary, for 30 years he's been building self-sustainable communities in the extreme climate of New Mexico's desert, where winter temperatures can fall to 30 below freezing. 

Called Earthships, the kind of monniker that is hardly going to endear him to the 'straights', these houses use passive solar for heating, and are constructed around a central greenhouse that enables a family to be almost entirely self-sufficient for water, heat, power and food. The walls are remarkable - mainly constructed from recycled plastic and glass bottles set into cement (resulting in igloo-like structures of stained glass beauty), or used tyres packed hard with earth to create thermal mass.

Thermal mass is something you become familiar with when you live in a stone house like mine, incidentally. With their granite walls 2ft thick, these houses have to be warmed up in winter until the heat sinks into the stones and radiates back out again, but once warm, they retain their heat brilliantly and don't need much topping up. It's something that the holiday-home owners rarely understand: because they're never here long enough to warm the houses up, they imagine that for the rest of us, they are cold to live in during winter. 

Anyway, back to Reynolds.

Establishing self-sufficient communities is the kind of thing that is hardly likely to please the powers that be, who would rather have us all firmly over a barrel where utilities are concerned (what do we exist for, if not to make money for the corporates?), and for around seven years, the authorities succeeded in depriving him of his licence and shutting him down.

But he was saved by the tsunami. Desperate for new ideas about building, architects in the Amdamman Islands called on him and his crew to help them rebuild after losing almost all their housing and half their population to the tidal wave.

Unhampered by red tape and over-regulation, he and his men showed the island communities how to build their houses from what they had lying around, and as usual with non-western communities, the hard labour of the local populace was shaming. We sometimes forget that most of the manual labour in the world is done by women and that 80 per cent of the world's farmers are women, but I was reminded of it watching these frail-looking females in their saris, mixing cement with mattocks to build new housing for their families.

The film was short on some of the detail I'd like to see - about exactly how the water and sewage systems work, for example - though this kind of territory is covered very well by series such as Grand Designs, which are more about the 'how' than the 'why'. This film focused more on Reynolds as a personality and his political battle, which has lessons for the rest of us. The end of the documentary was uplifting, with Reynolds - after years of fighting - managing to push a bill through his local senate to allow him to continue his experimental work in designated areas.

I highly recommend this inspirational documentary, which is by Oliver Hodge. You can also find out more about the film at Garbage Warrior.

Available at: Amazon.com

Yesterday there was another change in this house - we have gone back to British television.

For some years when we first bought our house in France, we didn't have television at all. We had a television SET, of course, but we only played videos on it (videos, remember them?...). It wasn't until I found one of our cats dead in the garden that I suddenly felt a need for access to television - simply for something to distract me mindlessly for the evening.

We opted then for a French satellite package, attempting to integrate into our new surroundings. Most of the channels, of course, were French, but there was also CNN and a couple of BBC channels, and you could watch films in 'version originale', which was fine if they were English (not so fine if, for instance, they were Korean...).

The problem was, to tell the truth, we didn't really watch the French channels. Although I love this country and the way of life, the majority of French television is utterly dire. There were some art and history programmes on channels like Premiere, but the truth was that, over the years, apart from the news, we watched the English-language channels almost exclusively.

Now, however, our provider has moved the goalposts. The film channel we enjoyed the most has disappeared. There hasn't been an English-language film we've wanted to see in months. And in October, it's all due to change again and we'll lose BBC Prime for good - no more British comedies or costume dramas.  

It was time to draw a line in the sand, and given the ability to now access Freeview and Freesat, and not pay a thing, it was also too good an opportunity to save money. Tilting the satellite dish to pick up the Astra2 and buying a second-hand digibox on Ebay has cost us a grand total of 62 quid. Our French satellite package cost 40 euros a MONTH. You do the math - it should pay for itself in eight weeks. 

Of course, this house being what it is, it wasn't as straightforward as it should have been (nothing ever is). A friend came over with a long ladder and a satellite finder, and we had to move the dish to the other end of the house and recable, owing to a massive tree that stood in the way of the signal. Then he put the bracket on the wrong way up (our fault - we didn't tell him). One way and another it took three blokes the greater part of the day to get the thing working. Meanwhile we girls were inside having a bit of a clothing bourse and lots of tea and biscuits like the helpless females we are.

But now that the thing is up and running, I am well pleased with the results. Last night we had the great pleasure of watching a Poirot, which I haven't seen in years, and on Friday, Helen Mirren will be on in The Queen. We still have CNN, and for the first time since moving to France, we finally have Radio 4, indispensible for the chattering classes. At last, considered debate on topical items, Women's Hour, but more importantly, Mornington Crescent and I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue. Ex-pat behaviour it may be, but I feel like I'm back in the land of the living...

Late on parade with this blog today.

The reason is, I'm trying to buy a new woodburner.

I recently had a small windfall when my pensions company demutualised and I found myself with shares I didn't know I had. Since it was money I wasn't expecting, spending it on a new woodburner seemed like a good idea. I don't know how we'd ever afford one otherwise, and I want to do something to help my asthma. 

Our current woodburner is 11 years old, and it's the wrong type. So naive were we when we bought this house that we didn't know the difference between a freestanding stove and an 'insert', so we simply bought the latter because it was the most powerful we could find.

For those who don't know, inserts are designed to fit inside a closed fireplace. Only the front of them is visible, so the top, sides and back are all insulated to keep the heat in, and you drive the heat out of vents in the front by using fans.

However, we have an open fireplace, so what we should have bought was a freestanding stove, where the heat radiates from all sides. These generally don't have fans, though some of the newer varieties use turbo chargers that redirect the hot air so that it comes out of the bottom of the stove, reducing the ceiling temperature and increasing the floor temperature (see drawing at right).

This is the type we've opted for - the Alsace Turbo 2 from a firm called Supra. The Alsace without turbo is the best-selling stove in France and several of our friends have it, and the result is houses that are far warmer and cosier than ours. It is also double combustion and a third more efficient than our current stove, which will mean should pay for itself over the course of two to four years. 

Another mistake I made was that back when we bought this house, there wasn't really an Internet, and I had a lot of trouble calculating how much kilowattage we would need (it was the kind of information heating engineers used to keep to themselves). Eventually Country Living magazine furnished some calculations, and I came up with a requirement of 12kw, so we bought a 12kw stove.

It's never been anywhere near enough. Running both fans full pelt, we could just about cope, but our living room is 70sqm - the whole ground floor of the house - and it has quite a high ceiling. Recalculating recently on one of the many websites that now tell you how to do it comes up with a figure of 16kw - even more if you have an open staircase (which we do).  

The room is also not insulated - none of these stone houses are. Instead, it relies on something called thermal mass to stay warm. You basically heat up the stone, which radiates heat back out, and the best bet is to do it slowly and gradually. We usually light our first fire on September 1st, well before we really need it, and stoke up the house a bit at a time. This summer's been so rubbish, though that we actually lit one a day or two ago, more for psychological reasons than anything else.  

Just to complicate matters, though possibly in a good way, the French are keen to push wood heating, so you're entitled to a tax credit of 50 per cent of the cost of the stove if you install one of these whizzy new clean-burn jobs, which the Alsace Turbo is. The trouble is, we have no idea how to claim the tax credit, and I don't know anyone who's done it successfully. The criteria for obtaining it seem to vary wherever you look. One government site tells you that it doesn't matter where you buy the stove, as long as you have it installed professionally. Another says you can only claim if both the supplier and the installer are professionals. Yet another tells you that the supplier and installer have to be the same person.

It is enough to make you tear your hair out, even if it wasn't all in a foreign language. Though clearly, French people have no more of a clue than I do, as there are questions about it all over the French forums.  

I am very nervous about getting this thing wrong, because, you see, I don't know if we will ever have this kind of money to spend again in one hit, and there are plenty of other things that we need. For instance, I could easily buy a second-hand, more basic version of this stove for half the price and we could install it ourselves. No tax credit, but it would work out about the same in terms of money - a temptation when I'm not absolutely sure we're going to get this money back. And for the same cost as a new stove, I could refit the bathroom or buy a new floor for this office, plus replace both of our office windows with double-glazed ones. It is a decision I don't want to get wrong.  

Oh la. Back to the drawing board. At least I've phoned the plumber already, and he will giving me a quote on installation. A lot depends on what he says, so wish me luck.  

I was thinking yesterday about wabi-sabi, as I was writing a review of a book (to come shortly), and it made me think of my parents' house and what a lesson it was to me in interior design. For all the wrong reasons.

The house was a council property, built in 1947 and designed by some enlightened architect, who got the entire housing estate right.

I didn't know how lucky I was, growing up in that house. It wasn't large, but it was designed in a spacious way. It was brick-built, with solid internal walls. There were big casement windows everywhere that opened out fully. There was crosslight. There were French windows in the living room, giving out onto large gardens and - in our case - woodland right down one side, as we were the last house in a cul-de-sac.

Downstairs, a front door flanked by a frosted glass window that flooded the hallway with light led to stairs to the upper floor and a corridor to the kitchen, and a built-in rack for coats. The kitchen was a masterpiece of design - a coal-burning stove in one corner, raised on a stone dais; a big ceramic Butler sink with teak drainers; a huge north-facing larder with real stone shelves for keeping milk and butter cool (this was in the days before many people had refridgerators).

A door led to a rear corridor and thence to a room that most people used for storage or as a workroom (later, with increasing prosperity, for freezers etc, and later still my father made his wine in here). In front of it was the coal-hole (we still ran on coal then - several tons of it a year), and a cubbyhole for the bins. There was also an outside loo, so you didn't have to stomp upstairs in your wellies. This section had stable doors, though most people closed it off with full doors. 

The living room, like the whole ground floor, was tiled in terracotta and black tiles, laid in a square pattern, and the deep windowsills were terrazzo. All the doors were panelled oak.   

Upstairs, two large bedrooms overlooked the street, with a small back bedroom and a bathroom (cast-iron bathtub) overlooking the garden, all with large casement windows. A massive cupboard for storage was built-in at the top of the stairs, and another, with slatted shelves, was built in as an airing cupboard over the hot water tank in the bathroom. Alcoves in every bedroom were big enough to take wardrobes or to build in closets.  

Add the huge attic, and you can see how much space there was in this small house - a workshop, storage for bikes, two toilets. But of course, my parents, being aspirational like most people, proceeded to mess it up.

The first thing I remember them doing was ripping out the Butler sink. Who could have told them then that these 'stone' sinks would one day be so desireable, along with the sturdy brass taps they loathed? In went the shallow stainless steel sink with built-in drainers so beloved of the 1960s (I assume the teak ones went in the fire...). In place of the old wooden worktop, they installed a yellow laminate work surface - laminate being the fresh new thing. Because they'd turned the kitchen around, you now couldn't reach the windows to open them.

The larder, designed to keep food cold, became home instead to the spindryer (no tumble-dryers in those days) and storage for mountains of crockery, which was always glacial (they did, at least, keep bread in here, where it wouldn't spoil). Meanwhile, they built a cupboard above the fridge, in the alcove opposite, and kept the canned food and baked goods here, where they suffered from the warmth rising from the heat exchanger. 

The kitchen was designed to eat in, near the small coal stove, but instead, my mum and dad set up a huge oak dining table in front of the French windows in the living room, blocking both light and access to the garden. I barely saw those windows open twice a year (in fact, for most of my life they were painted shut). In every place, in every room they placed huge, unwieldy pieces of furniture that you had to squeeze around, and the outside loo was usually home to a lawnmower and completely unusable.

The tile floors, of course, to them were a sign of poverty, so in the living room they laid wall-to-wall carpet. But they couldn't afford a good wool carpet, so it was an acrylic carpet of unimaginable awfulness - a cream background with a screaming floral pattern.  Nor did it actually meet the wall at one side, so they shoved in another bit of carpet that didn't match. Later, they would replace this carpet with one even more vomit-inducing, in shades of green and orange. In the hallway, the carpet that covered the tiles was protected in turn with a plastic runner that transformed the corridor into a slipway - lethal on a wet day. In the kitchen, the ceramic tile was covered with floral lino, and then with vinyl tiles in blue and black. 

The green and orange carpet in the living room which they laid in the 70s matched the new wallpaper, which was a design of huge green circles in vertical rows - as big as a dinner plate - and, naturally, in wash-down vinyl, as if a house was something that has to be steam-cleaned every five minutes to keep it hygienic. This replaced the simple whitewash with which the house had been supplied and you can imagine the effect of all these enormous patterns crowding in on one another.

Meanwhile, the windowsills became home to pot plants by the dozen, blocking the light and shedding leaves everywhere and making the windows impossible to open. Conforming to the social norms, the three-piece suite (which they retained even when there were only two of them in the house) took up almost the entire floor space.

While downstairs was cluttered beyond belief, especially after my parents began to collect antiques in the late 70s, the upstairs remained almost hostile in its bleakness. Freezing cold for much of the year (no central heating in those days), it did have carpets (though no underlay, as they couldn't afford it), but my parents never had more than a bare lightbulb handing from the ceiling in their bedroom. I don't even remember a bedside lamp, though I'm guessing my mum must have had one. Upstairs was not somewhere you hung around - I used to put my clothes in front of the living room fire for the next day, so they'd be warm enough to get into. 

It pains me now to think how different the house might have been if my parents had been able to accept what it was instead of fighting it. To have a few simple, plain - perhaps country - things rather than aspiring to middle-class tastes that they could only fall short of. If, basically, the interior had been more wabi-sabi.

Imagine it with those simple, tiled floors in place, and a few scattered rugs, with rough-plastered walls, with bleached floorboards upstairs and an iron bedstead (instead of my 70s divan with its plastic-covered headboard). With the storage used properly and all the remaining spaces left empty.

The truth was, the house had a wonderful Vermeer-like simplicity about it that my parents just couldn't recognise (and nor, as a child, of course, could I). I've seen it since in Lutyen's houses and Tudor houses and in farmhouses all over this region of France, houses with an enormous comfort and quietude about them - settings for the fabric of life.

The key elements are that everything is well-made and fit for its purpose, and our house fitted that bill. It used good and honest materials that needed to make no apologies for themselves - brick and stone, terrazzo and tile, wood and glass. There was masses of storage and room to build in more. Above all, it had the two most crucial components any house requires - space and light. But my parents squandered it like many people, by stuffing their home with clutter that they spent their lives cleaning and manoevring around and insuring and repairing. In later years, it was more museum than house and it felt to me as if the house owned them rather than the other way around.

The house is now in other people's hands. I haven't seen it in decades and I only hope that it is faring better under new ownership.

A few years back I used to enjoy a very guilty pleasure from watching a TV programme called Escape to the Country.

It was just another one of those estate agency programmes that litter the UK networks (Big Strong Boys, Place in the Sun, Big Strong Boys In The Sun, you know the kind of thing...). Each day, an aspiring couple, tired of the city, would decide to move to the country and task an estate agent with finding the right thing. Three or four properties would be chosen, and the people would view two of them. Brits being Brits, of course - a bunch of whingeing Poms - they'd never like any of them. 

One thing that always struck me, though, was the repeatedly expressed opinion (by the women) that moving to the countryside would entail less housework because 'it's so much cleaner'.

Hah bloody hah I'd think. Cleaner my backside. You'll learn, missy.

The countryside is filthy compared with the city. Spiders, spider webs, flies, fly shit, chestnut pollen, poplar fluff, willow seeds, stone dust, barley chaff, arsenic bugs, dead leaves, dust, mud. I wonder which bit of the countryside these women are planning to move to that's magically cleaner than town. They're in for a nasty shock. 

I know because it was a shock to me. I was thinking about it again this weekend, as I scoured and scrubbed the kitchen and living room (penance for my taking all Saturday off to drive around the region, having a girly good time while the DH was working).

It starts in spring, when the house fills up with pollen and seeds - hazelnut, followed by poplar, followed by willow, which carpets the courtyard (and our ground floor) in white bunnies (called "kittens" in French). Then comes the chestnut pollen, which smells exactly like semen, in case you didn't know - hence the local name 'spunk trees'.

Meanwhile, in the gravel courtyard, up comes whatever my farmer neighbour Patrick planted last year, seeded into every crack. Every other year it's wheat, but we've had maize, barley, rye and oats as well. Oats are particularly persistent, being a very natural sort of cereal and if I don't get them all out, by late summer I've lost the path to the woodshed.

In an old stone house like this, the stone constantly sheds. Nobody told me that, did they? This house is 'granite doux', and doux (soft) it certainly is. It has to be constantly vacuumed to keep the dust at bay, and the rough, uneven surface provides a lovely home for spiders.

Spiders, of course, are just a way of life. We have to pretend different to visitors, but there are big crawly ones hiding in every crack, and overnight some of them will spin webs across a doorway or over a mirror. I get rid of them with a big brush that looks like a giant loo brush - the best thing ever invented, but you can never stay on top of them. "A happy home has spider's webs," say the French, so I'm happy to go with that. They're at their worst in summer.

I don't kill them though - being a bit of a Buddhist - so I catch them in a big plastic jar with a lid and put them outside (my job, since the DH is scared witless of them). After all, spiders kill flies, which are much more of a problem. They start as soon as the weather warms up, coming out to feed on the ivy, and by mid-summer most of us here have fly papers (cat-friendly, of course) in every room, buzzing frantically with dying insects. I also have a bead curtain at the doorway. It is pretty useless, but I can't bear fly screens. We only put these up once the mozzies start in late summer, and only then out of dire necessity.

With the flies, comes fly shit - something I'd never encountered before moving to France. Little brown or black dots of velcro-like persistence that coat all your windows, along with every cup, plate or pan you leave out on show. I quickly learned, in our open-plan kitchen, to wash utensils before every use. And after the flies come the wasps, attracted by our calva pear orchard and as insistent as they are dumb. The only things worse are the hornets, the sight of which has me running for cover. With these beasts, I am not going to argue. 

Then there's the pets. Who doesn't love the little darlings? But with six cats and a big-pawed mud magnet of a spaniel, no surface stays print-free for long, as the cats leap up with fur wet from the grass onto the sideboard and coffee table, and every two weeks there's a faint brown line right round the sofa where the dog's rubbed himself dry. Thank heavens for removable covers on all the furniture, and pale grey paint on the woodwork (believe me, it hides a multitude of sins). From spring right through to winter the critters tread either dust or mud into the house in kilos, and you can't teach them to wipe their feet.  

There's also the question of hair, and if anyone's allergic to cats, they'd better never come in this house. Yesterday, after a period of neglect while I painted the bedroom, etc, I swept up a small dead animal's worth of fur from the living room floor. I like sweeping, which is quite contemplative, but I also can't afford to keep filling hoover bags, so it's a necessity as well as a choice. A damp rag is the best thing for getting fur off close covers, if anyone's interested.

Autumn, of course, means the house is full of leaves. Surrounded by orchard and woodland as we are, hundreds of kilos of leaves are shed around the house every year and a fair proportion has to make its way indoors, along with the odd rotting apple brought in by mutley as a toy.

Then, come winter, there's just as much muck in the house, only it's a different colour. As anyone with a woodburner will tell you, your house is covered with a fine layer of ash the whole time you use it, along with soot that drops out of the chimney and coats everything around the stove. Ours is peculiarly crystalline and gritty, which is just as well, as we usually get a bird or two down there each season, and you can brush it off a kestrel or an owl relatively well. But it renders housework like the Forth Bridge. I can write my name in the dust an hour after cleaning and whenever it rains, great rivulets of soot and rust pour down the back of the register plate over my freshly painted stonework, which gets whitewashed every summer.  

So now you know, country lovers. There's a reason we country dwellers all have hard floors and no curtains. And in this house at least, we have two rules: never start cleaning, and whatever you do, never look up.