Dick Strawbridge - A Year at the Chateau: As seen on the hit Channel 4 show

To Arthur and Dorothy, you are the reason we do what we do!

Firstly, thank you for buying this book and giving us the opportunity to relive our first year together at the chteau. This year, 2020, has been a year like no other and at times incredibly hard for many of us. We embarked on our first-ever speaking tour in February and arrived back mid-March. We travelled overnight to get home and hug the children. The next day, 12 March, the French president announced that schools and universities were going to close. By 17 March there was mandatory home confinement across the country For us, this pause gave us the chance to reflect on the remarkable journey we have been on, as well as the opportunity to put pen to paper and capture our story of the first year in our new home, Chteau-de-la-Motte Husson. We have loved writing this book and it has brought back so many happy memories for both of us: we have laughed, cried and honestly felt every emotion again. Its been beyond a pleasure.

We will not lie to you, this is a love story not just between us, but also with the chteau. This book celebrates what we have done to get our chteau habitable and turn it into a true family home. Our aim is to share both what we have learnt and what we have loved, as well as some of the details of our journey, from the food to the flies! There has never been a dull moment, and that first year was the most ridiculous of them all. It has truly been a rollercoaster, so buckle up.

Its impossible to tell the story of our first year the adventures, the challenges, the highs and the lows, the whirlwind romance, the tears and the laughter without first telling you a bit about how and why we ended up buying our chteau.

This is our family story, our shared adventures, but at times we have slightly different memories of exactly what occurred, or exactly how it unfolded youll find all that in here as well.

Before we go any further, we should explain one thing: when you see words in bold thats me, Angel, telling the story.

And when you see them like this, thats me, Dick.

So, lets get started, back to when we first set eyes on our dream home: October 2014. We hope you enjoy sharing our journey with us!

I will never forget the moment we first saw Chteau-de-la-Motte Husson. We had been in France searching for our forever home when the details were emailed over to us. I had butterflies in my belly the good ones that make you feel a little sick with nerves. I knew this was the one and I spent the next four-and-a-half-hour drive fretting that someone would put an offer in before we got to see it. The drive was painfully slow and with all the excitement we nearly missed the turning. As we rounded the corner for the very first time, we gasped. It was majestic, so much more than we could ever have imagined and most certainly the one. In fact, I would liken it to the very first time I met Dick.

The chteau itself was beautifully balanced with the twin towers Id been dreaming about; even the trees were symmetrical. Coming round the corner, we immediately focused on the chteau, but it took only seconds before we also became aware of the island and the moat surrounding it, then the abundance of huge old trees, then the outbuildings, each of which was a substantial stone building. And as we got closer the scale of the moat became apparent it was a huge lake! Everything on our wish list was right there in front of us.

That first impression, that feeling of finally being home, is imprinted in my minds eye for ever. As I write this, I have tears in my eyes just remembering the beauty of the surroundings. I have never tired of turning that corner and I know with all my heart that I never will.

Ive never wanted to do the maths to work out exactly how many hours we spent looking on the internet, driving through France and visiting estate agents in search of our dream home, but four years on from when we had made the decision to move it must have amounted to weeks, if not months. It had been a long, arduous and at times incredibly frustrating process.

The drive to view this very special chteau was beautiful. Driving in France is like a Sunday drive in the country used to be in the UK. In rural areas it feels like there is so little traffic. Its a big country and the countryside is not densely populated. Unless we had a lot of miles to cover, we stayed off the autoroutes, three-quarters of which are toll roads. If you are near a large city they can be crowded, but in the country they tend to be quiet, so you dont miss the sense of being somewhere different. Unlike motorways and many A roads in the UK, the Routes Nationales often take you through villages or around towns, so you get to see where and how people live.

There are lots and lots of trees in France and no shortage of old deciduous woodlands. It feels peaceful and a little bit exotic as the houses and villages are so very different from anything back home.

The idea of moving to France first came to us in 2012 while we were on holiday in the small fortified village of Caunes-Minervois near Carcassonne in the south of France. Dick had been living in Cornwall when we met in 2010 and I was based in east London. Relationships are tricky at the best of times, especially with over 300 miles between you. The old adage absence makes the heart grow fonder is all well and good at the beginning but it wasnt sustainable for us. We were on a mission to find somewhere we both wanted to call our home, in the geographical sense!

At first I moved up to London but I am definitely a country boy at heart London isnt my scene. Angela had been on Dragons Den and was very busy growing her elegant events company, the Vintage Patisserie. She had found run-down premises in Hackney, overlooking the St-John-at-Hackney church, and I was helping decorate and install kitchens so all her tea parties finally had a home. But even with all this activity going on we knew we had our life and family to build and the really big question was, where should we live?

We could go anywhere as long as we had a plan. I must admit I had an aversion to being inside the M25 and even found all the home counties too busy and frantic. As Id lived in Dorset and Cornwall before, the West Country would never have been ours, so we started to look further afield. I was brought up in Northern Ireland and know full well there is a very good reason for Ireland being green it rains a lot! Wales, Cumbria and Scotland have the same soft climates, which meant we crossed them off our lists. There are some truly beautiful, vibrant places in the UK but none of them had grabbed us and made us think we must move there, so we were a bit stuck on where we would make our home.

A solution to our dilemma as to where, and how, we would live came out of the blue when we took a holiday to the south of France. Neither of us had really had a proper holiday for many years and so we headed off for a romantic break to start 2012, all loved up. We stayed in a lovely little gte in the old part of Caunes-Minervois and, having stocked up on wine, foie gras, cheese and other delicacies we settled down to chill and cuddled up on the sofa in front of the blazing log fire, watching A Good Year, a romantic comedy with Russell Crowe. If you dont know the film, its about a successful city worker who inherits a run-down chteau and, after many ups and downs, ends up living happily ever after, forsaking life in the city for an idyllic existence making wonderful wine. Its fair to say it got us thinking.