Philofaxy French Meet Up - May 2017

It is about 7 years since we moved to live in France, yet in that time we have never been able to organise a proper meet up. That changed this last weekend.

Back in February a few people commented about holding a meet up in France, but where? It is a big country yet the towns are fairly well spread out.

After we gathered the interested parties together on a Facebook group we started to discuss possible dates and locations.

I had decided very early on that Alison would be coming along to this meet up mainly because my French isn't that good, certainly not good enough to converse over a whole weekend about planners and organisers in French!

Marie-Hélène came to the rescue with her suggestion of her mothers Chambre-d'Hôtes and Gite near the town of Chenonceaux which is fairly centrally located for the majority of people that had shown an interest in attending.

A date was fixed and we were all able to stay the night at the Chambre-d'Hôtes as well, so on Saturday we all converged on Chenonceaux to meet up for the first time.

We took over the dining room for the afternoon. Spreading out our planners and organisers and we chatted and shared things. I gave a quick demonstration on how to swap rings, naturally!

Considering the number of people, there was a huge number and quite a range of makes (Filofax, Van der Spek, Gillio, Quo Vadis etc) and sizes from Mini all the way up to A4, one A4 by Van der Spek was fitted with 38mm Krause rings, even when empty this organiser was quite a beast! but wonderful to see of course.

We spent the afternoon looking through all the various organisers and planners that we had all brought along. Lots of discussions going on around the large dining room, it was very relaxed.

Some pictures, with thanks to Isabelle and Alison for additional photos!

Saturday

The main table... quite a few here!

My side table, a mixture of Van der Spek, Gillio organisers and a Filofax or two as well. 

Lots more photos... click more!

Guest Post - Some enabling with LeBonCoin.fr ?

Merci beaucoup to Frédérique for this informative guest post

LeBonCoin.fr is the French equivalent of the "classified ads" section of a newspaper : people can place ads for... anything, cars, appartments, and so on. There's no payment system included in the website (unlike ebay), there are just ads, with 3 pictures max, a small description, and it's sorted geographically, by "département". Usually, you can get in touch with the seller by phone or email, and you agree together of the form of payment, and shipment, if that is the case, or you agree to meet in person, and exchange to goods, against cash.

By the way, I am not affiliated in any way with leboncoin.fr, it's just that I'm French and living in France, and this website is used by lots of people.

As any of you, I browse Ebay from time to time, and it can be fun to find models that were previously unknown to me : had you ever heard of a zipped compact Portobello ? Or a personal Ranger ? I hadn't... ! And it's strange, but I had never really thought of browsing leboncoin.fr for good Filofax deals...

But please be warned : people who use this website sometimes aren't... Internet-litterate, you will find lots of typos/grammar mistakes (and it's in French, obviously), the pics are not always helpful (sometimes blurry, and/or too small...); and regarding people selling Filofaxes, you will not always find the exact name model (or any name, for that matter). If you like digging around, that can be fun and surprising.

So, how do you search theses Filofax on this website ? First, load up http://www.leboncoin.fr/ in your browser. Then click any part on the map, because whichever "département" you choose, the next screen will have a drop-down menu allowing you to search an item in the whole of France.

Don't bother with a complex search : "filofax" will do the trick just fine. You can then sort the results by price (lowest to highest) and then, you might have some interesting suprises.

Here is the link with the results of this query : http://www.leboncoin.fr/annonces/offres/alsace/occasions/?q=filofax&sp=1

And so, as of today (Saturday, June 2nd, 2012), we could buy... lots of vintage/discontinued Filofaxes, and some pretty cool ones !

- a blue Pocket "College" Filofax, for 4 euros (funny, my mom offered my the personal one when I was 18 and entering University, I never knew there were other formats !)

- a Cross in M2 format (!!!), color "mustard", along with a pink Letts organizer, and both for... 7 euros !

- a grey Personal Tuscany, 15 euros

- a red A4 zip Graphic (or Sketch ?), 15 euros

- a red Personal Piccadilly (!), 15 euros

- a really old Personal Savannah, 20 euros

- a burgundy (?) Deskfax (model unknown), *and* its punch-hole, both for 30 euros :

- a Personal Richmond, 45 euros

- a Pocket Siena in cinnamon, 60 euros (retails for 140 on filofax.de but currently on sale at 98 euros...)

And so on...

I am currently trying to get the M2, and perhaps the Deskfax, as I am curious about these sizes, but perhaps some other French readers of Philofaxy might like to score some of these items for themselves ?

Oh, the enabling

Happy hunting !

Frédérique

The Move to France

As mentioned in FFAF no. 75, I have just moved to France. This has been a long term plan of my wife and I, so it wasn't a sudden thing. I've effectively retired from full time work as well (More time for Philofaxy!).

As this was our first house move in 24 years, you can imagine it was a fairly major move. The date of our move wasn't finalised until about 4 weeks before the actual move due to being linked to the sale of our UK house.

I sort the advice of Laurie, who is a frequent mover between countries... which sounds bad I know!!! But her tips proved very useful and included things I had not thought of.

Naturally, my Filofax proved to be very useful in the move, both for the organisation of various lists and for noting down important data. I'm a big user of To-Do lists anyway, so their use didn't surprise me at all.

One thing that happened almost by accident was I started to use coloured notepaper (because I had some already) for noting down information for different things, using the different colours to signify different functions and requirements. So utilities went on to green paper, financial on to blue paper etc. It separated out the different sections in that part of my Filofax without having to use tabbed section dividers. Having used this technique I will certainly use it again.

Having had a couple of days to recover from our last day of packing and the journey over to France I've just sat down and rationalised the contents of my two 'working' Filofax organisers.

In my Slimline I took out the completed To-Do lists that I'd been slavishly using, and the notepaper information and filed them carefully. As I use the Slimline as my wallet, various cards have been removed... likewise my UK money... I've asked for some pocket money in Euro's from my dear wife. Is it pay day yet was her reply!!!

Similarly in my A5 organiser, I've been updating my To-Do lists and started off some new ones of things we have to do now we are here... so the process never finishes, it just moves on to a new phase.

Thank you also for all your best wishes, very kind of you.