The first high-speed train service between Paris and eastern French cities made its maiden passenger trip earlier this month, slashing travel times and opening up Germany to France’s Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV) network.

The new line will enable France’s world-renowned high-speed trains to connect Paris with cities in Germany, France and Switzerland as well as the cities of Strasbourg, Nancy, Metz and Reims.

It will start to provide services into Germany from December, bringing Munich within just over six hours of Paris. Frankfurt, the German financial capital, will be a journey of three hours and fifty minutes.

The Paris-Strasbourg route will take only two hours and 20 minutes –almost halving from previous four hour travel time. Travelling times to Luxembourg and Switzerland will also be slashed.

Previous upgrades to the TGV line, in the southern cities of Marseille and Avignon, have resulted in tourism booms. House prices have increased 120 percent in the region since 2001, when the new TGV cut train journey times from Marseille to Paris to just three hours.

Unbearably noisy neighbours have forced 600,000 people in the UK to move house in the last 12 months, according to the Telegraph.

Anyone considering moving to France or Spain to get away from noise, however, should pause for thought. More people in France and Spain than in the UK are fed up with their neighbours’ noise.

A European-wide survey of 2,000 households found:

• In Britain, one in seven families say their quality of life suffers a great deal or a fair amount because of sounds, which are outside their control. A similar proportion say that they are significantly and regularly disturbed by noise made by their neighbours or in the immediate area outside their homes.
• 40 percent of French households reported finding neighbours’ noise intolerable.
• 34 percent of German and 33 percent of Spanish households reported finding neighbours’ noise intolerable.
• Only 12 percent of British people said they suffered significant stress caused by noisy neighbours.
• 13 percent of French people said they had confronted neighbours about noise.
• Only 5 percent of Brits said they had confronted neighbours about noise, making them the least likely in Europe to have complained to neighbours about noise.

In the UK, we don’t worry about termites. In the greater warmth of the Dordogne, however, termite infestations of properties are a common hazard – and a serious one. Within two or three years, these creatures can destroy the structural backbone of a house to leave it fit only for demolition.

Channel 4’s Selling Houses Abroad looked last night at the misfortunes of an English couple who had bought a home for themselves and their three children in Lalinde, a town in the Dordogne. Suzanne and Steve were hoping their new life in the Dordogne would enable them to spend more time with their children than they had in the UK.

When they bought their house for £100,000, it was certified to be termite free but the couple soon discovered the certification was incorrect – the house was riddled with termites. Suzanne and Steve began legal proceedings in order to recover the costs of treating the house for termites. Unfortunately the result of this was an 18 month delay during which they were not allowed to take action against the termites that were eating the structure of their home. There was a real danger that, in the absence of immediate treatment, Suzanne and Steve’s home might be destroyed.

The makers of Selling Houses Abroad invited a termite eradication company to determine the extent of the problem. It turned out that the house’s structure had not been destroyed but that the termites were present in the woodwork throughout the property. After obtaining approval from the courts, the house was treated using a substance that poisoned the termites but was harmless to children and pets. The treatment cost £2,600.

Homeowners who discover themselves in the same position as Suzanne and Steve were advised not to delay action while the legal system acted at a snail’s pace. Let the courts know your home is being destroyed and obtain permission to have treatment carried out as soon as possible.

Yesterday’s Money Programme looked at the increasing numbers of Britons making their homes abroad and commuting to work in the UK. Commuting in the UK can be a tortuous process and many people are now finding that a commute from Europe is preferable.

Justin Saunders, his wife and two daughters used to be crammed into a two-bedroom house in West Sussex. He commuted for three hours each day. They now have a five-bedroom house with pool in the beautiful village of Albas, South-West France. The house cost £180,000 price and included a separate cottage that was the same size as their old house in West Sussex. He now commutes by budget airline back to his work in Hampshire.

Gary Wheeler is a farrier who moved from Herne Bay to a farmhouse in an acre of land in Pas de Calais, which he bought for £60,000. He commutes daily to Kent through the Eurotunnel and says his commuting time has increased by one hour daily.

When the St Pancras high-speed rail terminal opens in November the travel time from Lille to London will be 80 minutes. The idea of daily commuting from Northern France suddenly becomes very practical.

According to the think tank Future Forum, within a decade there will be more than 1.5 million people working in the UK while living abroad.

Commuting From New Zealand To The UK

Perhaps the most extreme example of long distance commuting was a story that surfaced in The Sun in 2004. PC Chris McKee moved his wife and their five children to Dunedin, New Zealand in 2000. He paid £150,000 for a five-bed house with large grounds in a smart suburb. His family benefits from high-quality schools and health care, cheap food, a low crime rate and congestion-free roads.

PC McKee makes the 26-hour flight home three times a year and stays for two months, while keeping digs in London. He works enough overtime to spend half the year with his family in Dunedin.

“It’s a long way but it’s worth it to give my family a standard of living we could only dream about in England. I used to take stress home. Now I’m a lot more fun with the kids. I can also be totally focused at work.”

The Sun believes that many other members of the police force are commuting from abroad.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “We are committed to providing flexible working arrangements. This officer has a London home in accordance with the rules.”

The French Health Minister, Xavier Bertrand, has asked a very good question – why not nap at work he asks? I must say, I think it’s a fantastic idea. My own preference would be for an eight-hour nap each day. Trouble is my pesky employers might start to wonder what they’re paying me for – oops, they’re wondering that already.

If the French do bring in workplace napping, France will immediately jump higher up my list of the best places to live.

Naturally, the tone of the British newspapers to the suggestion of work-place naps tends to the not entirely sympathetic. Before we all get on our high-horses about work-shy Frogs though, we would do well to remember that the average French worker is 30 percent more productive than the average British worker. The French don’t seem to believe that being at work for 10 hours each day, (because that’s what your manager expects,) 3 hours of which is spent surfing the internet, chatting aimlessly to colleagues, and reading the newspaper is as good an idea as many of their British counterparts seem to.

So when Xavier Bertrand says napping at work shouldn’t be a taboo subject, he is probably right. After all, highly paid executives have been advised for a number of years now that power napping will increase their concentration and productivity.