The sleepy French region that suddenly became cool

In the years since she last lived there, Auvergne has quietly been undergoing a transformation

- Anna Richards

I was 20 when I first moved to France. Long before Emily Cooper waltzed in, I had grand Parisian dreams, although mine were shaped by a mix of Amélie Poulain’s artsy Montmartre and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen zooming around the city on mopeds and falling in love in Passport to Paris.

Finding work with my ropey French proved more complicated than anticipated. After a brief stint au pairing for a Parisian family, a long way from Montmartre, I found myself teaching English for a term in a little Auvergnian town called Monistrolsur-Loire. My au pair mum described it as “le trou du cul du monde” (the world’s arsehole), and I was fairly sure Amélie had never set foot here, let alone Mary-Kate and Ashley.

My expectations weren’t hard to exceed, but my term in Monistrol-sur-Loire was one of the best of my life. Along with another British student, I had lodgings in the old convent, part of which was still inhabited by nuns. We found the fact that they’d named their wifi network “Dieu” (God) hilarious, but the graphic paintings of Jesus bleeding to death throughout less so.

The one bar in town was a PMU (a cheap betting bar found all over France, a bit like a Wetherspoon with scratch cards). Weekends were filled by hitching a ride to Lyon, ClermontFerrand or Saint-Etienne, and we lived off a school-canteen diet of chicken nuggets and overcooked French beans.

Returning over a decade later, I expected some changes – after all, I’d changed myself. I didn’t expect to find that the “world’s arsehole” would have become cool.