WE’VE spent the last few days living with a family of economic migrants.

And no, I don’t mean sharing the abject misery of a cardboard shack with those poor devils in Calais.

Au contraire, we’ve been enjoying ourselves very much on holiday in the Dordogne.

The point I’m making is that our English pals who’ve moved to France are just as much economic migrants as those who risk everything to get into Britain.

Because the difference in property values is the driving force behind the exodus of the middle-aged middle classes. (Though of course, the prospect of some decent weather helps.) Our friends have a sizeable barn conversion, plus a large adjoining holiday let and an acre and a half, including woodland. Nowadays you could buy the lot for the same price as a starter home in Salisbury. It cost them far less.

But it’s not been achieved without a great deal of hard physical graft.

As well as running a business over the internet, they did all the building work themselves, and lead a pretty selfsufficient lifestyle, growing their own food and keeping hens. They’re even about to start keeping bees.

They recycle everything. Newspapers become mulch for tomato plants, tea bags nourish the azaleas, coffee grounds deter slugs and snails from the veg plot, egg and mussel shells are fed to the hens to give them extra calcium.

Old towels are cut up for dishcloths, used kitchen roll goes into the compost.

Even the wine corks are given to a cancer charity that sells them to be turned into insulating material.

They’ve got stuck into local events and organisations, learning the language, catering for the village fete, and making as many French as British friendships.

It’s not all G&Ts on the terrace and topping up the tan on the sun lounger.

But in return they have a better life than they could ever have achieved back in the UK.

Naturally, they’re hoping that the forthcoming referendum won’t end in Brexit, with all the uncertainty that would bring for thousands of expats like them all over Europe.

An Englishwoman we’ve met through them owns a bog standard three-bed South London semi that is worth in excess of £1million. And it doesn’t even have off-street parking.

She bought it many years ago, at an affordable price, before the world of home ownership went mad because nobody could trust the banks any more and they felt safer piling their savings into bricks and mortar.

What will happen in the future when she comes to sell? How could ordinary people, who need homes like that, possibly afford to buy it?

Essential workers are already priced out of not just central London but swathes of its suburbs. The capital’s distorted housing market has knock-on effects for miles around, certainly in south Wiltshire.

I don’t believe we can build our way out of this particular problem without destroying too much that we value in our environment.

The situation is not sustainable in even the medium, let alone the long term. It must surely end in tears.

anneriddle@gmail.com