France cured my asthma

Two years ago, I had a grown-up gap year. I had a novel to write and, reasoning that I might as well write it in rural France rather than miserable London, I put the computer and the cats in the back of the car and went to live in a cottage in the remote south-western province of the Béarn.

Yes, it was a scary thing to do, to leave my daughter, Chloe, then a 21-year-old student at university, and to leave my friends and the city where I've lived all my life. On the other hand, it was an adventure. New experiences, a different culture, new friends and new inspiration.

I had only one recurring anxiety dream - dying of asthma in my lonely cottage. Chloe, I imagined, would telephone, hear the French voicemail for days and finally rush down by TGV to find my decomposing body, Bridget-Jones-style, being gnawed by wolves - there really are wolves in the Pyrenees. I was close to western Europe's number one wilderness. That was part of the attraction.

Like an increasing number of Londoners who have become allergic to the city, I'm a relative newcomer to asthma. I've had it for about 10 years and it's the coughing sort, which means that when it's active I hack away like the Lady of the Camellias.

My GP referred me to Hammersmith Hospital where I had allergy tests. My triggers are cigarette smoke and artificial fragrances. The consultant broke the news that asthma can't be cured, only treated. He explained that asthma gets worse as the city heats up in the summer months and is a response by body tissues to "aggression" from the environment.

The long-term aggressor isn't necessarily the substance which triggers an attack. So I react to cigarettes and fragrance although I've never smoked and have always used hypoallergenic make-up. Sometimes I cough all night, so nobody in the house gets any sleep. I use inhalers to relieve coughing, but they don't do much.

When I left London, I was getting worse. Although I had not lost consciousness in an attack, the day was coming. I used Ventolin inhalers to relieve attacks, which they did temporarily. I tried vitamin C and herbal remedies to boost my immunity, but my throat was still raw and my breathing was getting more and more wheezy.

Then I spent a year in a tiny village in the Béarn, called Orriule. With its steep green hills and rivers meandering through a patchwork of small farms and woodlands, it was like living in the landscape of a medieval book of hours. Plus, of course, the awesome panorama of the Pyrenees, which greeted me every morning when I opened the shutters.

A writer's life is hideously unhealthy wherever you are. When things are really cooking, you sit still for hours, moving only your phalanges to conjure words out of the keyboard. Since I was soon writing the journal that became Deep France, as well as my novel, that didn't change.

Luckily for my health, I'm energetic. Instead of going to the gym, as I do in London, I dug a vegetable garden and worked on it for an hour or so each day. At weekends I went skiing in winter and to the beach or riverside in summer.

I also went to the spa. The Béarn is rich in hot springs, and almost every week I went to swim in the natural mineral pool at Salies-de-Béarn, which makes you feel like a million euros.

On the minus side, I failed to learn the French way of portion control. Captivated by one of the great country cuisines of France, I decided to put recipes in Deep France, and did much cooking, dragging people to restaurants and asking local housewives about their recipe secrets.

The chocolatier in my nearest town was one of the finest in the region, and it seemed downright unneighbourly not to patronise his shop, situated, just as Joanne Harris would have had it, opposite the church. So I went home fatter, and less fit, than when I left. But I was much, much healthier. My asthma just disappeared.

The Béarn was not without rural allergens. In the winter, there was the log fire, which gave the whole cottage the romantic tang of wood smoke. In the summer, every car was covered in the golden dust of buttercup pollen.

In the bars and the cafés, my new neighbours puffed Gauloises as if complying with a statutory need for national selfparody. The atmosphere is humid, thanks to the Atlantic weather system, and very hot in summer. That winter was the coldest for 30 years, with temperatures down to minus 10oC.

Nevertheless, my asthma started to get better immediately. I had just one attack in November, the first month, and then nothing. When I arrived, I had put an inhaler in a prominent place in every room and in the car. By the time I packed to come home, I didn't even know where my inhalers were.

This was good. Being chronically atrisk from a life-threatening condition doesn't sit well with me. I'm not a frail Traviata type at all; I come from a tall, well-built, active, healthy and longlived family. So why am I asthmatic? Because I live in west London. Hammersmith has five million vehicle movements every week. In the Béarn, a traffic jam is three cars and a cow.

I went to school here when I was 11 and, after the essential pad in Chelsea, came back when I was 21 and settled, only moving between Hammersmith, Chiswick and Acton as life went on. It's an area that has a lot going for it - it's friendly, diverse, pretty in parts, lively but not mental, good for families and convenient. The last one, as so many Londoners now realise, is the problem.

There's a price to be paid for being handy for three motorways and Heathrow - bad air. As I found out when I got involved in a local traffic campaign, west London has air pollution far above the guidelines of the World Health Organisation.

Air pollution is a killer, especially in summer months as smog appears. The official estimate is that 24,000 people in Britain die every year in the epidemic of related illness - bronchitis, asthma and heart disease. More people die from breathing bad air than in traffic accidents.

We seem to accept this. On sports day at my daughter's junior school, a pile of inhalers on a table by the finishing tape was handed out by a teacher to gasping children after every race.

Nearly all London is now an AQMA - Air Quality Management Area. The Government, flogged into action by an EU directive on reducing air pollution, introduced the designation a few years ago. This seems to be all it has done. Round here, 2003 was the worst year for air quality since records began.

I came back from France with a sense of renewal, as a person and as an author. The Béarn is a beautiful, tranquil place that enjoys a very rare stability. It was spiritually refreshing to touch base with customs, traditions, arts and music which had evolved with complete continuity. My writing moved up to a whole new level.

I attacked my novel with sky-high confidence. Now I realise that, creatively, I had been exhausted by all the negativity of London life. I even looked better when I came back. One of my friends said: "There was a darkness in you which has lifted."

So far, those benefits have lasted. But nine months after I returned to London, I started coughing again. And I'm coughing even as I write this article.