A few firsts

Friday morning was spent closing up the apartments before my trip back to London for a week. It is always quite a sad event - closing up the shutters and turning off all the water heaters and other electrical items.

In fact one of the shutter support arms broke this week - in the very high winds that accompanied the sudden drop in temperature. The previous weekend I was in shirt sleeves and would have gone out for a drive on Sunday afternoon in the sunshine, if the car had started, and by Tuesday it was back down to freezing point, dumping a metre of snow on the mountains and the wind was howling. The wind resulted in our first bit of structural damage - a support arm on one the shutters in the end apartment clearly couldn't take the strain, was initially bent and finally snapped in two. It was a replacement arm and not one of the original really heavy metal ones - they obviously don't make them as well as they did.

It was a week of firsts. I had my first breakage by a guest - who managed to break the top off the lid of a china coffee pot. Fortunately, it was a clean break and after judicious use of some superglue you can't see the join. I found my first piece of left behind clothing by a guest - nothing embarrassing, just a polo shirt, which I bought back to the UK and will send on from here.
I also had my first journalist visit which went very well and hopefully will result in an article sometime in the press. I also had my first enquiry from a Norwegian, as a result of a new listing on a travel website that Debrah found.

I flew back to London on Friday - a slow journey at every stage - the flight took over two hours because of a very different route from usual - the train took over an hour and was certainly not an express and then North London traffic was all snarled up on a Friday evening, not helped by some idiot who had fired a gun at police up near Manor House - welcome back to the big city.

We had a quiet night in and were up early on Saturday (not with Debrah's approval) to visit Brent Cross shopping centre (sooo many people!) and then watched wall to wall English sport all afternoon (a luxury) before going out for dinner with friends (expensive - by Carcassonne, not London, standards). In fact it has been really lovely to be with Debrah and I am really enjoying being back here - so far - I have to go into the office tomorrow, though.

I visited the Apple store whilst in Brent Cross. My old laptop is three years old and displaying all the characteristics of shutting down permanently any day now - battery doesn't charge any more, CD stuck in the drive etc etc - but it has done sterling work back and forth on a plane every other week for three years. So I bought a new base level MacBook which I can't really afford, but then I can't afford to be without a computer either when I am running a business and managing another business via the internet. Whilst I was buying my new computer, Debrah was wandering about the store calmly bringing up our website on every computer - I believe that is our first bit of underground viral marketing.

It has been a pretty good weekend for the Apartments too, even though I am not there - I have taken four bookings over the last two days, one of which is for the two nights immediately after I return to France on Saturday next - it will be straight back into it when I get back.