Speechless

I awoke yesterday morning with a very painful sore throat. I don't know where it came from but there it was. The pain has disappeared over the course of the last 36 hours along with my voice, which was sexy and husky (Debrah's description) this morning and is a faint non-existent whisper this evening.

So it was a bit of a shame that I met some of the great and good of Carcassonne tonight and wasn't really able to express myself - lack of voice and bad French combined. The occasion was the opening of an extension to the interior design shop Inthérieur 13 and the crowd was almost predominantly French and, it appeared, the influential crowd of the town. There was much glitz and glitter and make-up and jewellery in evidence - very much 'a la Paris', which is where Sophie, the proprietor of the shop, comes from - and a top buffet and wines on offer too.

Debrah had introduced herself to Sophie on her recent trip and I think a bond formed based on their joint love of fabulous interior design, furniture, paint, fabric et al. Late last week I ordered the paint from there for Denis' apartment and I shall collect it either tomorrow or Friday.

It was such a shame that Debrah wasn't here this evening, for while I huskily tried to charm Sophie and Nathalie and Penny, the wife of gallery owner, Richard, and many other well-to-do French ladies (one was the wife of the owner of Chateau Villerambert-Julien, a very well respected wine round these parts), I needed Debrah to exude her fabulousness on the mayor and Bernard, an ex-president of the Bank of France, and Richard, the gallery owner who seems to know everyone, and someone very well placed in the Peugeot family. Who would have thought that Carcassonne, and it's environs had such an in-crowd.

They all agreed, very kindly, that what we had done with our apartments was just what the old town needed. Penny, bless her, became an instant on-the-spot ambassador, introducing me to more people than I can remember and showing our cards to everyone.

It was a good day for meeting people because Matthew Stubbs MW, who is opening a wine school at Chateau Gayda, popped into the apartments this afternoon to see them for himself and to talk about how we might work together - and small networking world that it is in a very large region - he knows Juliet and Simon and Louise and John Hegarty, my old boss, and as always a big world is a tiny world.