Over my head

This evening I hosted a meeting of the co-proprietors of Hotel Roques-Guilhem, to give 42rvh it's official name. Hotel in France means a grand townhouse and M Roques-Guilhem was the person who commissioned and built it nearly three centuries ago.

I have always thought that the managing agents charges were quite high and that they didn't actually do very much to justify their charges. I have changed light bulbs and fixed faulty fittings and cut the hedge in the courtyard and unblocked the drain - so what exactly did they do? it seems that I wasn't the only one who thought that way.

For the past couple of months, my neighbour Brigitte - the Parisienne divorcee who lives upstairs - has been working away to persuade all the owners that we should manage the building ourselves and has obtained quotes from insurance companies etc in a bid to reduce the costs that we all pay annually.

So, instead of a meeting at the offices of the managing agents, we held a meeting in my dining room to officially terminate the contract of the managing agents and set up our own syndicate to manage the building.

Apart from providing the venue and a carafe of water, I had very little input to the proceedings. I understood the gist of a lot of the conversation but the majority of what was said, in detail, went over my head as the exchanges got quicker and louder. It appears that we approved the accounts of the last two years, which lets the outgoing agents walk away, we appointed a new president and treasurer and approved a draft budget and decided to obtain a quote for refurbishing the shutters on the outside of the building.

Brigitte, or Madame La Presidente, as she now thinks I should address her, has said that she will explain everything to me. In the meantime, I am the bad boy of the group as I haven't paid up all my arrears from the old agency and I am holding things up until I do - there is no rush as far as I'm concerned - I've done enough work unpaid for this place - a couple of weeks delay won't cause any harm.

There is something very disconcerting about sitting in a group of people and not being able to follow accurately what is being said and having absolutely no chance of inputting - by the time I had worked out a question in my head, the conversation had moved on and the question was redundant - consequently I spent most of time just listening and trying to follow what was going on. Suddenly, someone would turn to me and ask a question so fast and unexpected that I just floundered embarrassingly. So much for my language skills.

Someone else suffering from a lack of language skills today was Christian. He studied Spanish for a while at school and made a particularly bad job of it - well, today I bet he wished he had paid a bit more attention.

He, and a couple of chums, are doing a bit of inter-rail traveling this summer - as you do, when you are 18. They have been at a festival, somewhere south of Barcelona, for the past week and are trying to make their way up here so that they can come with us to see Massive Attack tomorrow night.

They happily told us they had made it to Valencia, which we pointed out was the wrong direction! They then spent a frustratingly long time trying to work out how to get from there back up the Spanish coast in a northerly direction, not helped by their lack of lingo and the fact that all the trains were full. Happily, they found someone who helped them and they got themselves on a slow train to Barcelona - where they found that a worried Debrah (mummy) had booked them into a proper hotel (not a hostel) for the night.

Apparently, it is all planned out for them to reach here tomorrow - but I suspect there might be another twist yet. This afternoon I was all set to drive to Barcelona to get them - but it looks like I am to be denied that pleasure.

You know - I am glad that they are finding their own way (hotel excepted) - that's what traveling is all about. But, we do all need to concentrate a bit more in our language lessons.