Welcome to 2010

It's a new blog year and I have already been pretty tardy in getting back into the swing of letting you all know what has been going on - so first things first, Happy New Year to all of you who kindly take the time to follow my ramblings here on the blogosphere.

As always at this time of year, there has been a lot of reflection and a lot of new thinking about the twelve months to come - and, as ever with a seasonally based business, a whole lot of paranoia about whether anyone is actually going to make a booking or not for our fabulous luxury apartments here in Carcassonne at 42rvh.

I get the same feeling every January and this is no different. The upside is that it spurs you into action on all the things that you have been meaning to do and vaguely thinking about during the last year whilst you were too busy to do anything about them - like new business ideas and updating the website and not getting pissed off about the people moving into your territory and copying/ripping off everything that you have been doing - the nerve of some people.

I guess that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and that is how I am going to deal with it - we must have been doing something right these past two years here at 42rvh or we wouldn't be being copied. I will embrace them all and see how best we can all work to our mutual benefit - I really mean that - there is no point holding grudges or developing enemies. It is also true that no business ever survived by standing still, so we have to evolve and that is what we have been turning our attention to over the past few days.

The website is undergoing a major overhaul to freshen it up and to include our new thinking about what our clients want for 2010 and beyond. As ever, it is part based on feedback, part based on evolution and part total guesswork with our fingers crossed that we are right. It's not ready yet but soon.

In the meantime, our New Year guests have departed, having enjoyed a fabulous five course dinner here at 42rvh on their last night. The minute they departed on Saturday morning I was dashing up to the airport to collect Christian, my poor overworked student stepson who looked like he hadn't slept for about a week.

I love him to bits but we always have our stepfather/stepson issues to resolve for a couple of days before we settle down to liking each other quite a lot - by which time we have always fallen out with my wife/his Mum - aaaarrrrggghhhh.

Anyway, he went to sleep for about 48 hours now that he was back in the company of grown-ups and Debrah and I had a delightful evening with Fabian and Nathalie. They are quite the most delightful French people we know and our only real French friends - because they are very chic, very enlightened, very stylish and completely lovely in all respects. They won't read this but I would be very happy if they did.

Sadly, the weather has been anything but exciting and apart from our beach picnic day it has been grey and damp and cold and pretty miserable, which hasn't helped anybody's mood.

We all need to just hang on in there through the January melancholy.