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.

Is it rubbish or not?

Frustratingly, I seem to find less and less time to sit here in front of my computer and relate my experiences to all and sundry. On the one hand it means that I am busier with clients and the business and on the other it means that I am getting less time to reflect and take it all in - as ever in life, a balance between conflicting pressures is the best course for sanity and peace of mind - so finding the balance is key.

After our fairly relaxed last week, we were a full house again for the weekend - a lovely couple from the north-east of England celebrating their 10th anniversary and a lovely couple of boys from London celebrating nothing at all - or just perhaps that these days they are now free to tour Europe without issue - good for them. Small world that it is, one of the London boys came originally from a small town in the north east just down the road from where the other couple lived - don't you just love co-incidences?

Debrah had her head down all weekend re-designing our website - and also had a loose tooth - which I can assure you isn't a good thing. The last time Debrah had a tooth problem was 15 years ago on our first ever holiday abroad together - a very large painkilling injection in her arse got her home and a general anaesthetic finally sorted out the tooth - much trauma - lots of stress - not looking forward to dealing with that again but sort it we must because it won't go away unless we do - there is, after all, only so much head in the sand you can do.

On Sunday morning we managed to get a little bit of relaxation - well, of a sort - we went to a brocante (car boot sale) at a local village called Cavanac. I actually find these things quite stressful, whereas Debrah finds them quite fun and relaxing. I think I find it a bit embarrassing looking interested at somebody's complete and utter shit, that they are trying to pass onto you for some ridiculous price - with a straight face - no I'm not joking - it's a 1980's original. I'm thinking - it's a video! - no-one in the new century owns a video player.

Despite all that we came home with an armful of somebody else's shit - a music stand and two portfolios of music sheets, a old and rather faded and broken military map of the Languedoc Roussillon region, a table lamp and a box of old curtain fittings and rings.

The table lamp is actually in use on the office desk right now and is casting a fabulous light on my workspace, so I am very grateful for it. I had to buy a new plug for it but having wired it up and plugged it in, I was totally surprised to find that the bulb, that was in the lamp when we bought it, actually worked. He missed a trick there - could have charged us extra for a working light bulb.

It was all change yesterday with both sets of clients leaving and Debrah going back to London and new clients from Australia via the UK - I, and my faithful Audi, made four separate trips to the airport, which I believe is a record for one day.

The Aussies had dinner this evening - just the two of them and me - and a very stimulating and interesting conversation it was - I am very happy when clients are clearly having a lovely time, not just here, but in Carcassonne as a whole because it is a great place to visit.

So to tomorrow - Aussies out and new clients in - the cycle continues.