Guests

When the announcement came over the tannoy I started to worry a little bit. It was Saturday morning and I had guests arriving that evening - I had been in London for a week and their suite wasn't yet ready for them. The announcement informed the waiting passengers that the inbound plane for our flight was due to land at the time it was due to take off - an impossibility without the aid of time transport. We were going to be late.

My guests were clients of Lesa and would be spending the day looking at property in the region - I hoped they might take longer than expected to give me some extra time to get things ready for them and get down to the shops for some provisions. As it turned out that is exactly what happened and by late afternoon, after a mad dash around town and a rapid cleaning/bed making hustle, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Very impressively, he managed to reverse his Mercedes Coupe straight through the archway with no hesitation - they had been in the car all day and he probably just wanted to park up and get out. This was to be our first family staying here - our suites are really designed for couples so this meant some furniture moving and re-arranging to fit an extra bed into the Studio. We wouldn't normally accept reservations from families but the the weekend was free and it was a favour for Lesa, who has been unrelenting in her promotion of our suites.

What has been really interesting for me so far is the real diversity of our guests, their backgrounds and why they are here with us in Carcassonne. I guess I expected a lot of the same sort of, perhaps, London based people enjoying a carefree weekend break but that is probably a failing of my own imagination - why should it be so? Indeed the opposite seems to be the case, with a real diversity of people (albeit only a few so far) visiting and booking for the next few months. I am really looking forward to meeting them all.

This weekend's guests already live in France but are now looking for a change of place and pace. They have two young girls who are fast growing up and they think that the Charente will be a bit rural for them as they turn into teenagers - Carcassonne is hardly London or Paris, but the town and the region does have a lot to offer so I will be very interested to see if they make the move down here.

I have breakfast to do in the morning and new guests arriving tomorrow afternoon - so I better get myself off to bed. I'm very enjoying this whole new experience though.

Too much work, not enough money

So much to do and only one week in London to do it all. I always think that five full working days will be plenty of time but the hours just seem to disappear and the list of jobs gets longer rather than shorter as the week goes on.

If it was just work for my London job then I might get it all done, but even then that's not guaranteed - and we are going through another/ongoing difficult funding period and fees to Directors are the last thing to be paid which is causing financial difficulties just as we are trying to get the business in France off the ground.

I thought that I would be able to dovetail my two work lives, but the bookings are going so well that it looks increasingly difficult that I can continue to do both because it is going to be increasingly hard to get back to London as often as the business there will need. If I have to make a choice, it would have to be our own business not somebody else's. After all, this is our future.

As ever, there are also a number of other home administration/mundane jobs that need to be done which I don't want to leave Debrah to deal with when I am back in France. One such issue was that, somehow, we had been driving around for nearly a year without any car tax. I know what happened - we changed address, we didn't notify the DVLA and so we didn't get a reminder notice - an easy mistake but one that carries a potential £1,000 fine which was worrying Debrah somewhat. I called the DVLA and it is now all straightened out - a cheque for the back tax and a new tax disc from the Post Office for the next year - would you believe it though, I could only get to the Post Office on the day that the tax increased after the Budget - talk about rubbing salt into the wound.

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.

Nothing's free

A journalist from the Evening Standard stayed here last night - our first freeloading journo visit. Am I being unkind with that comment? - probably yes and no. Yes, because why should a journalist doing research for an article get everything laid on for free and No, because if we get a mention in her article and get some bookings as a result it was worth it. Both arguments are ethically wrong - everyone staying here in our apartments should pay for their stay and we should not expect major promotion in return for providing a paid for service. As soon as it becomes a 'favour' then an element of 'trust' comes into the equation and that is where it all usually falls down.

I am casting no aspersions on my guest last night - just on the whole system. My guest last night was perfectly affable and lovely and we chatted away over dinner about why and how Debrah and I and had come to live in the Languedoc and start up a completely new business venture that neither of us had any prior experience of, and the difficulties of letting go of London and how much chance and circumstance was involved in the whole thing.

So if we get a mention in the article that she is writing about property in the Languedoc, then that will be great and if she gets her editor to approve an article about design or lifestyle about the apartments or us then even better.

If none of that happens then that's just life or 'C'est la vie' as they say round here and I'd like to say 'woe betide the next journalist that wants a free night' but actually they will be welcomed on the same basis of trust and hope of more publicity. I am so torn between the futility of the media/celebrity age and wanting to become the next best most desirable location in France, which is what we are (editors please note)

In the meantime, after my guest had departed, I set about putting my supposed newly enhanced language skills to the test in sorting out a few housekeeping/admin problems.

At the 'Tresor Public' I asked why the standing order that I thought I had set up last year to pay the 'taxe d'habitation' had not not resulted in me paying said tax and thus receiving a bill for tax in arrears plus 10% for late payment. 'Ne marche pas', was about as good as my understanding got - well obviously it didn't march or it would be paid by now. They generously knocked off the 10% surcharge and I handed over a cheque for last year and they assured me that this year is now set up for a monthly payment - we shall see.

At France Telecom, or Orange, as it now seems to be, I queried my internet charges because I thought I was being charged twice for the same thing, but it appears not - the standard charge is just split in two with different rates of TVA (VAT in English - just swap the letters around) being charged on different bits. I shrugged my shoulders and said 'desolee', I don't speak French very well and he shrugged his shoulders and said 'desolee' I can't save you any money.

At EPI, the managing agents for the property, I asked for the accounts for the the current year, nearly over, and the previous year, which I didn't receive. We (some of my neighbours and I) have a plan to fire the managing agents and set up our own 'syndic' and I think we have the voting power to do it between me (the English overlord who owns 50% of the building), Brigitte (the Parisienne outsider and divorcee in the second largest apartment ) and Denis (the charming Irishman). I bet you never thought you'd hear of an Englishman, a Frenchwoman and an Irishman in league together, but that's the case in our bid to reduce the costs which we all consider to be far to high for the service provided.

As ever with a trip into French adminland I ended up paying out lots of money and being slightly confused and none the wiser about what happens next - which just about sums up the municipal elections which seem to have been going on for an age but which come to a head during the next week whilst I will be in London.

I'm not looking forward to London.

I am so looking forward to seeing Debrah and that is all that matters.

Better late than never

I was aware during the night that the wind had picked up a bit - as in it was blowing a gale. I went out quite early to pick up some provisions for dinner and noticed immediately that it was about ten degrees colder than yesterday and another ten degrees colder if you stood in the wind. A car went past covered in snow - clearly it had been cold up in the hills. I ran around town and scooted back home as quick as I could.

On my way back in I checked my post box. It has become a habit of mine to open my post box, situated in the archway underneath the apartments, every time I pass it even though it is usually empty or just full of the local advertising papers, special offers (pork bargains) or local mayoral election manifestos. But today was special because today I received a Christmas card.!

Debrah and I stopped sending Christmas cards on ethical grounds many many years ago and slowly we have stopped receiving them as well, either because other people have taken a similar stance in response to ours or because they have adopted the 'I'm not sending them one if they don't send us one' approach. Either way it means we don't receive many Christmas cards. So it was with great joy and pleasure that I opened our third, and hopefully last, card relating to last Christmas.

It was from Debrah's mum and was correctly addressed and had a stamp on it and everything - so God knows where it has been for the last two months or so - following yonder star no doubt. It had an air mail sticker on it but I could have walked from Kent and still got here quicker. Oh well, in the name of diplomacy and the good old entente cordiale, let's just put it down to the fact that the postal systems in England and France could both be a bit more efficient, without laying blame anywhere.

As ever, from my mother-in-law, the card is very amusing but slightly mad.

Speaking French

I have been having French lessons in a bid to finally try and raise my game here in every day communication. It caused a bit of a stir with Debrah when she saw the names Amelie and Ann dotted all over my diary - but they just happen to be the names of my French teachers. Next month I will try and meet some local girls whose names begin with the letter B !.

Amelie is a qualified teacher and I am paying her for proper lessons. She is very good and is very structured in her teaching. Somehow she speaks in a way that I can understand, and if I can't, she instinctively knows and rephrases what she has said. She is very clear and very precise and very patient and when I am with her I feel as if I can speak French. She has explained the difficult differences in the usage of 'tu' and vous' and also when to use 'savoir' and when to use 'connaitre' and has tested me on the past tense and future tense and tells me that I know it but just need to practice it. 'C'est tres facile pour elle de dire'.

Ann is a friend with whom I have a timeshare agreement - that is to say, we spend half an hour just talking in French and she corrects and helps me and half an hour talking in English and I correct and help her. This has been a less than successful arrangement so far because every time I arrange to meet her something comes up to do with the Apartments or my London job to cut short our arrangement. I suspect she will fire me soon for non-performance, especially as I am going back to London at the end of this week for eight days so won't be able to help her with her English for a while. I hope not, because although she is a little serious, she is a good counterpoint to Amelie's approach because it is less formal and more everyday.

If only it were that easy! Oh No - I live in a region that has a very strong local accent. In fact, this part of France has only really spoken French, as we know it in England, for the past 150 years - prior to that the whole of the south of France spoke Occitan, which is nearer to Catalan than it is to French. In fact French was the language of Northern France, the Capucins, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne etc and has only recently been spoken here in the south and is still regarded with some suspicion in many quarters.

So, when the Parisian born chef was here this past weekend, he told me, that on at least two occasions, he had been blatantly ignored to the point of profound rudeness by local traders who immediately recognised him as being Parisian because of his accent - despite him having lived in London for fifteen years. He went into a shop and asked for something, in fluent French, and they ignored him for five minutes before getting round to begrudgingly serving him. Whatever happened 1000 years ago with the Cathars and despite the fact that tax laws are made in Paris, the centre of government and, therefore, hostility - that is still rude behaviour to the extreme.

My upstairs neighbour - Brigitte (you see I already know a 'B') - is also originally from Paris and admits that she was unable to understand the local accent when she first arrived here.

Apparently, it is the same as only ever having heard the Queen's English and suddenly finding yourself in Newcastle or Liverpool. Alors! What chance do I have of being able to speak fluent French, when my own inability, the local dialect, the local prejudice and my own friends are conspiring against me. This evening my friend Pierre called, incognito, asking in very rapid French if I had availability for 3 weeks in July. I was taken in absolutely and failed the test completely - I just floundered - so much for my improved language skills.

Cooking for a Chef

We are up and running. Paying guests have been and gone. I hadn't really realised how nervous I have been about the whole thing. I have been so concerned about getting everything right and making sure that nothing was overlooked or forgotten that I have found it impossible to sit down and write the blog. But tonight I am in a state of rare contentment and happiness, so here I am.

On Sunday morning I was about as nervous as I can ever remember because on Sunday evening I was cooking the included dinner in my guests weekend package. Debrah had been unable to get out this weekend and was in London and one of our guests was a top London restaurant chef - the real deal, classically trained and 15 years experience in Michelin starred restaurants. Oh my God - talk about a test of my home developed cooking skills.

Every possible scenario was constantly going through my head. I doubted my own ability - I knew I'd cooked the dinner plenty of times but decided today was the day it would go wrong. I decided that he might just be non-comital and nice and polite about it but then I reasoned he was French and born in Paris and was more likely to say "I cannot eet zis sheet".

The situation was made more nerve-wracking by the events of Saturday. He said he was going to the market to buy food to cook for his girlfriend that evening. Now the Apartment has a mini-kitchen with a small fridge and two electric hobs but I had never envisaged real cooking taking place there - so I offered him the use of my kitchen and in return he invited me to dinner! This was both an unexpected bonus and a rod for my own back. On the one hand, a paying guest had bought food and wine and was cooking for me in my own home and he was a classically trained chef whom I could watch and ask questions of and be his assistant for the evening. I watched the effortless ease with which he dealt with filleting red mullet and trimming up lamb chops and artichokes. On the other hand, I had to follow this display the next day.

I am glad to say that my kitchen lacked for nothing that he needed. He had even asked for an oyster knife earlier in the day because he had bought oysters for lunch. It seemed to me that they were having an enjoyable stay, which was naturally really pleasing - they seemed relaxed and happy and in love - all of which augured well.

And indeed we had a great Saturday evening, eating his beautifully prepared and presented food and drinking nice wine and chatting about all things good and life in general. When Debrah found out, she was absolutely gutted that she wasn't here this weekend - she so hates missing out on anything and this was missing out big time. He gave us scallops and red mullet and boudin noir to start and lamb chops and brochettes of lambs liver and sweetbreads on a bed of spinach and asparagus for main and a glazed pear with a pistachio and coriander creme fraiche dressing for dessert. It was all delicious, but to be honest, I didn't think the dessert worked as a dish - who the hell do I think I am!

On Sunday, they went out to explore La Cite and I fretted. I tried to take my mind off things by going out for a drive but the car threw a wobbly too and wouldn't start, so I went out on my bike which just made me hot, sweaty and tired. Bolton lost at home to Liverpool which pissed me off and two hours before I needed to, I was prepped and ready to go and couldn't wait to get on with it.

In the end it all went very well but I didn't really relax all evening which meant I probably drank a glass of wine or two too many. Two things stood out - the words 'beautifully cooked' about the asparagus starter and the fact that he finished his chocolate pudding in record time - and this a man who apparently doesn't eat dessert apart from his search for the prefect lemon tart. In between it all he gave me a tip about pulling the lower bone out of a leg of duck confit, and some hints on cooking the potatoes or even a suggestion that it would go really well with lentils - all of which at the time I took as being unhappiness with my food but on reflection, and in view of his comments today, was I think him trying to help me because he had had a good time. Hurrah - what a relief - let the paranoia go!

Most importantly of all, they seemed to have had a really enjoyable stay and will, I think, go back to London as ambassadors for our little place here. Apparently she shed a few tears this morning because she didn't want to go home and he gave me a classic french handshake, hug and kiss on both cheeks when he said goodbye after I dropped them at the airport.

Despite feeling under pressure, which probably isn't a bad thing, the whole weekend couldn't have gone much better - the conviviality was something that we always had in our minds to create because ultimately that's what makes weekends away memorable. Here's hoping it continues in the same vein.