What a waste of a weekend

I guess it had to come to an end, the run of fantastic sunny weekends is over, this weekend was cool and cloudy, and I spent almost all of it in bed fighting a cold. It came on during Friday morning in the office and by the time I got to Sigogne the fever had arrived and condemned me to a weekend in bed. So the weekend was not so great for anyone in our family. Fleur is not quite old enough understand what being ill means so she didn’t know why I didn’t want to play very much and kept falling asleep during the day.

Back to Bordeaux airport this morning, and amazingly there were none of the usual traffic jams on the way into Bordeaux so instead of arriving at my usual 9:00am I got here at 8:00am, so plenty of time to write my blog. I am going to be powered by Lemsip today, because as a freelance contractor, unless I am missing both my arms and legs, I turn up for work otherwise I don’t get paid, luckily the fever has gone and I am just left with the cold. March this year has the added pressure of being the month with Easter in it, so I will loose a week’s work to statutory holidays and a couple of extra days off so that I can stay in France for a week. Being as Easter is so early this year Fleur does not have school holidays around Easter apart from the bank holidays, her spring holiday is in April, so she will be at school whilst I am in France.

We appear to have picked up a couple of extra bookings this week which is always welcome, and we were checked out on Sunday night by the family of some French guests who are going to stay with us in July this year. This is going to present a challenge for us, the bookings we have mean that we now have a window of approximately 12 weeks to get the roof fixed and the major works to the 4^th room complete before we start accepting guests in July. We will talk with our builder either this coming weekend or the weekend after to see if it is possible and more importantly how much it is going to cost. The exchange rate is not doing us any favours at the moment, the pound is at it lowest level against the Euro for some years, meaning that we are getting on average 2000 less Euros for every £10000.00 than we were last year. £10000.00 used to equate to just under €15000.00 but now it is down to €13000.00, quite a big change.

Franca came up with the highlight of the weekend, she has got herself a job working for an American TV company that is making a programme similar to a place in the sun. The job is as a Production Assistant, but appears to be a local fix it person, but it is all good experience and since it pays real money we are not going to turn it down, though there appear to be some details that need to be worked out. It is all being done in conjunction with our Estate Agent Matthew who seems to be quite good at getting TV companies over to France to film in the Charente. I’m sure it will be good fun and it is handy that I am in France when they are over so I will act as child minder to Fleur whilst Franca goes to work! If we can get a bit of publicity in there for Au Bellefleur then that will be a nice bonus.