Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Just as suddenly as it arrive, the grape harvest is over and with it the bands of grape pickers are gone from the villages and their little clusters of caravans and vans.

This year the difference wasn’t quite so marked as just about all the wine growers bought the grape picking machines last year so they don’t need anything like the number of pickers that they did in years gone by and therefore the little campsites were much smaller.

With the arrival of assorted Eastern Block countries into Europe this year, the mix of pickers changed quite substantially as indeed has the face of the workforce elsewhere in Europe over the last year or so.

Since we use two bakers, we get two bills, of course.

However, as we use one of the bakers mainly for the weekend and the other mainly for during the week, you’d think that the bills would be substantially different. Funnily enough, there’s actually very little difference in them which is quite peculiar.

The reason why they’re fairly similar is that we’ve been getting growing numbers of Spanish staying during the week whilst the weekend is normally reserved for the British. The Spanish rarely take breakfast but the British nearly always do, so the weekend bill generally ends up higher than the mid-week one.

How come the Spanish don’t take breakfast though? Well, they’ve become used to the normal level of French breakfasts and it just ain’t enough for them so they eat elsewhere for breakfast for the most part although any that have seen the breakfast we put out have often wandered in and started eating which is something of a complication for us as we only get the croissants etc. if the people have ordered breakfast the night before.

We had quite an interesting family staying with us for a few days.

The older parents wanted to move to France and therefore everyone was over on a scouting trip for about a week. Now, that’s a sensible thing as they wanted somewhere that their grandchildren (thankfully not also in tow) would like and a trip together gives everyone a chance to throw in their 2 cents.

However, the downside of this type of group is that it’s difficult to reach an agreement which everyone can live with.

The parents (in their 70s) wanted to buy somewhere small that they could look after easily enough. The grown-up children were more interested in spending a bit more and getting somewhere as an investment.

It is actually possible to get a solution for such a seemingly divergent set of criteria but what’s required is that everyone sit down together and state what they really want rather than leaving a whole lot unsaid as seems to have been the case with this particular group. With such a meeting, it’s usually possible to come up with a specification containing the essentials and the desireables which can then be used to aid an estate agent in finding your ideal property.

Even if you don’t have a disparate group, it’s useful to draw up a specification like that as you’ll be much more likely to find your ideal property than if you don’t have that.

Our main busy season is, of course, in the Summer months when we don’t have school runs to do.

However, we generally get a bit of a jump in occupancy towards the end of September which takes us almost up to Summer levels. Snag is that we are also in the midst of school runs at that time which complicates scheduling no end.

Naturally, when you’d rather people stayed a little later in the morning that’ll be the day that they decide to head off early and that’s where we get our problems as their departure time usually falls right in the middle of the time that we’re off to leave James to school.

Even more complicated is when I’m off to do my Open University exam. At the moment, we don’t have many people over that period but, of course, Sod’s Law applying to such things we’ll probably end up full of awkward guests for Wendy to deal with.

Thankfully it’s the end of the grape picking season locally now and things are back to normal…. no more security guards in the shops and no more grape pickers hanging around everywhere.

Why the security guards? Simply because with the arrival of the grape pickers, the crime goes through the roof.

As well as that we’re able to get croissants in the shops again in the mornings.

They’re not completely gone as some vineyards have still to be picked but the numbers are right down to perhaps a handful of pickers in the area now.