Foreign Perspectives

Of course, there are books similar to that in the UK which depict a typical first day in nursery school. The difference is that in France, the drawings in the book look almost identical to the school that James goes to. Not because the drawings are of his school but rather that the schools are very standardised in France. Not so long ago for instance, if it was October 5th and you were in the fifth year then you were on page 5 of the maths book, regardless of where you were in France.

So there’s a very similar little cloakroom in other schools and zero privacy for the kids going to the toilet. Actually, I suspect that the drawing of children going to the toilet would be contrary to one or two laws in the UK.

Anyway, we’ve read the book to James in English. That’s probably not quite what the school intended us to do but to get him fully bilingual we need to balance his French and English; the simplest way to do that at the moment seems to be to use English all the time when he’s at home and keep the French to school time.

Want a laugh? Wendy’s going to propose us as parent representatives for the school board.

No more FP’s for a week as I’m off to Belfast tomorrow and won’t have any computer power ’til Saturday week.

Since then, the butcher has closed, the bank has closed and when we walked round the village in July the sheer number of boarded up shops was quite a shock. That’s what happens when a village is almost completely dependent on a single industry and that industry hits hard times.

Yet, even in these hard times for the wine industry, the English have been busy buying up vineyards in the area. More intrestingly perhaps is that they are much more successful at running the vineyards than the locals. Whereas the locals simply can’t shift their 2‚€ wines, the English are selling their stock at 25‚€ a bottle. How come? Simple really: the locals are trying to sell the cheap plonk that they’ve always sold in the way that they’ve always sold it but peoples’ tastes have changed. They drink less wine these days but it’s higher quality wine that they drink nowadays.

It’s not just the vineyards that the English are buying in the area. I’m told that some 90 English familes have bought property in Paziol for instance. So many in fact, that Paziol is pretty much an English village now.

Other indications that things aren’t good economically in this area is the closure of the Rolex shop in Perpignan. OK, people aren’t going to nip out and buy a Rolex every day but it is an indication that there’s a distinct shortage of money across the Pyrenees Orientale.

The downturn in the wine business has depressed property prices even more in an area that’s still relatively affordable so perhaps now would be a good time to buy in this area.

It’s important to keep on top of that transition as you can easily stock up on, say, butter only to find that you’re still sitting with the same box of butter a month later and have to throw it out when it reaches the expiry date. Non-perishables aren’t so bad really but we only finished off the soap we bought in mid-August last year almost exactly a year later.

Most noticeable perhaps are the French. We don’t get that many arriving ’til around July 15th when all of a sudden we’re pretty much full of them. They stop just as suddenly too around the Saturday nearest August 20th. Last year we turned away 12 separate couples on Saturday August 21st yet it was six weeks after that before we had any more French staying with us!

Just cutting out the almost daily restocking trips from the Summer frees up a substantial amount of time for us. No more do we spend over 7 hours a week just driving the sheets back and forth to the laundry, and that’s before you even consider that we don’t need to make up the rooms and tables every day. This year we’re actually fairly full for September with more in than we had July last year. However, we can get away with not “working” the rooms too hard and the longer stays typical of the Autumn make life considerably easier.

So what do we do with all this “spare time”?

Well, first off we need to catch up with administration that just doesn’t get done over the Summer. Then there’s the small matter of my upcoming Spanish exam which is coming up in less than 2 weeks. The combined effect of the Spanish plus the admin backlog means that we don’t really have free time ’til about mid-October.

At that point, we need to get going on running up our to-do list for the coming year as it’s very easy to find yourself in March with nothing done. We’ve not yet sat down and written it out in detail but broad objectives at the moment are:

– maintenance of the house side of things;

– review of the hotel rooms to see what needs doing;

– refresh of the hotel website (a never ending task);

– complete overhaul of the pyreneesthemes.com site: we started regrouping that last year but it needs to be organised more logically;

– integration of the villarenters.com and sales properties with ourgites.org and ourholidayrentalhomes.com;

– spot of marketing of the ourinns sites;

– tidy up of the foreignperspectives.com site.

Not to mention finishing off the Spanish books (though, surprisingly, I will be pretty close to doing that before the exam for a change). I’m also hoping to organise a residential for myself in Santiago next July. Next year will probably be different as I hope to be starting the English course in October which, hopefully, will be the final one of my BA (Hons) Modern Languages.

As well as the work-related things, we’re also hoping to get away for at least one short-break and hopefully more than that.

From then, things really happen quite quickly here with the first appearance of the baby grapes in early May until the grapes are pretty much fully formed about mid-June. During this time, the farmers are busy in the fields getting their plants attached to the strings holding them up (the plants in this field are quite old so aren’t tied up).

Once into June, things generally slow down. The plants have all been sprayed and it’s the time for the work inside the winery to get underway in preparation for the harvest. Although you don’t see so much activity in the fields, things are far from quiet inside the various wineries.

In our area, the harvest gets underway towards the end of August (the date varies depending on the weather) and it’s pretty much over by mid-September. As you can see, the plants deteriorate pretty quickly after the harvest but the surroundings remain green well into November. In fact, garden plants and the like don’t start growing ’til it cools down a little so the burnt appearance of gardens is replaced by greenery (except in those gardens maintained by very keen gardeners).

Things change pretty slowly in the wine business with the local vines being replaced over a cycle of 40 years which means that you get about 36 years worth of wine from each plant as it takes four years before the first grapes appear. The bulk of grapes are still harvested by hand though this year European money has obviously arrived in big dollops as there are an awful lot of brand new grape picking machines. That does seem a little bit counterproductive in that those machines are generally used for the grapes producing lower quality wine which is the bulk of what makes up the growing lake of unsellable wine in Europe and, of course, doesn’t really help the unemployment statistics either.