CHAPTER 9 A Starck Contrast

Early in the summer of 1990 Jane, Sarah and I took a two week holiday in Frasquenet. In order to offset some of the home loan I had taken out, we had decided to rent the house out to holiday makers, in the weeks we didn't need it. Advertisements had been placed in the Sunday Times and Exchange and Mart, which had resulted in six weeks of rentals having been taken up. Our paying guests were due to start arriving the day after we were planning to depart back to England.

Much of our holiday was spent making final improvements to the house and arranging for a cleaner to visit in between guests. Michael at the supermarket sent around a local lady in her early thirties named Isabelle for an interview. Due to language differences it must have been one of the shortest interviews in the history of interviewing. We hired her immediately.

Naturally we also had a good number of afternoons on the beaches at Narbonne plage and Gruissan, as well as a meal of local fare at a different restaurant each evening. It still required bribes to stop Sarah from shouting "grapes" as we drove around the vineyard covered countryside and to behave herself during the longer meals.

Having returned to the UK, the feedback we received from guests staying in the house was very good, but we were disappointed to find that the letting season was very short. It seemed that no one was interested in renting during the period October to June. This meant that rentals covered the cleaning and advertising, but not much of the home loan repayments.

Soon enough 1991 arrived and it was time for me to make a spring cleaning trip, before the summer letting season started. Of course that had really become just an excuse for a few days of good food and wine with some friends.

Mark and Pete were duly invited to accompany me again. I had moved the planned month to May, in the hope of having better weather than the previous year. Unfortunately Pete was not able to make it. Obviously during our earlier trip, I had worked him too hard and had been too stingy with the champagne.

Since three is better than two, we sought a substitute for Pete and eventually roped in Sam, a photographer friend of mine. This time we planned to fly to Paris, stay there for one night and then take the very fast train, the TGV, to Narbonne.

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