As we’re well into our winter break, I thought I would reflect a little on our first closed season after such a busy summer. As I’ve said a few times before…we were definitively ready for the break. We are now feeling much more refreshed and relaxed as well as making good progress with our ‘to-do list’.

Highlights for me over the last couple of months have been a week in the Canaries, a 3 week road trip which included seeing family in London and Derby, some great down-time on the beautiful North Norfolk coast in the stunning Freeholders cottage, running the brilliant Marathon du Cognac, the Christmas parties and get togethers that we have hosted and been to and the warm 18 degree sunny afternoons during late December.

Less pleasant activities have been decorating our kitchen, living room, back stairs & landing and one of our non-guest bedrooms, dealing with a leaking roof, faulty hot water system and various other maintenance matters, the -7 degree mornings during November and the coughs and colds that came with change of seasons.

The jazz guest weekends have been a great success so far and we have also accepted ad-hoc requests from other guests to stay when we were able to do so. I am starting to look forward now to next season and we already have 100 guest nights booked in and are full on a few weekends in the spring and summer. Given this time last year we hadn’t even started advertising, I’m really pleased with this.

In the coming weeks before we formally reopen, our projects include decorating a few more rooms (it is great to be making progress with the non-guest accommodation decorating that we didn’t get time to do last year!), some family visits, a winter sun holiday, running the Paris marathon and refreshing the house and garden ready for the 2023 season.

So, all in all I think it’s been a pretty good balance between R&R and improvement projects so far this winter. I’ll write again as we officially open for 2023!

October marked the start of our (nearly*) closed season for the winter. Our last weekend of guests included people visiting Eymet for a wedding, for a funeral and to meet a new grandchild for the first time which I felt had a reassuring sense of balance to it and made the chatter over breakfast interesting. We finished our first year with a Booking rating of 9.8 which I’m very pleased with. I’d have loved a 9.9 overall but taking a step back now I think we should be very proud of our 9.8. We have now closed the pool for the winter, had the boiler serviced, ordered a delivery of logs for the log burner and joined the rest of France hunting for some reasonably priced wood pellets for our pellet burners. Throughout last week, afternoon temperatures were still up in the mid / high 20s but a few more weeks and the nights and mornings will be getting very cold as we found out last year.

With a ‘last day of term’ spring in our step, we gave the house a good clean then headed to Tenerife for a week of much needed R&R before starting this winter’s projects. These are mostly in our non-guest areas / rooms that we didn’t have time to decorate etc. before we opened in May. Whilst our guests have enjoyed our fabulous newly decorated rooms, we have been living in our shabby accommodation, so it’ll be great to change that!

A quick update on learning our way around the French administration (which I think will be an ongoing project for years to come…) I now have a ‘numero fiscal’ following my first tax return here in September which is very helpful, however, I can now see that I misunderstood the tax agreement between the UK and France which (long story short) means I’m currently paying tax in both countries. This I obviously need to fix ASAP! I have found the appropriate forms which are currently with the Bergerac Impots team.

* nearly-closed season – in a late development, we were approached by Maquizart, who arrange jazz concerts at the chateau in Eymet through the winter, asking if we could host the musicians on the nights of these concerts, so we’ll be full for several Saturday nights during our ‘nearly-closed’ season… I’ll be back with an update in the new year as we start to think about getting the 2023 season underway.

Moving from August to September felt like a step change in several ways:

The B&B bookings went from crazy busy to just busy – we had some rooms sit empty for a few nights running, we were often only turning one or two rooms and even had a few nights with the house to ourselves which seemed very strange. A common theme among our guests during September has been house hunting in the area which is always exciting and we have been able to share our experience since moving over here.

The high-season activities in the region came to an end – with la rentrée came a change of pace in the region and end to the night markets, soirées gourmandes, festivals, outdoor cinema, live music in the square etc. It was sad to see it all finish, but the village has stayed lively, the weather has been mostly great and having fewer tourists around makes it easier to park, get a table at a café, move around the markets. I really enjoyed this time of year last year too.

The weather became autumnal – yes we had a final ‘sting in the tail’ heat wave with temperatures well into the 30s again in September, but the nights have been down as low as 3 degrees, and daytime highs in the low to mid 20s have replaced the August mid to high 30s. Breakfast on the terrace gradually came to an end and the water temperature in the pool has dropped below what I am prepared to swim in but it has still had a lot of use during the month.

We started making plans for the winter – it is still hard to imagine at the moment, but it is going to get VERY cold at times, we need a pellet burner installed in the kitchen and need to get stocked up with fuel. The non-guest areas of the house are in desperate need of decoration, the roof needs some attention, the garden needs a lot of work… plus we’ve got some holidays booked and a few other projects lined up.

We’ve been full again this weekend, Eymet has been hosting the annual conference of rural mayors and we were fully booked within about 30 minutes of its schedule being confirmed a couple of months ago. It’s a big event with around 500 mayors visiting and has been a welcome boost to our end of season bookings. It also great to see so much still going on in the village including fireworks on Friday night.

As it stands, we’ve got one more week of B&B bookings then we’re closed until April next year and I have to say we are ready for it! As September progressed, we found it more difficult to stay motivated not to cut corners and not to let our standards drop. This reinforces that our decision to close for the winter and start completely fresh in the spring was the right one. We are both tired, in need of a proper break and we’ll have time to get the work done on the house and garden that has been on hold for 6 months.

People often ask us if we have any regrets about moving out here and starting the B&B. The short answer is always ‘absolutely not’ but I thought I’d reflect on that a little more this week.

We don’t see our family as often as we did. We’ve missed some ad-hoc birthday celebrations and not been there for the hugs and moral support as people have been through the ups and downs of life for the last year. Both Tom and I have had to make short, unexpected trips back to England for family matters but being just 20 minutes from Bergerac airport with low-cost flights to Stansted and East Midlands, it is quite an easy trip. With WhatsApp, everyone getting on with their busy lives anyway, and having people to stay with us here… on balance I have no regrets on this so far.

Our income is a lot less than it was. Over the years we have taken expensive foreign holidays, eaten in some top restaurants, had weekends away, London theatre trips etc. We can’t afford that lifestyle anymore. I used to put money into savings every month and I can’t afford to do that anymore. But now we are living in a lovely holiday destination with our own pool and long hot summers. The B&B income allows us to eat out at some brilliant very good value restaurants. We have booked some ‘winter sunshine’ and whilst I’m no longer saving, I am not eating into my savings. Ask our friends and family back in the UK and they say our life is one long holiday now anyway! No regrets so far…

I’ve had a challenging and fulfilling career. For the most part I really enjoyed my jobs. I got to travel, I was always learning new ‘stuff’, meeting new people, challenging myself etc. But I was often working ~50 hours per week with 6 weeks holiday a year. I certainly wasn’t ready to retire – I would go crazy. But now instead of spending my mornings on trains, conference calls and emails earning money for someone else. I spend it serving guests, keeping the house and garden clean and tidy and earning money for us and I often have the afternoon to myself. I am still being challenged every day, meeting lots of new people and learning new ‘stuff’. Oh yeah and I get 5 months holiday a year! No regrets there.

I do get nostalgic for the things in the UK I loved… hiking in the Lake District, running along the North Norfolkand Suffolk coasts, a pint of Adnams in the beer garden at the Waldringfield Maybush, Pin Mill Butt and Oyster, Southwold Harbour Inn etc., Popping into London for a night out / weekend. An all-day brunch at the Whistlestop Café in Woodbridge. A beer and curry evening with friends from work… These have been replaced by some equally great R&R activities here and I can always go back to do them in the UK again so, no regrets, but these have been the sort of things that I think about most often…wouldn’t it be great to…

I could ramble on (even more…) but having reflected on the question a little more today: yes, there are places and things I miss, people I would like to spend more time with, but do I have any regrets ? Absolutely not.

With August coming to a close and the pace of life starting to slow a little here, I’m going to switch to monthly updates to my Blog. 

Tuesday and Wednesday last week both blessed us with a ‘4-room changeover day’.

What is a 4-room changeover day? Well, it means after getting up around 6:30am to prepare for breakfast, doing a breakfast service for 8 people and cheerfully saying farewell to all our guests, all 4 rooms need to be thoroughly cleaned and made up before mid-afternoon when we merrily start to welcome our next 8 arrivals.

There are 8 king size sheets, 4 duvet covers and 16 pillow-cases to wash, dry and iron plus 16 towels and 4 shower mats to wash and dry. Of course, we also need to keep the rest of the house, pool and garden looking great for our guests, stock up the cupboards for breakfast the following morning and stay on top of the day to day running of things…watering the plants, changing a broken light bulb, recycling, touching up paintwork etc… Doing this for two days running is tough. Perhaps it’s where the ‘Chambres Dôn’t’ joke comes from… Tom and I make a great team though and we keep each other going well when the going gets tough. A big‘respect’ to those that do it on their own! 

On Thursday and Friday last week on the other hand, we only had one changeover per day and none on Saturday because all 8 guests were staying for a few nights. So, all our B&B work was done by late morning and we had pretty much of the rest of the day to ourselves (OK there is always SOMETHING that needs doing in a house like this and there is always ironing to do, but you get the idea…) Suddenly it seems like quite an easy way of life.

A few more ‘highs’ that more than offset the ‘lows’ on a typical summer week like last week that come to mind:

• The guests are great, we have met so many different people and, for the most part, they are very happy to be here and leave feeling satisfied which makes me very happy.
• Living here is amazing, last week we had the Oyster and Wine festival in the village, the usual Thursday morning and Tuesday evening markets and live music in the village on Thursday and Friday evenings. Running through countryside, the lovely local community, meeting friends out and about when we are shopping etc…
• We are doing this on our terms. Of course there are the social charges and taxes to pay, but we are working for ourselves and doing this because we choose to. If we decide we want to block some or all the rooms off for a few days, we can and we do.

So, I’m moving into the last two weeks of full season feeling very positive about Le Portanel. We’ve had so many more guests than I was expecting, it has been challenging, a lot of hard work and frustrating at times, but I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved and I’m looking forward to a quieter September and an end-of-season celebration in October!