French Deal

Remember that one - a bit of a disappointment? Well here we go again. Four weeks later, and back to France to check on progress, only to find that there has been none. Or very very little. There was some compensation - it was brilliantly hot and sunny and coming from England where there's been non stop rain for a month and another month and a half forecast for the same, that was indeed some compensation to my fretting.

Still, Stephen my son who accompanied me and who had brought all his friends last summer before the work was done, was really pleased and said the new windows and doors and so on looked just great. However, money worries are starting to hit hard. And that, coupled with the lack of evidence of men on site, caused me another frenzy of doubt. Still, luckily we were both able to retire to the beautiful, completed, fabulous view, Basque house of Rick and Mol where we spent the evening and after the usual desperate glass or three of wine to steady my failing courage, we had a good night's sleep and I vowed to tackle Guillhaume the builder's project manager the next day.

This I did, up the road to Sauveterre and there he was and even his cuteness was just not going to get in the way here. I got strict, so Stephen stayed in the car. After shuffling here and there, Guillhaume agreed that not much had been done because, well, wouldn't you know, there was an american that needed a pool built and two other houses being worked on and their owners were getting heavy and therefore got priority and, well, just so much work on the go. So I pulled out the big guns which is 'Monsieur Hall is coming next week and he will not be pleased'. Rick is a client of 16 years ago and he, as an architect and longterm extoller of their work, carries weight in their eyes, unlike myself who was seen as a someone that should really being doing something more sensible.

So I put my foot down and, in addition, complained about the amount of stuff that had disappeared from the outhouses. But I don't think that it was them, it's people just helping themselves which is easy to do because the whole place is open to the breeze. As a working farm all the barns are open and easy to get into. Anyway, large amounts of annoyance conveyed in my best french, we ended the conversation with a joke and a chat about his girlfriend Marie who had just returned from a year out in Australia, Cambodia, Vietnam etc and was safely back in his arms. No wonder he wasn't caring much about anything else and was grinning like a maniac. Ah c'est l'amour je suppose.

posted by French Deal @ 1:34 pm