I have always found it hard to recommend people to do building work here in the South of France – I generally do most of my own and have a few specialist tradesmen who help – about the only person I have used consistently for over 15 years is a wonderful ‘plaquiste’ (a person who fixes and coates plasterboard) – he is retired and even has painted on the side of his van ‘retired, all work refused’ (in French of course) – but he will help me for a couple of days at a time if I am stuck and need a very high quality finish to my work.

It is still bitterly cold, although the longer evenings and lighter morning are a bonus – for the first time I have seen ice on the driveway stay there all day and some lumps of snow from Monday are still evident, thank goodness for our electric blanket.

So back to muddling through the day and doing the bleeding obvious again – this morning one water heater seems not to be heating, hopefully this is just the circuit breaker, I will know in a few hours. As with central heating systems and water softeners, I have multiple units so switching from one to another is simple, but if the salt runs low in all the softeners, elements fuse in all the heaters and we run out of oil, gas and wood simultaneously because I believe I resilience and back-ups then I am worse off than having one unit only and fixing that one.

Alert orange again today, so no school for Jack as the buses are not running although the sun is shining and there is not a scrap of snow – it is bloody cold though and there is ice on the top of the pool cover.

The aim of this blog is not to diarise my thoughts, but to shift me blooming arse and get into a blogging pattern – the temptation is to ramble on about events – like the garbage truck has just passed, great refuse collection in France – three times a week, friendly people and very polite and helpful – We get two general collections and one ‘yellow” bin collection for paper and tins etc – no dramatic sorting and as much as we need to put out. There is also a monthly collection of big junk like fridges and old beds if we leave them out – all in our council taxes which are about half what they are in the UK I understand.

My priority is to think of ways of earning some cash and,to put these thoughts into action and actually make some cash – everything is changing, both me the global situation, so I don’t think experience and established ways of doing business are necessarily highly relevant – times is hard – I guess the trick is to keep looking and not think too much ) the nugget of gold could be revealed with the next chop of the pick-axe – so keep hacking away, keep moving andyou will get soemwhere, or die of starvation and exhaustion

Shit – I just hit the diary category on the blog for reference – oh well…..

My thoughts of writing an anonymous blog here were confounded as I seem to have syndicated this one at FrUk all over the place – still I doubt anyone reads it so it can still be a discipline for me to get writing – stiffen the fingers and summon up the mood – sort of thing.

Snow from my WIndow in March

Clio Miranda an Jack are still here this morning, jack has no Lycee today as it is an “alert orange” which means the college bus will not dare trip out in 3 cm of snow – Mimi will be going back to Paris tomorrow and Clio is supposed to be getting the 11am train to Carcassonne.

Our dogs are total wimps, one is supposed to be part Husky, but one look at the snow and a paw into the white stuff and straight back to their baskets and in front of the log fire – central heating full on – only a few days of oil in the tank – I had hoped not to have to buy any ’till the summer – still we can couple up the gas boiler and I am planning a wood fueled furnace so as to have a triple system with two independent circuits for the house.

I am in two minds about making lists of actions I need to do – especially as I will have to be in “writing” mode to do it – not builder mode – this means that writing will likely take priority – but the truth I suspect is that there is so much to do that any list will be frightening – so I will proceed as usual doing the bleeding obvious – but I will try to discipline myself to sharing the day between writing and building – blogging and networking first – then today to unload a 22 ton truck with materials (in the snow), the delivery is due at 2pm, but I suspect most building sites are closed today so it could come this morning when I am supposed to be taking Clio to the station (in the snow).

I have the French translations for some advertising material – Clio does this, she is translating voice overs for television and films – it is what she has been training for and she is very very good – English to French is perfect, French to English sometimes needs someone from Essex to bring it into the current idiom it seems as her English is set in the 1990’s and is akin to Shakespeare or even Chaucer for British teenagers.

I have the nagging thought that there is something in the Internet I am missing, just around the corner, just out of sight, which will change things dramatically – I was in a gold mine once and the thought that the next pick or shovel to reveal untold wealth was always there, despite the millions of tons of rock that has already been moved – just one millimeter below any part of miles of tunnels could reveal the mother lode, the Internet is like that, compulsive and addictive.

I do have some application/software ideas which see to be radical and commercial – I also have some people keen to work with me on them – I just seem to be overwhelmed with work and do not allocate the time to structure the projects – perhaps this blog will help guide me to that path.

Log fire in the Living room in Villa Roquette

By “here” I don’t simply mean the reasoning behind my existence on earth and any philosophical ballshit, but why I am writing this in the first place. I am writing this because I think I need to organise myself better, there is a great deal I have to do and, it seems, not a lot of time to do it in, nor is there much money (any money actually) to do it with.

By using this blog www.fruk.eu it is a simply personal narrative, I don’t think this blog is networked or syndicated anywhere so no one is likely to read it – not even me – it is the simple act of writing, hopefully daily, that will help me plan.

Perish the though this is a diary, although I do need to itemise the activities I have to do an those actions I have performed – first to set the scene.

Location – we live in a large 19th century “Maison de Maitre” in Montblanc, a village in Languedoc in the South of France about 12 kilometers from the Mediterranean. I am typing on a Macbook, with a separate keyboard raised and angled at 45 degrees and viewing a separate screen which is slightly above head height. I work this way because I damaged my back a couple of years ago and I can sit comfortably in a ‘top of the range’ Ikea office chair with no pain. I am in a first floor room, opposite our bedroom, which is full of books and assorted junk, we call it the “book room” although there are books everywhere in the house.

It is March 7th 2010, bright and sunny, but cold – this has been a very cold winter, we had guest for a couple of months and had central heating on until two weeks ago, luxury, but after 2000 liters of oil, (the last delivery we have not paid for yet) I have a small electric fire next to me. I shall probably type until some of my fingers go white with the cold and I cannot feel them, this happens at a temperature at, or below, 7 degrees – there is a name for the syndrome but I forgot it.

So, to planning – I can only really do one thing at a time, my life at present is divided between building work and marketing work through the Internet.

The building is all to do with developing our home into a commercially viable set of rental units and the marketing work is to get clients to rent these units for short term or vacation rentals. I have been doing this almost constantly now for the past 20 years, ever since we first came to France.

I shall try typing with mittens – nice word “mittens” – how did such a word derive from gloves with no ends to the fingers – first I need to find some mittens.

To plan my time I suppose I should be making lists – but I shan’t – I may develop this, but for now I shall do the bleeding obvious. It is simple really, as long as I am doing something, and that this something is associated with either finishing the house or selling the rentals – I should be moving forwards. Sounds about right, but there is a flaw in this logic, I have been doing this for several years and we are very poor.

So this writing on this blog is a break from the pattern, an attempt to make new struture to shift us into profit.

My reasoning is that we are, I believe, very close to a successful plan/pattern/formula/whatever and I am missing something, not-seeing the catalyst which will enable the reaction to work. As I can only relate to either building work in France on my own properties, or on the Internet – somewhere in these two areas is the missing ingredient, probably in the Internet, so hence this blog entry, my attempt to focus thoughts into areas which may help find the activity to achieve oir goals.

Enough rambling for now – I just plugged in a heated towel rail for our shower room, my hands are freezing up (at 7 degrees I assume) and I hope to get a newsletter created and several “published” blog posts done today – also Miranda is down from Paris, Clio is coming over by train and will need picking up and Jack is home – so all the French part of my family is here today – Tony an Natalia are in France at his ski chalet in Montalbert so that leaves Belle, Jasmine, Tanya and Tyler in the UK – still 50 percent in France is good.

The sky is bright blue now, it is midday, it will be warmer in the garden than her at the desk, these old stone houses are too good for insulation – I will take a quick snap from the window – I can see the window needs cleaning – the Cedars of Lebanon in the front garden look great.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Profanity.svg/75px-Profanity.svg.png

A year away from the Hurly Burly of Internet an a couple of months back in and it is a can of worms.

So I am testing some old ideas of “popularity”, for example This is a link to a search engine which is listing our apartments and BandB in France – if dear Mr Google sees this page – then he may follow that link and he may think it is an important site and give it a big kiss.

Or he/she may think I am a horrid trickster an cast me forever into oblivion.

Ah… the slings and arrows….

Alexandra, my daughter, helps me a lot with translations. I am impressed with the letters she has composed for me. However she has a secret weapon there is a website www.Conso.net which gives help and one of their services is a set of standard letter templates for all manner of things.

Interestingly I also picked up a reference to this site on my Facebook pages today and found links to this site posted on other blogs and websites.

I went to Bristol in the UK for a few hours last week to meet a publisher who is developing a network of websites.

Beziers airport is only twenty minutes from our home at VillaRoquetteand with Ryanair, if you select tour dates, you can fly to the UK and back for less than the price of two cups of coffee, including all charges and stuff.

I have been interested in Internet publishing since I started making websites twelve years ago – I tried to build my own services with names like Goto-France, Wotspot, a publishing idea called Chez Frog, the French Property Digest and a raft of others – it is a huge amount of work and with the techical problems of secure hosting, keeping the hackers out etc all these have slipped quietly away.

I have also met and talked to other publishers looking at a local operation, the best for information is an excellent group of sites based around AngloInfo – their local site is operated by Caroline and from one operation in place when I first met them, they now have many franchisees around the world. Their style is to give local information and keep a discussion forums which attract advertising. Anglo Info has a good directory about local laws, services and regulations and is a big help to ex-pats where English is their first language.

Perhaps I should have considered their Languedoc franchise, but their style is not mine, and I do not like the word ‘Anglo’.

Other information sites in France include French Entree and locally there are several good information sites for Languedoc including Creme de Languedoc , The Languedoc Page , Languedoc France , Herault Whats On , BlaBlaBlah and Languedoc Sun – so is there a market for a new site called Guide2Languedoc?

All these sites survive on advertising and, although Languedoc has the biggest concentration of English speaking ex-pats in France and is now the most visited region in France, is it a good time to bring another online service focused on this region to scratch for the advertising euros?

Taking on this project is a huge amount of work – the rental accommodation in our home, Villa Roquette, is (nearly) finished so I will have time.

What attracts me about the Guide2 websites is the plans they have to make their service a community and to give good relevant news and information.

I would welcome any comment and ideas from readers, your opinion is valuable to me and I hope to hear from you.

Now that I have stopped working (well almost) on the house, I am back to marketing and getting guests for our apartments and BandB. We first started this in our old home in Nizas 12 years ago and did all our marketing through the Internet – hopefully I can get back into the same flow as before, there is a lot more actiity on the internet now and the days of getting to the top of Alta Vista in a couple of hours are long gone – the tricks I used then would get me banned from Google for life. I am looking at what is on offer for help in Internet marketing, the rules and ruses seem top be the same, just follow the Google motto of ‘Do No Evil’ – a good website I found is http://www.nikkipilkington.com/about-us/ – Nikki looks good too! (plus she’s a biker)

Hopefully my 20 years experience of Internet marketing will get me started, but I will always look for good skills and help. I don’t have the strong websites I used to own, which got to the top of all French accommodation listings, but I will – Start All Over Again –

If you are thinking of coming to France – stay with us – I will try to make you an offer you cannot refuse.

Villa Roquette

Would you like your own home in the South of France? It is a dream shared by most of the visitors I meet here and, after a quiet year with most of the world (according to the Daily Mail) hopping from one crisis to another, people are beginning to look for bargains for sale – there are a few still around.

For a while I was selling property in France, I worked with an excellent company which I thoroughly recommend if you are looking along the Riviera. However, I found the local agencies are, generally, a bunch of thieving rascals – there are a couple I would recommend in Languedoc, so if you are looking here then do contact me first. I am happy to give advice, but I cannot charge and get no commission as I am not registered as an agent now. You get my personal opinion from 20 years of experience, preferably over a glass of wine

Most visitors fall in love with old beams and stone houses – many of these homes in this region were built over three hundred years ago – our first home here was first recorded in the 10th century – and has been lived in continuously for over 1,000 years – our present home is a mixture of 17th and 19th century, so is very modern in comparison.

But old houses, although built to last with stone walls sometimes two yards thick, need a lot of work if you need to renovate – I know, I have spent a lot of the last fifteen years with a hammer, shovel and pick.

One very sweet house I sold a couple of years ago is back on the market – here are some photos, it (very rare) comes with a courtyard garden and a fig tree. It need a lot of work, but is not too big and a realistic project. The village is just perfect, a classic Mediterranean village in one of the most beautiful parts of France. Contact me and I will put you directly in touch with the owner, a charming American lady who rides a Ducati (very fast). The price, I understand, is around 50,000 euro.