Le Couvent Diary

I'm currently limbering up for entry into a competition. You know, the one for the untidiest desk on Earth. I think I stand a good chance of winning.

The problem is that I have a butterfly brain and find everything my eyes fall upon interesting. As a result I have the Filemaker Pro 10 manual permanently open, the Boden catalogue waiting for me to order Ali's birthday present. (Her birthday's tomorrow, so I'm already way too late.) There's a tube containing a biodynamic calendar waiting for me to find a suitable place to pin it up. Countless list of done and undone jobs litter the desk. Wires are everywhere despite wireless networks, bluetooth and magic connections. I'm in the middle of sorting out health insurance, car registrations (we're six years overdue on that too), how to treat olives, wondering where to send extra tax information,  reading the mini-tractor manual, updating websites, cogitating dry-stone walling courses, keeping vineyard records, taking part in a national health study, not to mention hopping haphazardly through dozens of websites each day whilst I'm waiting for guests to come down to breakfast.

The only thing I'm truly rigorous about is answering guests' e-mails and keeping the bookings database in crisp order. For the rest of it I'm in perpetual chaos. Largely because I loathe paperwork with a passion, but love my Macs, books and the internet with an equal lust.

As if the untidiness wasn't bad enough, I also share my office with the dogs. So there is the perpetual tumbleweed of hair and toys to negotiate. And they just sleep though it all. Not a care in the world. Confident of the next meal and the next visit to the vineyards.

Thank God the guests don't see any of it. It's all tucked tidily away in our private bit of the house.

Ali & I have spent the last four days working on this website, and the sister site, Chateau Mal au Dos . We've tested it on Safari, Camino, Firefox and Internet Explorer, although not extensively. If you come across anything that doesn't work, or seems illogical we'd be very grateful if you could let us know.

Meanwhile, here's Ali looking boggy-eyed in her office while we're discussing the new site.

Yep, that's me. But these aren't words you can use against my luscious new Mac laptop and the all new and shiny Mac Leopard operating system. Before I was  a B&B landlady in the south of France I had a computer company in England which built PCs for businesses and installed networks. We were very good at it, but it was tricky and stressful. I suppose, if one is going to fix computers you may as well choose the ones that go wrong, i.e. anything Microsoft.