Le Couvent Diary

A few years ago we had a lovely jazz singer to stay.  She has a friend who lives close by here who makes soap and she told us that her friend's soap was exceptional.  Now, I don't know about you, but to me the notion of making soap seems somehow rather arcane.  It's a process I know practically nothing about, I just know that like anything that's good, it takes effort, knowledge and skill to make it terrific as opposed to ordinary, and, hey, we all know that most bars of soap do the job in a wet and suddy kind of way but, basically, ordinary is missing the point.  Isn't it? 

So.  Ripple, lather, dissolve.  For the last couple of years we've bought our delicious organic soap from the Savonnerie de Saint Privat.  (Her lavender soap, by the way, is the very same gorgeous, purple stuff sold by Neal's Yard.)  Anyway I phoned the savonerie yesterday to find out if she or her partner were going to have a stall at Clermont market.  She told me she'd just had a baby and wasn't going to be making any soap for the next year or two.  Eekamouse.  PANIC.   

So today, on her advice, I headed for the Olive Oil Co-operative at Clermont l'Herault which is where all the local growers take their olives to be pressed.  I discovered that it also has rather a fantastic shop, which apart from olive oil also sells regional artisanal products like wine, pottery, honey and wine.  And soap.  Lots and lots of soap.  And also our girl's soap. 

I bought it out.

So, when you arrive, you may find in your soapdish:

Lavender (lavendre)

Honey and Geranium  (miel et geranium)

Rosemary and Spirulina (romarin et spirulin)

or

Orange and Cinammon (orange et cannelle)

I drove back with the car heavily, headily, drowsily pungent with all of the above.  Oh my, oh my, it smelt good. 

We can't actually afford to give you a whole big bar of these soaps because, like most things good, they're pretty expensive and it would be enormously wasteful to throw out almost all of a bar each time.  So we hope you enjoy trying a taste of something that couldn't be more real or more local. 

Guests who've been to stay at Le Couvent previously will know that we have lots of art on the walls. Some of it is 'proper' and worth a bit, and some is from flea markets. The game is to tell which is which. For the past three years we've housed a wonderful oil that belongs to our pal Yvonne - just while her house was being renovated. (It's taken longer than envisaged when she bought the painting, luckily for us.)

It's by Dominique Caby - a fantastic artist from the nearby village of Nizas. His paintings range from around 600 - 2000 euros. We have three that we own, but Yvonne's picture has disappeared off  to its new home, so we have a gap. Ali's gone over to see Dom and his artist partner, Line Mangin , to choose some paintings that we can have available for sale - and to fill the gap. I'm sure she's having the best time in their atelier among all the squeezed paint tubes.

If you are coming to stay at Le Couvent and fancy a visit to Dom's atelier do let us know and we'll take you to meet him. Bring your cheque book, just in case eh?

'Is your life really the idyll it looks?' ask many of our guests. Without hesitation we reply that for us it is. We work for five months meeting and accommodating fantastic people and that means we are able to live in a beautiful house all year, seven months of which we have completely to ourselves. Now how hard is that?

Yet this morning, as we were in one of our cleaning blitzes, I realised something. Both Ali and I hated cleaning and housework before we moved here. But in the process of running the house as a B&B we've become so accustomed to it that neither of us ever thinks about it. We just get on and do it. We have seven bedrooms in the house, plus three sitting rooms, two offices, two kitchens and a huge gallery space - oh, and seven bathrooms. We have the lovely Patricia, our cleaner, to do our own apartment, but all the rest we do ourselves. We never get tetchy about it - indeed I don't think we even think about it - it's just another job.

But if you're considering running your own B&B, you have to be able to get over the fact that you'll have other people sharing your house and that there'll be a heap of cleaning, washing, gardening, restaurant-booking and wine-drinking to do. The pool has to be more spotless than it would be if it was just you using it. You can't leave jobs until tomorrow because the sun's out - it's almost always out. And you really must like people. Not tolerate them. Really like people - you know, genuinely find them interesting. Now, we're super-lucky because we have a stream of very interesting people who pitch up at this quirky old house. And they are super kind to us. The rooms are always left spotless, so we have a pretty easy job of it. Thanks to all of you - and come back soon eh?

An idyll? Most certainly. Work-free? Most certainly not. Fun - absolutely definitely. Personally, I wouldn't swap my life for any other in the world. As for the cleaning, I still don't relish the thought, but I love seeing the house in it's finest, cleanest clothes.

It's been a busy week. We're don't officially re-open for the summer until 1 May, but , as a favour to our pals Nicola & Teddy, we're making an exception. We have a group of writers coming to stay for a week's workshop from 25 March. So we have to get the house and garden in guest mode a bit early.

As a result Ali has been painting like a dervish all week, the green bathroom's now germolene pink. We're not at all sure about it, but hope that the addition of lots of art and photos might make it bearable. At least it's a lot lighter now. The ceiling has yet to be lowered and new lights installed. I know, wrong way round, but you try getting a workmen at this time of year. Ali's now moved on to the orange bedroom, re-painting the ceiling and a couple of walls.

Some of the windows have taken a battering during the winter so a little outside work has to be done on those. The windows and shutters are wonderfully battered and beautiful. The paint's weathered naturally into the most glorious multi-hued fade - the sort of thing TV makeover people try to do by distressing things. There's nothing remotely stressed about our shutters, they're just slack and gorgeous. But that comes at a price - we have to be gentle with them, just doing enough to ensure they're safe and that they work, but not deciding to replace them with brand new ones. When it comes to that time we will sell up and move. I would be very sad to see this beautiful old girl tarted up like a teenager on a date.

I, on the other hand, get to tickle the garden back into shape. Actually, it's less of a tickle than a short back and sides. Having spent the whole winter pruning our vines the garden has had less attention than usual. But we must have done something right in the previous six years because it's stood up to this neglect rather well. The plants are all thriving and there really aren't millions of weeds. Last year we invested in a garden shredder and shredded everything in sight, tossing the mulch on the garden. I'm assuming the weeds gave up in the darkness because relatively few have bothered to surface.

Actually I'm rather disappointed. I was hoping to have tons of garden waste to take to the tip in our new trailer. I am particularly hopeless at reversing it and the municipal tip is the perfect place to practise. It's a huge open bit of ground and if I choose my timing carefully there might be no-one there to witness me jack-knifing repeatedly. For the moment, though, I'm doing it in a simulated kind of a way. See how you get on in this reversing game .

Today it's very chilly. We have an appointment with the accountant this afternoon, so we've abandoned the vines for a day. It's cold and we have to pay our taxes so it seems the perfect excuse to reward ourselves with a holiday. I've just booked us into a lovely riad in Marrakesh for a week in April - a recommendation from some great guests who stayed here this summer.

We'll squeeze it in before our first guests of the season arrive at the beginning of May. Oooh, what a treat.

For those of you who've stayed at Le Couvent, you'll know that Ali and I have a separate apartment and that we shut the main part of the house for the winter. Today, however, our lovely cleaner Patricia is hoovering away upstairs, so I've lit the big fire in the kitchen. The air outside is full of woodsmoke and the hens are burbling away by the kitchen door. It makes a change to be here at the big table.

Ali is beside me framing lots of original old photos we bought from the archive of the now defunct San Francisco Examiner. They really are extraordinary testaments of their time and you'll see them on the staircase walls when you next come to stay.