We’ve ten days left.  Nine if you don’t count the fact that we fly out of Paris on the 10th.  Eight if you don’t include the penultimate day of our sojourn here: it’s spent frantically cleaning and packing and doing the very last load of laundry and legging it down to the station for noon which hardly counts as a day, does it?

This morning I was awakened in the very dark of the night, the brightness of the street lamps on the north side of the Dordogne filtered by river-fog, by an odd sort of hoovery noise that first made itself heard yesterday afternoon.  It is the sound of the modern vendage in the form of a big mechanical grape harvester, which looks something like this:

It isn’t an intrusive noise by any means.  Just different enough at 5AM (as that’s what it was) to awaken you.  I lay in bed listening to the vigneron working away – not making hay while the sun shone, but making wine by headlights – and feeling guilty at how we’ve managed to fritter the last four months away and wondering how the time has slipped through our fingers with so little to show for it.  Four whole months.  Gone!  Just like that.  How?  I turfed myself out of bed, my conscience well and truly pricked.

I know what we have done – lots of good maintenance and improvements to the house, re-vamped the web site, polished scratches from the car’s body-work and given the interior a long-overdue good clean.  It’s the things that we haven’t done that disturb me.  We didn’t do as we’d promised ourselves and go off for a few days away to explore (further afield).  Some of that was being budget-conscious, some was needing to be available to do work for clients for our BVI-based work (but we could still have disappeared over the August Festival), some was about preparing for guests arriving at Les Terraces over the summer, or family to stay.  But not enough of it, to be honest.

I think that some of our failure is that we’re at home, not on holiday.  You know the routine: I’m sure that you’re equally guilty of the same shortcomings when you’re not at work and haven’t gone away.  You don’t go to local historical sites, or museums, or festivals, or even eat out very often unless you’ve visitors, do you?  Please say “no”!

But, being brutally honest, more of the failing can be laid squarely at the feet of two culprits: habit & laziness.  An hour spent reading the papers online, a hour over coffee and the cryptic crossword, an hour watching the news too (if you’re a news junkie like Graham), an hour (or three if your name’s Alex) playing Scrabble on the computer, an hour or so having a beer and people-watching at the pub and there you are – almost half a day gone with nothing to show for it!  This is exacerbated by sleeping better, and later, here than I do in the BVI.  There 4-5AM is my normal waking hour, so much is done before the day begins and less of the end of the day is spent mindlessly in front of the idiot-box.

Things will be different when we finally move here full-time, as there will be new enterprises to start, a puppy to find, train and walk. Life will once again have a routine – clearly I need routine in order to be productive and disciplined.  But for now we’re neither fish nor fowl, with a foot here in France and the other in the BVI.