70forseventy

 As many of you know, J and I ended up buying a huge old stone farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the Ariège, at 500 metres altitude in the Pyrenean foothills. It wasn't a ruin but it did need renovation to turn it into the maison d'hôtes that was part of our plan ... and the 2 year renovation project turned into 4 years of hard, 14 hour a day graft. Days off and days out were few and far between - to bring in some much needed funds I also worked as a massage practitioner at a nearby yoga centre and had a good number of counselling clients too. I wrote about this period in a blog, ironically entitled Slow Living in the French Pyrenees .  Renovation finally finished, we opened for business ... and immediately found ourselves fully booked from April to October, every year. For several years I cooked for guests 4 or 5 times a week - and here in France that means not just cooking, but hosting and eating with the guests. We had some fab multicultural, multilingual evenings, and ...