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out of the dark ages.
    Â Â The mice were proving more stubborn. I was on the brink of moving out when they met their match. The local one-man hardware store sold the world's most sensitive mousetraps. At 95 cents each they were the cheapest remedy so far and they took the entire hoard of rodents down. Sean was my hero. He valiantly removed the dead bodies as they succumbed, mouse by mouse. I almost missed them once they were gone. With these time-consuming challenges solved we turned our attention to the renovations and the farm.

Chapter 3
    Homesick

    I wanted the glamorous part of owning a vineyard, not the hard work. Sean was to do the vineyard work and I would look after the kids, do light renovation and eventually the marketing. At the time there was little that could be called glamorous in what we had purchased save perhaps the view.
    Â Â What we had bought was a large old house that had originally been two houses, numerous ragged outbuildings including the fermentation winery or pressoir , the storage winery and a very large barn, and a chunk of about 30 acres of surrounding land of which 25 acres were vineyards in different stages of disrepair. One small part of the house was liveable: a large bedroom where we had installed our entire family, a kitchen where we had a makeshift set-up that included our new equipment and a very old hob, and a large bathroom that once thoroughly cleaned was passable but miles from glamorous. Looking after a very young family in a kitchen that rated just above camping was a full-time job. The gas hob had two working plates and we had no oven. We were scared stiff of spending any more money.
    Â Â The winery and its renovation were on the long finger – we might have to put them off for a while. It would be a year before we turned our attention to our first harvest and it seemed far, far away. Just coping with daily life in this new environment was enough; my mind could not take in the idea of making our own wine.
    Â Â Decades of garbage had to be removed from Château Haut Garrigue: fridges and ovens that didn't work, beds that hadn't been used in generations and mounds of unidentifiable detritus. Soon the dreadlocked young man at the dump was greeting me like a friend.
    Â Â We lived in one large room together while we worked on our first project – a bedroom for the girls. It was lightweight renovation, decorative rather than structural, and meant we would at last get a bit of parental privacy. It had a dirty neon light and walls covered with brown, flowery wallpaper that was peeling badly and stained dark yellow with nicotine. The window in the corner was black with mould. Below it were several fist-size holes that had been the main entrance for our late friends, the mice. The concrete floor was covered with filthy linoleum curling up at the edges like old tobacco. The door had several large vertical cracks running down the upper half and didn't close. We started by removing the linoleum. Once we had cleared the room I tackled the wallpaper while Sean took on the window. I steamed and scraped until my arms ached. Drops of boiling water, molten nicotine and soggy paper fell incessantly onto my arms and hair. I geared up in waterproofs with goggles and hood regardless of the heat. The wallpaper was beyond tenacious. An Internet search affirmed that what we had was not normal. Clearly something more serious than standard wallpaper glue had been used to attach it.
    Â Â Weeks later, my arms were toned but the room was still in an awful state. I was more at home with a keyboard than a screwdriver and found myself a reluctant renovator.
    Â Â 'We're getting nowhere, SF,' I said, bursting into tears. Completing this room alone before Sean started pruning the vineyard was looking unlikely. I envisioned trying to do the renovations on my own and dissolved into further floods of tears.
    Â Â 'Feck it, Carolinus, we have moved country,' said Sean, trying to