Statistically viable

A journal of château life - 25th-31st January 2026

Statistically viable – audio version

A brief walk before the rain

Sunday 25th January

The rain is a constant companion today, falling steadily, relentlessly in straight rods from an iron grey sky. I watch it through the old kitchen windows as I potter through my jobs.

Tim has compiled some statistics for me, totting up guest numbers, breakfasts served and croissants bought. It’s good to keep check, to have at least some idea of how we’re doing. In 2025 we had fewer guests than in 2024, but there were also fewer one night stays, fewer beds to change because people stayed for longer, which we’re always grateful for.

We bought 522 baguettes and 1470 croissants from our local bakeries, supporting other little, local businesses as we always promised ourselves we would. I created 960 little posies of flowers and every single stem came from my cutting garden. I cut bucketfuls of flowers every Monday and Thursday and spent several hours on those days creating 20 little posies of flowers for our guests, that’s 40 arrangements per week, all summer long.

It makes my stomach twist a little to think that most of this year’s flowers are still tiny brown seeds in paper packets, or dusty tubers packed away in crates. It doesn’t seem possible that in just a few months time the garden will be full again.

My brain and body also can’t imagine cooking 378 evening meals and hundreds of grazing boards, baking batch after batch of brownies and granola and hundreds of puddings. When you’re in the midst of it, it all falls into place, but from the outside looking in, the very thought of doing it all again makes me panic.

There’s a lot to be said for the energy that comes with longer, brighter days. I’m not sure my body could sustain the pace of our summer season if it happened over winter. I push down the nerves and remind myself that it’s still only January, there are three more months until we open, plenty of time to finish all the planning and preparation, to get back into the swing of things and to store up some energy to hit the ground running.

Monday 26th January

I leave the soup to bubble on the stove, the carrots, swede, fennel and onion already softened in butter, now cooking through in hot stock with some red lentils. It’s still dark outside, the world hasn’t woken up yet, but lunch is already cooking. We’re filming today so I won’t have time for this later.

I stir marshmallows and crushed digestive biscuits through melted butter, golden syrup and chocolate and push the dark, sticky mess of it into a tin foil lined tray. I slide the rocky road into the fridge to chill so that we have a sweet treat to eat with coffee after our soup at lunch.

Tim is sawing up wood and mouldings to start making the panelling for the sitting room and I’m determined not to spend the day standing around waiting to hand him a screw driver or a tape measure just so the cameras can see us “working together.”

I slope off to the workshop and get on with painting the radiators, kneeling on some cardboard to cushion my knees and stop the cold seeping up from the concrete floor. It’s a fiddly job painting between the cast iron columns, my angled radiator brush making it easier, but it’s slow work all the same. I constantly shift position to bring the life back to my feet, painting first one side and then the other of each column, doing the insides first so I don’t mess up the paint on the outside as I work.

I’m just getting into the swing of it when the camera appears, keen to catch me working on the radiator if I won’t oblige and hang about holding tools for Tim. Work slows considerably as I pause to answer questions and run the brush along the same bit of radiator multiple times so the perfect shot can be captured. It’s a relief when they disappear again, going back to slow down Tim’s work instead.

I’m stiff from kneeling on the floor, my overalls covered in paint and my hands freezing in the cold of a January day. The radiator is coming along nicely though, the fresh white paint picking out the pretty flower details and making it look almost as good as new.

By lunch time the first radiator is done and I warm my hands up around a steaming bowl of sweet vegetable soup, blitzed until it’s silky smooth and eaten with some thickly buttered crunchy baguette to dunk with.

A very quick snapshot where nothing is fixed and I am terrified it’s all going to fall off. Excuse the wonkiness.

Tuesday 27th January

The sky is sulky and dark and it feels like the sun barely rises, light seems hard to find, shadows slinking everywhere. Tim and I put on our phone torches to search through the salle de chasse for the marble fireplace that Tim collected from a house in Angers in the summer. There’s no electricity in this room and there’s not enough daylight to see properly.

The fire place is in pieces, stacked up with layers of cardboard in between; the upright plinths, the top part with its curved corbels, the sides and the mantle shelf, all tucked away in the musty darkness of this room full of old furniture and brocante finds

We’ve decided not to use the sides of the fireplace and to just attach the plinths to the wall instead to save space on the hearth. We don’t need the added depth because the log burner is already inset. The marble is old and fragile, the plinths pockmarked at the bottoms, it’s a little more worn than I remember, but it was free, so I forgive its imperfections.

My heart is hammering again, the kitchen worktop nerves resurfacing as they did when we laid the hearth. This time though there’s a camera here watching me panic. It would be marvellous for the tv if we dropped a piece, but I’m determined that it won’t happen.

Tim has already boarded up the chimney breast, hiding away the old columns and the log burner flue. Now he makes some L-shaped metal brackets to attach the marble plinths and the cross piece with the corbels around the log burner. Thankfully there are existing holes in the marble that he can bolt into so he doesn’t have to drill anything. We gingerly lift each piece into place and back down again multiple times to make sure it’s all going to line up correctly. Each time we lift my heart drums in my ears.

The half light of the day is already slipping away as Tim tightens the bolts and we nestle the corbels on top of the plinths. There’s no time left to film us adding the mantle shelf and I let out my breath in relief, thankful that Tim doesn’t have to try and cut the marble mantle down to its new proportions on camera. It’s a job for another day, so we light the fire and enjoy the view of the half finished fire place.

Wednesday 28th January

It’s fog that blocks the light today, ghostly and tinged blue, making everywhere feel cold and damp, dripping from where it snags on the branches of the trees, turning every surface slick. From time-to-time it thins ever so slightly, teasing us with a distant glimmer of sunshine that never quite makes it through.

After school we pack the boys into the car and drive through the fog, coming out into the sunshine as the road climbs higher and back into the mist with each dip and trough. An afternoon in Ikea, looking for bookcase inspiration that isn’t really there; the “hacks” we’ve seen online not feeling quite right for our sitting room. We learn though, what we don’t like, deciding instead to make the shelves from scratch.

I drive us all home again through the last patches of golden winter sunshine, soaking up the blue sky before we descend again into the fog. We turn into the drive in the last scraps of light, the sun just beginning to disappear behind the barn, the fog already pooling again in the lowest part of the field.

Thursday 29th January

I stand with my arms folded, my chin resting on the thumb of my right hand, my index finger between my teeth, thinking. Tim is stretching the tape measure along the wall at the library end of the room, measuring out the span of shelves and cupboards.

We talk through many bookshelf ideas, weighing up the pros, cons and costs of each. Walking back and forth to the kitchen to get a true sense of shelf depth and drawer height. Once we settle on an idea Tim sketches it roughly in his notebook - we’ve been at this long enough now to keep a record of these chats somewhere safe. We have wasted too many hours searching for sketches on scraps of paper and trying to remember what solutions we’d already found.

It’s almost lunch time by the time we’ve finished puzzling. The planning and decision making always takes so much time. It feels like we’ve got nothing done, but really it’s all progress, making decisions now means that we won’t hold ourselves up later.

Friday 30th January

At last a milky winter sun hangs in the sky and the air feels soft, the birds are everywhere, blue tits, great tits, song thrushes and robins rushing through the trees, watching me from the hedgerows, calling at me as I walk past. A red squirrel streaks across the drive in front of me, unseen by Monty, it spirals its way up a tree and out of sight across its highway of branches.

I’m so happy to finally be working in the fresh air. I throw open the greenhouse doors and heft a new bag of compost onto my shoulder. Ranunculus corms are soaking in pots, my second sowing that I’ll plant out in the cutting garden in March for a crop that follows the one in the greenhouse bed.

I scoop up handfuls of compost, scattering it into my seeds tray, which I tap smartly on the bench to level the soil. Tiny larkspur seeds rustle out onto my palm, I pick them up one-by-one with my finger tip, sowing them two per cell in the hopes one will germinate. This is a second crop too, an insurance policy in case the slugs take a fancy to the beautiful little larkspur plants I’ve been nursing all winter.

By mid afternoon the rain blows back in, it drums on the greenhouse roof, a cold breeze blowing through the open doors. I close up, brushing the dirt from my hands, pulling up my hood against the weather and going to meet Jean-Marc who is just arriving in his old tractor to deliver a load more fire wood to the barn.

Saturday 31st January

The last day of January and another damp, misty morning. Rufus and I drive through the fading fog to the bakers for fresh bread and chausson au pomme. The car fills with the scent of warm yeasty baguette and sweet buttery pastry, it’s hard to wait until we get home for breakfast.

I use my fingertip to lift the last pieces of pastry from my plate, keen not to waste a scrap. Over breakfast we decide that we all feel like getting out today for a little town bustle and a pizza for lunch so we leave mid-morning grateful that the fog has lifted and the sun is shining.

As we drive towards town the sunlight is making the tips of the trees glow pink with new life, it feels as if the season has shifted ever so slightly, a gentle nudge towards spring. The pizza is just what we need, bright and cheerful, the restaurant warm and buzzing. We eat until we can’t eat anymore, then have a wander around town with our bellies full, before heading home to haul in some logs and light the fire for a cosy afternoon.

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