I was striding up the path to the front door the other night, having spent the day in London celebrating my son’s birthday, when something out of the ordinary caught my eye on the front lawn. It turned out I was about to receive a gift of my own.

I took several steps back to check whether I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing.

There before me was a giant willow chicken. At least I thought it was a chicken, but I couldn’t be sure for I knew that a guest we had staying had been at the Newt all day, attending an “immersive” willow-weaving course with the intention of crafting a sheep. She’d come over from Girona in Spain especially for it.

“Is that the sculpture you made?” I asked tentatively when I came into the house, poking my nose into the drawing room where our guest was sitting with her family, all munching on a take-away pizza they’d picked up for supper.

“Yes,” she says, her face lighting up into a full giggle. She’s travelling with her mother and her two daughters, and each time I see them, I’m struck by their resemblance to each other. It’s like looking at an age of man depiction.

“Is it a hen?” I query, not wanting to hurt her feelings if indeed it was a sheep.

She nods, this time her face dissolving into a full-blown laugh, her family joining in.

“I’m sorry. It’s not very good, but it’s a present for you.” Her English is fluent so I know I’m not mistranslating her when I hear the word “present”.

“A present?” I say. “For us?” My returning grin is feeling a bit stiff. I’ve always wanted a sculpture for the garden is what I’m trying to make my mouth express.

I’m always astonished and ridiculously touched when guests give us gifts. We are meant to be looking after them after all, and it is not as if they are staying for free. But over the years we’ve had a vast selection of them, ranging from chocolates and flowers, to a bespoke cribbage set, a hand-made turned wooden bowl, and an antique silver-plated jam holder, which tragically, as we loved using it on the breakfast table, was stolen in a burglary last year, along with the other silver bits and bobs we used for our guests.

Then there was the crystal, brought by a woman attending a petal power course in Castle Cary, of which I had no idea such a thing existed. Being so close to Glastonbury, we often have people staying with us to attend what Martin calls “Woo Woo” courses, including those looking for their “inner Goddess” (I’ve never known anyone come back from a course looking so ill), or some other inner vibrational therapy. Others attend silent retreats and chat nine to the dozen when released back into our normal world. “I’ve never heard anyone talk so much,” Martin declared of one couple, which is saying something as he’s famous for being loquacious.

Petal power, I discovered from our guest, is akin to homeopathy and has links to flower remedies, and she swore by its medicinal strength. But when she heard that Martin had suffered from cancer and at one stage been given two years to live, but by some miracle was now cancer free, she drove to Glastonbury, which is festooned with crystal shops, and came back with a huge crystal. She presented it to us ceremoniously over breakfast the next morning.

I couldn’t look at Martin when she handed it over. Made of milky-white quartz, it was unmistakably phallic in shape. I had to bite back a giggle as I handled the stone carefully while she revealed that it was good for “releasing negative energy,” “easing stress,” and that it had “cleansing properties,” good for warding off cancer.

We were given strict instructions for its use: wash it regularly and recharge it by placing it on a windowsill under a full moon.

“Make sure you keep it by your bed at night,” she told Martin. “It will work at its best, kept close to you.”

To this day we still have it, kept close, not to our bed, but to the computer, as it’s also said to be good for absorbing radiation from screens. It makes me smile whenever I catch sight of it.

Whether we keep the chicken for the same amount of time, I have no idea, but we have named her Mildred and she will certainly make me grin every time I walk past her. I’ve already bought solar fairy lights to illuminate her at night, and have decided to describe her as a contemporary sculptural interpretation of a hen to any guests who ask. Though in truth, she could just as easily be a sheep. Or possibly a dog.

When the Spanish family leave, they insist on gathering us all together in the front garden to be photographed with her. Martin is summoned for a separate portrait, standing in the doorway with her blocking his path, looking faintly bemused. Then we photograph them, three generations of women from Girona, lined up proudly behind her and beaming broadly. I think we have given them a trip to remember as much as they have given us something to remember them.

“Well, make sure they are white,” she says. Everything in her house (including the sofas) is white, which is slightly terrifying on two counts: one for my own personal health and safety, because I keep missing steps that are there and nearly going flying, there being no distinction in colour to mark them out; and two, I’m terrified of spillages.

“I just know I’m going to splash red wine somewhere, or an entire cup of tea,” I say to Martin. We’ve already covered the sofas in heaps of throws, tonally appropriate of course, for the dogs, but I know there’s room for incidents somewhere still.

My sister is inordinately house proud when it comes to her Ibiza property, and rightly so. She’s bought it with her own money, decorated it exactly how she wants, and received accolades from the interiors press and her chic friends along the way. It is now our responsibility to look after it while we are here on a break, and we’re terrified. I suspect she might be worried too, as I can be a bit accident prone and, well, when there are dogs in a house, you never know what incidents might occur.

But where I know I am safe is in the matter of health and safety. The B&B has seen to that. When we began, more than a decade ago now, we had no idea we needed a health and safety once-over. We’d evolved from taking lodgers to Airbnb-ers, after all, where safety measures had been minimal or a matter of common sense. Not so a fully classified B&B, which we only discovered when we were reported to our district environmental health officer by, to cap it all, some guests who didn’t even stay.

At the time, we had a dear friend lodging with us. He’d recently sold his extraordinary Hansel-and-Gretel-style folly deep in the woods on the nearby Stourhead Estate, after his wife Lula, one of my closest friends, had died of a brain tumour. Before she left us, I’d promised to look after both him and Teasel, their long-legged, shaggy, pale-blonde lurcher. And so here they were.

While staying with us, Gibs watched the steady stream of guests coming and going, wide-eyed with bemusement. Castle Cary may be a small rural market town, but as a gateway to the West Country, it keeps a steady tourist flow. We were busy.

“Come on, you two, you’re not getting a break,” he said, after days of observing our frantic hospitality and seeing us exhausted at the end of each day. “Let me help out.”

We accepted. Big mistake. For when Gibs was on call to meet and greet, every single guest took fright and left.

We simply couldn’t work out why. Gibs is charm personified, but he clearly didn’t have that welcome-to-our-house-and-make-yourself-at-home touch, at least not with one particular couple who made it as far as their bedroom (and other rooms besides, including our own), didn’t like what they saw, and reported us.

From what we gathered when they phoned in a huff after their visit, they objected to the “gentleman’s accoutrements”, their tone suggesting they had stumbled across something unspeakable rather than objects in Martin’s study, and to the dogs. Never mind that our website is liberally illustrated with canines and that we are plainly labelled dog-friendly; the pair declared the house unfit for their habitation and, besides, “we are allergic to them.” It was when we declined to refund their money that they alerted the environmental health team.

Little did they know it, but they did us a favour. When Doug, our local environmental health officer, came to inspect us the following day, not only did he give us a five-star hygiene rating of the kind you see displayed in hotel and restaurant windows, but he also gave us tips on what we needed to do going forward, such as completing an online Level 2 Hygiene and Safety for Catering course, plus the equivalent to cover allergies.

“Ya Boo Sucks to those annoying guests,” I declared childishly, waving the relevant paperwork as I danced around Martin when he came back from work.

Doug had also told us to make sure we were up to scratch with the fire regulations. But it was our Marlborough Red and Havana cigar smoking Chinese guest and possible spy, Mrs P, who really brought the matter home. She spent nigh on a year with us thanks to the various lockdowns, and most of the time would smoke outside on the terrace, come rain or shine.

Occasionally, however, she would hang herself out of her bedroom window, just like a teenager, and, equally like a guilty child, deny all knowledge of it when I stomped upstairs in a huff to tell her for the umpteenth time that smoking was banned in the house.

When the world started opening up again and we had other guests alongside Mrs P, they were less forgiving of her habits. Worse, one of them happened to be a fire health and safety officer by trade who, rather than making a scene, discreetly contacted our local fire safety manager and suggested we be recommended an update on our fire safety policy. What we hadn’t realised was that B&B fire policies had been significantly tightened in the wake of the Grenfell disaster.

And so we found ourselves, thanks to Mrs P, calling in a specially trained electrician to install new fire alarms in practically every room in the house, leaving a clearly worded fire policy in each bedroom, and much more besides. It cost a fortune and Martin grumbled throughout, but I pointed out that once again a guest, albeit an infuriating smoking one, had done us a favour.

Which is why I knew all about fire alarms when my sister started messaging us in Ibiza.

“Can’t they be somewhere discreet?” she asked, referring to the smoke detectors being installed. “Well, yes, but they need to be somewhere they can actually detect smoke,” I texted back. Which made it slightly ironic that in order to check one particular alarm was working, when the fire officer had finished installing everything, Martin had to be called in to assist.

The fire officer had tested each alarm by waving a piece of flaming paper directly under its sensors, but one, newly installed in a central spot in the kitchen and probably therefore the most important of all, was refusing to react to anything being put under its nostrils at all.

Now Martin is legendary for his love of cigars. He has a huge collection of them (and of humidors too), and is famous for playing tennis with a racket in one hand and a cigar in the other, still slamming the opposition. Since his cancer, he is technically forbidden to touch them by his wife (ie me), friends and family alike, but occasionally he allows himself the odd smoke, such as when he is on holiday.

This was relayed in my best Spanglish to the fire officer who, after some enthusiastic Google translating, got the gist and waved Martin, by now armed with a lit cigar, to a spot directly under the alarm.

Still it did not work. So there was much scuffling about while a ladder was located and brought in. To this day I still chuckle at the video on my phone of Martin, assisted solicitously by the fire officer as if he were escorting a duchess up a ladder rather than a Teletubby-tummied 73-year-old man, gamely puffing cigar smoke at the sensor, almost making himself pass out in the process, until his efforts finally inspired a suitably alarming ring.

Back in Ibiza, the fire alarms sorted, further safety correspondence arrived for our B&B at home. These days, hostelries like ours no longer require an on-site visit from a health and safety officer. Instead, we must fill in a multiple choice form, which I find problematic at the best of times, as I tend to think there is always more than one answer. So it proved. An email arrived informing us that we had not yet passed our health and safety check, that my hygiene certificate needed updating and that Martin’s did too.

On top of that came a note from the tax office informing us that we needed to move to digital accounting. Martin does his accounts scrupulously on paper and regards anything online with deep suspicion, especially banking.

“That’s it,” he said. “I’ve had enough. We are not doing the B&B any more.”

And yet. As I write this, we are still at our front door, still welcoming strangers into our home and our beds. And I am still working out how to get Martin round to digitalisation, which feels a feat too far. I’d far rather be back in an all-white house in Ibiza filled with hazards any day.

He rang at 8 o’clock in the evening and was at Castle Cary station by 8.16pm. Not the latest last minute booking we’ve ever had, but late enough. And from the moment he called, I had a feeling we might be receiving another dodgy guest. I was on my own, Martin was out playing his regular tennis.

For a start, he called me by my name, which always disconcerts me, and then by my nickname, reminding me of PRs in the old days who wanted to make me think I knew them by being overfamiliar. I also had shades of a rather unsavoury guest from a previous stay, and he did arrive looking worryingly similar: dark bomber jacket, slim, same tidy, combed to one side, black hair, black overnight bag. On top of that, he didn’t want to give me his card details.

Taxis from our station to us are few and far between, so I offered to collect him myself, muttering inanely for my own neurotic safety purposes that normally Martin would pick him up, but that he was out. “However, he will be back very soon,” I blurted.

Coincidentally, as soon as we cut the call, and while I was running around frantically getting the room ready and the heating on (we were otherwise empty that night), the phone rang again. It was him.

“Mel, I’ve just bumped into a lady who has very kindly offered to give me a lift. She says she knows you.”

“How lovely,” I replied. “Who is it?”

I heard a murmur and muffled giggles. “I can’t say that,” I heard him say in the background. Then the sound of the phone being passed to another hand: “You talk to her.”

On came the female voice.

“Mel, it’s Bee.”

Bee is one of my favourite people in the area, but one I hardly ever get to see, as we are so busy here with the B&B that our social life tends to stay around the breakfast table, and when we are free, generally early in the week, they are booked up and vice versa. It was heaven to hear her voice.

“Bee!” I squealed.

“Funny, isn’t it,” she said, referring to the man. “We met over the rubbish.”

They had been in the same train carriage and, just as the train was coming into our station, were both keen to find the bin to put their rubbish away, and only found each other instead. If he’s a man who worries about putting his rubbish away, I thought, there must be something nice about him.

And indeed there was. Bee dropped him off, embracing me in a big, big-bosomed Bee hug before speeding off home. “Love to Martin!” she cried.

“What did she call herself that you couldn’t say?” I asked our guest, once Bee had gone.

“Short and fat.” He looked pained. “That’s why I couldn’t say it.”

“Oh,” I replied. “That’s so Bee.” Indeed she is small in stature but not fat, instead, to put it politely, well-endowed upstairs, which gives her a certain extra padding. She always wears heels, which reminds me of a Beryl Cook painting whenever I see her.

I first came across Bee when I was still working at Country Life. She is mad about horses and was hugely into using The Box: a device which, by some alchemy, reveals what might be wrong with a horse and therefore how to heal it. I ended up writing about it when I relayed her work to our editor, who owned a horse at the time and was keen to know everything there is to know about holistic treatments for equines. So I went to see her in Somerset, and then completely forgot about the whole trip when I came down to live near where she had her stables, far too preoccupied with my own present life to think back to my past one.

She even rang me, with a cheerful “halloo”, and suggested that if I ever wanted to ride I should come and visit, and to let me know that as a newcomer she could help with anything I needed. It was characteristically delightful and generous of her. Only I never took her up on her offer, and didn’t actually get to meet her again properly until I met Martin, for she turned out to be a great friend of his.

They grew up in the area together, she in a big pile of a house nearby that is now rumoured to host sex parties. “The basement rooms there are something else,” said a friend who went to a conference there recently.

She married another big house owner but it was not a great success, and she now has a vet as a partner who is equally charming and entertaining. She, he and Martin are in regular WhatsApp joke sessions together. She is always a joy to see, and our new guest took to her too.

I beamed as I showed him around. And when it came to the stage of asking him about breakfast timings, his face turned into a sort of apologetic expression. “I have to get up really early,” he said.

He was here for work at nearby Wincanton, his business being technology or AI, making him a sort of high-faluting business Techy. He added that he was dreadful in the mornings, and at that point I was sold on him completely. Here was a man after my own heart, a fellow night owl. “That’s just like me,” I said. “I hate morning.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he replied. “I can be polite at any hour.” And indeed he was.

For he came down super early for breakfast the next morning, not because he had turned into a lark overnight, but because his children had stolen his toothbrush charger. “Kids, hey,” he said with a shrug and a smile. “Do you have one I can borrow?”

I was still in my pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, getting the table ready. Normally I get a little flustered and annoyed if someone comes down before we are fully prepared, but in this case I didn’t mind at all. I grinned back. “Of course. We’ll charge the brush and put it in your room later. Now, what would you like, tea or coffee?”

***

He’s now staying a couple more nights, which has involved juggling other guests around, and Martin is happy that at last, signs of a slow spring are beginning to pick up. As for me, I’ve been reminded that now I’m more experienced as a B&B hostess, I should never be too old and wizened in letting bad experiences of the past colour my view of present guests. Not everyone who is superfriendly on the phone is dodgy. They are just friendly and nice.

We still don’t have his card details, mind you.

In my wildest dreams as a B&B hostess, I never expected to find myself dancing round our kitchen table with a legendary Motown man. And yet there I was at 10 a.m., shimmying as if the table were my handbag, alongside a 6 ft 2, rasta‑haired singer who had once been part of The Drifters and The Temptations, and was now one of our guests. Music was blaring from the kitchen‑cupboard speakers and I was grinning from ear to ear.

Quite how I got to that point, I’m still not entirely sure. But Clyde, as he introduced himself in his gorgeously mellifluous voice, told me about a new version of a song called I Want to Ta Ta You Baby. He’d just recorded it with the Portuguese singer‑songwriter Cordeone. We found the track on YouTube and, before I knew it, we were in full boogie mode: hips swinging as if I was in Studio 54, dressed to the nines, and not in my trademark AGA apron.

Don’t get me wrong, my kitchen has often doubled up as a dance floor. My sister even gave me a disco ball to hang in it, and my filmmaker son once used clips of me mum‑dancing, arms in the air, in a birthday video. But that was always in the dark, at night, sometimes on my own, and certainly never with guests in glaringly broad daylight over toast and marmalade.

Clyde and his then partner had come to stay as they were house-hunting in the area. My first glimpse of him was out of my bedroom window: he unfurled himself from his red Mercedes saloon, broad-rimmed hat and dark glasses firmly in place.

“I hope to goodness, the whole of Castle Cary is seeing this,” I muttered excitedly. We may be close to Glastonbury Festival territory, but it is not often you see a man of Clyde’s exotic calibre in our tiny town. I rushed down to greet him, lingering on the street as long as possible hoping that curtains were twitching at the sight of me.

It was over breakfast that I heard Clyde’s full story (a version of which you can hear on BBC Sounds). His story is classic Motown. Born in Brooklyn, he began singing with his brother aged five in a gospel group formed by his father. When I met him, he was still deeply religious. At breakfast, he would cross himself before he ate, sending up a silent prayer of gratitude “to the man upstairs”.

His music break came just at a “fork in his life”. He had been offered a basketball sports scholarship and was studying law when he was approached to sing with the Drifters. “I had damaged my knee and thought, well, I always go back to law if music doesn’t work.” He never looked back and ended up sharing stages with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Martha Reeves and many more Motown greats, coming over to the UK some two decades ago, and ending up one night at our B&B.

Martin was not around at this stage. He was still based at his workshop outside Wells, crafting the Gothic follies and garden pots that were his trademark. Which was perhaps just as well, for I’m not sure I would have shimmied quite so freely had my husband been watching.

Slightly out of breath, I collapsed back into my chair as the music faded. It was then that Clyde mentioned, almost in passing, that he did the occasional charity concert with his band Masterpiece, a celebration of the Motown greats.

My ears pricked up immediately. “Would you do one here, for me?” I asked, enthusiasm taking over.

“Sure,” he grinned.

And that was how, a few months later, I ended up dancing to Clyde’s music again, only not at our B&B, but at a glorious house nearby called North Cadbury Court, owned by a friend. Many of our guests would be familiar with it as it normally doubles up as a super chic country house wedding venue, but on this occasion it was the perfect setting for a Motown concert in its old ballroom, headlined by our houseguest.

I have never quite experienced an evening like it. It seemed as if half the local community, plus their guests, had dressed à la Motown. The host’s wife, together with her sister and best friend, had come as the Three Degrees: wigs, blue sequin jumpsuits, stacked heels and all. They looked spectacular. And the moment Clyde came on, it was as if something extraordinary had been unleashed.

Suddenly everyone gathered on the dance floor, all 300 of us, with my 80-year-old mother elbowing her way to the front to be at Clyde’s feet. “This is my kind of music,” she squealed, bopping away. The atmosphere was electric. For two hours, though it felt like minutes, nobody stopped dancing until Clyde finished his last track. And then it was as if everything slowed and people stood staring, blinking at each other, wondering what had just happened.

Our lives for those two hours had become Motown.

But the concert was not Clyde’s only performance on our patch. My filmmaker son Jasper had other ideas. He cast Clyde as the star of a short film entitled So What I can Dance he made for Hunger magazine, the premise being a suited office worker who, fed up with his day, gets up and dances, to the astonishment of the secretary played by Jasper’s actress girlfriend.

Clyde threw himself into it completely, three-piece suit, tie and all. What nobody had warned him about was quite how many times Jasper would make him repeat the same moves. He was in his Seventies at the time.

“Don’t tell Jasper,” he confided afterwards, with characteristic grace, “but I ache in every bit of my body.” (Check out the clip to understand why).

It was the most Clyde thing he could possibly have said. A man who had shared stages with Aretha Franklin, brought down a Somerset ballroom and danced in a kitchen at 10 in the morning, and his only complaint was that he didn’t want to disappoint a young director.

Clyde’s mantra for life is “adapt and improvise”. When he left, I felt that his words summed up our life as a B&B host beautifully. With each new guest we have to adapt and improvise too, and I can’t imagine ever dancing around the table with a guest, let alone a Motown one, again. But then I never imagined I would either.

Since Clyde, and quite recently we have had an Irish mathematician with a tin whistle tucked in his overnight bag and a traditional Irish flute, who had us all toe-tapping over breakfast as he rehearsed a jig for a wedding.

You never know who is going to walk through the door next. And that is where the fun of running a B&B lies.

Martin is usually as light in his conversation as he is on his feet: always ready with a quip at the breakfast table, deft at steering things away from awkwardness, and fond of remarks that skim just close enough to the bone to earn a guilty giggle. But occasionally he makes a complete boob, as he did the other morning.

It was one of those deceptively peaceful B&B breakfasts, coffee smells drifting up the stairs, cutlery chinking quietly, the soft murmur of conversation. Right up until one couple began chatting about their plans to visit Shepton Mallet.

“Why?” asks Martin bluntly, hitching a tea towel over his shoulder. And before they can answer, he launches into the local nickname for the town: “Shit and Smellit!” “Or,” he adds, putting on a French accent, “Shepton Mall-et” (as in ballet) “if you’re trying to sound posh.” Naturally I feel compelled to join in.

“Yup. And we call Yeovil, ‘Yeo-vile’.”

These are exactly the sort of terms that incomera like me start using to sound more local than we really are. I borrow shamelessly from genuine locals like Martin, who grew up practically under the shadow of Glastonbury Tor.

The nicknames earn a giggle from the couple at the end of the table, a pair from Guildford here to visit Stourhead gardens, secure in the knowledge they’re headed somewhere universally admired.

Not so the other couple.

“Actually, we’re going because my family originates from Shepton Mallet,” says one, who turns out to be a former British Consul General in São Paulo.

There is a tiny, immaculate pause. Even the toast Martin has put on for their scrambled eggs seems to go into momentary suspension before popping up. Realising that for once he’s stepped squarely into it, Martin begins an enthusiastic backtrack.

The last time I’d seen him this discomforted at breakfast was when he started mocking Trump to a group of MAGA-supporting Texans during Trump’s first US election stint.

“Err, well, yes. There’s the famous prison there,” he blurts. “It’s where the really bad people went.”

Not sure that’s much of a consolation, I wade in again. “It is an incredible prison. Very old,” I say, trying to rescue him. “Seventeenth century. It’s now used for films and TV, and is something of a tourist attraction. They run events there too.”

I’m thinking of the guests who went for escape-room parties at the prison, and the mother and daughter duo who stayed purely for an overnight ghost tour. The prison is meant to be one of the most haunted in the country, and apparently still echoes with the sounds of the poor souls who met their end there. They were such unlikely ghost hunters, more tiny wee Reese Witherspoons than ghoulish spectre chasers, that they’ve stayed lodged in my memory.

The Italian Job

With Shepton Mallet equally lodged in my mind, I’m now trying desperately hard not to splutter out another related and again slightly tactless story, freshly resurfacing thanks to the local buzz about the new Italian restaurant, which has just opened in Castle Cary. It’s the talk of the town. Unlike nearby Bruton, now known as the Notting Hill of Somerset, we are short of restaurants here and its arrival has been greeted with excitement, which makes it doubly hard to stop myself from recounting this earlier Shepton tale.

The story involved a couple from Portsmouth who had come to stay with us for an easy overnight trip to celebrate a birthday. “That’s interesting. Where are you going to celebrate?” asked Martin, who has a habit of enquiring about guests’ eating plans almost before they’ve crossed the threshold, such is his interest in food.

We were both surprised when they mentioned an Italian in Shepton Mallet. “Oh, we’ve never heard of that one,” said Martin after a pause. He prides himself on knowing every decent eatery in the area.

“It’s got very good reviews,” they replied, a touch defensively. And sure enough, a quick check on TripAdvisor confirmed it. The restaurant had some of the highest ratings we’ve seen locally, even matching Osip, our über-chic Michelin-starred restaurant outside Bruton.

“Perhaps we’d better check it out sometime,” Martin said, sounding dubious.

However, all thoughts of that vanished the following morning when Martin asked how their meal had gone. It turned out they’d enjoyed a birthday supper to remember, though not for the reasons they’d hoped.

“It was really good,” said the wife. “You know, a classic, friendly Italian. Except halfway through supper the restaurant was raided by immigration officers.”

“What?” we both exclaimed.

“Yes. Apparently there’d been a tip-off. Two were guarding the front door and the rest went into the kitchen. And they were big bruisers. About ten of them.”

“Goodness,” I said, shocked. “Coo. That’s not what you’d expect around here,” added Martin, struggling to imagine sleepy Shepton dealing with city-style raids. The couple agreed, nodding that it was more like something they might encounter in Portsmouth. “We were lucky though. We’d ordered, and our meal had arrived. Others had to wait at least an hour.”

In Defence of Shepton

Somehow I resisted repeating that story, and later that day, when our diplomat and his wife returned, we both headed to the hallway to ask how their visit had gone, still feeling guilty about our reactions that morning.

“I thought Shepton was really nice, by the way,” said his wife, a Brazilian dentist with a master’s from São Paulo and a doctorate from London, delivering the line with the kind of polished warmth that felt, ever so gently, like a reprimand.

Sadly they’d found no sign of a relative in the graveyard nor of the ancestor’s workshop. The great-great-grandfather had been the last bootmaker in a long line, with an alleyway down the side of his shop leading to where he kept his horse. Fifty years ago it was taken over by an electrician who was no longer there, but they had roughly located where the original shop would have been, and had enjoyed the local library. “It’s brilliant for local history,” she said. “You must go there if you want to find anything out about the area.”

And actually, Shepton has a lot going for it. It was once a great wool town (hence the shortened “sheep” in the name) and now, thanks to a new wave of creatives, it’s quietly reinventing itself. The old industrial buildings hide artists’ studios and workshops, and the Art Bank on the High Street runs residencies and exhibitions. Come February, the whole town blossoms for its Snowdrop Festival, with shopfronts turning into galleries.

The town’s also home to the Showering family, the cider-brewing dynasty, who made their name in the 1950s by inventing Babycham, that sparkling perry with the prancing deer, served in a coupe glass, designed to attract women into pubs, and the first alcoholic drink ever advertised on British television. They later launched Brothers Cider, still made in Shepton, and have since bought back their ancestral home at Kilver Court to turn it into a creative hub.

Martin’s favourite tale, though, is of old Keith Showering, whose office looked out over the lawn by the pond in front of the viaduct. “He used to keep flamingos on the lake there,” Martin will say, “as he liked the look of them. Except they kept straying onto the lawns or ambling into the garden beds, so he’d get his secretary to shoo them back.”

Nipple to Nipple

Mentioning Babycham always sparks something, and this time it was June, our housekeeper, who happened to overhear the conversation as she came through with a basket of freshly ironed napkins.

“Ooh, I love Babycham,” she declares, in the same tone one might reserve for announcing a lifelong devotion to fine Champagne. Before anyone can respond, she adds proudly, “And my father had the Babycham logo tattooed on his chest. The champagne glass and the little deer. Right here.” She taps her sternum. “Full size. Nipple to nipple.”

There is a beat of silence as everyone digests this unexpected image: a man, bare-chested, permanently emblazoned with what is essentially a festive woodland creature raising a toast. June, entirely unbothered, continues. “He got it in the seventies because he thought it was classy.” And honestly, for Shepton, it sort of is.

One Final Boob

As the couple finally gather themselves to leave, diplomatic calm fully restored, Martin decides to have one last go at being helpful and, inevitably, makes one final boob.

“If you’re heading back through Shepton,” he says cheerfully, “you’ll pass Cannards Grave. You know, the crossroads named after that rogue innkeeper who was either hanged there or buried after topping himself. He’s very famous locally.”

I see the British Consul’s shoulders stiffen almost imperceptibly. Giles Cannard was reputedly the landlord of a hostelry about one mile south of Shepton Mallet. By day he was a respectable host, running a popular staging post for travellers between Bristol and the south. His wealth, however, was not gained solely by honourable means. According to an account dated 1662, the rector of Shepton noted that rumours abounded about Cannard’s involvement with smuggling, gambling and “profane” activities. Eventually exposure and humiliation drove the man to take his own life, and he was buried at the crossroads near his pub.

I can’t tell whether the Consul’s stiffening is because he has absolutely no idea what Martin is talking about, or because he’s now bracing for yet another unflattering fact about his ancestral town. But ever the diplomat, he manages a smooth, unwavering smile.

“Wonderful. Well, thank you both. See you again soon. We’ll be in touch.” And with that he glides out, the only man I’ve ever seen leave our B&B dining room as if departing from an embassy reception.

The Boot on the Other Foot

A few days later we have a hip-looking young couple at breakfast, staying for a night before heading off to join their family at Babington House near Frome. Somehow we get on to the subject of our Shit and Smellit boob.

“Oh, I’ve done that before,” laughs the girl, a Pippi Longstocking lookalike with a wonderful smattering of freckles across her nose and lovely, laughing eyes. “I was meeting a new girlfriend of a friend and started talking about how grim Croydon is. It turned out the the girlfriend was from Croydon.”

This time, it’s Martin’s turn to fall silent. For I know perfectly well his son’s first London house had a CR (Croydon) postcode. He’s moved now, but it frustrated his son that, while the house was technically in Croydon, it was actually on the edge of Mitcham and Tooting.

Meanwhile, it’s hard not to feel a quiet affection for a town that can claim a haunted prison, an immigration-raid-ready Italian restaurant, flamingo-wrangling secretaries and a vintage perry brand whose mascot once adorned our housekeeper’s father’s chest from nipple to nipple. Sometimes it’s good to have a Shit and Smellit cobbler ancestor’s boot on the other foot.

Times like Easter and Christmas do strange things to the boundaries between guest and host in a B&B like ours. On ordinary days, your own life and that of your guests can overlap in all sorts of unpredictable ways. The doorbell will inevitably ring just as you sink into the bath, leaving you to hurtle downstairs half‑dressed and in danger of terrifying whoever’s on the doorstep. Or you can be desperate for the loo, holding off because you’re expecting someone to arrive at any moment, only to finally give in to the pressure of your bladder and hear, at that precise instant, the doorbell ring. And once, after an hour of gardening on a hot afternoon, I opened the door to an early guest while wearing a bikini. I hated that. It put me completely on the wrong foot to be so bare. Besides, my winter‑pale body was far from bikini ready. Life isn’t entirely your own when you run a B&B.

But during Christmas and Easter, those edges blur even more. Christmas especially tends to test the limits of hospitality. One year we had guests staying on the top floor, regular visitors from the Shetlands whose parents lived nearby in a small cottage. We were also hosting a family Christmas for twenty‑eight, and to cap it all, our dog chose that December to have a litter of puppies.

I’ll never forget the sullen faces of my teenage nieces and nephews as they were made to wait for our traditional stocking‑opening session until the guests had finished breakfast and the kitchen was finally clear for our own celebrations. The only way to cheer them up was to hand out puppy duties.

Never has a set of puppies gone to new homes so well socialised, or so house‑trained, when they were finally old enough to leave. Martin and I were scrupulous about preventing accidents in the kitchen, where our dog had chosen to make her nest. Somehow, puppy poo and pee don’t make the most alluring companions at breakfast, so we stayed hot on the case long after our nieces and nephews had lost interest. By the time the festive period was over, Martin and I needed at least two full pyjama days before we had enough energy to speak to each other again, let alone do anything active like changing beds.

“Never again,” Martin said, which might explain why we let our Italian greyhound‑whippety thing pass quietly beyond her puppy‑producing years. It also perhaps explains why, whenever I suggest hosting an event of more than eight people, including us, he flatly refuses.

One of the most memorable Christmases was when a Nigerian woman called Yolly came to stay. She was a personal shopper who had come down especially for the Mulberry factory shop’s Boxing Day sale, just fifteen minutes away. Yolly was also an aspiring influencer and changed her outfit at least six times a day, asking one of us to take photos of her posing in various places around the house and garden, usually just at a key point when we were in the middle of cooking or cleaning.

We were, again, hosting our family Christmas, and just as everyone sat down for turkey, Yolly appeared unannounced, made herself at home at the table, and offered up the cracker we’d left in her room along with gifts from the small stocking we’d given her. Then, without hesitation, she helped herself to lunch. Never have I seen my family so astonished, or so silent. But being who they are, within minutes they had drawn her into the fold, chatting away as if absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

The following year brought a different test altogether. We were hosting a Chinese woman, Mrs P, and her daughter May, who wanted to experience a traditional English family Christmas. It turned out to be the only time I’ve ever felt truly wrong‑footed by a guest’s behaviour.

Just as I’d finished decorating the kitchen table at about four o’clock on Christmas Eve, there came a knock at the door. When I opened it, there stood Mrs P, looking for all the world as though she’d brought Macbeth’s Birnam Wood to our doorstep. She was almost invisible behind a mountain of foliage. Without a word, she swept in, removed every decoration I’d spent the afternoon arranging, and rebuilt the table to her own design. I was so tired I could feel tears pricking my eyes and had to leave the room, otherwise I might have said something I’d regret.

Christmas lunch wasn’t much calmer. After quietly watching me cook for most of the morning, Mrs P suddenly decided her daughter would need something more familiar. Halfway through the meal she rose from her chair, rolled up her sleeves, and began preparing wontons right there in the middle of my kitchen, adding another layer of chaos to an already chaotic day and leaving the rest of us in giggles.

Life can be busy as a B&B hostess, and sometimes trying, but it is rarely dull and often unexpectedly full of laughter, especially now that we’ve solved the Christmas hosting issue by heading off to my sister’s new home in Ibiza, where we’re the ones waited on hand and foot. It’s the most immense treat. But we’re still open at Easter.

This year has been a relatively calm one, helped by the fact that Great Western Railway chose this very holiday weekend to cancel its regular train service and replace it with buses, thanks to “planned engineering work.” That alone has kept numbers down, and rising oil prices have played their part too, prompting some visitors to wonder whether they can still afford to get here. Between Great Western and the wider world, the guest list has more or less arranged itself.

Nevertheless, we’ve had an intrepid few who have made our Easter entertaining: our son Jasper and his girlfriend Connie; two regular visitors at this time of year; two Chinese couples touring the West Country; and a pair helping their daughter and her partner fix problems in the new house they’ve just bought in Castle Cary. We’ve also seen two of our grandchildren. As ever, by the end of it, as I write, it’s hard to tell quite where our family ends and our guests begin, which, in a B&B, is so often how these things turn out.

Happy Easter, everyone!

This week, one of our regular younger guests, a gorgeous auburn-haired scientist who comes to stay for work and has become part of our B&B “family”, announced that “the perfect time for a break up is in December”.

Her reasoning?

“You can spend all of the month in your pyjamas, doing a full Bridget Jones, tucking into wine and weeping, and no one will take any notice.”

She said this with her eyes glistening, one small tear escaping down her freckled cheek, which she wiped away quickly, clearly hoping we had not seen. It may be four months since she and her boyfriend split up after seven years together, but she is still feeling the pain.

Martin and I felt for her instantly. But neither of us really knew what to say, beyond making sympathetic noises.

She is 31, at that point where you expect life to be settling down and everything to be moving forwards. In fact, she had settled down, or so she thought. She and her boyfriend had bought a two-bedroom apartment together and were talking about marriage and children.

Then things changed.

Her other half announced, more or less out of the blue, that he was going to take a six-month job exchange, leaving her to move into their new “forever together” home on her own. Which she did, uncomplainingly spending weekend after weekend lugging furniture around and getting the flat ready for when he got home, choosing carpets, curtains and a new washing machine, everything that goes with an exciting new life.

“I don’t understand it,” she sniffed. “He kept ringing me while he was away to tell me he loved me and that he was missing me, and everything seemed fine when I went out to visit him.”

But the story was very different when he came home. He declared everything was over. They would not be moving in together. Instead, he was going to emigrate to Australia. It was a kind of goodbye, have a nice life moment, a complete blow to the stomach, even for his parents who were shattered by the prospect of their son moving so far away.

“The only thing I can think of was that he was suffering an early mid-life crisis,” she said.

I thought differently but kept that to myself.

Whatever the reason, it was not going to lessen the pain. As she admitted mournfully, staring deeply into her coffee as if the odd floating grain might reveal something about her future,

“I thought I knew what my life was going to look like.”

I tried to be reassuring by telling her that I did not have a child until I was 34, and that I did not marry until I was 51, and that you never know what is around the next corner. But even to my own ears, my words sounded more hollow than consoling.

For his part, Martin was equally desperate to offer reassurance. Shifting awkwardly, he offered her more coffee, as if copious amounts of caffeine might heal an emotional wound, before saying, “Yes, well… I can see the idea. Get it all out of the way in a month, then back on track.”

I laughed and she managed a wobbly smile.

“I don’t think it is as cut and dried as all that, my darling,” I said.

His comment reminded me of when we had a group of women staying one summer weekend. They were all sharing rooms, all friends in couples, all serious professionals of one kind or another, and all attending weddings, though not necessarily the same one.

All had partners they had left behind, bar one. An American woman, living in France and in her mid-thirties, who was hopeful she might meet her match at one of the wedding parties. Instead, she came back crestfallen.

“Everyone seemed to be attached,” she said at breakfast to us all, with the natural confidence of a wealthy Hamptons heiress. “I don’t understand it. I’m not bad looking, I’m blonde, I have money, a wonderful apartment in Lyon, I know about wine, I’m a master, and yet I can’t seem to find anyone who wants to be with me.”

At which point Martin stepped in with, “Well, you’d better get on with it, otherwise you’ll miss the boat if you want children.”

There was a palpable silence around the table, until somehow I deflected the moment by turning the tables on Martin, pointing out that he had not left home until he was 34, and that was to get married, a fact I am very glad I did not know when I first met him, otherwise it might have put me off him.

I relayed this tale to our auburn-haired guest, chuckling at the memory of Martin’s tact.

“He’s not particularly famous for being reassuring in these moments,” I said.

Then I added that, shortly after, our American master of wine had gone on to become something of an internet sensation, creating a very funny Instagram account about being a tall, slightly generous around the middle, ample-chested American woman living in France. She would film herself trying to squeeze into ski outfits that were supposedly her size, with no chance whatsoever of persuading jackets and trousers to meet in the middle.

She became so popular that a number of French fashion houses began sending her properly sized clothes to try on.

“She did eventually meet her man,” I said, “an aristocratic Frenchman, and is now happily married with a baby.” She also developed a new sideline offering tuition in growing Instagram audiences.

That made our guest smile.

“Well, I suppose there is some hope for me,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll go down the Instagram route. I’ll just stick to conventional dating.”

We refilled her coffee and sent her off to work with a spare croissant for a mid-morning snack, as if that might help in some small way.

The guests who come through our door always bring with them a remarkable range of tales, some more poignant than others, and this one, perhaps because of our affection for the girl, will remain with us for a while.

The truth is, there is very little you can say at times like this. People do not want reassurance, or timelines, or examples of how things worked out for someone else. They want to hold on to their story and keep it theirs.

All we can really do is stand with them, listen, and hope that, in time, they begin to imagine a different one with an altogether happier ending.

Though I should add, not all breakfast conversations are quite so gentle. Some are rather more… unexpected. But that,

I think, is a story for next week.

When we took a booking from a very English-sounding older gentleman for his German brother, we thought nothing of it. We often have this kind of “spillover” from families staying when they are local and there is a room short at their end, particularly if they have retired and downsized. What we didn’t expect was that they would be meeting for the very first time at our breakfast table, at the age of seventy-something.

Breakfast, at first, was perfectly normal, except that one brother had stayed with us and the other had come from his own bed.

“Good morning, good morning,” said Martin, with his usual cheer, as the German, who we later learnt was a psychiatrist by training, came downstairs into the kitchen. “Did you sleep well… good, good. Coffee or tea?”

His brother rang the doorbell a few seconds later. Whereupon I stepped in, showed him to his seat, and went into my usual spiel, pointing out our home-made granola and muesli and describing our compotes and everything else we have on offer at breakfast, including Martin’s “legendary” scrambled eggs.

If the two men seemed a touch awkward with each other, we put it down to it being a bit too early in the morning for conversation to have warmed up. They sat opposite each other, mildly formal, chatting about their plans for the day ahead, with one or other of us interjecting from time to time to fill the odd silence. Neither particularly resembled the other, though both had a full head of hair, one very grey, the other dark, and were much the same height.

Gradually they began talking about their respective families, and it was as if they were describing them to each other for the very first time, which both Martin and I found faintly odd.

Until we heard their full story, which went something like this.

The Englishman had been adopted. He had never been particularly curious about his biological heritage, but when his daughter wanted to have children and asked him to do a DNA test, in case there was some inherited condition in his genetic make-up, he agreed quite happily.

Only the results were not quite what either had expected.

“You’ve got a brother,” the daughter said. “And he’s living in Germany.”

Apparently, towards the end of the Second World War, an English officer had met and fallen in love with a married German woman. The affair was brief, risky and doomed from the start, but it left the woman pregnant, unbeknown to the officer, who returned home. He married, had two children and adopted another, our English breakfast guest, without ever realising that he had fathered another child.

The tale would never have been uncovered had it not been for the Englishman’s granddaughter asking for the DNA test.

I was reminded of this while reading an article about the punk rocker Billy Idol last week. Idol’s daughter had been given a DNA test as a gift by her husband, and through it discovered she had a brother. “I actually had a son that I didn’t realise,” he said sounding rather delighted.

Both our men were equally delighted by their discovery, though they noted, with some interest, that in another era they might have been enemies, which is perhaps why they chose to meet on neutral territory. On this occasion, that turned out to be our kitchen.

Our kitchen table has many a story to tell, but this one may be among its most unusual.

Sometimes guests just don’t want to leave our B&B.

“How come?” a friend asked. “Did you make life too comfortable for them?”

“Well, yes and no. To be honest, I think we were just schmucks in the early days and they saw us coming.” Or we were “too nice,” as my mother would say, not meaning it as a compliment.

We’ve had two guests who wouldn’t leave. Three, if you count the one who never came back.

He was in his late twenties, good-looking, a country sports type and perfectly charming. He arrived one winter’s night after his newly built house had flooded. He chose us because we were dog-friendly and brought with him a beautifully kept working spaniel.

“I’m being compensated by my insurance company,” he told us, “and work’s helping me out, so don’t worry about the cost. Don’t give me a discount. Charge the full price.”

Given his situation, and the fact he would clearly be with us for a while, we offered him a cheaper rate anyway.

I can’t quite remember what he did, something like estate management. At weekends he disappeared to his girlfriend in Devon, who also worked on an estate for someone famous.

Then one weekend, after a few weeks with us, he simply didn’t come back.

He left behind a worn plastic bag of dog food and treats, and a cheap black holdall containing a pair of smart brown Oxford shoes, a full change of clothes, and the usual bathroom things: shaving cream, razors, aftershave and deodorant.

We texted. We called. We wondered what he was planning to do and reassured him we weren’t concerned about the money he owed.

Nothing. Nada. Stone-cold silence.

In the end, we took the clothes to a charity shop and gave the dog food away.

The other two were different.

One turned out to be vaguely psychotic and eventually trashed us across various review platforms after we finally prised her out. The other was a good old-fashioned loony tune who we later discovered drifted from house to house like some modern-day hustler of a Buddhist monk, taking advantage of gullible newcomers to the B&B trade like us.

The latter started off by not coming down to breakfast, sending a text saying he was ill.

“Oh no! You poor thing,” I texted back. “Do you need anything?”

“Maybe a croissant and some coffee, only if you can manage it,” came the wan reply.

For the next few days we coddled and comforted him and even shared our lunch, though not at the same time. We didn’t want to catch whatever he had. It was summer, and he would come downstairs in his tracksuit and sit outside, occasionally asking forlornly for a couple of paracetamol and some water.

After several days of this, Martin started to get suspicious. Something was niggling him. So if the man ventured any further than the garden, he would check whether his duffel bag was still in the room, coming downstairs reassured that he hadn’t done a runner.

Only he did.

About a week later, on the day Martin had decided we should ask him for some money, we came back from a shopping trip to find he had vanished.

We always take card details when people book, but we don’t process the payment until they leave. It’s standard practice. Deposits can be more trouble than they’re worth if you have to return them.

Only this man’s card didn’t work, of course.

We’d been diddled.

“And to think we gave him lunch every day,” Martin said.

But the worst was yet to come.

One Sunday, an American woman rang to book a room for the following day, wanting at least one night. “My partner might come too, but I’m not sure yet.” We had one room left, a twin, so we gave her that.

The next morning, at 7.30am, while we were busy preparing breakfast for our existing guests, the doorbell rang.

Martin went to answer it. It was the American. Martin being Martin, and ever hospitable, explained that it was a bit early for check-in, but she was welcome to leave her bags with us and would she like a coffee, since nothing would be open in town?

The next thing I knew, in she strode into the kitchen, ignoring Martin’s suggestion that she sit in the drawing room. My heart did a cold shiver when I saw her. With her white magnolia pallor, jet black trousers, white shirt and black jacket, she looked as if she had strayed out of the Addams Family. There was something about her that struck me as, well, odd, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. My hackles rose instinctively.

Seeing that we were laying up breakfast, she sat down at the table, grabbed a bowl and started to help herself to whatever she could see before her: compotes, granola and yogurt.

“Actually, that’s breakfast for existing guests,” said Martin, fluttering anxiously around her.

“Yes, and you’re here far too early,” I added, rather more sharply, looking daggers at Martin.

“How can you have let her in?” I whispered angrily.

“I couldn’t help it, she just pushed past,” he whispered back.

I began to wonder what the other guests would make of this strange creature at our table. If I thought there was something odd about her, surely they would pick that up too.

So when they started trickling down for breakfast, I shooed them out to the terrace, suggesting that since it was such a lovely day, they take advantage of the weather. “We’ll bring everything out to you.”

Only she followed them.

By this stage I was muttering to myself like Mutley, furious with Martin, who was darting backwards and forwards between the guests, all too aware that he was the target of my fury.

“That’s it. I’m going to check her out online.” And off I trotted to my laptop tucked into a gap under a kitchen unit by the Aga.

Sure enough, her name came up and, to my surprise, she turned out to be a major architectural historian, working at top universities in this country and abroad. There were photographs her giving lectures and in consultation with other architectural historians.

Somewhat mollified, I relaxed, thinking she was just like of the eccentric academics and collectors I met when I was features editor at Country Life.

During the next few days, we fed her, chatted to her. Her language matched those of the historians on the magazine and she was able to talk stone knowledgeably with Martin whose professional career before he took up the B&B was to build Gothic follies for gardens. But still something did not add up and there was no sign of her partner. She refused to discuss her background and her family in America, and just as I was starting to get suspicious again, she produced a wedding invitation, designed by some chichi stationers in Walton Street for sometime later in the year. It was to be held at Castle Cary church and the celebrations would take place at the nearby Newt hotel and at the Hauser & Wirth gallery. We were listed in a sheet recommending local accommodation. She was, it seemed, marrying a local peer.

“Now you know why I have been so cagey,” she explained. “We have been trying not to be too public about it.”

Later we had supper with some friends and relayed our tale about the American guest. “I tell you, if it turns out to be true, we are going to that wedding,” Martin chuckled.

Only of course it wasn’t. The venues may have been booked and the invitations printed, but the wedding turned out to be a figment of the woman’s wishful thinking. There was no partner, only someone she hoped to be associated with whom maybe she once had a Fatal Attraction kind of fling with and had refused to let it go. We never not to the bottom of it properly.

After six days of looking after her, we told her she could no longer stay. We simply had no availability and recommended that she went to the main pub in town to ask for a room. This she did, leaving her luggage behind with us, explaining that her other half would collect it later and pay for the room.

Needless to say he didn’t appear. We rang the pub and suggested they process her card. It didn’t work and they literally threw her out. She ranted, she raved, she threw every tantrum she possibly could accusing us and the pub of harrassment. Eventually the police were involved and it was then that we realised she was actual quite a serious criminal on a large scale. She was wanted for fraud in America and owed an individual in the UK - her propsective ‘husband’ £500k. “Coo! This is big,” we exlaimed, when the police came to talk to us about her.

Her bags were never claimed and then one day we decided to look inside them. It was filled with medication which we discovered was for someone who was bipolar or schozophrenic. Her bag was littered with love messages to her so called partner, notes about places she had visited that she thought he might like. It was tragic really and left us feeling empty inside.

But for a long time, we worried she might come back in the night in a fit of rage and I’d jump at pale reflections in the window. Sometime later, I noticed a heap of negative reviews came up on various online platforms, haranguing the pub, ourselves and the local bookshop. I recognised her hand, but there was nothing we could do to remove them.

Our lesson was learnt. The moment instinct tells that something is not right, just say no, politely of course. We don’t have any room for you.

You never quite know who is going to come through your door. That, more than anything, is something we have learned from running a B&B.

People arrive with their bags, their stories, their habits, their ailments, their ways of doing things, and you catch glimpses of it all over breakfast, usually when they are not quite aware of it themselves. You also hear some extraordinary tales.

Last week we had guests from Peru, Belgium, Canada, Vietnam and France, all sitting around the table in Somerset, eating granola, compotes and croissants as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Over coffee we heard about political data analysis, space investment, diplomacy and AI, much of which I only half understood.

This week has been much the same.

A couple from Toronto came to stay, intrepid in their determination to explore every corner of Dorset and Somerset, all in the space of two days. Both were children of Italian immigrants, one from the heel, the other from the instep.

“Mafia then,” said Martin lightly.

They chuckled. “Something like that.”

He designs nuclear reactors, which makes him, one imagines, rather busy at the moment. She is a vice-president at a large and wonderfully diverse school in Toronto.

Alongside stories about the school, they told us about their daughter. A much-loved and longed-for only child who had been diagnosed with a benign brain tumour. About the fear of it, the waiting, the recovery. About a cancerous lump on the vice-president’s kidney, discovered entirely by accident during a routine check. And how she, too, had come through it. We listened, quietly. These things are never far from our own lives either, as Martin knows only too well.

“It’s the first time we’ve travelled without our daughter,” she said. “She couldn’t come because it clashes with her university dates, but this was the only time we could go.”

There was something about the way she said it, as though some invisible umbilical cord was still being stretched, even now her daughter had reached early adulthood, perhaps because of the illness.

On a more levelling note, he told us he had been slightly obsessed with Escape to the Country, which is why they had ignored London and come straight to rural Somerset. They both seemed quietly delighted to find themselves in a house that matched the dream.

“I’ve really escaped to the country,” he said, looking out over the garden and the farmland beyond.

Where many foreign guests find our narrow West Country lanes alarming, these two embraced them entirely. It was refreshing, their enthusiasm.

Though not, it seemed, for the mushroom soup I had made that morning.

I had been at the Creamery at Castle Cary station, owned by The Newt, a few days before, where, alongside the usual cheeses and loaves, there was an entire section devoted to mushrooms. Fresh lion’s mane sat on the shelf, pale and slightly otherworldly, and nearby was a whole section of mushroom potions and tinctures, each promising some version of clarity, calm or resilience.

It reminded me of a Chinese guest we had during lockdown who introduced us to a traditional snow fungus soup and spoke of its benefits with quiet certainty. Good for the immune system, she said. Good for the body. Good for resilience. At the time, we took what we could get.

It became, in a way, our Covid defence. And like many things in this house, it stayed.

So that morning, while Martin was making his usual heroic quantities of scrambled eggs, I found myself making a pot of snow fungus soup. Not something I would once have contemplated at eight o’clock, but it has quietly worked its way into our kitchen, prompted by the sight of those mushrooms at the Creamery.

The couple watched me, slightly fascinated, as the pale, unassuming pieces of mushroom softened in the pot.

“What is that?” one of them asked, eventually.

I explained.

There was a pause.

“Would you like to try it?” I said.

They smiled, kindly. “No thank you,” and swiftly returned to their egs.

It is always slightly surprising what people will share, and what they quietly draw the line at.

My stepmother, when she came to stay shortly after Covid, took one look at the soup and wrinkled her nose. “It looks slimy,” she said. But stepmothers can be fond of that sort of honesty.

Still, that is the thing about people. However far they travel, however much they know, there are always small lines they draw for themselves, often in the most unexpected places.

We cleared the plates, topped up the coffee, and sent our guests on their way to explore our bit of the West Country right down to the coastline of Dorset.

The soup remained, quietly steaming on the side, ready for Martin and me, and perhaps someone a little more curious next time.

Why is it wedding guests are so messy?” said Martin, standing beside me in the doorway of one of our bedrooms, taking in the scene before us. Socks, knickers, bedding, jewellery, clothes and lipstick-stained tissues strewn everywhere. There’s a large tea stain on the duvet, and a strong whiff of scent mixed with aftershave hangs in the air. My nose twitched involuntarily, as if mildly offended.

And it’s true. There’s something about wedding guests that brings with them a particular kind of chaos. It’s as if time slips into another dimension. There is always a panic, something misplaced at the crucial moment, a growing sense of being late, of needing to get ready and to the church on time all at once.

And then bedlam hits the bedroom.

“I’d forgotten about this,” I said to Martin.

“So had I,” he sighed, before wading in to make some sort of sense of the bed.

In fact, we had forgotten rather a lot. Since returning from our winter break in Ibiza, the simplest things have momentarily eluded us. That morning, I stood in the kitchen unable to remember which bowls we use for the compotes, while Martin hovered over the dresser trying to work out which plates double as serving dishes. He had, slightly alarmingly, almost forgotten how to use the washing machine, which is extraordinary given he is, in normal life, the undisputed Big Chief of sheet washing.

It’s amazing how three months away can dull the B&B mind. Soon enough, though, we were back in full swing, operating with a synchronicity that would have made Morecambe and Wise proud.

And just as well. Because our first guests of the season are wedding guests. And if this bedroom is anything to go by, we are not easing ourselves in gently. Certainly, breakfast was an unusually sticky affair.

You would have thought that a group all attending the same wedding might have something to say to one another. Who knew the bride, who knew the groom, that sort of thing. As it turned out, they were all engaged themselves, each just a few months off their own weddings. That ought to have been a conversational gift.

Not for this lot.

Despite Martin’s best efforts to draw them in, conversation was as staccato as a woodpecker’s. It came in brief, awkward bursts, then stopped altogether.

It was so stilted that I began to feel uncomfortable, pottering between the Aga and the table, making toast, scrambling eggs, stacking plates by the sink, aware of the silence sitting in the room like an extra guest. It was just as well Martin, who since his bout of bowel cancer is not always entirely predictable in the mornings, was feeling unusually settled, otherwise we might have had an altogether different sort of contribution to the conversation.

It was our dog Willow who broke the ice. Perhaps sensing we needed help, she left her perch on the sofa and wove around the guests’ legs like a slinky toy, tail wagging furiously. It turned out they all shared a love of dogs and immediately began talking about their own pooches back at home, or their plans to have one.

And from there, the conversation opened up.

We began to learn more about them, and they turned out to be some of the most fascinating and internationally minded guests we have ever had. One girl was from Peru, her family now living in Barcelona. She had met her other half, who was Belgian, in Australia, and the two of them were now based in Brussels, where he worked for the Irish government. She, meanwhile, was working for a non-profit American organisation researching investment into space.

Another guest was Canadian by birth but working for the Liberal Democrats as a data analyst. His fiancée was a civil servant in Westminster. Their friend, the bride, was a diplomat based in Brussels, and the groom was in AI, “doing I don’t understand what,” as the Liberal Democrat chappie put it.

Added to the cultural mix were a couple of regulars of ours, two students from the local state boarding school who come to stay when the school break is so short that it is not worth them travelling home. One is from Vietnam and half English; the other is English but living in France.

We felt positively parochial and island-centric in comparison, despite our recent travels.

On the Sunday, once everyone had left, we took my mother for a Mother’s Day lunch at an old-fashioned but rather wonderful hotel called Plumber Manor in Dorset. After the meal, we sat down with the owner, whom my mother knew.

“Do you like your work?” my mother asked.

“It’s going to sound trite,” he said. “It’s hard work, but what makes it worthwhile is the people and making sure they’ve had a happy time. If we’ve achieved that, then that’s what it’s all about.”

Martin and I exchanged a look. It was exactly how we felt.

All our guests left, albeit with post-wedding hangovers, saying they had had a really enjoyable stay.

Messy rooms or not, that is what makes running a B&B worthwhile.

“Though I’d quite like to be back in Ibiza,” I said to Martin later that night, once we had gone to bed.

“Me too,” he sighed.

For there, we are the ones being looked after, not the other way around. Though we do make sure we don’t let bedlam loose in our bedroom.

This is a story from Ibiza while we are still strangers in different beds. It is about, of all things, Amazon deliveries, of which, back in the UK, when we are in full-blown B&B mode, we have heaps. Bear with me, it is more interesting than it sounds and there is a moral to the tale.

If I were to think of all the Amazon deliveries we have ever had, I would probably crisp fry myself into a carbonised pylon of cardboard in a rush to deny just how much of it has passed through our house.

At home, we shop local. Martin (see picture above) is the short-wearing champion of that. He zooms into town most mornings, hallooing his way round to buy eggs, bread, veg, fruit and anything else we need for breakfast that is fresh and yummy and that we cannot get from our garden. The rest, loo paper, washing powder and so on, he buys in industrial quantities from Lidl.

We are used to that routine. Take us out of that comfort zone and we are not quite sure how, what or even if we should order anything online or where to buy things in Ibiza. Plus, of course, we have a language barrier.

Whenever I try to speak Spanish, I speak in a form of childish Franglais, Spanglish and Ital-anglaise all rolled into one.

So I tried Amazon.es out of curiosity.

What an adventure we have had trying to track down our parcels.

The first order I made was for an HDMI cable and an Amazon Fire Stick, both of which my film director son had suggested we order to go with the projector and screen we have here. There is no television in this house, just our iPads and the projector.

“Put the exact spot. Use What3Words and Google pin to mark the location of where the delivery should be sent,” he said confidently. He had done exactly that in the UK at his off grid Tiny House, he explained. He had trained drivers to find the house that way.

No such luck here in Ibiza.

They take one look at the driveway to our house, rough, bumpy, rocky, hilly, lurchy and stomach turning, and run, or rather drive, a kilometre away.

I had not realised until I spoke to Robin, one of the lovely regular couriers who comes to our house in the UK, that many delivery drivers have to supply their own vans and are paid by the package. It is no wonder a courier does not want to go down terrifying tracks if it is going to tear up and damage their vehicle.

Consequently, I have discovered that whoever is taking charge of an Amazon parcel for us takes one look at the drive, sends a message that they have tried to deliver and could not, and moves swiftly on to the next mission.

The first message telling me a driver had been unable to deliver our package came from SEUR, one of the main delivery companies in Spain.

We were given a delivery pick up point in St Antoni, a town nearby in Ibiza. Off Martin and I drove to find it. By some miracle we even found somewhere to park close by. Parking is hell here, even in winter. But could we find the SEUR pick up point. No.

We walked up and down narrow, sun shaded streets, tugging Willow, our whippety Italian greyhound thing, behind us on her lead, but no SEUR pick up point was signposted.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a SEUR van and a harassed delivery driver shouting at someone inside a shop.

In my best Google Translate fashion, Martin gently but firmly positioning himself behind me, I called out,

“Dónde está el punto de entrega de SEUR?”, my Google Translate voice at the fore.

“Allí,” he replied, pointing towards a veterinary clinic.

“Allí?” I repeated sceptically.

“Sí, sí.” And off he went, clearly done for the day with mad British women.

He is pointing to the vet clinic, I said to Martin.

“No it cannot be,” he replied.

But there, set into the side of the practice, was a bank of yellow lockers. The only problem was that we did not have a code to access them.

An Ibicencan woman who spoke Spanglish almost as well as I did took pity on us and, through gestures and fragments of shared vocabulary, we established that one needs a number, not a QR code, to open the lockers.

We did not have a number so we drove home deflated but not entirely defeated.

“Maybe I have got it wrong,” I said to the ever tolerant Martin. “Perhaps it is in the barbers opposite.”

Martin raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. The barbers.”

Looking again at the exact pin drop, I saw on Google Maps that it appeared to be next door to the vet clinic, near a barber and tattoo shop.

The following day we returned to St Antoni. Martin and Willow remained outside while I approached the barber’s shop alone, QR code raised on my phone like a nuclear weapon.

A lanky man paused mid haircut and looked at me.

“¿Qué?”, he shrugged.

“Tengo un paquete que recoger.”

He shrugged. There was laughter from somewhere behind him, even from the man in the barber’s chair.

I tried again, holding up my QR code. This time he smiled, as if the performance were over.

“¿Cómo te llamas?”, he said curling his lips like a lion ready for the kill.

“Melanie,” I said, still brandishing the QR code like proof of citizenship.

“Ah, Melanie.”

He walked to what looked like a ping pong table draped in cloth, lifted it with a small flourish and revealed a heap of Amazon parcels underneath.

From the pile he produced my teeny tiny package.

Victory.

Only partial victory, as it turned out. When I got back to the car I realised it contained the Fire Stick but not the HDMI cable.

“Are you sure there are not dos paquetes?” I had asked in my Spanglish.

He had smiled and said, “No.” A word I understood perfectly.

So once again I tracked down SEUR and was directed to the main office in Ibiza, neatly signposted off an industrial estate. Armed with my driving licence and package number, I finally retrieved the missing cable. That felt more like home.

“I have got this,” I said to Martin, returning to the car as if I had won a small military campaign. We can order something else now.

So, foolishly, I did. A hairbrush for my husband and a NEBO torch, both of which had given up during our stay and neither of which we had found in the shops on the island.

This time a different company was involved. Correas, which turns out to be something like the Royal Mail of Ibiza.

That took us to a tiny supermarket behind the Old Town. I arrived armed with QR code, driving licence and anything else I could conceivably be asked for.

A friend who had lived in Spain for five years said to me, “That is Spanish shopkeepers for you. They are so aggressive. Do you not love them.”

My immediate thought was no. But it did give me an idea. The next time I went in, I entered with a swish of the hips and a faint swagger. I was not going to be beaten this time, no matter what paperwork or QR code I had to hand.

There was no queue. I went straight to the front. I produced my licence and within a minute my package emerged from beneath the counter.

“I have really got this,” I said to Martin.

So I ordered again. Moisturiser, and a serum to go with it, to make me look young and beautiful of course, neither of which I am, especially after hunting down the packages.

The message came back. A new location. The national post office in Ibiza, where queues can last an hour or more. My brief swagger evaporated.

Once again, I was deflated.

A local friend has kindly offered to collect it for me. All I need to provide is my driving licence, passport and a letter in Spanish giving permission. Perfectly simple, apparently. If you know how.

It is, I tell myself, all part of getting to know the island. One day I shall run rings round it rather than the other way round. Or perhaps I shall simply learn to move at its pace, which may be the wiser ambition.

What this small saga has given me, though, is a lesson in something else entirely.

Back in Somerset, when guests arrive looking faintly uncertain, whether Londoners convinced the countryside is riddled with crime and double locking their cars, or travellers from further afield unsure how British plumbing, breakfast times or gravel drives function, I sometimes forget how disorientating it is to step into someone else’s way of doing things.

In Ibiza, brandishing QR codes and mispronouncing paquete, I have been that person.

Dependent. Slightly foolish. Hoping not to get it wrong.

So the next time a guest hesitates on our threshold, I shall think not of Amazon Prime but of yellow lockers on the side of a veterinary clinic and parcels hidden under a barber’s ping pong table.

We are all, at some point, strangers in other people’s shoes. It does us good to remember that.

Who’d have thought someone professing to be a plane spotter could be such a fascinating conversationalist at breakfast. But this is exactly what happened one morning when a relatively unassuming man (round faced, round-spectacled, round tummy, round relatively hairless scalp, dressed in safe navy), came down for his coffee and croissants and had us all spellbound with his tales of standing alongside windswept airports, binoculars, notepad and pencil in hand.

For he wasn’t just any old plane spotter, but someone who held our national security at his fingertips. I exaggerate (a bit), for the sake of the tale, but it is true that he forms one small part of our line of defence against terrorism or malignant activity at our airports.

Of course, it all makes sense when you hear his story, but it was something that had clearly not occurred to any of us round our breakfast table before, and certainly not me, standing at the Aga, listening in.

This gentleman, a lifelong plane enthusiast, his father before him too, operated his plane spotting post on the outskirts of Stansted, which happens to be the airport where Air Force One lands if the American president is making a state visit to the UK.

Initially, the UK police and American security officers were sceptical of his presence, and others like him, and shooed them away, our plane spotter told us. However, as time went by, both security forces realised that plane spotters were an asset. This is not to suggest, I hasten to add, that they ever replaced the FBI or Britain’s own security services, it was simply that there is no one more qualified than a plane spotter to notice anomalies on a runway, and clever security forces recognised that.

So they were put on standby. On alert for anything out of the ordinary.

At this point in his tale, we around the kitchen table were no longer seeing an ordinary man with a faintly bewildering hobby, but someone called to arms, and not in a Captain Mainwaring Dad’s Army way. Before our eyes he morphed into a figure of quiet importance, someone who might, in fragile moments, save us. He was the plane spotters’ version of Tom Cruise, undercover in his robes of navy, someone who made us feel safe in his very normality.

For a while there was silence as we digested this information. Then everyone began talking at once, asking what exactly he was asked to do.

The answer, of course, was disarmingly simple: track numbers, track planes, notice strange activity on the tarmac, if indeed there was any.

In a way I am a secret plane spotter myself, which is perhaps why I found the story so compelling. I love the route from our house into London via the A303 and M3 because it takes me beneath the Heathrow landing line. I am transfixed by the planes coming in and out and bless the M25 for its delays, if they occur near Heathrow. Likewise, I love the Yeovilton-based planes crossing our skyline at the back of the hill. There is still something deeply compelling and romantic about flight, and about seeing planes, or the wispy trace of them, against our Somerset sky.

The next morning I was keen to hear more. It transpires that these plane spotters act as a kind of neighbourhood watch at airports. No one studies the choreography of an airport more obsessively than they do. They notice the tiny deviations others might miss: a tail number that does not belong, a vehicle parked where it should not be, a movement on the tarmac that jars. In short, they play an extraordinary role, whether it is Air Force One landing in our midst or simply a cheap holiday flight taking off at dawn. They are there as part of our defence, and I find that a quietly comforting thought.

Of course, if that same guest were to come round our breakfast table today, I might ask a different set of questions about other activities he might have spotted at Stansted. But would I really want to hear the answers? Probably not. Breakfast at our house remains a comforting place where cornflakes and coffee are not to be disturbed too much, even if the wider world, and the skies above it, feel rather less certain.

As an aside, we have our own plane buff on the hill behind the house: Colin, the local king of model aircraft, whose self-appointed mission is to lure children away from their phones and to turn their attention back up and into the skies.

But that is a story for another time….

.

I thought we were being burgled the other night.

We are still away in Ibiza, being strangers in other people’s beds. Here, I’m all too aware that one of the island’s more significant crimes, apart from drug trafficking (natch), is the robbery of large villas like the one we’re staying in. It is the sort of fact you absorb idly in daylight and forget. But at 4am, in a different house to home, especially after watching a gripping crime drama the evening before, it resurfaces with unnerving clarity and the imagination begins to run riot - well at least mine does.

I had got up to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. It was around 4am. Suddenly my senses were on high alert. Across the dining room, the muslin curtains over the double doors fluttered. Then I heard a scrabbling at the door and the unmistakable sound of the handle being turned.

“Oh my God. Someone’s trying to break in.”

In one swift move I belted through the sitting room calling for Martin.

“Martin!”

My voice was wobbly and breathy in the strange way it becomes in dreams, when you are trying to speak but cannot quite get the words out.

I shot into the bedroom where he was emerging from a deep sleep.

“Yes,” he muttered.

“We are being burgled,” I said, my voice still shaky.

Out he bravely strode, shoulders squared like a cowboy entering a saloon, only in a stripy nightshirt, with me creeping behind like the wuss I was being.

The curtain shook again and the handle rattled.

“It’s the cats,” he said.

And he was right.

The next hour was spent chivvying a skinny feral creature around the house. It leapt on top of the fridge, hid behind sofas, vanished into a room upstairs and, despite being cajoled with food, nothing worked until we got out a broom and shooed it out of the back door. How it got in we have no idea, probably through a tiny gap in one of the windows.

Strangely, when a real-life frightening episode occurred, I did not panic. Not one bit.

This took place back at home at the B&B, when we had a full house of strangers in our beds, all down for a wedding at a local venue.

It is one thing to wake in the middle of the night to use the loo; it is quite another to wake and find a nearly naked man, definitely not your husband, standing at the foot of your bed, wanting to use it.

Yet here I was, again at 4am, blinking at a slim, swaying stranger in the gloom, wearing nothing but boxer shorts.

Somewhere in my subconscious I knew I ought to be terrified, screaming for help. After all, we do not exactly run police checks when someone books a room. A name, phone number, email and bank card will do. But instead of screaming, I found myself absurdly calm, in that hyperaware state that comes with being jolted out of deep sleep.

So, with all the composure of a debutante at tea, I murmured, “Can I help you?” while simultaneously prodding Martin in the ribs and whispering, “Wake up. There’s someone in the room.”

He rolled over, mumbling, “Whaaa… I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” clearly imagining a tug-of-war over the TV remote.

“No. You really have to wake up,” I hissed, jabbing him harder. “There’s a man in our room. I think he’s looking for the loo.”

And that is when it dawned on me. This poor soul had simply overdone it. I suddenly pictured him deciding to widdle on the carpet, just as several of my male friends once confessed to mistaking wardrobes for toilets after heavy nights. Amusing in the retelling. Considerably less so in my bedroom.

Martin finally sat up and scrambled off the bed, crouching low to grab his rainbow-striped towelling robe from the bathroom door before gently steering our guest elsewhere.

The poor fellow was, as it turned out, one half of a couple staying in the room above us. Which only begged the question: why stagger all the way down a steep flight of stairs into our bedroom when his own room had a perfectly good loo and even an antique commode in the hall?

But then, that is wedding guests for you. Overindulgence confuses both dignity and direction, just as imagination does when it seizes on a statistic at 4am and turns a flicker of curtain into a burglary. In Ibiza, it was a cat. At home, it was a stranger. Either way, the mind can be far more dramatic than the reality.

This isn’t quite Strangers in My Bed material, in that strangers ended up NOT sleeping in our beds, but bear with me and some of the quirks of human nature will reveal themselves.

Last Friday, I featured in the Daily Mirror, talking about how many B&Bs like ours could suffer under the proposed tourist tax. In short, I said that businesses like ours already operate on tight margins and, if we are required to levy an additional charge on every guest, some of us may simply become unviable.

The response has been rousing, not just from other B&B owners, but from small community businesses of all kinds. It seems many of us feel the same anxiety about survival.

It has made me think about the other financial pressures small hospitality businesses like ours face — not least in human form. As anyone in hospitality will recognise, most people are good. But occasionally you meet the bad and the ugly.

This is about two such moments, both triggered by our cancellation policy.

Our cancellation policy is fairly standard for B&Bs and hotels: 24 hours midweek and 48 hours at weekends. If someone cancels inside that window, we charge for the first night. This isn’t money-grabbing; it’s practical. At short notice, it is highly unlikely we can refill the room.

One evening at 9pm, as we were sitting on the kitchen sofa watching television, a middle-aged-sounding man rang. He was very sorry, he said, but owing to a “family emergency”, he and his wife would need to cancel their booking for the following night. Now, if the booking had only just been made, we might have reconsidered. But this reservation had been in the diary for weeks. So we replied, sounding sympathetic to his crisis, of course:

“I’m so sorry to hear that. But I hope you understand that, due to the short notice, we will still need to take payment.”

“But I’ve given you 24 hours’ notice,” he spluttered.

His reasoning? He had told us his arrival time was 9pm the next evening.

“It doesn’t quite work like that,” we explained gently, going on to elaborate that our cancellation policy refers to a full day before the booking, not an estimated time of arrival. After all, guests often arrive earlier or later than planned; we have to set a clear parameter.

Despite calmly pointing out that this was stated in the booking confirmation, he was outraged and hung up. We were left staring at the phone, speechless.

“How rude,” we said to each other. “Still, he’s probably traumatised by the emergency.”

We weren’t saying that the following day.

As is standard practice, we take card details as security at the time of booking, not payment, in case of a no-show or late cancellation. So, thinking nothing more of it, we processed the charge. Twenty-four hours later, the money vanished. SumUp, the card payment system we use, had returned it. Now it was our turn to splutter.

“But how can that be?” we asked. “How is this allowed to happen? The guest had clearly breached our terms and conditions.”

The response was unmoved. “It has nothing to do with us. This is a matter for the banks.”

“Hah!” I said to Martin after the conversation ended in frustration. “Does that mean we can go shopping and merrily buy anything we want, then retrieve the money afterwards under some pretext of a service not being fulfilled properly? If that’s the case, I’m hitting Net-A-Porter.”

For a moment, I considered ringing the bank, but realised I would be on a losing wicket and end up twitching like Herbert Lom in a Peter Sellers film before I’d even managed to speak to a human being.

So we resolved to accept the loss, nevertheless remaining frustrated that the very system designed to protect small businesses had sided with the customer.

The second incident was different, but no less frustrating. An American lady had booked a stay with us as part of a long UK trip and had chosen Castle Cary as one of her stop-offs. During the booking process, we had exchanged several emails about the house and her stay. All seemed good at that stage.

However, on the day she was due to arrive, we had committed one of our rare indulgences: tickets for a matinee at the Theatre Royal in Bath. We love these small outings. We usually take the train from Castle Cary on the Weymouth line, which trundles through the countryside and every station en route. There’s something romantic about the trip. We wander through Bath, have an early lunch at The Ivy near the theatre, watch the show — Martin, fortified by a glass or two of wine and lulled by the warmth of the darkened auditorium, inevitably nods off — and then return home restored.

We only do this when we have help in the house, so rooms are prepared and everything is in order. On this occasion, however, it unravelled — badly.

Our guest had not given us an arrival time. We had left messages — voicemail and email — and received nothing in reply. So we asked June, our housekeeper who lives locally, to be on standby in our absence. The guest was asked to call June when she was on her way.

Eventually, a short, distinctly huffy text arrived.

“I don’t know why you need my arrival time. I’ll be there at 5.15.”

“Great,” I replied. “We won’t be far behind you. Our lovely housekeeper will be there to greet you.”

We messaged June to switch on the lights, prepare the room and make the house feel cosy. And then we waited.

At 5.15pm the guest arrived. Within minutes, June could sense something was amiss. The house, apparently, was “dark”. It was “cold”. June, who is neither dark nor cold but calm and conscientious, and who most people love, was deemed “unprofessional”. She showed the guest and her friend to their room, a room most people enter with the words, “Oh, this is lovely.” On this occasion, there was no such reaction.

The two women stepped inside, closed the door firmly behind them and left June outside on the landing. She could hear muttering. A pause. More muttering. Then the door opened.

They did not like it. They would not be staying. They had friends at The George, the main pub in town, and would go there instead. And off they went in high dudgeon.

June was shaken. “They were so awful,” she said afterwards, genuinely distressed that she had somehow failed.

When we returned from Bath (Martin fully awake by then) we heard the story. The room had been prepared. The heating was on. The lamps were lit. But it was February. It was dark outside. And we were not physically standing in the hallway to perform the greeting ourselves.

We took the payment. The cancellation was, after all, very last minute. And again, the money vanished. Again, the objection was upheld. Again, the system sided elsewhere. This time, however, there was an additional flourish.

An excoriating review appeared on TripAdvisor. We were criticised for requesting an arrival time. The house was “cold and dark”. The housekeeper “incompetent”. The owners “absent”.

It is a strange thing, running a small B&B from your own home. You are expected to be warm, flexible and endlessly accommodating — rightly so. Hospitality depends on it. But you are also expected to absorb the financial blow when someone changes their mind, reinterprets your terms or simply decides they prefer somewhere else.

Large hotels build such losses into vast operating models. For small, characterful places like ours, each room matters. Each booking counts.

So when politicians talk airily of levies and tourist taxes, I sometimes wonder whether they realise that the fragility of businesses like ours is not simply economic. It is also human.

Most guests are generous, fair and kind. Many have become friends. A lot return. But occasionally you meet the guest who knows that a charge can be reversed with a click, and that a sharp paragraph on a reviewing platform may linger rather longer than the memory of the stay itself.

Still, the following morning, someone else usually arrives, apologising for traffic, admiring the garden, laughing at the dogs and sitting down to scrambled eggs as if none of it ever happened.

And that, in the end, is why we keep opening the door and having strangers in our bed.

Leave a comment

At a time when the world feels wonky tonky and we can’t quite tell whether we’re edging towards World War III or simply waiting for the next scandal to erupt on our screens, I’ve realised that the strangers who come through our door offer a marvellous lesson in humanity and human nature.

Though it can be challenging at times to have strangers in our house and in our beds, most people we meet are lovely, especially once they’ve shaken off the stresses of travel: the trains that aren’t working, the potholes they’ve hit en route, the arguments they may have had on the journey to us and the dreadful weather.

We see it time and time again. People haven’t left enough time to get to a nearby event, or someone has forgotten the one thing they were convinced they’d packed. They arrive brimming with tension and irritation. But let them settle in, relax, and allow Martin, who is the most hospitable of hosts, to work his magic on them and, more importantly, make them laugh.

They soften. They calm down. And then the conversation begins to flow, especially around the breakfast table, where we usually discover that somewhere, beneath it all, there’s a common thread we can relate to.

All our guests sit around a communal table at breakfast, so navigating different personalities can require a certain amount of emotional and psychosocial footwork.

The most challenging combination we ever had to deal with was when four slightly grand, immaculately groomed individuals from Surrey arrived to discover they’d be sharing our house — and that breakfast table — with four Hells Angels–type characters from Manchester.

Tattooed, bodied up in full armour of leather and jewellery, their bikes parked outside like a two-wheeled army battalion. Their profession was trucking, men and women alike.

The Surrey lot were bankers. The husbands, mainly.

“How on earth are we going to manage this at breakfast?” I asked Martin.

“Hmmm,” he replied. “Not entirely sure I know.”

The groups were as opposite as it was possible to be and seemed to fulfil each other’s stereotypical expectations entirely.

So the next morning we sprinted down to the kitchen extra early, partly to prepare breakfast, but mostly to do a bit of strategic table planning.

We were lucky. The different groups came down more or less in unison, with the Surrey crew arriving first.

(As an aside, before anyone starts snorting about Surrey and Manchester types: I have family members who were born, brought up, lived, died and were buried in Surrey. It’s a beautiful county and vastly underestimated for its rural space. As for Manchester, when I was sixteen I went to a tertiary college just outside Preston in Lancashire and was mocked — even by teachers — for my double-barrelled surname and convent-educated accent. Eventually we all learned to cope with the perceived north–south divide and got on with, well, getting on. Anyway. I digress.)

You could see the shock register on the faces of our Surrey guests as they clocked who would be joining them at the table. The thought bubbles above their heads were almost visible: have we come to the right place to stay?

Martin, ever swift on his feet, gestured cheerfully to where everyone needed to sit — one group at one end of the table, the other at the opposite. Were we about to witness a West Side Story scenario, or would there be peace amongst men?

We were both nervous that we couldn’t make it work. Martin hallooed hellos in his usual booming voice and asked what they would like to drink: tea or coffee?

Chairs scraped. Feet scuffled. Hands twitched. The silence was almost as palpable as the tension in the air.

“Coffee,” said one of the Surrey guys.

“I’d like a herbal tea,” said one of the female truckers, who I quickly learned was the kingpin of the group.

Silence again.

Then Martin stepped in like a sheriff, except armed with the weapon of his wit and hospitality. I forget exactly what he said, but within minutes he had them all chuckling, one by one, as he handed them their hot drinks, gently drawing them into conversation.

Suddenly the female lead trucker — who, even if I had met late at night on the street, I might have been slightly frightened of — came out with a story about her experience of being a care worker during Covid.

“It was awful,” she said. “I watched people die in front of my eyes, and the pain of the families trying to get access to them.”

She had us all silenced.

“Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more, so I left. Now I help children who missed school during Covid learn to read.”

Silence again.

Then everyone started talking around the table about their own experiences of family members in care homes, swapping tales of children and grandchildren, of the government in the state it was in, of the political climate, of the turbulence of the world generally — just the stuff we all chatter about when we’ve gathered around a table.

And that, I think, is what restores my faith when the world feels at its most skewed. Strip away the leather or tweed jackets, the assumptions and the armour we all wear, and people are remarkably similar. Given a chair, a cup of something warm and the space to be heard, most of us soften. We remember our losses, our children, our fears and our hopes, and we recognise them in one another.

Time and again, around that battered breakfast table, I’m reminded that kindness is never far away. It just needs a moment — and sometimes a good host — to bring it to the surface. Then we remember the common thread that draws us together as humanity. And life feels better.

We have learnt to manage this - a bit - by giving ourselves longer and longer windows before breakfast time to prepare ourselves for any eventuality. But it is never foolproof.

When we first set up the B&B, I proudly put ourselves online as being “open all hours”. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, in the silly, naïve way that I can sometimes think, that we might need intervals between guests. Time, for example, to change beds, wash sheets, iron them, clean rooms, wash floors, and so on.

This was despite the fact that I should have known better. Travel was once part of my career: I launched a travel sub-section at a magazine I worked for at the time. But I was dealing with the industry from the other side of the coin. I wasn’t a member of staff. I was a VIP visitor.

That experience did at least give me a feel for what people like when they come to stay: fluffy towels, clean, fresh-smelling linen, and nice products in the bathroom. What it didn’t teach me was how to deal with grumpy guests when you are not instantly available because they have arrived early and you are, say, walking the dog, chatting to a friend on the phone, or on the loo for an extended moment you really cannot break away from. Otherwise, Lord knows what they would think, and what the reviews would say, if you greeted them with half a poo down your leg.

Take this as an example.

A father and his teenage daughter arrived one day a full hour before our check-in time of 4pm. We do our best to explain in the information we send out after booking that anyone needing to arrive early should let us know in advance. Somehow, this message had not filtered through to the teenage daughter.

Martin and I happened to be out shopping for household essentials, the very things needed, ironically, for having guests. Then the phone rang.

“We have arrived. Why are you not here?” said the father, more or less.

Martin explained, in his infinitely patient way, that they were a little early, but that we would be home shortly, and that if they needed shelter there was a pub directly across the road where they could wait.

The father sounded perfectly happy with this.

Except when we arrived home, the pair were still standing outside our front door, looking distinctly unimpressed. Once again we apologised and explained that they had, in fact, arrived early. We then took them upstairs to show them their room, with Martin heaving their vast suitcases up behind them.

Hardly a minute after he came back downstairs, my phone pinged.

There, already online, was a review awarding us a miserable rating.

“Hosts were not there when we arrived.”

It turned out to be from the teenage daughter.

It always surprises us when people announce they are vegetarians for breakfast - there is so much about breakfast that is not for the meat eater: except for the notable and culturally indestructible Bacon & Eggs of course. And in the 10+ years we have been running a B&B we have rarely been asked for a traditional B&B breakfast and nor do we supply it any more - except when asked. The waste of those not wanting the food just gets too expensive.

We used to do bacon sarnies with lashings of brown sauce and tomato ketchup for those hungover post a big event, like New Year’s Eve or a wedding. But then the wellness movement kicked in and the branding for breakfast became in people’s minds, oat milk, soya milk, no processed meat and loads of our home-made granola and good pro-biotic yoghurt.

Except recently a guest complained, gave us a 5 out of 10 in our reviews for not supplying bacon and eggs automatically. So I guess the idea of a B&B supplying bacon and eggs is still wrapped up in people’s minds when they stay at a traditional guest house like ours.

Which suggests that the idea of a B&B breakfast remains stubbornly fixed in people’s minds. Somewhere, the full English still arrives unbidden, sizzling reassuringly, even if most of us haven’t eaten like that in years.

Martin and I are not vegetarians. Most of the time we eat what we eat, vegetarian or otherwise, because we love it: because we know where it came from, how it was produced, and how it ended up on our table. That knowledge, that sense of territory, affects the flavour. We grow what we can in the garden and source the rest locally for the breakfast table.

My grandmother had a simple saying: “You are what you eat.” It still rings true. Food is also love. Virginia Woolf put it more elegantly: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Each time we set out home-prepared fruit compotes, work out what someone might enjoy, or present Martin’s now-legendary scrambled eggs, it is an act of care, of sharing.

When people gather around our breakfast table - a single long rectangular one in the kitchen, where everyone sits together - something else happens. Conversation flows more easily. Differences soften. Even the most unlikely combinations of guests find common ground. Food does that. It cuts through social platitudes and beliefs. It gives us what we need.

This post is a little off piste. It isn’t about having strangers in our beds so much as strange events while we are not sleeping in our own.

Last night, a storm raged in Ibiza that felt as if the gods, led by Zeus, were waging war on humanity. Not surprising, frankly, given world events. Apart from hearing the wind howl and trees click their branches together in hideous anxiety, I was wonderfully oblivious to it. Partly because my nose was buried in a book, and partly because back in Somerset, where I live, gales are part of daily winter life, whistling over the Levels in a happy, mischievous delight of grey destruction until they reach a final stopping point.

“Pah,” I said to my husband, Martin, when I read a local weather report saying the island was on an orange weather alert overnight, with winds of 70 kilometres per hour expected. Note kilometres, not miles per hour, a far more paltry figure. “We’re used to that on the hill.”

There is a steep hill behind our house, known as Lodge Hill, once owned by a Somerset dairy-farming family and now part of the mighty Newt in Somerset’s territory. Sometimes, up there walking the dog, I have been able to play the equivalent of snow angels in the wind, leaning my whole body into it, Wuthering Heights style, and remain supported. Other times I have found myself propelled at speed back down a slippery slope, ass over tit, when I had actually wanted to go up.

Silly me. I had forgotten that Ibiza is a tiny island, where it can have a “lazy” wind, one that goes straight through rather than around. The trees here, mainly evergreens with shallow roots, are easily upended and unpicked from their soil. It wasn’t until I took the dog out for her afternoon walk that I saw the full casualties.

I reported back to my sister, whose house we are staying in, sending her pictures of fallen trees across footpaths and roofs, and another casualty too: a dead snake.

“Weather been crazy! NY bonkers,” she replied.

A columnist I read, reporting on the terrible weather back in the UK, said that all we needed now was a plague of locusts. Which reminded me that some years ago, I found myself in the midst of a very real one.

I was in Morocco, at a chi-chi resort just beyond the Atlas Mountains, reviewing it for a travel magazine I was editing at the time. Almost the moment I arrived, the locusts hit. They had munched their way through southern Africa and now found sumptuous grub where I was staying. They were relentless. The immaculate rose garden, the landscape, the kitchen garden for which the hotel was famous, all destroyed. There was nothing the locusts were not going to get to, as precise and military in their movements as an advancing force.

Valiantly, the hotel tried to cope.

“Would you still like to have your horse ride?” queried the receptionist when he rang that first morning.

I had fantasised about riding into the desert. If I was jittery about locusts, horses, always more sensitive to outside disturbances, would surely be worse. I declined and instead, determined to get some sun and take some exercise, headed for the swimming pool. I had been told it had its own block of mosquito deterrent around it. How that squared with the hotel’s organic reputation I have no idea. I suspect they had deployed some hideous insect-repelling noise machine. Whatever it was, there was a large, rectangular, three-dimensional zone around the pool which locusts would not enter.

What hadn’t occurred to me was that if locusts eat a lot, they also poo a lot.

So, having batted, literally with a tennis racket, my way through the locusts from our room to the pool and collapsed onto a sunbed in relief, I suddenly found myself being pelted with locust bullets of poo in repeated fly-bys.

That was it. Back to the hotel room. It felt biblical and momentous, as if another encounter with God was required and the insects were delivering the message.

I don’t know if anyone has ever seen a locust up close and personal. I hadn’t until then. They are actually beautiful creatures, with prawn-like scales, and they are big. The size of a little finger or a matchbox, as I discovered when one dropped dead outside my room.

“Why don’t you take it home with you for your son?” my photographer companion suggested. We were at a dead end with our report, after all, and needed something.

Jasper was six at the time.

I proudly showed him the locust on my return, in an insouciant I’ve-survived-a-plague kind of way. He was, of course, far too young to appreciate it. But it remains a forever memory, and I will never look at storms, or plagues, in quite the same way again.

These days, storms make me think less of gods and omens than of health and safety. Of what might be happening back at home when we are not there to see it. Of trees that might fall, paths that might slip, roofs that might rattle in the wind. Running a B&B has a way of doing that to you. You can leave your own bed, but you never quite leave the responsibility that comes with other people sleeping in it.

Friends can often look slightly askance when I tell them we run a B&B within our home. Not because of the early mornings, the endless washing and ironing, or the sheer hard work of it all (which, truth be told, few people fully grasp unless they work in hospitality), but because of the intimacy.

Strangers in your home. Your house. Your rooms. In your space. Seeing everything of yours in the raw, including, occasionally, your knickers (I still blush at the memory).

“I don’t know how you do it,” they say.

Truth is, nor, at times, do I.

But it didn’t trouble me at all in the early days of the B&B - not even on the first occasion we put someone in our bed. At the time, it barely registered as odd. It simply felt like the decent thing to do. People needed somewhere to stay; we had a roof over our heads. They could have our room. We would sleep elsewhere.

The first time it happened was one Easter Good Friday.

It was the tone of my husband’s voice that told me something had gone horribly wrong.

“Melanie,” he called.

Then again, louder. “MELANIE.”

Martin’s voice, full-chested at the best of times, somewhere between opera singer and foghorn, was now unmistakably panicked.

I had been upstairs in our bedroom, congratulating myself on how well we were doing at this B&B thing. All our rooms were booked. Everyone had arrived (or so I thought). Fresh sheets, fresh towels, water by the beds. Even our online ratings were behaving themselves showing 10 out of 10s or 5 out of 5s, depending on which platform you looked at. (Oh, those were the days, I sigh thinking about it - the innocence, the optimism!).

Big mistake.

Standing on the doorstep was a stylish Parisian couple, one of them very clearly heavily pregnant, calmly telling us they had a booking.

“You have?” I said, trying to sound professionally insouciant while my insides flapped.

They produced paperwork.

“This is Ellesmere House, non?”

I fled to the computer. There it was: their booking, glowing red. Cancelled. Their room already taken by someone else. It wasn’t our fault, but it was very much our problem.

It was Good Friday. It was 7pm. And the woman was eight months pregnant.

There was no question of turning them away when we knew everywhere else would be fully booked and the weather outside was pants.

So we gave them our room.

Sleeping on the drawing-room floor, as it turned out, was not the worst part. It was surprisingly comfortable. We made a makeshift mattress fashioned from cushions and bolsters repurposed as pillows, throwing an duvet over the top. We lay there, side by side, in front of the fireplace, wondering briefly what on earth we had done.

The worst part came later.

To have people in our room and be comfortable, we had to erase ourselves (or so I thought).

Everything - clothes, books, shoes, the odd personal embarrassment - was shoved somewhere, anywhere, in one swift, panicked action. Cupboards swallowed things whole. Drawers were crammed. Surfaces cleared in seconds. Any external evidence that we actually lived there, or rather slept in the room, was hastily removed.

Putting ourselves back together afterwards was another mat

ter entirely. For weeks, we couldn’t find anything. Familiar objects surfaced in unlikely places. Others vanished altogether. We lived with the low-level irritation of people who had temporarily mislaid themselves.

That was the first time strangers slept in our bed.

The final time it happened was with a supermodel from the 1960s. That, even by our standards, felt like an embarrassment too far.