How To Kill Your Guests

A beginner's guide to not doing so

My sister’s messaging. Martin and I are in Ibiza, where she has a drop-dead, achingly perfect house (unlike ours) and she’s asking “if they can try and do a pretty one.” I giggle because she’s referring to fire alarms and a fire expert who’s coming in today to fit them throughout her house (all 14 of them, just to give you an idea of the scale of the property). “I think they only do one flavour,” I respond.

“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.

Holiday time! Who’d have thought Martin’s cigar would help with health and safety.

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.