Airbnb

‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts. ‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted.

‘There’s a flat rat under the mat!’ I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead rat beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, of indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.

It started during the bus journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh airport on the way home to Provence. Saying goodbye is always sad but there were other worries; earnings have been minimal for the past ten months and the new hot water tank was costing more than the balance of my bank account. People who assert that it’s no good throwing money at a problem have either never been poor or had an unhappy teenage daughter. In the old days when I had a bit of cash and one of the girls was especially miserable, a chat in the car and a wee spin round Topshop or Urban Outfitters generally did wonders. Those days are gone. I’ve been a financial basket case for years now.

The Airbnb help centre chatbot kept telling me that she understood how frustrating it must be for me to have all these problems created by Airbnb. But she offered no solution, save for congratulating me effusively on being a wonderful host. After a while I asked this person, allegedly a woman: ‘Are you real or is this AI?’ For the relentlessly upbeat drivel she was churning out bore no resemblance to the furious questions I was typing in. I could have told her I was about to throw myself out of the window because of the rise in Airbnb’s fees and the redesign of their app that stops me from using it unless I buy a new £600 iPhone, and she would have replied: ‘Melissa, we know what a great job hosts like you do for guests!

Assuming it was full of junk, I tried to pull the trunk out of the way but I couldn’t move it, so I opened up the lid and gasped. Whenever the builder boyfriend is away I do battle with clutter. I’d gone through acres of horse tack in the boiler room and was now up the back stairs in the rabbit warren of rough-and-ready back bedrooms which haven’t been used since the last family, who also ran this place as a guest house, made their children sleep there to free up the nicer rooms.

The estate agent said that they would send someone round tomorrow and I had to calm them down. Come in two weeks, I told them, because the builder boyfriend is still painting the hallway with the yellow paint I don’t much like any more because it’s taken so long. The new laws leave us paranoid about having anyone step foot in our house for longer than three weeks They love selling these old country piles in Ireland because they change hands so often it’s a licence to print money – not for the owners, but for the agents who keep selling them year after year, after the owners have not been able to afford to keep them going. Usually, it’s the lack of plumbers and tradesmen, but now there is another problem.

Over coffee in a seafood restaurant in the harbour, I talked with the most notorious accused man in Ireland and, I have to say, I liked him and thought he was most likely innocent. It was shortly before Ian Bailey died of a heart attack in January 2024, and I had just moved to West Cork. I bumped into him at a market day and asked if he would like to meet for lunch. I had long been fascinated by the unsolved murder of the French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, whose body was found by the gate of her remote West Cork cottage in 1996. After initially working on the case as a journalist, Bailey became the chief suspect and, following innumerable twists in a most bizarre case, he was eventually convicted in absentia in a court in Paris, although he managed to fight extradition.

A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon. Lying by the hotel pool facing the seafront, I was watching the surfers, the fishing boats, the palm trees waving on the promenade, and something else. ‘John, I just need to be honest with you,’ said a glamorous, buxom, pink-lipsticked blonde lady in her sixties wearing a leopard-print sarong, sitting on a sunbed sideways facing the back of a slim, frightened-looking man, also in his sixties. She spoke in a soft Scottish accent, coquettishly stirring a cocktail in a poolside cardboard cup.

As I sat down to dinner in a lovely old country pub my reservation was cancelled by my iPhone, which was having a tantrum. The owner of this restaurant was serving us with a smile, we had been shown to our table, drinks and menus had been brought. But the buzzing lump of metal in my bag was adamant this was not happening. My iPhone had packaged up a montage surprise, complete with a replay of our private conversation I was experiencing one of those moments where reality splits into two: the one you are experiencing and the one your phone claims you are. A lot of people obediently accept the phone’s version no matter what. This is presumably why drivers follow their satnavs into garden walls, or swerve along the motorway looking at pictures of dogs on Facebook.

Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer as clearly and distinctly as a clarion of trumpets. Afterwards the nights were cooler and the sun less fierce and it was easier to maintain one’s temper. We could begin to look forward again instead of merely enduring. The week before the storm burst the village had been stretched to its collective mental limit. You could see it on the exhausted faces of the waiters and in the traffic negotiating normally unfrequented side streets.

The Airbnb accommodation at Paddington, chez Mohammed, was a fourth-floor room measuring about nine feet by five. As well as having a single bed, this small space was extraordinarily well equipped, with a wardrobe, huge fridge, sink, draining board, ironing board, microwave oven, kettle, two electric hobs, a set of saucepans and enough cutlery and crockery for a select dinner party, and a television set. The room’s heat, which came from an unidentifiable source, was tropical. The mattress had a couple of broken springs and was horribly filthy, but the sheet covering it smelt freshly laundered and for just £22 a night I was well pleased.

A wise meme once said that you should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. If you want to know who said that, you can look it up online. But you don’t need to look it up online, because the internet has freed us all from the bonds of copyright law and common decency. If you did look it up online, you will find that this aphorism was originally popularized in the 1980s in The Jargon File, a computer programmers’ handbook. So needy were the nerds to avenge themselves on the physical world, source of their steamy-spectacled, spotty-faced humiliations, that they tossed this aphorism around without tracking down its source.

I had been in Los Angeles for less than a month when I received the call from a concerned neighbour back home in London. ‘Why are there men queuing up outside your flat at 3 a.m.?’ It was a good question. ‘And are you aware that a locksmith came over the other day to change your locks?’ I had no idea. ‘Oh and by the way, your tenant has put some kind of security camera outside your front door.’ Concern turned to panic. ‘And there’s been rather a lot of … erm, activity, you know … to-ing and fro-ing. That tenant of yours certainly has an appetite for the ladies.’ My neighbour must have been mistaken. I had rented my apartment to Alan and Ada, a respectable young Chinese couple.