Airbnb

What a fraught, divisive, infuriating sort of year it’s been. It started with me attempting to go on a blind date and being clocked by a speed camera doing 35 in a 30 in the dark on the way home. And on the way to the speed course, obviously, I pranged my car trying to park. I took this to be an omen. The ex-builder boyfriend was duly dusted off and put back into active service. In February, while having two new tyres fitted at a tyre shop in Wandsworth, I found myself being hit on by a jihadist tyre-fitter. We got chatting as I sat in his waiting room. He sat at his desk, beneath a golden passage from the Koran, and I somehow ended up telling him I had been to Iraq. The next thing I knew he was confessing to the fact that he was just back from there, for top secret reasons.

The Israeli chef and I have become firm friends since he moved out of my flat. He has his own place now, and is trying to find a job. I take him horse riding at the weekends. On the way down the A3 he asks me all sorts of questions about his new life in Britain and the things he is struggling to make sense of. Like why he can’t get a work visa. He is very upset about this. ‘You have to understand,’ I explain, ‘that the mistake you made was to come here legally and apply to the system honestly and openly, stating clearly that you wanted to find work.’ I glanced at him as I drove, surveying his handsome baby face, dark skin, slightly curly black hair.

A wonderful email has arrived from Airbnb entitled ‘Discrimination and Belonging — What It Means For You’. Having tried to make sense of it, I feel it can mean only one thing with any certainty. And that is that the Airbnb party is over. The web business started by a whizz kid in his New York apartment is about to feed itself to the ravening equality agenda wolves. Sadly, the once proud Airbnb corporation has decided to launch ‘a comprehensive effort to fight bias and inequality in the Airbnb community’.

After the Fawlty Towers incident, I decided it was best to research the origin and extraction of all future B&B guests on arrival, before the builder boyfriend got stuck in. You may remember that he accidentally on purpose got a piece of gaffa tape caught on his top lip and held some ceiling felt at a jaunty angle during the stay of the Airbnb customers from Bavaria. Thankfully, they were in another room and didn’t see but I had to shush him because he was making a bad job of whispering, ‘Don’t mention Brexit! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!’ A girl from Taiwan and a gentleman from Zimbabwe then came and went with no major incidents. But when a young chap from Israel booked in I thought I had better be careful.

After a tense two week stand-off, the Balham Airbnb Crisis has been resolved. My upstairs neighbour and I have drawn back from the brink. He has agreed to let me station bed and breakfast guests in my main bedroom. I have agreed to pay slightly higher building insurance contributions. By the time we signed the new direct debit forms, we had brought Balham to the brink of world war three. The biggest irony is, now it’s all sorted, I’m not so sure I want to do Airbnb. I’m not sure my nerves will stand it. My latest guest, a girl from Taiwan, arrived on Sunday afternoon when I was out doing the horses. I had hidden a key and messaged her to call me when she got there. I talked her through where the key was, and though it took her quite a while, she found it.

The gloves are off in my battle with the two brothers who live in the flat upstairs. They have just socked me a brutal left hook. And so no more am I going to be the neurotic, menopausal fruitcake downstairs. From now on I am going to unleash my difficult side. It’s a shame, because when they first moved in I thought they were going to be the neighbours I had always dreamed of: handsome and polite, with a look of dread in their eyes whenever I banged on their door. When I explained that the wheelie bin must be put out at right angles to the kerb at 8 p.m. sharp on Wednesday night, they did it. When I told them they had better not clank about in high heels they said they wouldn’t.

I am becoming the Basil Fawlty of Airbnb. Almost everything that tormented Basil has tormented me since I started taking in guests. I am thinking of nailing up a sign saying Kitey Towers, with the ‘y’ askew. If you don’t know what Airbnb is: some whizz-kid in America hit upon the idea of charging people to sleep on an airbed in his New York apartment. He started a website. You register your home, put up photos, and choose guests you think you will get on with. I’ve had customers from Australia, New Zealand, America, Spain. But while they are usually delightful, I have often felt myself bristling like Fawlty at the sheer cheek of the paying public.

‘No, I do not do WhatsApp.’ That’s pretty much all I ever seem to say to people nowadays. They ask me if I do WhatsApp, I say I don’t do WhatsApp and they never bother with me again. I deduce from this that not only can we not now meet in person (so 80s), we cannot talk on the mobile phone either (so 90s), and nor can we email each other (so noughties). We have to do WhatsApp. I don’t know what WhatsApp is and I cannot bring myself to find out. In answer to the next person who asks, I say: WtfApp! WhocaresApp?! GetalifeApp!! I was full up with pointless technology when I got as far as using an iPhone.