B&b

‘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.

To B&B or not to B&B? That is the question. Whether it’s nobler to offer breakfast to a guest is not in question, but whether it’s possible has been my dilemma since I started my guest house. After reading Ross Clark on The Spectator website saying that he longs for the traditional B&B, all I can say is I’ve really tried to be that landlady he describes, in pink fluffy slippers, frying bacon in a house with Artex walls. I’ve tried to take people who roll up late at night, I’ve tried to put the second B back into the enterprise, and I’ve tried to cope with customers who, like Ross, want the option of a cooked breakfast but not a fry-up – porridge, made just the way they want it, which is different for every single customer.

The thoroughbred looked cross, with flared nostrils and a pinched expression, so I should have known what was about to happen. It’s always bad news when the mare’s serene beauty drains out of her face and she affects a look like a female daytime television panel member. She turned round and bit me as I led her in from the field, and she only ever does that when she’s trying to tell me something. In the barn, she nibbled a strand of hay from her net, and spat it back out. Then she turned herself round in circles several times, before buckling her knees and collapsing herself like a folding sun chair. With a big exhalation she hit the shavings, stretched out on one side with her head on the ground, and stuck her four legs out straight, absolutely senseless from overeating.

The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show. I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the travelling public all summer, so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism. My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but never both. Only the French can be relied upon to eat everything, followed by the Irish and the Germans. Everyone else can go every which way.