Meg Mason’s trademark take on DIY dramas

We’re heading offff on an extended European holiday, and I’m tempted to put our harbourside apartment up on one of the holiday accommodation sites to make a bit of pocket money while we’re away. What are some of the pros and cons?

Aside from cat videos and the anti-aging secret your dermatologist does not want you to know about, the internet is brimful of sites outlining the many and various hazards associated with private holiday lettings. So I won’t delve into the murky legal issues that can arise if say, you happen to be renting the apartment yourselves and chanced to skip over the bit in your lease expressly banning private sublets, or where you would stand, insurance-wise, if a guest takes their eye out while uncorking the vintage Krug you’d laid away for the

birth of your first child and comes after you for compensation, since I’m no law expert and I’ve got the most unimaginable backlog of new cat videos to get through by COB.

I’ll also choose to assume you’ve already had a nice, long think through how you would feel about a complete stranger - whose profile picture appears to show them doing jelly shots in a parked-up Jucy camper - sleeping in your bed, wiping their pizza fingers on your scatter cushions or sloughing off a sunburn with the exfoliating mitts you forgot to put under lock and key. And, that having thought it through, you’ve decided that $139 per night plus GST is adequate reparation for that degree of intrusion, in which case I can only commend you for being so open-minded and obviously not afflicted by any hygiene-based phobias.

But here’s the one pitfall I will point out, since most potential hosts don’t consider it, yet the fallout is felt long after your guest has moved onto their next destination and you’ve hoovered the last of their DNA off the Berber.

Have you thought about the reviews? Because it’s a hard thing to come back from a lovely time away, to find someone’s written in the most scathing terms about your inadequate selection of dry

herbs, or the over-representation of Mariah Carey in

your CD collection. That an “otherwise enjoyable trip Down Under was ruined by the sun reflecting off the harbour and shining onto the TV making it go all white. Also, no cumin”.

It’s the worst sort of violation, Allie, a negative review, especially when the person who wrote it relocated every one of your New

Yorkers into the lav over the course of their stay, but still doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re Foxtel package doesn’t have any of the sports channels”.

Indeed, to borrow parlance from the comments section, having your home besmirched online, unfairly and forever, is a one-outof-five-star experience. Would *not* recommend.

My adult children got me one of those robotic vacuum cleaners at Christmas. It was hugely expensive, but I’m worried what it says about me. Do they think I’m lazy, decrepit or just a poor housekeeper? Prudence, Rose Park, SA It doesn’t matter what the gift is saying, Prue darling. Once you get it going and it starts scraping itself across the floorboards, knocking into furniture and setting the dog off in a fit of barking, you won’t be able to hear a thing.