How to get rid of unwelcome house guests

Recently, as our guests and my bride and I sat around the breakfast table, someone, out of politeness, asked what my next column is going to be about.

When I replied that I hadn’t a clue, someone countered, “how about how to get rid of unwelcome house guests?”

We all laughed uproariously at this, since the holiday season is the time of year that even inhospitable folk encounter a steady stream of humanity at their doorstep.

Some tales of bad visits ensued, as well as some strategies — such as ensuring that the mattress in the visitor’s bed isn’t “too comfortable,” as ours apparently was — to handle such a situation.

Somebody repeated the old adage that fish and houseguests all begin to stink after three days, which was met with nods, and general merriment.

I will say right here and now that our friends were model guests: nice, fun, quiet sleepers, who shared in the cooking and cleaning up, arriving with more than enough grub, then making a welltimed departure the next morning.

But not long after they left, I was on the blower, searching for some insights on how to deal with bedfellows, good and bad.

(A colleague was some help here: when a guest had possibly overstayed their welcome at an uncle’s house he would walk into the room and inform them “you could stay longer, but you wouldn’t like it.”)

My expert has been in the hospitality business in rural Nova Scotia for a long time. Along with an inn he also owns houses all over the place that he rents for short and long periods of time. When the fish were running he had guests — fine people who blended in with the year-rounders in the area — who used to stay for months at a time.

When I reached him by cellphone, he and a son were bound for one of his houses that they needed to prepare for a renter who would lodge there until June, and maybe longer.

He wanted to remain nameless, for obvious reasons. So we will call him Joss Merlyn, after the innkeeper from Daphne du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn.

“When I look back over 40-plus years they’ve been basically great,” he said of his guests.

Even so, there were the ones that lifted a crazy, beer stein lamp that Merlyn was fond of, along with the anglers who simply had to have the thousandtrout fishing book, which had been personally inscribed by the author who had nice things to say about his accommodations.

There was the time that, to accommodate some raucous, regular, longtime guests, he built a new cabin out in the woods, a decision that was a costly one since they never, ever returned.

There was the time a couple of the staffers — “good Baptist girls” — came to him because they were concerned about some screams issuing from one of the cabins. Those sounds turned out to be amorous pleasure, rather than the signs of something sinister, but were still disturbing enough that the occupants had to be asked to leave.

“When it comes to that there’s no beating around the bush,” he explained. “You just have to say ‘I think you should go’ and they go.”

Easy of course for him to say; he’s got a business to run.

In non-commercial situations — unless there has been some sort of egregious lapse in etiquette — this can be hard to do. Subtlety is called for.

No ignoring food allergies. Handing them a shovel and asking for a little hand with the sod on the vegetable patch out back won’t do. Neither, I suppose, would be asking for some sort of monetary compensation.

A person could always, as an old WikiHow post counsels, “do something boring” (like playing pick-up sticks or washing your cat), or “use body language — gently” (no overt scowls).

But I don’t know, I just don’t know. Some questions, for which there are no easy answers, just require deeper consideration.

I dearly wanted to do so, while I still could, because it was the holiday season. The dog was barking. Someone was at the door.

Our next houseguests had arrived.