A spotter’s guide to house guests from hell
It is May in west Cornwall, the Airbnbs are full, and friends and acquaintances ask: can we come to stay? My instinct is to say yes. When we moved here, we bought a large house to fill with friends. I dreamed of an ongoing house party; a remembrance of university life (mine was both drunken and nerdish, a pottage of hell), but better. I forgot that when I moved to paradise, I had to work, or leave it. My guests, though, are pleasure-seekers, and pleasure-seekers do not mingle with angry workaholics.
My husband says I am a bad host, that I am not open-hearted. This feels unfair: I like a house full of people, but I do not want to have to clean up after them, feed them or apologise for needing to work (to pay for the food and the cleaning products to facilitate their pleasure). My husband can’t see dirt and he loves to cook. I, though, am a control freak who should probably open a nightmarish kind of guesthouse in which I shout at people and get mad reviews on Tripadvisor.
I am so afraid of the potential for chaos, last summer I found myself saying things like: “Do come, but you have to buy your own food.” Or: “Do come, but please put your recycling in the appropriate bag.” Or: “Do come, but I can’t look after you.” Then I hate myself for being joyless,
In my defence, I am a good guest. Or I think I am: you would have to ask my friends. I am certainly a manic guest. I cook meals, wipe tables and wash floors. My friend’s mother in
Corn-wailing: ‘I’d get mad reviews on Tripadvisor,’ says Tanya Gold Ireland calls me “the maid”. I am proud of that.
People are happy on holiday, at least until they meet me. They are infantilised, seeking their lost innocence, their childlike selves. I understand this, but it still renders me Mother. I once returned home from chores to find four adult guests sitting at the kitchen table patiently waiting for the food I had put in the oven an hour before. Not one of them had thought to check if the food was burnt – and it was. They said it wasn’t, but it was. I’m a restaurant critic.
Last year was the nadir. I invited a woman who has six children; I loved the children. I know her vaguely from my years in London. She said she was getting divorced and had no money for a holiday. Come down, I said, idiotically – and bring the puppy! On the first day, a child flooded the bathroom at 6am, trying to shower. Get a wet room, she suggested, when I showed her the flood on the ancient floorboards my husband had just finished sanding and varnishing. On the second day, she left my husband on the beach with seven children – including my own – to go and chat up the man in the surfboard shop.
On the third day, she left the house to have sex with him on the beach or, if it rained, in a car park, leaving us to babysit (this was in the middle of a global pandemic). I asked her not to go. “I need this for myself,” she said. What could I, a feminist, say?
On the fourth day, she parked her van outside the fish processing plant, so the crab fishermen could not unload their perishable catch.
On the fifth day, when I asked her to clean up the dog poo that had lived under the kitchen table throughout her stay, she said: “You told me to bring the puppy.”
On the sixth day, I discovered a pile of soiled puppy pads inside the wastepaper basket in my study. Well, it had been my study, but that reality collapsed into myth. It was then the children’s TV room. She tried to show Jaws 2 to the under-sixes.
On the seventh day, she left, leaving me an evil glass fish as a present. Her children said their father had given it to her. I suppose I was less far to go than the charity shop. She fed the children sugar from dawn to midnight and my son had to share it, for fairness’ sake. When she left, his clothes didn’t fit and he begged for green vegetables, which surprised him. Her final insult was to steal my toothbrush. I wept tears of rage.
This nadir was useful: I am careful now. I have, like political parties, a sanctioned list of trusted people who can behave and are given the responsibility – the honour – of returning.
My favourite guests include a father who buys food, cooks it, shares it and takes Virgil Dog for walks without my asking; and a mother who cleans the kitchen floor and makes her husband take out the bins.
They do not judge me when I eat cheap Chinese food and stare slack-jawed at Selling Sunset, and I do not judge them. This is what my Cornish paradise has shrunk to. This, now, is friendship.
I must be getting old.
‘I like a home full of people, but not having to clean up after them’