It's getting to the time of year - summer a faint memory behind us and Christmas* a faint prospect ahead, that short breaks start to seem like a great idea. And what could be better than a short break in a nice B&B? Thirty days in jail, that's what.
Okay that might be overstating it a bit. When a B&B is good, it's very very good but when it's bad it's . . . hilarious.
I can never decide which are worse: bad British B&Bs - candlewick bedspreads, those wee tubes of Nescafe and fag ash in the fried eggs; or bad US B&Bs - gingham love-hearts hanging from the door handles, excruciating social hours at teatime and the proud announcement of "today's coffee". My memory of "today's coffee" doesn't go beyond hazelnut and maple but my travelling companion swears he remembers spiced orange and toasted coconut. Not together, but still.
Anyway, to celebrate the launch - today! - of GO TO MY GRAVE, which is set in a posh B&B, I've whittled away at some happy memories and compiled my top five remarkable (for various reasons) B&Bs. (Some names have been omitted to protect the incompetent.)
No. 5 Hog Heaven
Glebe Farm at North Creake in Norfolk (the UK one) is a winner. It's beautiful outside with its warm red brick and a cottage garden. beautiful inside with its Bloomsbury hues and books galore, beautiful all around with its coastal walks and stripy lighthouses. Mary and Jeremy make great (coffee-flavoured) coffee and tip-top fry-ups and then they leave you alone.
In fact my best experience at Glebe Farm was when they literally left me alone. I asked about a particular date. They said they would be away. Then they emailed again with a suggestion: would I feed the cat and fry my own bangers if they didn't charge me? Would I? I was in hog heaven. I commandeered the kitchen to make a pork pie for Val McDermid (another blog and not a short one) and once I'd worked out how to turn the telly on (a task that gets more complicated every time the tech changes) and how to put the many colour-coded bins out (ditto) I've never been happier. Mary and Jeremy might have had regrets, when they came home to a freezer full of leftover ham stock, but not me.
No. 4 Knick-Knack Central
At the far reaches of the other end of the scale is a place I spent a few nights in in London. There was one letting bedroom, so crammed with knick-knacks it was hard to find enough flat space to charge a phone. Also, none of the family members - I think, although they could have been anyone - got the memo that the en suite bathroom was for the B&B guest alone. Maybe that was a teething problem - I know they hadn't been at the venture all that long because my fifty quid a night was still a novelty. I know that because they say in the garden under an open window arguing about what to do with it. And the landlady tidied the linen cupboard just outside my bedroom door at one o'clock in the morning. How loud can that be, you're wondering. Depends on the number of bangles she's wearing, is my reply.
Worst of all in this truly abysmal establishment was breakfast. The advert said "continental selection of croissants, spreads and preserves served at your leisure". What that meant was one of the many tiny tables in the room had a basket of little pastries in packets, with all the writing in various exotic languages. They puzzled me for a while until I worked out that they were airline food, saved from flights. And not recent flights either: the last two digits of six digit consume-by dates are the same the world over.
No. 3 Local Heroine
One of my favourite B&Bs sounds the same on paper: one letting room, make your own breakfast. But this cottage in Pennan on the Aberdeenshire coast couldn't be more different in real life. The make-your-own involves a fridge, a toaster and home-made marmalade that could wipe out the competition at any WI in the land. The room is spacious, the bathroom unoccupied and outside is this:
And the phone box from Local Hero. What's not to love? Susan cheerfully gives over half the downstairs of a not-very-big cottage and lets guests sprawl all over her garden. There don't seem to be any rules or restrictions. There are certainly no wee signs.
No. 2 Lord, give me a sign!
In contrast, somewhere in New England (I'm not being discreet; it was a whistle-stop tour and it's all run together) is what my travelling companion and I call The House of A Hundred Signs.
That's unfair. We didn't count the signs outside our room. Inside our room, there were "only" sixteen. We'd already noticed the sign thing on this trip and taken to totting them up. Ahem:
- No smoking (fair enough)
- Do not use washcloth to wash face.(?)
- Do not lie on coverlet (mkay)
- Do not lean against this wall when passing through door (no one would, unless trying to read the sign)
- Coffee (propped up in front of the coffee-maker)
- Please ask innkeeper for cream
- Cookies (propped up in front of cookie jar)
- Please use plate when eating cookies
- Do not consume cookies in bed
- Let whirlpool tub fill completely before turning on jets
- Do not overfill tub
- Do not use whirlpool after 10pm
- Breakfast is served between 8 and 8.30 (half an hour!)
- TV remote (propped up in fornt of guess what)
- TV Guide (guess)
- Turn key to lock door (shocker!)
There was no sign saying "after breathing in, breathe out and repeat". If I travelled with my own laminator, I'd have donated one. My best guess about The House of A Hundred Signs is they paid for a bulk order of the things as part of a start-up package and wanted to get their money's worth.
No. 1. On A Dark and Stormy Night . . .
Picking my all-time number one B&B was a challenge. Nobottle Grange in Northamptonshie, Nightingale's Inn in Ashland, OR. and Bosillian House in Grampound village in Cornwall were all contenders. But the best night I've ever had in a B&B, by far, went as follows: driving back from Skye to Galloway at night, through hammering rain, exhausted and dejected, we turned a corner and saw a sign - "bed and breakfast + phone number". There was no reception. We kept driving. Five miles farther on, half a bar appeared. I phoned. They had a room. We turned back.
It was a B&B. we expected that. It was also a castle. A turreted, crenulated, stone-mullioned castle. Now, some castle-dwellers' response to two bedraggled and scruffy late arrivals dripping on their mediaeval parquet would be to put down paper. These people? They gave us towels and shooed us into the kitchen (vaulted) for soup. They put hot-water bottles (stone) in our bed (four-poster - the real kind, with wood-worm holes) and filled a bath the size of a Buick in the nearby bathroom (round, because in a tower).
We slept like rocks, woke to a foggy morning, were served a fry-up in a red-velvet and cobweb dining room, then took off at five miles an hour with the full beams on.
I can't tell you the name of this place because I never heard it. And I can't point you to its location because, afterwards at home, we couldn't find it on the OS sheet map. They certainly don't have a website. I've got a sneaky suspicion that the sign with the phone number was for some cottage on the drive that we missed in the dark and bad weather, and that the soup-serving, bed-warming, bath-drawing castle-dwellers were just very hospitable to random strangers. I've always hoped we didn't offend them by paying.
Of course, there's another less likely but somehow more compelling explanation. One that would account for the fact that in the years since that night, Google Earth has never let us stick a pin in the place again. That's why we call it - my travelling companion and I - the best B&B that never was. Possibly.
*Speaking for myself. Other winter festivals are available
Hilarious blog, Catriona, and your objections to B&Bs is while I'll never get my husband near one. Congratulations on your new book.
Posted by: Elaine Viets | October 23, 2018 at 01:02 PM
Whoa. And you call me a witch? I love the idea of the Brigadoonish B&B.
Posted by: Ann Mason. | October 23, 2018 at 01:07 PM
The number 1 does sound like Brigadoon. Or a less bizarre version of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Maybe they were ghosts. The "best of the worst" (worst of the best?) do sound hilarious. Especially the signs. I don't know if I could have been as sanguine about the stale airline pastries as you are.
Posted by: Alexia | October 23, 2018 at 02:28 PM
Happy book birthday, Catriona! I love this post, and giggled at the sign list, especially. I always wonder how many people had to do something before there was a sign made—did a hundred people eat cookies in bed, or did one just rain shortbread crumbs everywhere and ruin it for everyone? I ponder stuff like this way too frequently.
Posted by: LynDee Walker | October 25, 2018 at 12:10 PM