Wow!  You know how Four in a Bed - the programme where lots of B&Bers get together and make each other cry - is my favourite, after Downton? 

Well I've just received a very polite email inviting me to be on it!!  I am absolutely chuffed to bits that they've found and targetted Wydemeet, out of all the millions and millions of B&Bs that are out there, especially since we're not on any official lists except for TripAdvisor.

I have often daydreamed about what being on Four in a Bed might be like, as I embark on my fourth pre-recorded episode of an evening, once my guests are all cosily tucked up in bed upstairs.  And now the offer has come direct!

As a professional PR, my advice to me would be that going anywhere near it would be complete madness.  The only reason ever to get involved with the media is if you think they might be able to help you in some way, eg marketing something for you that you want to sell.

Well call me complacent - but judging by last year I will already have sufficient demand for B&B this summer, without putting myself forward for more.  So why would I proactively wish for the ritual humiliation endured by every B&Ber who goes on that programme, purely for the entertainment of the great unwashed, as they get a buzz out of my distress? Schadenfreude, my clever 15 year old Revered Son called it, as he bent over his congealed baked beans at lunchtime earlier today.

Because I'm a show-off, and it's a long time since I was last on telly, are the reasons.  Also I would be very interested in watching the process of making the TV programme, and finally, hopefully, there might be some money in it.

So I've emailed them back, questioning their assertion that Four in a Bed 'Celebrates the Great British Bed & Breakfast and its owners' and giving them all of the above with both barrels, and we'll see what happens.  I think the idea of lots of fat suburbanites falling off stepping stones into the river, and off tussocks into bogs, will be too tempting for them to resist, but I may be being far too arrogant and simply wrong.

I will probably live to regret this, but at the moment Beloved Daughter and I think it will be a great wheeze, and hopefully hardly anyone we know watches  the programme anyway.

It's half term, with lots of lovely horsey events booked for Beloved Daughter at the pony club.

On the last school day, I drive home and just as I reach the garden gate there's a terrible stench and smoke pours out of the front of Bill, the Shogun. I leap out before he explodes - he's petrol so he'll go up big and fast.  The nice man from the AA joins us for breakfast and follows me to Super Sexy Dick's garage, where the problem turns out to be simple stuck brake.

The next day, Beloved Daughter is entered for the Intermediate Trec competition, which includes some people who represent Great Britain.  I've organised it like this so that our slots are at about the same time, for efficiency.  Beloved Daughter comes fourth out of six - not bad!  We also enter the Pairs together - it is a very special thing to be able to participate in the same sport as your offspring. The weather has an extraordinary window and it is just beautiful riding across Woodborough Common.
 
The next day is a funride and another early start.  While I cook our guests breakfast, Sashka prepares the horses for Lady Muck (me) and her daughter.  We are just about to set out through the horizontal lashing rain, to discover the trailer has a puncture.  Ever resourceful Sashka swaps the wheel, and we are still early for the start. Beloved Daughter's pony, Warrior, decides he is in charge, and he'll go wherever he likes, at his own pace - the gallop. On a scale of 1 - 10, one being a disaster and ten being brilliant, the day scores three.

After that is a showjumping lesson, oversubscribed and booked three months ago for £20.  Bill overheats at the top of the hill and Beloved Daughter has to ride home, while I am visited by the AA man again.  This time it is a simple leaking radiator.

The next day is a Fun Ride of around eighty horses.  I have been looking forward to this for months.  I'm all dressed up and ready to go, to find that my wonderful mare, Panda, has lost a shoe, so it's a no go.

So, instead I drive to Newton Abbot to collect Revered Son from the station after his daily parties of sex, drugs and rocknroll, or whatever they have instead these days, and Bill hardly moves, going through half a tank of petrol, and overheating again on the hills, as a funny orange light flashes.  I limp into Super Sexy Dick's again and collect Marvin, who is still without a clutch.

So much for Beloved Daughter's next horsey event booked for tomorrow.  We'll never get there now.  I hope it pours.

Next time I might buy a new car.

So that is why I suddenly have time to contribute to my Blog.

"BT's here!" shouted Beloved Daughter.  Odd.  They hadn't made an appointment as far as I was aware.

Hey Baby I'm the Telephone Man popped out of the driver's door.  

"You've taken your time," I said rudely, and offered him a cup of tea.

It turned out that he's visited Wydemeet many times over the years, and knew exactly where all the boxes are.  He solved both problems in a jiffy - a blown socket and two burnt out wires, caused by lightning on January 4th.

Meanwhile Kind Neighbours next door have enjoyed three visits from 'Open Reach' or whoever, who could easily have popped by and sorted us out, and all this nonsense about broken telegraph poles requiring planning permission with an open ended date given was just clap-trap sent in an automated message to us from a BT computer in India.

So now I was able to hear all twenty messages left on 1571 in the first week of January, one of which was a potential booking of the entire house for a week in the summer, sum total: £2500.  I called the lady back and they've booked somewhere else now, no surprises.

Anyway, so now I am finally able to book an appointment at the hairdressers.  Hurray!

We've just received a score of 2.5 out of 10 for 'service', on Booking.com.

That would have been the couple who booked Hexworthy at 1pm, for a 4pm arrival the same day.  Hexworthy is our most luxurious room, costing £130 per night, accounted for by the comfort and spaciousness of both bedroom and bathroom.

I have been personally using Hexworthy for months now, so it needed a very urgent deep clean, which normally takes me three hours. Without the use of the phone, with minutes to spare I succeeded in arranging by text for some kind neighbours, who are also in the B&B game and therefore understand the problems, to kindly collect Beloved Daughter daughter from school while I did battle with my Marigolds.

So my guests arrived to no phone.  No mobile signal. No electric gate. Weak Wifi.  And then to cap it all, Tesco's, with various ingredients of my guests' vegetarian breakfast on board, came and went without delivering anything, neglecting to ring the bell (the battery had expired) or shouting, despite the fact that there were three cars parked outside the house, and three people in it.  Through the window I caught sight of their van slowly disappearing out of the gate in the rain, and Tesco (who I couldnt phone) ignored the urgent email I sent, imploring them to send it back.

So fair do's.  Sometimes you are just jinxed, especially living out in the wilds of woolly Dartmoor.  Incidentally, my guests did describe their visit as "Welcoming, homely, awesome location, really quiet, would go again" so it can't have been all bad.  I'm just relieved they wrote their review on Booking.com's site (we still rate '9.1 Superb') rather than on TripAdvisor, where we have slowly climbed to the No 14 Slot and rising, out of all 182 B&Bs on Dartmoor.

Wydemeet is probably the most remote B&B on Dartmoor.  

At least that is what I have written in all my advertising blurb.  It probably is - we're at the end of a 3/4 mile dead-end lane which looks private, but which is actually public. Occasionally snow ploughs with 'Motorway Maintenance' written on the side can be seen making their way along it, just outside our gate. I think uniquely, we have footpaths and bridleways stretching in every direction from our house - as you will no doubt have already read in the main body of this site, and we're 800 feet or metres (I forget which, but high enough to be bleak and cold) above sea level.

The school run to Beloved Daughter's place of learning, just outside Tavistock, is a twice daily,  26 mile, round trip of absolute pleasure. We start by going up a steep hill, and then we go down an even steeper, very windy one, over a bridge, and after a couple of miles we meet the main Dartmoor B-road that crosses the moor.  This is primarily used by prison officers who fly up and down along it at 100mph, even though its got '40' written and circled in white at regular intervals on the tarmac, bright enough to make the horses shy and refuse to tread on it.

So I need to have a 4-wheel drive in case of ice, hence Bill.

I have never seen anything like this weather, and have been out digging ditches in the field to divert the water and preserve what's left of my drive; and thrusting my arm down pipes and gutters, pulling out gunk and leaves, to stop the water flooding over into bits where it's not supposed to go.

This morning Beloved Daughter and I nearly reached the bridge, to find a tree fallen across the power lines and over the road. This resulted in a 30 minute diversion to the next bridge available, and meant for the second time Beloved Daughter was unable to be presented by the headmaster I mean headteacher with her certificate for 'Musician of the Week' in Morning Assembly.

The phone, obviously, remains down, but so far broadband, oil and electric power are intact.  We have a couple arriving to stay from Norfolk tomorrow.  They are bringing wellies and macs.  I'm hoping they're not going to need torches and a gas burner as well!  In the event that we do lose power, ironically we will have no water (it's electronically pumped up from a borehole and pure enough to sell!) so I expect I will have to find us all alternative accommodation.

Fingers and toes crossed!

Last night I sued BT again, for the third time, this time for £5000.

To do this takes about five minutes if you go through the on-line small claims arrangement.  You're allowed 1000 characters to describe what's happened and why the defendant owes you what you claim.  I need 1000 pages! The stupid computer wouldn't let me send my completed form through for ages, and eventually I discovered this was because you're not allowed to use a '&' in your copy.  So I changed it to 'B and B' but the finished version came out as 'Band B' so I hope they get what I'm on about.

I claimed for pain and suffering - the worry that I have been through, and the misery X has suffered, unable to make his daily night-night call to Beloved Daughter; lost earnings and reputation for my B&B business, my satellite broadband dish, my HTC Orange mobile with its special built-in Signal Boost app, wages for Suz to wait around while BT failed to keep its appointments, and an Orange 'Signal Box' which I'm going to be forced to buy at this rate.  Trouble is - I can't call anyone at Orange, or what's now called ee for some reason - to ask them whether their new Signal Box thing will work here. 

The summons gets sent direct from the Court to BT's head office in London.  This exercise has cost me £100. Even if I dont win anything, it will have been worth doing!

Beloved Daughter and I have won a prize in the Scoot Headline Awards!

We are to be presented with our trophy and certificate by someone famous called Ebony Feare at a glittering ceremony on April 28th at Millbank.  And if we attend that ceremony, we qualify to win another award for 'National Business Leaders', and go to another presentation, as well as getting our entry included on a CD!

We were very excited at the prospect of going up to London for a sitdown dinner surrounded by lots of other successful and knowledgeable B&Bers, all dressed in their best lounge suits and frocks.  We thought we'd pick up even more tips than we have from Four In A Bed!

But then I realised that, as far as I am aware, no one from Scoot has ever visited to check us out, nor, I don't think, has anyone ever booked Wydemeet through them.

What I do know is that I enjoyed completing their competition form in my best PR speak, and that appears to have done the trick!  Hurray!

We thought we'd still go, until I read that, as far as I can gather, the event just offers light refreshments, and it's during a schoolday, and it costs £150 + VAT for two, so we thought we'd give up and let them post us our award instead.

I'm still wondering what we've actually won it for?

BT has seen fit to leave us with no landline service now for over four weeks.

I have had three angry male friends onto them, all of whom have been put through to Edwin, Colin etc in India, who continue to send me texts with conflicting messages. Various representatives from BT also call me almost daily, surprised to find that no one answers the mobile because there is no signal here, as they have been told on so many occasions.  You can't call them back, as there's no way of leaving a message, even if you had a line or signal.

No one has turned up for three appointments now. One text tells me its an internal fault, the next that its an external fault which will be mended within a couple of days, and the next that it is an external fault which requires planning permission, is affecting a lot of people, and there is no date given for repair.  On one occasion I received 45 identical computerised texts running, acknowledging receipt of one of mine.

Funny how BT or Open Reach or whoever they are, have managed to mend Kind Neighbours' phone (who live at the end of the line) twice in the interim.

Thank goodness for my satellite broadband which battles on through the gales, snow and hail, and allows you to contact me without too much trouble.  Everything else, apart from the electric gate, is withstanding the worst weather that Dartmoor has thrown at Wydemeet in the 20 years that I have lived here, really rather well.  A part of me is pleased and relieved, and a lot of me is delighted while Beloved Daughter and I snuggle down to watch telly in front of the fire in the cosy sitting room, as the rain lashes against the window.

There was snow on the way to school this morning, it's just finished hailing, and now the sun's out, with a chill wind.

I couldnt face my regular Tuesday ride, and am preparing for this weekend's guests instead.  They will be ably looked after for a couple of nights by Beloved Daughter (11), her Dad, and Twiglet, while I see my seven best friends from university in Somerset.  How grown up and civilised have we all become?!