Well, I was going to write about my perfect moment as follows:

Wow! Wow! Wow!  I am reclining here in the dark on my newly-oiled teak sun-lounger, with a full moon gazing down upon me through the gap in the trees, picking on Lidl's 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate with raspberries, enjoying a fag, and a chilled glass of Naked Wine's Mar del Sur; while Revered Son lies back in the hot tub before me, reading a dodgy-looking novel called 'The Vincent Boys', illuminated occasionally by flashing  blue, orange and blood red strobe lights; his tea, lap-top and i-pod next to him, positioned on the shelf by his head,  playing music, some of which I know and actually quite like,as the smell of honeysuckle permeates through to us both.

The house is clean and tidy, the lawn and patio immaculate, the tubs of flowers and herbs still alive, my pots of cooking oil, beverages, preserves, tins of baked beans, herbs and spices all in their neat OCD rows, everything just as I want it, awaiting the arrival of my guests on Saturday, while we catch EasyJet to Pisa and drive on to Sienna, to stay in a luxury pad even lovelier than ours, to relax for a week with 14 other members of the immediate family, courtesy my lovely sister.

Tomorrow the window cleaner, telly man, hot tub man, and my 'Mr Fixit Team' arrive to finish everything off, while I live up to my new persona of 'Mad Mower of the Moor'.

I've just received a B&B booking for two rooms for mid-August for a couple of nights from a German family.  We've arrived.  We're going to be OK.  And the unforeseen bonus is that this holiday lettings/B&B thing means that you can spend time and money making your home really nice, just as you'd always hoped it might be, guilt-free - and get paid for the privilege.  Bingo! All is right in my world.

But.  It has taken 45 minutes for my i-pad not to log on to this site, so I've had to come indoors two floors up to my normal computer, which still took another 20 minutes to work, we are so far from a proper broadband connection, and it is now well past bedtime at one o'clock in the morning, so I am in a bait. 

I have decided that I am going to offer the best B&B on the moor.

This, of course, means the most expensive.  But I'm still cheaper than a hotel, and I'm not liable for VAT yet, which means 20% off for guests - or 20% more for me - one or the other.  If I have sufficiently few guests so that I can manage all the work myself I should be quids in!

The reason I have been 'off air' recently is because I have been trying to market the thing.  After three months I have felt as though I have been banging my head against a brick wall until it bleeds.  I have become increasingly frustrated and irritable as nothing I do seems to work, and all appears out of my control.

I used to style myself modestly as 'Queen of PR'.  I could make anyone famous, and get any crappy old product into the national papers for free. Well these talents are now redundant. These days I have just one simple marketing goal.  That if you plug 'Dartmoor B&B' into Google's search engine, up comes Wydemeet. Simples. Not. These three months I have got nowhere.

Owners Direct - for holiday rentals - no enquiries since January, despite my putting a 20% reduction on my prices.

Trip Advisor - after three months they have still failed to put me on their map, and I am languishing at No 47 in their 'Top 166 B&Bs in Dartmoor'. They refuse to include any contact details unless you pay, and finally I got myself signed up with LateRooms who include a Booking Diary on Trip Advisor if you push hard enough to remind them to sort it out for you.

AdWords - they're the ones that come up in the yellow box, or are listed down the side when you do a Google search. Every time somebody clicks on them it costs the advertiser around £1 according to a complicated kind of auction-system. You have to make up several very short ads, and fill in columns and columns of keywords and phrases (I completed over 200 in the end) to make sure they come up according to the various searches potential guests might make (most of which contain spelling mistakes such as acomodation).  I upped my budget to £5 a day and my ads started appearing on the front page occasionally, but the campaign has come to nothing so I have cancelled my subscription.

LateRooms - I spent hours sorting out details of what should go on their website, and then changed to a company called Eviivo, which covers LateRooms, TopRooms, LastMinutedotCom, Expedia and about 30 others, all at once. So I needn't have bothered. It took two weeks to get up and running with Eviivo - quite quick in this business.  They were sensible and efficient to work with. What a relief!

Booking.Com - operates separately from Eviivo. Loony company.  Writes its own copy and chooses what pictures to use and in what order.  My greatest asset, according to them, was that I offer 'easy access' to the ghastly Torquay (25 miles away), and the first picture they used to advertise my home was one of a silver horse and some glasses on my dining room table.

Air BnB - operates differently from the above agencies.  The others mostly charge me 15% commission per booking.  Air BnB charges both customers and operators. Canny! And they are flying, judging by the number of enquiries I have been gettting from them.  And easy to set up on.

God of B&Bs - has gone away to France so I won't be on his website until after he gets back.

Search Engine Optimisation. Otherwise known as SEO.  Hah! How modern am I to know that? I have been working on optimising my own website www.wydemeet-dartmoor.com.  You have to list lots of 'key words' in your copy and behind the scenes in special hard-to-find sections of your website, add a blog, use captions with capital letters in under your photo's, etc etc etc.  Apparently it can take six months for all these little touches to start working, once Google's 'spiders' have crawled all around them.  It is an ancient myth that the more clicks you get, the higher up you appear. So far I'm nowhere - not even on page 12 of search results!

YouTube: on one of our rare sunny days I grabbed the opportunity to film the garden and a bedroom I've called 'Dartmeet', and put the results up on YouTube, using as many keywords as I could think of, accompanying the footage with a Chopin Nocturne for the bedroom, and a quick blast of Beethoven's Pastoral for the outside footage.  This has put me onto page 6 of Google Search, but somebody not very kind has added a 'dislike' little sign to my bedroom film.  Perhaps they thought the use of one of the most beautiful tunes ever written, to advertise a B&B, was naff.

So I have been busy.  With zero result.  No other accommodation in the area is following up so many marketing avenues, as far as I am aware. So what's the problem? That I am up there too late in the season, that I am too expensive, that I am too dictatorial demanding a minimum of two nights, that the place is let out for a week in July, that I am new, so that I am at the bottom of all the marketing arms with no reviews as yet and have no repeat business?  Or possibly just because I am horrid.

All this remains to be seen.  At least I now have an on-line presence.  Which means that I can calm down, leave my computer for a few minutes a day, and be a bit nicer to people around me.

And I remain firmly optimistic that very soon it will all begin to gather momentum and in due course I will be over-inundated with bookings.  Watch this space!

I tell you what.  100% Egyptian cotton with a 200 thread count is a complete bummer. After washing, its creases resemble the complexion of an old woman, and it's impossible to iron.

But.  This B&B lark.  It's brilliant!  I am really loving it!  I still simply just can't believe that I ever possibly could!

I mean.  You actually get paid for doing your own hoovering and mowing, and making your house look like a show home! Well, you would, assuming you had some customers.  Which I'm sure I will eventually.

My freaky scary night with my first guests coinciding with the arrival of God of B&Bs was really great.  Esteemed Partner and I had dinner with God and his especially delightful wife, just after I got back from listening to Beloved Daughter singing 'Swing Low'' particularly wonderfully, in our local parish church.

I asked God whether it would be OK to serve my guests food from 'Cook' - a company in Kent that makes home-made food in bulk, freezes it, and gets it to you within 24 hrs of ordering.  Most courses cost £3.95 a serving, and taste exquisite - words can't really do it justice.  It's miles nicer than anything that I could ever make and completely reliable and consistent, unlike my cooking.

It seems that God is most comfortable with honesty and personality - two things that I rather pride myself on actually.  He said it would be fine to serve food from 'Cook' provided I were open about the fact.  He also commented on the hideous piles of timber piled sky high just outside my gate, which have been growing so fast over the past decade that my poor home is now drowning behind it all.  "It's real," he said.  "It's what the moor's all about these days.  What's really going on now that the hill farmers are forced to diversify."  He made me feel completely better about it.

All six of us sat around the polished dining room table for breakfast the next morning, and it was really like a jolly house party.  The freshly baked (from frozen) croissants and pain-au-chocolats that I had found the day before in Sainsbury's went down particularly well.

I joined God and his wife for lunch at the Rugglestone in Widecombe - the best pub on Dartmoor - after they had wandered down the River Swincombe, which winds down the valley from just outside our house to join the East Dart.  They were stunned by the beauty of the place.  I have recently discovered that people who have lived on Dartmoor for years choose this out-of-the-way very spot to celebrate their most special occasions.  It is so important not to take where I live for granted. There is truly nowhere else like it in the world.

I had spent the morning filling in God's B&B form, and rushing around tidying, clearing up dining room, bedrooms and kitchen, washing up, straightening flowers in vases and beds, wiping around bathrooms and hoovering.  Stuff that I have never really done in my life before - well at least not since the school holidays over thirty years ago.

For the price of an overnight stay - averaging £100 a room for one of my three rooms - I really can't complain about this.  All the books say that to run a B&B is such hard work.  Well, not compared with a proper job, in my probably not as humble as it should be opinion.  It just gives you an excuse to keep your house in good nick and hopefully, in the end, to entertain a steady stream of people staying the night, and to cook breakfast for them, and chat to them.  All of my favourite things.

Roll on that steady stream!

And in the meantime I'll gird my loins and get experimenting with the new steam press I picked up last week off Ebay for £52, from a very nice lady just down the road from the health club.  All the books agree that a decent B&B must offer Egyptian cotton.  I really can't see the problem with polyester, but there we are.