I hate Radio 1.  It goes tsch te te tsch te te tsch te te tsch irritatingly all the time in the background, while some youth with an unintelligible regional accent shouts above the racket using obscure teen language, interspersed with electronic noises with no tune and angry ghetto-speak rattled off more quickly than you can say 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' (correct spelling); impossible to sing along to, and entirely devoid of any sentimentality.

Yet Beloved Daughter's Latin and English teachers, both as old as I am, enjoy it! They danced happily on the bar, to everything played during our school ski trip disco, whereas the only tune I recognised was 'Happy'.  They have teenage children and told me that Radio 1 is good during the afternoons.  But I cant miss Steve Wright.

I'm having a bit of an argument with the Golden Monster's radio at the moment. It doesnt seem to be very good at tuning in to anything.

So it happened that last night, at about 7pm, while I briefly gathered that Adam appears still to be the only gay in the village, and sadly missed Simon Mayo's Midweek Mosh, I found my ears being assaulted by someone ranting down a phone about her brother leaving butter and jam all over her table and floor. Then a kiwi called 'Zane' shouted about how much he hates too much butter on his bread.  Then someone else started yelling about how boring it is when people tell you about their dreams (couldn't agree more). Next a little kiddie was screaming about how they're planning to make the school day even longer - "school, school, homework, dinner, bed"; followed a teenage bloke furious at those hysterical girls who wreck live recordings.

Now this is my kind of radio.

It turned out to be a show on Radio 1 where they encourage you to phone in and 'Rage' at their answerphone. All compered by a charming, clearly well educated and civilised young man, with a very nice voice and gentle sense of humour, whose father is a teacher.  

So Ive got a plan.  I'm going to ring that answerphone myself and 'rage' to it about how much I hate Radio 1 going tsch te te tsch te te tsch tee tsch and not playing any proper music.

Meanwhile, the smell of dead mouse in our smart cloakroom has intensified.  It appears not to have been old McDonald's
leftovers causing the stench after all.  I now have the area surrounded by three potpourris, a vase of real alive lilies, and a very expensive reed diffuser.  But even this army of aromas is unequal to the battle.  I fear some floorboards are going to have to come up. 

"Your house smells nice".

These were the first words that my friend's autistic son addressed to me, as he walked in through Wydemeet's back door.

Ahhh! Just one of the greatest compliments! Such a shame that its not usually the sort of thing people say when they visit other people's homes.

I think different smells can be as mood-changing as different kinds of music, and I am verging on the neurotic about smells in this house.  "Dead mouse" is one that makes me freak out the most. Even worse than my son's Sex Wax.

Our best cloakroom, that all our guests come through, has been smelling of dead mouse recently. What a way to greet them!  The smell just wouldnt go away so I went mad on eBay, bidding for 24 bottles of pot pourri reviver, and three packets of rose, autumn mist, and lavender pot pourri's.  I won them all - as you might have guessed.

So I'm going to make quite sure that any smell of dead mouse is drowned out by dried bits of flower in future.

Living where we do, a mouse invasion is a constant threat, and they like to come inside - between the inside and outside walls - when the temperatures are sub-zero.  An immediate assault with poison is highly efficacious (God I'm sounding like 'The Scaffold' now).  Apparently, having been poisoned, the wee mice go off somewhere to drink, and die by the water source and mummify in some strange way.  Normally under our cloakroom floor it would seem.

I was also becoming extremely nervous about the smell of mildew finding its way into the main body of the house from my private new bathroom.

I favour carpets in this back of beyond, to keep us all warm and cosy, which is fine until the overflow gets loose and starts leaking.   My bathroom has a roll top bath, a silver-grey deep carpet (top of the range remnant from Trago), a silver and blue chandelier and bright yellow blind.  It is featured on this website and is much admired. I think bathrooms should smell as lovely as they look.

So I cut away the mouldy bit of carpet and slipped an ice cream container under the offending pipe I found, only for the smell to get worse! After many, many days of this, shutting my door, persuading myself that I was making things up, I made myself have another search around for the offending source, and discovered that all this time the radiator has a leaky joint. Which also accounts for the fact that I am having to constantly prime the central heating.

And then I realised why the front cloakroom was smelling so horrid - a waste paper basket full of old McDonalds left-overs from the car, combined with a pile of horse rugs in the washroom next door!

So I have spent weeks worrying over something that could have been put right in minutes.  And now Ive got to think of what to do with the 23 bottles of pot pourri reviver I have left ...

Miles driven: 650; time spent driving: a couple of weeks; coffees consumed: 25; fags consumed: 25; taxis paid for because late for school pick-up for Beloved Daughter: 1; new boyfriends attained: 0. 

MPG: 40!!! Result!!!

"We are from the same world, but inhabit very different countries."

I don't normally write personal stuff about any of you, because I don't want people to stop communicating with me in case I go public on them.   But honestly, this bloke has made me so cross that this time I am.

Like a total moron, having corresponded with him for hour after hour, week after week, writing all sorts of hilarious stuff especially for him that could easily have entertained all of you, my numerous, lovely, loyal readers who support me through thick and thin asking nothing in return, I drive six hours each way to see him, and two days later I get dumped by text without even a "but you are pretty", or "thank you for coming all this way"!!  I ask you!  AND I had stopped off en route for a quick spot of TK Maxx therapy, in Slough where I was born so don't be rude about it, but why on earth my mother couldnt have chosen Royal Windsor like she did for my siblings I will never know, and I have to admit to it on at least one form a month ... anyway, where was I?

So first I was hurt. Then I was a bit affronted.  But all the time I knew he had a point, which I think he expressed in a rather perceptive and condensed way, as opposed to a pretentious one. Which do you think it is? I have actually started using it myself, as a quick, easily understandable and not too rude way to fob off the 98% of inappropriate people who contact me via Encounters.

During our meeting, I had quietly admired his nicely ironed striped shirt, his shiny cufflinks, orange socks and light tan brogues.  I thought they matched my Golden Monster rather well.  And he was considerably taller and heavier than I am. I just love that.

So. Sigh. The thing is I belong everywhere and nowhere. I don't have a country. Anyone who isn't posh thinks I am.  And anyone who's genuinely posh knows I'm not. And there's no-mans land inbetween.  So I think this annoying bloke has hit it on the head in a sentence. 

My 'country' currently comprises a great deal of chat about private schools, swimming, riding, doing lunches, school run, watching children's matches and events; oh yes! And running a successful B&B business!

How do I provide time to make a man feel special in and amongst all of that?

Well - things could change big-time in the summer, when Dearly Beloved starts weekly boarding.

I may even have to give up Wydemeet and move. Or delegate more. Or become famous being interviewed all around the world about my amazing first book.  Or become some bloke's free housekeeper somewhere.

I would like to meet the right chap, and then think about it.

So we've done Pre-Historic.  We've done the Middle Ages.  Now we're onto,  say, Victorian times.  Or not so Victorian.  We will see. Bring on Volume 3!

Google Analytics sent me an unsolicited email yesterday. It had some very interesting statistics in it (I think).  They're rather complicated to understand, so I dont know if they're good or bad.

The email informed me that last month, out of 657 visitors to this website, 243 'exited' from this diary page. It's clearly not very good then. What an insult!  Except presumably those 243 visitors read a bit of it, before exiting in disgust.  Unless most of these were from me, checking that no further boring comments had been posted, requiring instant deletion.

So I still dont know exactly how many individual readers we're getting, because I can't work out which button to press. But my guess is that its now quite a lot more than 13, though still none from my target audience of bewildered, bemused, broke people freshly dumped from a relationship they felt was going well.

The trouble is, riding along on my horse this morning, I couldnt think of anything new to say.  Now we've done a year or more, the same old Goosey Fair, Dickensian Christmas etc are going to keep returning, round and round.  But I've got some news: 

WE'VE GOT OUR FIRST RETURNS!!!!!!!!!!!!

So after a little over a year's operation, our first returning visitors have re-booked for a weekend in November.  They are one of our favourite couples.  They were incredibly nice about it when we knocked their drying gilet, worth £120, onto the Aga and it melted. And together we finalised the names and content of our speciality breakfast of Eggs Florentine and Royale. Well the whole thing is a birthday surprise, so I'm not saying anything more, but it represents a turning point.  Some of our guests voting with their feet - in through the door, rather than out of it.  How wonderful!

Just as well, because I have over-honed down on the marketing, so business is a bit slow and I'm going to go overdrawn soon, unless some miracle happens. I'm back in touch with booking.com so they can start taking all my money again.  This is such a flexible business - you can turn it up and down, on or off, like the knobs on a radio!

Meanwhile Times Encounters has gone ballistic.  It is beyond me how the 'top twenty most popular people' cope, because I must be a long way off that, but I am being courted by several people 15 years my junior and cant really keep up! And highly erudite and flattering they are too!  I am going to become a worse show-off than ever at this rate!

Relationship-wise, there wont be anything concrete to report for months, because its not your business yet, so wedding bells is not going to be the ending to this book, if it ever becomes one.

And finally, in the summer, Beloved Daughter will start weekly boarding.  What shall I do all day?  Well that might just become the start of a new way of life and a whole new book perhaps!

So give me a sec, and I shall start looking into publishing this thing, and going mega-public.  How exciting this is going to be! Can't wait!

Today is Goosey Fair - an historical event held annually by the attractive Devonian market town of Tavistock.

The first time I went I was rather hoping for a goose sandwich - I rather like goose.  Makes a change from Dartmoor Pony, or turkey for that matter.

Well, there was not a goose in sight, I searched and searched.  Instead I came away with five watches, all of whose batteries expired five months later, and a pair of slippers in Size 8.

The staff and Mums at Beloved Daughter's school dread Goosey Fair, which is held on the first Wednesday of October every year.  I'm the only I know who looks forward to its buzz and naffness.

Of greatest interest to me, is the almost universal inverse relationship between precocious child and scary ride.  Beloved Daughter's best friend Jackie is a slight, gentle, very polite, obedient and intellectual creature, meanwhile determination and courage do not feature at the top of the leader board for Beloved Daughter when it comes to the hockey pitch or the cross country course.

And yet. These two, aged 10, insisted on queueing up for the scariest rides available at the fair.  The tallest, fastest, highest, loudest one is called 'Oxygen'.  Dorothy, (Jackie's mother) and I both felt sick as we stared up at our two little girls whizzing around backwards and forwards 200 metres above us, laughing their heads off. Their peers waited next to us at the foot of the horrifying, thumping, crane-like edifice, gazing up in wonder, a newfound respect emerging for our sweet daughters. Then they quietly slid off to their own favourite ride - one where you sit in a giant teacup and, very slowly, go round and round in circles.

So Im off there again in a minute.  I wonder whether the fairground people have managed to build something even wilder than Oxygen? Our two girls are beginning to find it rather tame, now they have reached the great age of 12!

There's been a lot of discussion in the media recently about tucking into sandwiches made from cuddly wuddly Dartmoor foalies.

I think it was my mate, Charlotte Faulkner (her real name), who first went public on the subject.  Charlotte founded The Dartmoor Hill Pony Association nearly twenty years ago, and no one could care more passionately about Dartmoor's ponies than she does.  With endless loyal support from her extended family, she has devoted  her life to their cause.

I know quite a lot about marketing meat because I used to work for the British Turkey Federation, so I'm particularly interested in all of this.

In our marketing materials we would never use pictures of cuddly wuddly live turkeys.  We had to completely divorce the idea of the clingfilmed slab of cream fillet in the supermarket from anything that had ever been alive. I eventually stopped sending press releases to The Independent (the least independent newspaper of them all if you ask me - worse than the Daily Mail.  At least nobody reads it except journalists) because they would simply use my info as a catalyst to call up their friends at 'Chickens Lib' (yes it does exist), and give poor old Bernie Matthews another roasting. I have even turned down opportunities to appear on the Today programme, because I know they're just after a slanging match between the Turkey people and the veggies, which is never going to sell more turkey sausages.

So I was a bit horrified to see on our local BBC Spotlight programme a large slithery piece of red pony fillet being swirled around in a bowl of what looked like dark red blood, but I think was actually wine, interspersed with shots of merry foals gambling on the moor, and licking tourists' ice creams.

However, on the Jeremy Vine Programme it was a relief to hear about 95% listeners talking sense.  The only two against were both clearly barmy weedy wimmin who frankly sounded completely off their trollies.

Charlotte is quite clear about the problem of not having enough ponies on the moor, which has been somewhat overlooked in most of the coverage. Ponies keep the moor in good order.  They eat scrub - gorse, bracken etc - that even the sheep wont touch.  With numbers down from 30,000 to 3,000 or something,  the speckled warbler (for whom it appears most of DEFRA's legislation is devised) is thriving - good for it, but being understocked, the moor itself is becoming  ever less accessible for walkers, riders, cyclists, farmers etc, the heather is disappearing, and basically its less beautiful than it was when we first moved here in 1995.

The Dartmoor commoners continue to maintain some ponies.  But most of the foals get shot, and fed to the hunt hounds, or zoo animals. Why not to humans too?

Unlike the millions of hothoused chickens and turkeys we consume, Dartmoor foals have a jolly, free life til it comes to the crunch, so to speak.  I'm with Charlotte.