Hmmm.  I'm wondering whether business could be brisker? Is it just that it's November and it's raining again?

Or could it be something that I've done?

"You never want to see how laws and sausages are made," wrote one of my potential internet dates the other day.

Re-reading what I have written recently in the blogs below - well its hardly how you would normally advertise a B&B is it?! And I call myself a sales-person!  

May I just reassure all potential guests that Wydemeet is the most utterly, wonderful, fantastic place to stay!  47 x the full five blobs in just one year, giving us TripAdvisor's top ranking for any B&B on Dartmoor - well. Golly wow! 

I am so massively proud of our home and the service that we offer. Our little team tries its absolute hardest to make sure that everything is absolutely immaculate at all times.

Meanwhile, attempting to provide lighthearted, quirky advice for anyone thinking of setting up a B&B, which is what this blog has been mostly about, and then putting it on the same website as marketing that B&B is actually, in retrospect, completely nuts.  

I will therefore shortly be removing the blog altogether, and attempting to start turning what I have written into a book; but first of all I have to find out how!  

So, potential guests, please bear with me, and be assured that everyone visiting Wydemeet has an incredibly memorable, enjoyable and relaxing stay - as far as I am aware anyway.  So do come! 

And, once we've discussed all the best nearby eating places, you've popped out to experience for yourself the magical wildness and beauty of our immediate vicinity, we've talked about what you'd most like to get out of your stay, and what you'd most like for breakfast, where and when; you'll be prepared and braced for whether you want to hear any more of this kind of drivel!

The second explanation is because of booking.com.  I think I have rung them five times asking for them to reinstate me on their site - at the moment Im using no agents at all.  I have even advised them that I wont pay their latest invoice until they do so, and had no response as usual.

Well yesterday I discovered why their company appears to have gone a bit wonky.  It was national news on the radio that they are being targetted by fraudsters claiming to be accommodation providers, taking deposits for bookings, and disappearing. Well.  Fancy!  But right now I need them! Please reinstate me booking. com.  All is forgiven!

So this diary has been performing rather a lot of functions over the past year or so.  Whilst it was primarily intended as a Self Help Guide for the bemused, broke and bewildered coming out of relationships, wondering what the future might hold, I'm not sure a single person like that reads it!

I have a feeling that not very many potential guests read it either.

However, it's certainly proved useful to give potential internet dates a clear picture of what they are letting themselves in for with me.

And various friends check in and out in order to update themselves on progress at the Hadow's.

But all of this has meant that I have to be pretty careful about what I go public on.

So now I've had a new idea.

I think the Search Engine Optimisation of this site is already pretty good, so it probably doesnt need a regular blog - and if I find out I am slipping down the rankings by not contributing any longer, I can update it with banal observations on the changing seasons of Dartmoor.  All is going golden brown at the moment, by the way.

Meanwhile, I thought I might now change to a more secret, fewer holds barred diary, which I could turn into 'Surviving Solo Volume 2', once it's been past scrupulous lawyers. So hold on to your seats guys!

And in the meantime, thank you all, so much, and goodbye.  I will miss you.  It's been tremendous fun. I have enjoyed sharing the progress of my life and Wydemeet B&B with you so much.

With love to you all

Mary xx

Continuing on this litigious theme - 

I think you ought to be able to sue hairdressers.  I blame my hairdresser for my divorce.  I mean just look at me!

He's gay, which could explain why he wanted to make me look like a bloke.

In the Spring of 2008 he cut off all my hair without being asked to, and then told me that I would look like all the eventers I admire most - like Zara Phillips, Mary King etc.  Well if he had asked me whether to cut off all of my hair I would have screamed NO! NEVER!!!

Throughout my childhood my mother used to take me to the local (very cheap) barber for haircuts, and/or cut my fringe herself, really short.

Being an athletically built strong, tall sort of girl, the result was that everybody thought I was a very plain boy, and despite my best efforts, I never managed to become a teacher's pet.  Clearly I have never quite recovered, and am still trying!

Anyway, every time since, whenever I have tried having short hair, it has ten times out of ten been an A1 catastrophic disaster!  Yet this plonker went and did it without asking, and charged me for the privilege.

Well guess what. Less than twelve months later I had no husband.

So I went to the head hairdresser at Tony & Guys and asked him to sort me out.

"Whatever you do, don't give me layers, or I end up looking like Linda McCartney," I said.  So what did he do? Gave me layers.  Without telling me. So I never realised that he had. And what did I look like? Well I can tell you that every morning I looked shorn, as the few whispy bits he'd left at the ends disappeared altogether.

Fast forward a few years; X has gone off, and I've got no money, so I gave up the luxury of Tony & Guy and risked a cheap place in Tavistock.  And guess what.  

"We need to grow out these layers," she said.  Well I'd wondered why my hair always looked so awful in the wind and in the mornings, and now I understood why.

And it's taken four years, FOUR YEARS!!! to grow out the stupid layers.  That I'd forbidden 'the master hairdresser' to put in, in the first place! We finally achieved it last Wednesday. At last! Hurray!  And this is what I look like now - six years older than in the other pic.  They say age is just a number.  Well I think it's just a hairdresser. Thanks Charlotte! You are the first decent hairdresser I have come across in 54 years!

Dah-doing, dah-doing, dah-doing went my heart at 180 beats per second.  Sorry.  Minute.

I paid another little trip to the Ladies.

I have often been told that it doesn't show when I'm nervous.

I hoped it didn't show now.

I was outside Court Room No 2 waiting to be called in by the judge, sitting in the same small room as my adversaries.

"Odd," I thought.  "I feel just like this when I'm stuck in the same room as my Nemesis, only I don't hate them so much.  I just don't want to look at them and will pretend they don't exist."

My next thought was, "This must be what being on The Apprentice feels like."

The internal phone rang.

"Hadow vs Doodah. Lord Whateverhisnamewas will see you now."

We followed her in to this intimidating room with My Lord sitting way above us behind a barrier on a sort of platform at one end of the room, surrounded ny microphones and other paraphernalia.

"You may sit down," the elderly gentleman from my sort of world commanded from his stage.

"Yes M'Lud" gushed my ex-garage-man, a short, fat, t-shirted version of Uriah Heep.

Well the outcome was always obvious.  Two hours later his judgement was that the garage should keep Bill the knackered Mistubishi, and return the £2500 I had paid them not to repair him properly, plus £275 I had paid in court costs.  Just as anyone could have predicted.  The whole thing was a complete waste of everybody's time, money, and nervous energy.  A pyrrhic victory.  I did not in the least feel like jumping around grinning and punching the air, as they wrote me out my cheque.  Instead I felt like hitting them. Stupid, thick, idiots.

What was most interesting to me about the whole experience, was how the garage man's bottle blonde girlfriend streamed lies - so many that I couldn't keep up and remember them all when it was finally my turn to be allowed to speak.  Under no circumstances may you interrupt either your adversary or the judge.  And if you start writing things down you can't keep up with the rest of the c..p.

Amongst 1000 other things, she claimed that my man friend and I were both aggressive towards her, that I had thrown the car keys at her, and run out of her office.  In fact I had thought that my 'man friend' - an internet date whom I'd met twice, who had very sweetly agreed to accompany me into the foray, and was keeping out of the way near the door - wasn't actually as supportive as I had expected he would be.  Meanwhile I left the keys in the car for the garage to check out what was still wrong with it, and drove off with my very kind and generous date, who has since turned into a good friend, for lunch at the Mill End Hotel outside Chagford, in his sports car.

I believe, though, that she believed every word she was saying, while even the judge appeared to be raising his eyebrows slightly.  He termed my encounters with the garage staff as "unsatisfactory"  and it was fairly clear to me that he had a pretty good idea of what had actually transpired.

I wonder whether hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of court time are wasted like this.

I hold my hand up and put the problem down to education. The pair were just, simply, massively THICK, and I can't hate them for that.  I know that I am privileged to have received a first rate education and am automatically at an advantage.

I have now won nine of the ten of my small and middle-sized claims.  These include the cutlery company whose 'lifetime' silver plate went green after less than a year; two plumbers; BT (twice); a holiday company who neglected to supply an aeroplane home, a removals company who left behind half our belongings, and whose lorry we had to push up the hill; and an ex-friend for whom I bought a horse, who sold it without telling me and sniffed away the proceeds.  Most of them were already bankrupt and knew just how to avoid the bailiffs, so I haven't necessarily received compensation, but feel they have received some comeuppance.

The case I lost was the burglar alarm company who charged double their estimate without checking first that I would be pay, so I didn't.  They sued me, and  I now have a credit rating problem because I was on holiday when the order arrived telling me to cough up.  

So my question is, why am I the only person I have ever met who gets herself into these situations? I may be blonde (a real one!) but I won't put up with people treating me as one. Because my sense is, as I think I've said earlier, that they will treat other people like this, who are less able to look after themselves, such as my Mum. I absolutely do not enjoy the process. But I won't have them getting away with being so hopeless and/or so horrid.   So there.

Hey ho.  I can relax now.  £2775 to put towards my child tax credits bill.