Forget Amazon and Google. There's another monopolistic internet company out there which is quietly taking over all of our lives. It's called 'Owners Direct'.
 
Innocently looking for a website through which to market my house, I have discovered that I am not alone in finding myself choosing Owners Direct. Of around 100 families paying the fees for my children's posh, expensive school, it turns out that at the very least, five of them are renting out their properties to help make ends meet. And every single one is signed up with Owners Direct.

Turning abroad I discover that both of my friends who rent out their continental properties also use the company - whether it's called Owners Direct, or 'HomeAway' it's the same headquarters based in Bressenden Place in London, representing nearly 200,000 properties around the world.

I chose it to market my house because there are no fussy agents involved, no one demanding 30% commission, while making me empty out my cupboards and clean my fridge.

And now I have just received my first enquiry. From a nice-sounding man called Jim, who is looking for three nights, for three
families comprising six adults and five children. Perfect! I immediately confirm I have availability.

I then spend nearly £2,000 in a morning, on 100% Egyptian cotton sheets, duvets, duvet covers, mattress protectors; twenty pillows, twenty pillow protectors, and thirty towels.

Jim gets back to me to say he has found somewhere else, cheaper.

I am relieved. It was all too much, too fast. Yet it demonstrates that Owners Direct actually works! It could really happen! I might succeed in renting out my home in its entirity for a substantial sum!

How scary! How exciting!

Hurray for Owners Direct!

'Dartmoor Killings' is the working title of the film. My friend Peter, who already has a BAFTA to his name, has won the use of a camera worth a million quid, to film a promo in my house, which will be used to help source finance for the whole feature. The trouble is that the camera is so complicated that it takes three people to use it. I hope nobody drops it.

The crew's two nights' sojourn is my opportunity - a trial run - to practise my potentially non-existent B&B skills.

My ultimate aim is to charge the maximum possible rate for a Dartmoor B&B (about £100 a room per night) which means I have to really try to do it properly. I have spent days and nights on the internet tracking down diddy kettles, diddy thermoses for cold milk, diddy cafetieres. Then there's the individual tea bags (Earl Grey, Camomile etc) and filter coffees; the titchy toiletries and even the baskets to put them all in.

But the Christmas rush has meant that the only thing to arrive in time is the kettles. Which turn out to be fitted with continental plugs, and have to be relocated to my 'present drawer'.

The crew arrives two hours later than anticipated, and, having requested drinks at 8.30pm followed by dinner at 9.00pm, instead film solidly til 11pm. My wild mushroom 'Cook!' lasagne miraculously survives the wait and Significant Other and I fall into bed at 1.30am. Up again at 6.30am to prepare Organic Breakfast. God - what order do you cook everything in? Croissants, muesli, Golden Nuggets, Artisan bread.. how many sausages. Bacon in the oven, or fried? Eeek! Two people request poached eggs, and two want fried. My poached eggs always look like embryo's covered in goo.

Help! Two massive great frying pans (one rusty); a baking tray in the oven with sausages, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms in it. Baked beans in the microwave. Toast. Plates heating in the lower oven. Nowhere to hide - we are all in the kitchen together - my mistakes on full display. How much of each for whom? I mustn't let them know that I am a walking zombie and I have never done anything like this before.

Somehow not an egg is broken, and my poached ones look yellow and white and fairly symetrical, and not full of mucus. But how do you serve them? Genius! I grab a couple of pieces of thinly sliced brown toast and pop them on that. Then the whole lot goes onto a large platter so they can help themselves and I am relieved at least of the question - how much to serve?

Phew! It's done! It's been fun! I am a pale ghost of my former self after 48 hours of this. Peter's first 'Dartmoor Killing'. But I have done it. And I can do it again.

Bring It On!

The fuel guage on my Range Rover tells fibs. It said I had enough fuel for another 65  miles. Wrong. I ran out of diesel just inside the school gates this morning.
 
The kind groundsmen put in a gallon of red diesel meant for their tractor, and were very kind about the brown ruts in their beautiful cricket field, made by all the other Mums trying to get round my marooned car.

It's my first venture into B&B today, and I've got a film crew of five arriving at 4.30pm.

I left Significant Other (SO) still working on the loo of the third bathroom, with the main spare bedroom filled with all the furniture that used to be where the bathroom's going, including an enormous chest of drawers and an extra bed.

Kate, who cleans for me, and Sashka, who does my horses, were arriving at 9am to get everything ready.

I had planned to go swimming, followed by a jacuzzi (to calm my nerves you understand). So I went - £115 down after finally allowing myself to drop in on Tesco's petrol station to finally refill my greedy car.

Then I drove to Ashburton to stock up on 'local quality produce'. An artisan loaf of bread costs over £2! Paying for it caused
me actual physical pain. Some large organic tomatoes on the vine and mushrooms cost over £4. Agh! How do people do this regularly? I usually survive on sliced brown wholemeal at 45p a loaf. It makes fewer crumbs and you don't have to bother with a  knife.

I return home to find my house transformed by my incredible team. But there is no way that the new bathroom is going to be
usable. After all that. They will have to use a chamber pot.

Sashka needs to leave and discovers that my car is blocking everyone else in, and it has a hole in its front tyre.

We retire for a coffee and a fag to think about what to do now.

I'm trying to prepare for Christmas at the moment. I have organised mulled wine for the Form 4 Mums at Browns Hotel before we pick our children up from their Hogwarts-inspired Christmas feast at 7pm. The film crew is going to arrive in the meantime. I have bought two 'home made' wild mushroom lasagnes from 'Cook!' to try to take on the local dining out places. Will they defrost and cook properly in my temperamental AGA? The beef joint for tomorrow is still frozen solid. I haven't cooked a full English breakfast for several years and cant fry an egg without breaking it. I hate mornings.

The AA is on its way to replace the tyre before I can set off for the mulled wine fest.

I can't smoke in my own house because I will make it smell.

I am in full panic mode.

"So,  Beloved Daughter, do you believe in Father Christmas and tooth fairies?" I enquire casually, as we are driving to her friend's 10th birthday party - comprising a 4pm disco and make-up pamper session (no boys invited).

My heart is actually beating quite fast in apprehension, dreading her answer, despite the apparent matter-of-factness of my question. I am beginning to think it's a bit weird that my ten year old seems still to believe in all this stuff, especially in view of what her older brother has introduced her to on the internet. She is calm watching Hot Fuzz, and laughs at Borak; but still can't sleep after films like 'Hook!' and Doctor Who.

Last year, as part of her Father Christmas letter she asked him to leave a signed photo. "For proof that he exists," she
explained to me.

A month ago she was on her way to another birthday party and I dug out a birthday card from my collection for her to give, with a picture of a fairy on it.

"Oh it was you," she said, accusingly. My brain ground around in its spectacularly slow way. I realised she was referring to a card I had written to her, with the same picture, pretending it had come from the toothfairies, apologising that it had taken them three months to give her some loose change in exchange for her tooth which had got lost when the bed was made. Now I was cornered.

"Yes, OK, it was me that wrote you the card," I admitted; "because I thought it was a bit mean of the toothfairies to leave it
so long to give you money for your tooth."

She appeared to accept this explanation without question.

I am slightly worried about her blind faith and naivity. Her brother stopped believing in fairies and Father Christmas
when he was about seven.

"If you don't believe in Father Christmas, you won't get any presents from him," I had warned him. So he kept up the pretence
so as not to lose out.

WHY do we go through this charade? What really is the point? Why are we lying through our teeth to our children, year in, year out, when all is so blindingly obvious? Especially when Santa forgets to eat his mince pie or drink his sherry, as happened last Christmas. Does this really engender trust between children and their parents?

Anyway, back to our car journey. Daughter pauses, and says "I believe in Father Christmas and fairies because I think it's better to."

"Do you believe in God then?" I counter.

"Yes, in the same way," she replies.

"Of the three, are there one or two that you believe in much more than the others?" I query.

 "No - all about the same," she says. "I believe in mythical creatures too," she continues.

"What, things like dragons?" I say.

"Well nice ones. So what's the biggest bird? Umm, if you could cross an ostrich or an emu with a horse, then you'd get a Pegasus. That would be nice."

"Um, yes, like unicorns and things," I say. "So, do you believe in reindeers?"
 
"Yes, silly Mummy, they're real. I've met loads of them at Pennywell Farm and places."

"OK, just checking," I mumble, as we turn into the balloon festooned driveway gates.

Hmm - so God clearly ranks alongside Father Christmas and toothfairies. I'm not sure I'm too happy about this.

Next time I see my 14 year old cynical son, I will say, "I know we've never formally acknowledged whether or not Father Christmas and fairies exist or not, but would you mind telling your little sister the truth about them?"

I don't know if this is the best route to take, but much as we all admire a lively imagination, and have a desire for our children to enjoy their childhood, whatever that really means, I do think it is time that my lovely dreamy daughter put her feet a little more firmly on the ground, before she gets horribly teased by some more worldly contemporary.

But I don't want to be the one responsible for imparting such a ground-shattering disillusion.

Do you know what MILF means?

I didn't, until a couple of months ago. It's pretty rude, so I'm not enlightening you here, and if you're unaware of what it
stands for, you will have to miss this blog out because it will mean nothing to you.

But aaaaaaaaaggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! I mean OMG, being up-to-date with the parlance of teenagers.

I really try, quite hard, to avoid being an embarrassing mother. Except for the day I kissed my head boy son on the
cheek in front of his entire school when I was giving out the swimming prizes, and he'd won the cup for Fastest U13 Freestyle. That was on purpose and the rest of the school and I thought it was considerably funnier than he did.

But this time, oh no.

I was practising using Facebook. I originally signed up to it in order to check up on what my children were getting up to - which I have manifestly failed to do because I couldn't get a handle on how to work it.

So being ill, I now have time to experiment. I'm a bit in the dark as to how to find would-be 'Friends' but somehow I manage to manouevre myself onto Revered Son's site. I send him a little message. I wrote the first thing that came into my head. It was a play on his name, putting the 'W' upside down.

I didn't know that there was a difference between sending messages and 'posts'.

Underneath a general clarion call from his old sciencemaster to everyone he knows, encouraging them to come and watch rugby, was posted what I thought was my private and thoroughly witty observation about his name. And possibly even worse, it was signed off 'Love from Mummy'.

I have since made a genuinely contrite apology, and it would appear that Revered Son has now wiped away my first ever 'Post'. I expect it's been left  lying in an etherial bin called 'garbage'.

Don't you think internet dating is just great! I do! I'm an old hand - been doing it since before the internet was invented, when you had to think up something clever to write in Private Eye.

Mine went: "Lovely, leggy, bubbly blonde (26) believes that all interesting, attractive, entertaining men are in hiding.
Please prove her wrong." I got lots of replies, but none of them proved me wrong.

The experience led me on to study graphology - the interpretation of handwriting - so that I could weed out the more promising respondents and stop wasting evenings yawning, chatting to grey men in expensive restaurants. 

Sadly there proved never to be any promising respondents to weed out, but I have gone on to practise graphology professionally, both for use in head-hunting, and for analysing the personalities of various celebrities for the media - be it Michael Jackson or Nurse Allitt (remember the murderess?)

But that was all decades ago. Now every single, single person I know, has some involvement or other with internet dating. It stops us all hurling ourselves off the top of high buildings, facing the rest of our lives without romantic intrigue, whether we are 53 or even 83!

So I was fascinated by an article in yesterday's Mail about how dating sites are for 'total losers', written by someone called Liz Hodgkinson (no picture, annoyingly).

So that's nine million of us, then.

In her article, she used her own, three, personal experiences to illustrate her viewpoint.

She minds (in her words) that 'bald, white bearded, broke, fat, dull, over-50s men' are having a crack at finding themselves someone affluent, beautiful, and young, to become their free housekeeper.

The way that she writes indicates that there is a shred of possibility that her own character traits might include 'smug, complacent, intellectually arrogant, opinionated, impatient and judgmental'.

She would appear also to be 'fattist, beardist, hair-ist and money-ist'.

And if she's over fifty, she will probably have wobbly arms, tummy, bum and thighs; a criss-cross of wrinkles across her chest and neck, and the moles on her face will be beginning to sprout hair. She might also be suffering from hormonal mood swings, and sweat in bed.

Just like me! I expect if I met her I would really like her!

But it's no wonder these hideous old grandpas might be searching for someone a little less faded than Liz and myself. It's so difficult for us to remember that we're no longer what we once were.

In short, I actually think that those involved in internet dating are simply representative of the world in general, and the older we get, the more we must look in our mirrors, and, probably, lower our expectations.

The doc said I was lucky not have developed something called 'Quinsy'. I said I thought that was a name of a medic from the last century. It takes a lot to get a laugh from a busy GP and I expect she's heard that a million times before. She grimaced and wrote me out a prescription for the heaviest antibiotics known to man. Or woman.

Anyway, I am now officially ill for the first time since the children were born.  It's been 10 years! Self-employed people with polar-explorer husbands, or ex-husbands, children and horses can't ever be ill, or their world comes down like a pack of cards.

But my being finally ill now has meant that I can lie in bed and learn the 'social media' on my i-pad.

This has taken me days. I am utterly fascinated by how boring it is. You can now tweet me, facebook me, linked-in me, blog me; but by the time I got to pinterest and timbrall or something, I had lost the will to live.

It's also given me an opportunity to set up this blog. WHAT an ugly word. Like bog. Something I've been meaning to do for a while. People have told me that it would be very easy, but I am struggling. Mine is through something recommended by the Daily Telegraph called 'Go Daddy'.

Suffice to say - if you're reading this, then I've done it!