The builders are here!

This luxury Dartmoor B&B is really going to look the part now, as well as feel it.

We will open again in time for the early May Bank Holiday: April 29th; and stay open til August 1st, to make sure that, even though Wydemeet will be back on the market, the house will still be available for B&B.  

My blog has been turned into a book! Called 'Surviving Solo', the kindle version went live last September, and the paperback was published last November.  Both are selling well, and have received wonderful reviews.  Click here to buy!


The book contains six months' more of my blogs, detailing everything that went wrong in setting up Wydemeet as a B&B, which I felt were unsuitable for public viewing on this site!  Read the book, and see if you still want to come!

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.

 

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!