Posted on by maryhadow

No Customers

“We’re full next weekend,” Dan, of the Forest Inn, reports cheerfully.

“Sorry – can’t fit you in for dinner,” Charles, from the upmarket Prince Hall Country House Hotel, a ten minute drive away, tells me.

Humph.  Business for me fell off a cliff as of November 1st.  Just like last year. I’ve got two couples booked in between now, and the whole of the rest of my life.  Agh!

“It’s because you’re twice the price of the Forest Inn, and don’t provide the feeling of being socially superior like Prince Hall,” explains my cool son Will (19), who, immaculately trained by yours truly, enjoys working there as a chambermaid during university holidays, commuting on an E-bike.

I reassure myself that my guests have a special niche of their own.  For them to have tracked down ‘probably the most remote (and expensive) B&B south of the Watford Gap’, they are able, individual, discerning, well educated, successful, fit types, whose company I enjoy so much that I’d have them to stay for nothing (don’t tell them that), and I’m missing them already.

The upside is that I now use my best B&B room myself – complete with ironed Egyptian cotton bedlinen, thick fluffy white towels, separate shower and bidet, 4000 pocket-sprung mattress, and 4″ topper.

Posted on by maryhadow

Dead

My neighbour is lying, apparently dead, on the floor of our local pub.

Tom, the sous-chef is attempting to revive her, using the defibrillator that normally lives in the telephone box down the road.

My new love interest and I are are sitting watching, nursing our drinks, together with a few other locals, everybody pretending not to notice him gently massaging my inner thigh.  No one’s  seen me with a bloke in the ten years since my husband walked.

“What about giving her the kiss of life?” I suggest.

When she hears this, Ann suddenly regains consciousness and struggles up from her prone position on the green patterny carpet.

We’re all here to be taught how to use the ‘defib’ which Ann, parish councillor for the Hexworthy/Huccaby ward, had installed in 2014, and which, to my knowledge, has never been used. Tom has been on a course to learn how to demonstrate its miraculous powers.

“Have you read ‘This is Going to Hurt’?” I enquire.  “It says that for CPR to work, you have to press so hard you break their ribs.”

I’m not really here to learn about the ‘defib’ – I’ve come to support the pub. It’s sad that so few Hexworthy residents attend its events: Christmas drinks, New Year’s Eve parties, a 1970s Karaoke/Disco evening, ‘Pirates and Poldark’, live bands… there’s only one other local couple who also regularly join in with the fun.

“The Pub Is The Hub” says the Prince of Wales, who recently sold the freehold of The Forest Inn to two local families, after it had been lying empty for so long that a family of bunnies and rooks had moved in.

Soon after the pub closed I’d put my family home on eBay for £1 million – the third most expensive thing for sale on the entire site, with the intention of moving nearer to Exeter and normal people.  With no central focus, life in Hexworthy had become increasingly isolated and lonely for me, running a big house all on my own in central nowhere.

With the re-opening of the pub, now I have a sort of extra sitting room, full of people I know, where I can sit at the bar without looking desperate.  It is so life-changing for me that I’ve declared they’ll have to remove me from my home of twenty years, feet first.