I have been operating a B&B continuously now for a quarter of a century now, so I guess I am getting close to being qualified to say something about it. I do so with a little trepidation as many dear readers will be regular guests and will think I am giving them a report card or something. So let me say up front ‘I love youse all!’ Am I out of trouble yet? Well nearly all. I might get to some horror stories.
Like most things in my life, I got into the business accidentally. Everything important to that has ever happened to me has been an impossible outside chance that swept me along before I could even think about it. Which is somewhat galling for a logical guy like me who thinks you should always sit down and carefully scrutinise your options. Put somewhat better by Shakespeare in Macbeth “Can such things be, and o’ercome us like a summer’s cloud without our special wonder?”. Don’t you hate that guy? He always said it first. Even emigrating to Oz was a quick decision as a result of freak meeting with a guy in a shower. Don’t ask.
So I met this guy (Mike) doing exploration in the deserts of WA, got persuaded to buy some land on the Atherton Tablelands where I had never been, put up a house, got married, had kids, built other houses to keep this menagerie in, then his wife wants to move to Bris and I buy him out. By this time you will have realised I am a straw in the wind without any self-determination. Things just happen to me, and other people make the decisions. When I first heard the phrase “path of least resistance”, I instantly knew what it meant, having trodden down it for a few decades.
Pardon my ramblings, comes with advancing years I’m told. Which seems to be confirmed by my grandson Henry aged 3, whose years are advancing at exactly the same rate as mine, and he rambles all the time. Meanwhile back at B&B I ended up with 3 dwellings. Here I may draw the wrath of young families priced out of housing, asking how this idiot pom can accidentally end up with 3 houses when they are struggling to even raise a deposit for one. Here I can only plead that not only have I been deprived of choices in my life, I have been dogged by good luck. I seem to have been at the right place at the right time even though other people chose both the time and the place.
So I leased the other 2 dwellings to families such as agricultural workers in the district. Really nice people until I had the tenants from hell. I totally failed to detect the whiff of sulfur and brimstone at the interview. Or in Freudian terms, egotism and paranoia. Relations went from bad to worse when their chooks died and my dog was accused of predation. No blood, not a feather out of place. Actually their kids and mine had fed them play dough. Massive amount of salt, and they had died from dehydration. Amazing how evidence cannot convince the paranoid. I cannot imagine their convoluted thoughts as they constructed my motivation for such a heinous crime. The result of this unfortunate confrontation and considerable stress for my wife Hilary was to totally forget leasing and consider B&B where people would only be here for a few nights. By now you know me and I do what I am told, so B&B it was.
OK, so I seem to have gotten round to talking about how I got into B&B, but not actually talking about what it is like. Part 2 sometime later.
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