COLUMN JOIE DE VIVRE
Never mind the book sales, I’ve cracked bed linen management...”
With the B&B fully booked, Ian Moore turns his living room into a Victorian Chinese laundry
F
or someone who spends so much time on my own I have become remarkably bad at it. I
write alone, travel and stay in hotels alone, perform stand- up alone and after the gig go back to my digs alone. I am the very model of insular self-suffi ciency. But leave me at home for a weeks alone, and after a few hours I’m a gibbering wreck, a pent-up ball of irritability who eschews regular meals, and after a few days even solids, and is more highly strung than an orchestral harp. The intention is to get
by on a level of personal organisation that is so fi nely tuned, so detailed in its planning, so delicately poised that I’m in complete control. But in practice, the slightest thing, the smallest test of its effi cacy, can cause the entire fl imsy house of cards to come crashing down. And if there’s one guarantee in life, then it will happen the second Natalie and the boys have disappeared over the horizon. The B&B week was going to
be sold out, full occupancy, which would require a high level of bed linen management, which is not something I ever thought I’d have to deal with to be honest, who does? “Hey Ian, how are the book
sales going?” “Never mind that,
I’ve cracked bed linen management.” The weather was going to
be truly awful too. And those washer/dryers don’t work
Not this time. “So, have you
come for the zoo?” “Oh, thank you very much
monsieur! It was supposed to be a secret for little Benoît!” And how the hell was I
supposed to know that? I mean, I hope Benoît has a
full and happy life, that he can possibly fi nd a way to get over the trauma of the zoo revelation, especially coming as it did a whole 30 minutes before he went to the actual bloody zoo. I strongly recommend
that
Booking.com and Expedia add a little extra to their booking pages so
that hoteliers and B&Bers can be pre-warned maybe? A special ‘Secrets not to be
revealed’ element on the payment page. As it was, Benoît had
either, they’re as mythical as train wifi . So over the course of the next few days, I transformed the front room and upstairs landing into what looked like one of those sepia-coloured, Victorian Chinese laundries. Linen was draped from ceiling light to ceiling light, giving the place a Bedouin tent feel, only with me pacing around occasionally grabbing a duvet corner and muttering, “too damp, too damp”. I even built an early season fi re which had an eff ect on the linen itself. I showed one family into their pristine room and madame said quietly, “can you smell burning?”
I ignored the question.
We hadn’t got off to the best of starts anyway. Small talk isn’t my thing but I’ve had to eff ectively write a routine for the meet-and-greet of customers and it feels a bit like a hairdresser’s “going anywhere nice this year?” I’m just fi lling time obviously, I genuinely have no interest in the answer, I’m just trying to appear non-threatening, well, less-threatening anyway. One of my stock lines is,
“have you come for the zoo?” and 90% of the time the answer is a smiling yes and I can talk about our goats having been born there and so on.
cheekily been left off the booking in the fi rst place – maybe he was the actual surprise – so while Madame was sniffi ng the air suspecting charred bedsheets, I was struggling up the stairs with a spare bed and reconfi guring their room. I was, by now, willing to tell young Benoît that not only was he going to the zoo, but maybe we should also have a chat about the veracity of the whole Father Christmas thing. It was going to be a long week indeed. ■
Ian Moore Comedian, writer, chutney-maker and mod who lives with his family in the Loire Valley. His latest book in Playing the Martyr (£8.99,
amazon.co.uk)
ianmoore.info
lapausevaldeloire.com
FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: September/October 2023 103
© RITA EVANS
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