The buzz phrase for 2009 is “couch-surfing”. This is when people who have no money but still want a holiday accept offers from kind strangers on the internet who’ll give them a bed for nothing because they’re investors in the new “trust economy” or because they want to chop them into small pieces and bury them under the patio.
The latter view may seem misanthropic, but come on. House guests are trying enough when you’ve known them 20 years – suffering a backpacker who picks his feet and believes in flushing only after a number two approaches the seventh circle of Hell. Why put yourself through it unless you’re madder than a wet hen?
I suppose accommodating strangers, whether free or for a very small charge, is the travel lovers’ global riposte to the recession. Fine – you be all altruistic but, like the old clich? that after three days guests, like fish, begin to smell, there are things you should remember.
House guests will use your expensive Clarins body wash and may even expect you to see a “show” with them. Because they are travelling, thus “self-improving”, they won’t hesitate to say, as you settle down for Corrie, “Oh, you watch soaps? I find them pretty vacuous.”
They won’t wash up enough and will be insufficiently affectionate to your pets. Yet you’ll still feel a strange duty to have fresh flowers on display and change their bed linen every five minutes, even though you change your own once every five weeks.
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Then there’ll come the time when they bring home a “date”. And when you hear the dreaded 3am squeak of the mattress, this is when you’ll be entirely justified in getting up and dusting off your copy of American Psycho.