Saturday February 15th 2025 "The Airbnb business - the horror stories are starting to come out now, aren't they!"

Here's another rather personal question for you this morning, Friends! 

Have you ever thought of letting your own house out as an Airbnb? Most of us have, haven't we, but then not done it, incredibly, like me and my wife Lois, of all people!

If you've done it, as most of us have, how were you able to do it?

Maybe you've got somebody else your medium-to-long-suffering wife (or husband!) can go and stay with temporarily? Or maybe you've got two houses, or even two husbands, or two wives (!). Or maybe just two bedrooms, one of which you're willing to rent out. There may be, like, a billion reasons - almost "legion", in fact.

But I've got news for you: your neighbours won't necessarily like it! Did you see this recent horror story in the local Onion News for East Hampshire ?

Of course, sometimes people let out a room in their house, hoping it will somehow solve all their, like billion, problems. There was that other story this morning, wasn't there, about area woman Rose Strides

Poor Rose !!!!!

Empty nest syndrome AND long-distance grand-parenting - what madness Life sometimes chucks at us, doesn't it.

Lois and I can certainly relate to the long-distance grand-parenting, with our younger daughter Sarah (47) now living 9000 miles away in Perth, Australia, with husband Francis and their 11-year-old twins Lily and Jessica.

flashback to last Sunday: we talk to our 47-year-old daughter Sarah, and her

11-year-old twins Lily and Jessica in Perth, Australia, via a tiny

6 inch by 2 and a half inch phone screen - what madness !!!!

However, "empty nest syndrome" - that's just a distant memory now for Lois and me. 

But can it really be 30 years since our daughter, Sarah, then just 18, was preparing to "flee the nest" - going on a gap-year overland truck holiday from Nairobi to Windhoek to Harare, prior to starting university?

I wonder....!

[Of course it's 30 years, Colin. You do the maths haha! - Ed]

flashback to 1995: our younger daughter Sarah, 18,

on her gap-year overland truck holiday in Africa

- here pictured with the majestic backdrop of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

Awww !!!! Bless her little cotton socks !!!!

And Lois and I are thinking about these memories today as we prepare for what we're calling "full nest syndrome" (FNS), would you believe!

Yes, because for the next 7 days and nights, our 18-year-old granddaughter Josie, will be staying with us here in Liphook, Hampshire, and blowing some of the cobwebs off us, along the way!

She's with us because she wants to study for her forthcoming A-Levels, and so doesn't want to join her parents and siblings on a weeklong break to Denmark, where the family lived for 7 years, from 2012  to 2018.

these will be Josie's "mini-apartment" for 7 days - her bedroom (left) and her study-room...

... and this is our living-room, now looking unnaturally tidy and uncluttered,

and the dining-area of our kitchen, with table set for three: yikes !!!!

18:00 It's 6 o'clock, and suddenly Josie's here, arriving in her own car, blowing the cobwebs off us (not literally haha!) and filling the house with her young person's exuberance and charming conversation, which is a bit of a delight for us, to put it mildly.

Well, Josie's 18 herself now, and all sophisticated, thanks in part to her 7 years in Copenhagen, Denmark, at International School, and now her attendance at St Catherine's School, Guildford, where she routinely rubs shoulders with fellow-students from around the world.

We won't know ourselves, that's what we say! And let's hope we don't disturb her too much with our night-time loo-visits haha!

Before we know it, however, Josie's busy upstairs, arranging her stuff, getting all her books out and planning her week's revision, while Lois and I sit and watch a bit of telly on the couch, like we normally do (!).

20:00 We're anxious to see the second half of James May's opening programme in his new series about Great Explorers.

Columbus famously thought he had landed in Asia - just off Japan somewhere, as he said in his letter to the Queen of Spain, after arriving back in Europe. It was the sensation of the age, and led to a lot of celebratory woodblock prints being produced all over the continent, which May explains were the 15th century equivalent of today's tabloid press.

And Columbus was able to give the Queen glowing, and very touching, reports about the Taino people his crew encountered on their first landfall, actually in the Caribbean of course.

He reported that the Taino people "welcomed him and his crew with open arms", and went on to praise their endearing personal qualities.

Yes, this first visit to the New World seemed like a dream come true, and therefore more's the pity that there were also gold and other desirable products to be found or extracted. Because Columbus' second visit, this time with 17 ships instead of 3, was essentially concentrating on getting the gold and the other "goodies" both for the Queen and for Spain in general.

And more's the pity that all this led to cruel exploitation of those gracious and generous native people, with the purpose of extracting the area's riches at all costs, and eventually to the bringing of slaves from Africa to take the place of the natives, who'd been worked to death or been killed in all the mad frenzy. 

And the rest is history, unfortunately, but too late to do anything about it now, of course.

Fascinating stuff, though, isn't it!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!