by Kate Keefe Originally published 10 August 2023, The Tablet
As a larger family, we have always gone self-catering for our holidays, rather than staying in holiday camps or hotels, and we tend to keep to Britain rather than flying off anywhere else. Of course we do have meals out and all sorts of excursions, but we like to be in charge of our timings and menus. The children have always been well-behaved in restaurants and hotels, even when they were little, but we find it more relaxing to set up a home from home instead of having to fit in with other people’s schedules. Because we flew and lived abroad regularly for work, we didn’t want to spend any holiday time in airports (not our favourite places, especially when the children were small).
We’ve never had a car big enough for the whole family (except while we were living in Kenya, where we had to have a long wheelbase Land Rover to do the job), so we operated a system known as Party A and Party B. Which was which depended on the member of the family that was speaking (ditto which was the cooler group), but one lot went by car, and the other lot travelled by train, and was picked up from the destination station a bit later on.
This worked very well, especially as roughly half the family gets carsick, and over the years we have been able to reach everywhere we wanted to go (usually remote seasides). There we would stay in a holiday cottage or holiday house, and it’s always been fascinating. Airbnb has made this much more difficult, because there are fewer cottages or holiday houses available now for weekly or fortnightly lets. Obviously owners can make more money on short-term lets, and people like us end up having to pay multiples of what are effectively weekend rates, but it’s been really interesting to see what other differences this trend has made.
It seems to me that in Airbnb properties the owner thinks of the house as an extended hotel room. I have nothing against hotel rooms for brief stays; indeed, it’s much easier to pack up and leave in an uncluttered space, and what you need when you arrive is clear surfaces to put things on; but hotel rooms feel a bit antiseptic for longer stays, especially relaxed ones like holidays. Hotel rooms have pictures on the walls (usually fairly generic), but nothing else at all personal, or (as you might say) no clutter. In Airbnbs, because they are more like hotel rooms than a house or apartment, there tends not to be much by way of cooking equipment, or any evidence that people spend time there – so no radio, no clock. There’s often a shortage of mugs, but plenty of excessively large wine glasses. Egg cups are rare, and so are cups and saucers. There are few if any books (we find this disturbing, not to say frightening). There are still pictures on the walls, but the artwork feels like hotel pictures, as if it’s been bought off the shelf (indeed, one of our children recognised one house’s main pictures as having come from a range in a shop he’d been in the previous week). The lack of a radio was bad enough, but when we came across one house which didn’t even have a teapot, I started to think about what our basic requirements would be.
Our favourite places over the years have been the ones which the owners have described slightly defensively as ‘a bit shabby’, or ‘comfortable but not luxurious’. There is a code to this, just as there is for estate agents, and we tend to like the places where another family has been happily settled over some time. A bit of dilapidation is entirely relaxing, and I love being able to glimpse evidence of happy past summers (a collection of random shells in a corner of the garden, a faded or cracked bucket and spade behind the door of a shed). We are always delighted to find a collection of books and fairly easy jigsaws; we happily recognise ancient bath toys on a high shelf in the airing cupboard, because we’ve still got several of them on the high shelf in our airing cupboard.
These tend to be the houses with enough crockery and cutlery for the number of chairs around the kitchen table, plus a few extra. You don’t have to wash up immediately after every cup of tea. We stayed in a house once which had exactly six of everything (two of the children hadn’t been able to come, so it was officially a six-person let), and it actually made cooking surprisingly difficult, with no spare spoon or knife unless you kept washing them, and no spare plate to double as a butter dish. Just as well we didn’t need a sugar bowl.
We don’t need anything fancy by way of cooking equipment, but I’m amazed by what some people seem able to do without (saucepan lids? A tray? A colander?). It’s quite funny to find a fancy little coffee machine or a complicated hamburger press, and you can’t help thinking that they must be either really difficult to clean or not actually very effective, otherwise the owner would have kept them close. We have a list of kitchen essentials (lodged in Margaret’s phone) of things we have decided to carry with us over various years, to supplement what’s provided. This started long ago as a paper list kept in a cookbook, of what was missing from the official Foreign Office float when you arrived for a posting. Your baggage always arrives some time after you, but you need to be able to go into accommodation straight away, and you need to be able to cook whatever it is you can find to eat. So the original list started with a good bread knife (no float ever has a good bread knife) and a vegetable peeler. Now it has at least a dozen essential things on it. I think the most recent addition a few years ago was a very large tin. This comes away with us full of baking, but once we’re there it doubles as a bread bin – and all the other tools fit inside it (along with the phone chargers) for the journey home.
I’m happy to work around other people’s ornaments and possessions, however bizarre. It’s good to have some sense of a house’s personality, and it’s harmless, because you nearly never meet the owner except on line or by letter, so you can enjoy speculating why they think that particular amazing object deserves pride of place in the sitting room. Sometimes we put them safely away for the duration of our visit, sometimes not, but we have learnt to go round the place taking a full set of photographs at the beginning before we’ve touched anything (getting one of the children to do this was a genius move which has made life easier ever since), so that we can make sure everything is back in the right place at the end. But other people’s ornaments are fun, even if you don’t like some of them, and the only thing we absolutely get rid of on arrival are incense sticks and plug-in room-perfumers. We deeply dislike these (and some of the children are asthmatic, so I’m allowed to say that). So they go into the under-the-stairs cupboard until we are just about to leave.
It’s interesting and chastening to look at your own house and think about what conclusions people might draw. Of course, you would tidy up and put a lot of things away in the special locked cupboard (or occasionally room), which every holiday home seems to have, and which always makes me think of Bluebeard, but what would you leave out?
We did let out our house at the beginning of our diplomatic career, because we needed to pay the mortgage. At that point we had only a couple of children, the rules allowing you to come home were much stricter, and the trips home rarer. The first couple of times and tenants were OK, but after that each let seemed to be worse than the one before. Eventually the agents went bust and the then tenants did a moonlight flit, with our few decent bits of furniture, leaving the house damaged and filthy. We were in Africa with a large brood at this point, and couldn’t get home very often. Since then we have never let our house out, mainly because the number of children made hiring anywhere else for the holidays difficult and expensive, and then later the children were increasingly based in the UK (so there was usually somebody who needed to use the house).
We’d have to remove all the photographs of the children that are on the walls, plus the icons and the crucifixes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any religious art in rented accommodation, and of course you wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or risk it being treated badly, so you’d put it away. Our Bluebeard’s cupboard would be full of peculiar and personal things which wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, but mean a lot to us because of their associations. So, apart from serious kitchen equipment like a food processor or an air fryer, presumably that’s what is in other people’s Bluebeard’s cupboards as well. We would put away not the children’s toys and books, which we are very happy to share with later generations, but the random and personal objects which might get lost, broken or mislaid, and then we would be sad. I’d have to take down all the flying angels hanging from the kitchen light fitting (including St Peter with a string of fish and the holy glass dinosaur), and the angel postcards covering the larder door.
When you are being an Ambassador, your residence is in effect a public building, and you have to choose which and how many personal objects to leave around to make it look comfortable and lived-in. I had not realised that people visiting the house would take things (presumably as souvenirs), but they do, and we lost some objects that we were fond of, before we realised we could not prevent it happening. So I do understand why some people clear the decks completely before renting out their house or flat as a holiday house; but we prefer the ones where it feels like a home. Especially when there is a decent-sized teapot.
© Kate Keefe 2023
