With four children under six, flying anywhere for the annual summer holiday has become prohibitively expensive, so for the past five years we’ve been going to Cornwall.
With four children under six, flying anywhere for the annual summer holiday has become prohibitively expensive, so for the past five years we’ve been going to Cornwall. The upshot is that I am now an expert when it comes to renting holiday cottages. I have rented big ones, small ones, cheap ones and expensive ones, and I’ve come to the following conclusion: wherever possible, go gay.
I don’t mean that the owners of the cottage should be gay, though that probably helps. I mean the cottage should cater to homosexual couples. When it comes to things like home furnishings, tablewear and bathroom fittings, their standards are so much higher than anyone else’s. It’s the difference between being in a Woody Allen film and a Mike Leigh movie. In ordinary Cornish cottages, you’re left in no doubt that you’re on a bucket-and-spade holiday. In a gay cottage, you can make believe you’re in the Hamptons. (There is one caveat: homosexual couples usually have dogs and dogs can be messy. But on the plus side, they tend to have very small dogs and there’s only so much damage a chihuahua can do. Gay dogs, like gay cottages, are very clean.)
I have learnt this lesson the hard way. The first time I rented a cottage I thought I’d found a real bargain: it was on a working farm, which I thought would be fun for the kids, and was about half the price of anything else. It didn’t occur to me that there would be a connection between these two things until we got there. We opened the front door to be greeted by a swarm of flies. The farmer’s wife explained that they’d only just finished spreading manure on the crops. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ she said cheerfully, perhaps not realising that my wife is a nice Jewish girl from north London. Caroline would forever after refer to Meadowbrook Farm as ‘the fly house’.
We had slightly better luck the following year. The cottage was mercifully free of bugs, but there was still a fly in the ointment in the form of the owner. When the woman from the Landmark Trust said he ‘lived nearby’ we hadn’t realised it was in the other half of the house. Funnily enough, that turned out to be an advantage, because it meant I didn’t have to walk across any muddy fields to complain about the lack of a telephone or hot water. When I inquired whether he had ‘wireless broadband’, he looked at me as if I’d asked to see his flying car.
After several similar experiences, we stumbled upon Tregadjack Farm through a company called Rural Retreats. At last we’d found what we’d been looking for: a country cottage straight out of a Laura Ashley catalogue. As we walked into the kitchen, complete with Aga on one side and walk-in fridge on the other, there was a plate of freshly baked brownies sitting on the table. Everything had a sumptuous, luxurious feel to it, from the down-filled duvets to the high-definition widescreen television. There was even a BT Broadband router next to the trouser press in the utility room. We felt like we’d walked into an aeroplane and finally turned left instead of right.
The reason soon became clear. ‘We get a lot of gays,’ explained Christine Briggs, who owns it with her husband Philip. ‘Am I allowed to say that? We get a couple of vicars every year, too.’
Originally from Worcestershire, the Briggses used to run a battery business but sold it to their son and moved to Cornwall in 1997. They bought Tregadjack Farm with a view to renting it out, and quickly decided to aim for the top. Chris Briggs is a canny businesswoman and she realised that provided everything was just so, the bachelors would soon be beating a path to her door. ‘Definitely no new pine furniture,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be of a standard.’
Thanks to the exacting requirements of the Briggses’ fastidious clients, Tregadjack Farm is the first cottage my wife feels completely at home in. She knows she isn’t going to be greeted by any unsightly stains in the downstairs loo or find any mouse droppings on the kitchen worktop. The gays simply wouldn’t stand for it.
‘I have a huge amount of respect for the pink pound,’ said Chris as we were leaving. Me too.
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