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I’ve gone Dutch and now my house is full of foreigners — London’s open round my gaff

Ellen E. Jones: Perhaps the exploding popularity of Airbnb will help us change our selfish shut-in ways: Daniel Hambury
Ellen E. Jones: Perhaps the exploding popularity of Airbnb will help us change our selfish shut-in ways: Daniel Hambury

We’ve got another guest staying with us this week. She looks a bit like a young Michelle Pfeiffer but there the similarities with Mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s controversial new film about nightmarish visitors who outstay their welcome, end.

No, our guest is a trainee human rights barrister on a pupilage, fresh from five months working at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia and one of a succession of interesting internationals who I’ve been forced to welcome into my home since I took up with a Dutchman from a large and sociable family. I was raised in the kind of London household that turns off all the lights and dives under the sofa whenever an out-of-towner’s tell-tale knock is heard at the door. So this hosting fandango is all new to me. And guess what? I love it.

What were we so afraid of, for so long, I wonder? The truth is, guests are rather lovely to have around. Yet while other countries pride themselves on a culture of hospitality, the British have a woeful reputation which is entirely deserved.

When we return from abroad the holiday report will often include some mildly patronising marvelling at the friendliness of the locals — “the Vietnamese! Such lovely people!” No foreign visitor has ever said similar about hiking in the Peak District, or a weekend at one of the capital’s swankier hotels, where condescending to the guests has been rebranded as a luxury travel experience. The phrase “traditional British hospitality” conjures up nothing so much as a disapproving grunt on arrival and a fry-up served at 7am, then snatched away again at a quarter past.

Maybe we’re not as bad as the Americans — better Basil Fawlty than Norman Bates — but Britain’s failure to cultivate hospitality as a civic virtue has widespread consequences… cough...Brexit… cough, cough… Stansted Airport departures lounge.

Perhaps the exploding popularity of Airbnb will help us change our selfish shut-in ways. The number of people staying in spare rooms in the UK which they found on the site has shot up by 80 per cent since last summer, with around 64,000 separate accommodation listings in London alone.

Or perhaps the exploding popularity of Airbnb will only decimate the business of professional hoteliers, while entrenching the more established British values of miserliness and finicky resistance to change.

Comedian Martin Pilgrim recently raked in the re-tweets by posting a two-page grumble he’d received from an Airbnb host, accusing him of such grievous crimes as leaving “the shower head turned to the wall”. As Pilgrim commented: “Never let me stay in your Airbnb. I will move your chairs and jars slightly and all I’ll give you in return is hundreds of pounds.”

Sadly many remain persuaded beyond reason that guests only take, take, take, when in fact guests actually give you stuff. And I don’t just mean bottles of duty-free whisky either. Although, such pressies are always very much appreciated — thanks, Lucia!

As a now-experienced host, I can also tell you that the generosity of good guests even extends to house-(un)proud slatterns who never use fabric softener on the guest towels (which are beach towels anyway), who haven’t quite got around to tiling the kitchen and who have the temerity to live a full 12-minute walk from the nearest Tube station.

Still they come, with friendly smiles, life-enriching conversation and sleeves rolled up, ready for dish-washing. Which rather exposes the flaw in the Home Office’s “hostile environment” immigration policy, doesn’t it?

The battle between innovators and cynics keeps hotting up

Here are a few things I’ve invented for which I am yet to receive proper credit: the word “mandigan”, meaning a cardigan-like item of clothing worn by males — though admittedly it’s fallen out of usage since the Great Genderless Clothes Revolution of 2017; the UK viewership of seminal TV show The Wire, and several still-going-strong marriages (looking at you, Nisha and Dan).

So I do sympathise with the writers of 2001 song Playas Gon’ Play, who recently launched a copyright infringement suit over a lyric in Taylor Swift’s 2015 hit Shake It Off. No doubt you’ll remember the lyric in question from your favourite gym playlist: “Players gonna play (play, play, play, play) and the haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate).”

Unfortunately, for all parties involved, real genius, the kind which articulates some essential aspect of the human condition, is doomed to go unrecognised. When a truth is that universally acknowledged, everyone soon feels some shared sense of ownership.

It’s almost as if we inspired innovators must carry on doing our thing, regardless of the fact that the bitter cynics will similarly continue doing theirs.

Now if only there were some common-usage phrase pithily to express that sentiment…

* The most exciting thing about the statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett is not that it will be the first of a woman in Parliament Square but the first one by a woman, the Turner Prize-winning Gillian Wearing. Fawcett will be depicted not as a youthful Venus de Milo-esque flibbertigibbet but as a fully dressed, 50-year-old at the height of her powers. Girl Power is great but its battleaxes inspire our fervent fandom.