Wendyl Nissen: Bit of guest work okay

Rolling out the welcome mat isn't so easy for obsessive-compulsive hosts. Photo / Supplied

I have never met anyone who doesn't like having guests to stay.

Most people seem to enjoy sharing their home and having their friends around for days on end, eating and drinking, laughing and telling stories like one long episode of Friends. I am not one of those people.

I never invite anyone to stay and if they invite themselves my heart rate increases, I spin out and panic.

"It's just having some friends to stay," my husband reasons with me. "Old friends, people you know well, non-judgmental friends who love you."

"Where's the Irish linen?" I screech. "Who used the good towels? We need to buy a new bed! What will I feed their baby?"

"Last I heard he was being breastfed," came the voice of reason, again.

To me, having guests means I must immediately transform myself into the entire servant cast of Upstairs, Downstairs.

I must cook five-course gourmet meals and clean to the level of a five-star hotel.

I just know my friends will take one look at my cluttered, chaotic house and think I have lost the use of most of my faculties. I also believe that no guest should be expected to wash a dish, do their own laundry or make a bed. Their cutlery is washed and dried while they are still eating.

Consequently, by the end of day one, our guests are too scared to make a cup of tea in case I come swooping in and insist on doing it myself - even though I was just making pain au chocolat from scratch and whisking up a blancmange.

I never stop long enough to enjoy their company. Instead I crawl into bed suffering from exhaustion and wishing they would all bloody go home and get the hell out of my office so that I can get back to work.

There was a time when I wasn't like this. Guests would be welcomed at the door and told to find a spare bed, or a clear patch of floor if they couldn't, shown where the linen cupboard was and advised to help themselves to any food and wine they could find. If they felt like dinner, there was some mince in the fridge somewhere.

And then an old friend arrived from overseas about 15 years ago. Within moments I was being asked where I kept the bottled water as she didn't do tap, told the bed was lumpy and that she only ate pesticide-free lettuce.

At the time I was going through a marriage break-up, attempting to keep two confused children emotionally stable and by the end of it felt like a total host failure. Which is when the obsessive-compulsive host moved in.

But this year my husband conducted what is now known as the "caravan intervention". He started by inviting people to stay at the caravan and waited for me to spin out.

"There's no room! We can't expect them to sleep in a tent! How am I going to cook a cassoulet on the barbecue? I never have guests at the caravan!"

"Here's what is going to happen," he instructed. "I am taking care of everything and you are going to pretend you have been hypnotised into not caring what happens and go with it."

The guests arrived. They were taken care of. A perfectly nice time was had by all, even though it rained, the baby food ran out and the wine was gone by the second night. All potential disasters for the former obsessive host.

"I think you're ready to go solo," he announced as he went back to Auckland for the night and I welcomed my second guest for the weekend as the first guests drove away.

As she hauled from her car fresh basil, lettuce, blue cheese, smoked fish, plums, avocados, crispy fresh bread and wine, I found myself feeling more guest than host.

"Off for a swim," she chortled.

"Then we'll have a nice afternoon chatting and catching up."

And so we did. I made up her bed with fresh linen, washed the linen from the last guests and then sat in the sun gossiping until bedtime, marvelling at my newfound host abilities.

"Having a nice time?" came the text from home.

"Lovely," I replied.