The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show.

I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the travelling public all summer, so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism.

My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but never both. Only the French can be relied upon to eat everything, followed by the Irish and the Germans. Everyone else can go every which way.

As a result, I wait until someone tells me what they want before offering them food that will offend them. You can, however, have a good guess based on the amount of face jewellery. This Portuguese lady had a nose ring and had just come from touring the bottom end of the Mizen Head, where she had been camping in wigwams and tipis for so long that the child had demanded a night in a bed. When they arrived late, the little boy was so happy he could be heard leaping on and off the king divan.

The next morning I cooked a full Irish for a couple in another room, whose nationality defied me until I narrowed it down to him being Scottish and she French or vice versa. I couldn’t work it out because their accents kept swapping,........

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