I know it can be difficult to have sympathy for anybody who owns a holiday let, but for me and my wife August is often a war between us and the holiday guests from hell. It’s an open season of refund-seeking, blackmailing guests and wild children whose parents think we operate a kids’ club in our gardens. And it’s only getting worse.

We got a flavour the week that schools broke up late last month, when a group of eight adults calmly sat on the terrace in the sun, swilling cans of beer and prosecco as their pack of six children began picking up heavy pebble gravel and throwing the stones at the windows of my elderly parents’ barn.

Many middle-class families have no idea how to behave on holiday or how to control their children

The barn is one of several in a courtyard that we have converted into holiday let cottages. The income is how we keep our Shropshire historic house and gardens – open to the public in the summer – operating. We have no subsidies and rely on these few cottages to pay for astronomical insurance (up by 20 per cent in two years), laundry costs (also up by 20 per cent this year), garden upkeep and house repairs (thanks to George Osborne, you can’t claim VAT back on historic building repairs).

My wife – an Airbnb ‘superhost’ – and I are unpaid estate lackeys, armed with mops, towers of loo paper, broken hoovers, stain remover and wasp repellent, helped by two saintly part-time housekeepers who do the ‘changeovers’. We make no profit and take no salary, but the income just about covers the........

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