You find all sorts of strange creatures curled up, fast asleep on the furniture 

Bloomfield House - Fawlty Towers meets The Waltons 

Sublime to Ridiculous

What's really interesting is the leverage effect that seems to be associated with Bloomfield House and Bath in general. I just ran into a friend of mine in the local corner shop. He lives on the same road - Bloomfield Road - as us. Another friend, also a Bathonian, had asked me last week if I might be able to help his company - a very well-known multinational - with some of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues. He was particularly keen to take a look at links with the United Nations. My neighbour just happens to be an advisor to Kofi Annan on the Global Compact, his (Kofi's) favourite UN corporate initiative. Funny old world - everything's on your doorstep. We've got environmental strategists, human rights specialists and globalisation gurus coming out of our ears around here, and most of them are to be found at our local deli, chewing the fat. Sometimes, when we're running CSR seminars at the hotel, you might find a group of international business movers and shakers in the drawing room, with a couple of my kids sat with them, holding forth on the meaning of life. We can serve up the world's tastiest bacon on a Sunday morning, provided by BBC broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby's Bath organic farm (almost visible from our dining room), then hear him on the radio, locking horns with the Prime Minister over the Common Agricultural Policy.

Rob - not really messianic, more 'did I turn the gas off?' 

The Fawlty Towers bit

We didn't intend Bloomfield House to be unduly eccentric but there was a certain inevitability about it. We'd never been hoteliers before, when we moved in around a year-and-a-half ago on a Friday evening. The following day we were fully booked. The entire contents of our previous home - which were voluminous, as it was a big old five-storey Bath town house - plus the children and the animals, were packed into our private quarters, within the hotel. Despite spacious rooms and high ceilings, there were boxes, gazillions of them, stacked in almost every cubic inch of our space. We had to climb mountains of furniture and squeeze oúrselves along the bedroom ceiling to find our way downstairs. The guest areas, however, were immaculate. Something had to give. This was a top-of-the-range, five-diamond guest house, as established by the previous owners. Actually, the guests never had any idea we were beginners. A trained chef and old friend of the family arrived early on Sunday morning and we, after almost no sleep at all, served delicious farmers' market organic full English breakfasts to an amazingly enthusiastic clientele.

Then the hotel inspector arrived to confirm, or withdraw, our five diamond status and, as he was sat in the dining room, discussing the finer points of top quality hotel service with Kari, the puppy crept under the inspector's chair and deposited an odoriferous little gift on the carpet...

The Waltons bit

So, there's me, Kari and the five kids: Arun, Anna, Finn, Felix and Claudia. Plus Alfie the border collie (all sound, no fury), Honey the almost-matching cat, Beau-Beau the handsome buck rabbit, Isabelle his demure, sexy wife and her wombful of fluffy - if soggy - baby dwarf lops. We run the place as an eco-hotel, which means not that there are solar panels on the foúr-posters but that the food is as organic, local and fair-traded as we can make it. Rainwater irrigates some of the garden and the car may soon be running on recycled cooking oil, if and when we can buy it in sub-humungous batches. The rest is elegantly wasted sillk curtains and antiques with the odd muddy rugby boot to break the monotony. The children earn and then jeopardise their allowances by changing beds, waiting at table and breaking windows. The guests hang out in the garden and take photographs of the astonishing sculptures that emerge from the fountain after the kids have dosed it with detergent.

This is going to sound too weird

What's so weird is that, on the face of it, it all seems quite idyllic and wonderful. And in many ways it is, it truly is. We live in this gorgeous Georgian manor house in Bath, one of England's most beautiful cities. Bloomfield House belonged, many years ago, to the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Bath and now it's ours - or, at least, we sort of co-own it with the most amazing bank. Yet the route to this place has been both hilarious and scary - and, like nearly everything that actually happens in the real world, impossibly unlikely.

How we got to this perhaps enviable position has often seemed particularly unenviable. Rob tends to do long-winded, Kari long-suffering. But, against all the odds, it seems to be working. For now.