A life less ordinary: Tobias Jones

Having an open-door policy is great in theory. But the endless stream of surprise visitors is making Tobias feel less than hospitable

I'm constantly amazed by how many people just rock up here unannounced. I'm mostly amazed that they actually find the place. We've given verbal and visual directions to plenty of people who have spent hours trying to find us. Those people probably get lost because we live in an area so rural that there's one postcode for a dozen houses, making satnav fairly useless. And since we live a few hundred metres beyond a derelict house, many people see the ruin and just turn back, assuming they've gone wrong.

And yet every week we get a surprise visitor. The other day I was doing the washing up ("It's always me") and there was a knock at the door. Before I even saw who it was I glimpsed an orange campervan parked under one of the big beech trees. A man stepped into view. You couldn't make it up: he had a goatee and a wooden leg covered in a leopard-skin tight. When he spoke he had a foreign accent. "I'm looking for a writer who has started a commune in the woods," he said.

"Aha," I said hesitantly, pained by the word "commune". I was tempted to point at the horizon and say "over there". But we invited him in, gave him a cup of tea and offered him lunch.

"Lunch?" he said. "Zat would be OK." My wife Fra and I exchanged glances: there was something about the shoulder-shrug response to our generosity that amused us. So we had lunch and answered his questions and went for a walk in the woods. And then off he went.

It happens all the time. The other day we had evacuated the place of children and guests for an afternoon to give Fra the rare joy of having time at home entirely to herself. When we all got back, we expected to find her fast asleep or at least refreshed. But there were tea cups all over the table and she rolled her eyes. "The family of some friend of an ex-girlfriend of yours turned up," she said.

We were in the middle of lunch the other day when three pensioners shook the bell by the gate. One of them was a geologist who had written his doctoral thesis about the quarry on our land 50 years ago. He was slightly shocked and disorientated by the fact that trees had so thoroughly reclaimed the land. And then just this week a car rolled up and a lady in a long gown with a flamboyant hem got out. She was a herbalist from London who had heard about our project and wondered whether she could hunt for healing herbs.

Now I enjoy these unexpected arrivals and would be genuinely sad if they ever stopped. One of the drawbacks of living in the sticks is that people don't just drop by on the walk home. No one walks home via us. We are, as I say, at the end of a bumpy track beyond a ruin. So it's good that people surprise us. No one turns up empty-handed or empty-headed. I enjoy the sense of adventure that comes from having a gate that's almost always, and always very publicly, open. And I've often said that a community only avoids being elitist or eugenic if it has space for the uninvited. And yet… if I'm honest, I've found all these unexpected visitors one of the hardest adjustments to make. Having complete strangers walk through the door, blithely using the loo or the kettle, just isn't something I'm used to.

I've spent a long time trying to analyse my unease and talking it through with other people here. Maybe it's natural to feel mildly peeved. It's not something any of us is really used to. Maybe I'm just a hypocrite: good at pontificating on the theory, not so strong on practising it. Or maybe it's actually the opposite, that we're too anxious about the practice. One of our long-term guests reckons we're too hospitable, that we should be more taciturn and not stress about bending over backwards every time someone rolls up unannounced. I think part of the problem is that this house is so small that there are few buffers or boundaries: anyone can stumble into the heart of the place and I'm probably anxious about what they're looking for here, and especially what they will find.


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