A year at the inn, in numbers

We keep a ledger, and once a year, in the quiet week after the cows have come down, we read it out at the long table. This is the year just gone.

Guests

• Two thousand nine hundred nights, across eleven rooms, which is about seventy percent of what the inn could hold. We are not trying for more.
• Six thousand breakfasts. Four hundred of them at the window table.
• Eleven countries, which is fewer than before the pandemic and more than last year.

The house

• Fourteen cords of wood, all of it burned.
• Thirty-one snow days, counting only the ones with snow falling.
• The road closed four times, for a day each, and once for two.
• One television removed, three more to go.

The kitchen

• Two hundred and eight loaves from the village oven, at breakfast alone.
• Ninety kilos of apricot jam, of which none is left.
• Forty-four Tuesdays.

Next year

A second window table. A bigger woodshed. The same eleven rooms, the same road, the same cows.