Tom’s & Douglas’s Barn guests help support Mary’s Meals

As many of you know, we strongly urge all our guests to take out holiday cancellation insurance, just in case something untoward should happen that prevents them taking up the holiday at the last minute. With so many of you booking so far in advance it is even more possible that an unforeseen problem might arise that one really couldn’t have anticipated at the time.

Anyway, we recommend taking out insurance and have to be very careful not to push one product rather than another (not that we have a great deal of personal experience). Many people already have their own favourite provider but if anyone needs guidance, we suggest they look at the Pavey Insurance scheme, which is a special scheme for Premier Cottages guests and therefore apparently rather good value. So far so good.

Anyway, the potential embarrassment creeps in when at the end of each year (well, it was March really this year) we get sent a small cheque, which is our commission. There is no way we would feel happy about accepting this ourselves so we have pledged to give it to Mary’s Meals, a wonderful charity that provides meals for children in school in poverty-stricken parts of the world. The idea is that parents encourage their children to go to school, the child thrives because it has at least one good meal a day, and hopefully will be able to escape the poverty trap by being able to get a good job afterwards.

It costs £9.40 to feed a child for a year, so our modest £15.70 represents roughly the cost of providing a nourishing meal for one child for a year and a half. It’s shaming, but wonderful that so modest a sum can mean so much.

So, thank you all!