I think of myself as somewhat of an expert in the realm of self-catering holiday cottages, having stayed in a fair few in my time ranging from a dinky cottage for two to a large manor house accommodating a dozen people or more.

There are a few points that I think potential providers of holiday cottages ought to bear in mind if they want not to cause that well-known syndrome of "cottage anxiety" among their guests.

• Zip 'n' link beds - i.e. 3' beds which can be joined together or left apart. These are a good thing. Rooms can be arranged as doubles or twins (or triples), depending on the needs of the visitors.
  
  
• Bathrooms. I know people like the idea of en-suite bathrooms in this day and age. They give an impression of luxury. But, in my opinion, this is only true if you provide an en-suite to every bedroom in the house. The number of times I've seen cottage anxiety emerge because couple x get the luxury double room with en-suite whilst singleton y gets the kids' bunk room and has to traipse into other people's bedrooms to access the only decent shower. In my opinion, if you can't provide en-suite facilities to every room, then you shouldn't provide it to any room. Instead, you should provide an ample amount of bathrooms which are accessible to all. I would also apply this rule to house-building in general, but that's another story.
  
  
• Showers. However many you're thinking of installing, you should probably add one or two more for good measure.
  
  
• Kitchen accessories. If your accommodation allows for up to 8 people, you really should be providing a range of pots and pans to cater for that amount of people. The cottage from which we've just returned had a choice between a huge stockpot and a teeny-weeny milk pan. The frying pans were small and barely serviceable. There was no wok (for me, that's an issue) and only one oven tray. The cheese grater was of a comedy size, barely bigger than the nutmeg grater I'd brought with me (you never know when you're going to need one!). There were a number of dismembered food processors, none of which seemed to have the full complement of parts to make a whole piece of useful equipment. The knives were blunt. However, there were several dozen scalloped avocado dishes and a melon baller, so that made up for it. Not.
  
  
• Directions. The most important direction we should have received for getting to this particular cottage would have been: "FOR GOD'S SAKE, BRING A TORCH!". If you are letting the accommodation from Friday to Friday, it's likely that people will be arriving in darkness. If the cottage is hidden away down an unlit footpath and there is no mobile phone signal to alert your friends that you've arrived and that you can't actually see anything at all, this simple direction could have prevented several minutes of stumbling around in the darkness after a long drive.
  
  
• Locks on bathroom doors. I love my friends, but there are some things I don't want to have to share with them, thank you very much.
  

So they did okay on the zip'n'link beds. As for the rest - must try harder.

We did have a lovely time, though, honest!