Allowing strangers into your home and treating them as honoured guests in return for a sum that would barely buy a round of drinks in a swanky London hotel is a very British concept.

In your posh hotel, the cooked breakfast will have been sitting on a hotplate since 7am, ensuring rubbery scrambled eggs, watery tomatoes, leathery bacon and tasteless button mushrooms. In a good farmhouse B&B, the eggs may have been laid that morning, the bacon might be home-cured and the tomatoes cooked to perfection.

So what if you have to enjoy the traditional breakfast with an overfriendly cat who keeps your legs warm as you eat, or the family dog insists on sharing your bacon?

B&Bs are the antidote to the claustrophobic uniformity of chain hotels, in which the aroma of stale guests, stale beer and all the cigarettes put out before the smoking ban is only partly masked by an automated air freshener.

Memorable B&Bs include a Duchy of Cornwall farm where the owner made her own sausages, and a cottage with a huge family room that incorporated a snooker table. Choosing one can be pot luck, but it is likely the landing will be uneven, the bed springs will creak and the breakfast will be the best you have ever eaten.

B&Bs are much more congenial for families than even small hotels: generally you only have to worry about squalling infants disturbing the owner, who is being paid for the privilege, rather than other guests.

True, not every B&B is a five-star hotel in miniature. Too many still have nylon bedspreads and an oversolicitous owner who assumes that guests want their rooms at 80F. But B&Bs are one of the glories of the British tourist industry, precisely because they are run by real people.

Britain’s vast network of B&Bs is something that foreigners envy but appear unable to emulate. Take a recent visit to Italy, where the B&B idea is just catching on. In Naples a marble icebox advertised as “fully self-catering bed and breakfast” came equipped with nothing apart from a stack of plastic cups and a voucher for a pastry.

In Rome, there was not even an owner, just a harassed minion on a moped who arrived with a bill and a bag of supermarket croissants. The minion warned us not to use the kitchen sink because it made the cupboard beneath fill with water.

In contrast, Wallace’s Arthouse in a medieval palazzo in Spoleto was everything you could hope a bed and breakfast to be. Its owner just happens to be a Scotsman.

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