Sharing our house

 We've had lodgers in this house for years. In the noughties, local schools had money for developing language skills so would bring in European language assistants who then needed to stay somewhere for a few months. A local teacher told us about them asking if we had a spare room and as our first teenager had left and gone to university totally clearing her room, we had a spare space. We took in language assistants from France, and Spain. They would come in October, disappear for a long Christmas holiday and come back for the Easter and half the summer term, leaving in May. This worked well for us because then our university student daughter could have her room back in her holidays, we had a little extra cash and the young (usually) assistant had a home with access to internet and kitchen. One smoked, which we didn't allow in the house, so set him up in the garden or on the roof. Once, one of our family commented that they'd seen a lodger hanging out of a window smoking, and "it didn't look like tobacco!" Another lodger had meetings and discussions in his room, which was nice - I think they were discussing Islam because someone had brought him a copy of the Koran. I did wonder after because the school the lodger worked at had an Islamic influence on its students and the woman later known as the White Widow had been a student there a few years earlier. 

Usually these language assistants were in their early twenties, though once we had a slightly older assistant from Spain. She complained that she had to take the assistant job because there weren't enough teaching jobs in Spain. She worried that we weren't paying tax on her rent and her father was a tax man in Spain. We explained about the UK's Rent a Room scheme allowing tax free rented rooms in your own house within a limit. Eventually, she found a teaching job in Spain and left us and her local school with little notice, causing the school problems but I could see her point - she wanted and needed a career. Her facebook page indicates that she's still happily working in Spain,