Back to BB and Nutty now. I really feel the need to get to the bottom of this and I am finding these postings very helpful.
I got her through a good agency and paid £400. She was really quite teenagery at first, leaving me to come home to a messy house with her stuff all over the hall and so on, not doing the jobs on her sheet in anything like the time she was supposed to, etc, moaning to me as I was on my way out of the door in the morning that the kids had run out of clean clothes when it was her who hadn't washed them, etc, so they spent a lot of time coaching her on the phone and generally sorting her out, which helped a lot.
She then came to me and said how much she appreciated being with us and what a good host family we were, which was nice, as I believe she genuinely meant it. I know we're a good billet because other APs have discussed their friends' host families with us and we seem to compare quite favourably.
But I think the reality of APs is that they are not the most go-getting of people in the first place, so there are always going to be tensions, just as there are when two women are in a household. So I am always trying to keep that in mind when judging them. On this occasion (and DH has come back with further intelligence now) the bag the tub was supplied in broke, so she apparently cycled two miles back into town to find a replacement and then cycled like a maniac to get back here on time (or so she thought) and when I then had a go, felt hard done by because she thought she had given it her best shot.
All that having been said, I am like BB, I was not always together in my early 20s but I did pull my socks up when things mattered. For example I was already working for Time Life in the holidays and if you got something wrong there it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars so you learned fast how to be reliable.