Audience is all

We've recently spent ten days on holiday in Norfolk and arrived back earlier this week with a hire car full of all the stuff we reckoned we needed for a stay in a self-catering holiday cottage. Incidentally, what's with the phrase 'everything but the kitchen sink'? Surely I can't be the only one who takes the kitchen sink with me.

Anyway, we arrived back in Edinburgh early evening last Monday, picked up an easy microwave supper from the local supermarket and made our weary way back to our flat. Now I need to give some backstory here, so bear with me. Because we split our time between Edinburgh and France, we rent out our flat through an agency for short-term business and holiday rentals when we're not there. I had noted that two tenants would be staying in our flat for one week while we were away. By my calculations that meant they were leaving two days before we were due to arrive back. So imagine our surprise (spot the cliche no self-respecting writer should ever use) when we turned the key in our flat door and found two very surprised people dishing up their curry supper - I'm just glad that's all they were doing!

Lucky for us, they turned out to be extremely good humoured about two strangers barging in on their holiday and after some friendly banter and profuse apolgies from us, we left them in peace to enjoy their curry. So there we were, 8pm, stranded in a hire car piled with suitcases and cardboard boxes and a bag full of dirty laundry, homeless and hungry...I think at this point I should run a contest for a suitable ending for this story. However, that wouldn't be quite fair as there is a deus ex machina I've been withholding. We have three grown-up sons who live in Edinburgh. We texted them all and ended up moving in with one of them for the rest of the week. He's a playwright and immediately posted on Facebook that his parents had turned up unexpectedly on a Monday evening and planned to stay for the rest of the week - was he in a Chekhov play?

So, in this context, picking our way round piles of random luggage in our son's spare room, trying to work out where we'd put our tooth brushes, I received an email entitled: One week to go before your trip - got your bags packed yet? No doubt a marketing team at the airline we're flying back to France with next week decided this kind of automated email would be an important aspect of customer relations; no doubt in many cases, it is. But for me, searching in vain for my tooth brush, I found it as irritating as being asked if I'd done my Christmas shopping yet in mid-October.

As a writer, that email set me thinking. Audience is all. No matter how lyrical my prose, if it doesn't take account of my audience, I may as well not bother.

Do you have any 'misjudging audience' stories? If you're a writer, do you have any tips for keeping your audience in mind?