Downsides of staying in UK host families

I read with interest the accounts in the January 2005 Issue of HLT by an Italian girl and a Thai girl staying in UK host families. My own experience was less satisfying than theirs. This is maybe to do with the difference between being in your early twenties , as they were, and being a forty something, as I am.
I spent two weeks in a host family in UK and I found that I was uneasy about all the explicit and implicit rules that the air seemed too full of. I do not like to be told that I can only bring one friend to the house at a time. I do not like to have to sit through the family saying "grace" at the start of each meal. I am not religious. I feel uneasy about being asked not to use the garden, which is for the family only.
I know that the English love to try and reduce their fear of uncertainly by multiplying their rules but I don't feel good, at my age, about playing these games.

I wonder how many other people have had unsettling experiences in UK homes? Am I alone? Maybe this is why many of us mainland Europeans prefer to go to EFL schools in Ireland?