As the eco-tourism season got under way, the confused-looking French people began to arrive.
They come to see ‘la nature’, and they insist they don’t mind about the rain or the terrible food, or the fact you can’t actually access any of this nature because it’s all owned by strapping great Cork farmers who won’t let you near it. After a few days, their faces suggest they’re getting a tad disorientated, but they don’t want to admit it.
First there arrived a very nice couple from a town in northern France where the builder boyfriend and I had one of our most memorable holidays together.
As I served them their breakfast coffee, they asked where they could go for a walk, for they had tried in vain for days. I told them ‘beaches, that’s it’ – and most of those are inaccessible to cars and have cows grazing beside them and farmers waiting to jump out.
‘Un moment,’ I said, and went off to fetch something – a picture of the BB standing by a perfect swimming pool in front of a perfect château. Every morning in this place, we would come down to platters heaped with fresh croissants. We lazed by the pool with our little dog Cydney, and slept in a four-poster bed.
The French will not admit they are getting anything about visiting Ireland wrong
When it was time to continue south we had almost wished we weren’t on our way to the Dordogne, though of course when we got there it was heaven, the warm air sweetly scented with fruit crops drifting through the car windows…
That château cost us less than I was having to charge this poor couple to stay in a drafty Georgian pile in relentless rain. I showed them several pictures and they looked up from their cereal from the cold breakfast buffet that now passes for the only thing we can afford to serve anyone as Irish inflation sky-rockets, and they shrugged and said they didn’t know the place.
‘I suppose there are just so many gorgeous châteaux,’ I said, and they nodded uninterestedly while munching. ‘You have some of the most beautiful places in the world in France…’
They didn’t reply. They were now looking at maps, planning their day trip to Mizen Head in the driving rain. They would be enjoying staring out to a black angry sea as waves crashed against rocks and then a visitor centre would serve them very expensive stewed tea and packets of very bad sandwiches and inedible cakes.
‘I suppose,’ I said to the builder B, when he came home that evening to find our framed French holiday pictures out on the kitchen counter, ‘that if you live in the most beautiful country in the world, you need a change. If you’re used to delicious, inexpensive food, a warm climate and gorgeous scenery, maybe all you want is to come to a cold, wet island and look at craggy cliffs and inhospitable landscapes populated by volatile farmers and mad English hippies, and eat food that is barely edible for enormous prices.’
‘They’re mental,’ said the BB, who is already planning our retirement in France.
The next couple to arrive were also French and middle-aged and were happy enough until their last day when a further French couple arrived, whereupon they beat a hasty retreat from the breakfast room to avoid them. These two were in their twenties, he tall, wiry and from Marseille, she tanned, curly-haired and originally from Greece. They looked shell-shocked as they stood in the hallway.
They had been on a tour of Cork city and had got into a row with another French couple. ‘I told him to shut up and listen to the guide and he threatened to punch me – ugh?’ he ranted. ‘So I said I would punch him! Ugh!’
His girlfriend shushed him but he wasn’t having it. He was appalled that he had met a French person during his Irish trip.
It’s a terrible shock to all our French customers when they get here and realise there are so many of them. I would say there are more French people in West Cork than Irish at the height of the season, if you consider there are only five million people in Ireland, and most of those are in Dublin and its surrounds, and that during the summer the population doubles with overseas visitors, and most of them are French, and down here, endlessly going round the Ring of Kerry.
The French-Greek couple spent their one night with us refusing to believe me when I told them that they had to try to eat before 8.30 p.m.
‘Ugh! She will not be ready by then – ugh?’ he said, and they adamantly refused to shower and change and go out until 9 p.m., whereupon they discovered all the restaurants in the nearest town were no longer serving.
They then, they told us the next morning, drove back to the village where they ventured into the Chinese takeaway – very ill-advised, we could have told them if they asked. ‘Bah non!’ he insisted, claiming preposterously that the only thing wrong with their meal was that there was too much of it. He looked distinctly peaky.
But the French will not admit they are getting anything about visiting Ireland wrong.
Before they left I told them which road to take to Glengarriff and which gate to go out of, and they ignored me, drove out the other gate and, I imagine, set off on the precisely wrong road. Five hours later, the BB and I went 15 minutes down the road to Bantry for some shopping and, as we drove around Wolfe Tone Square, there they were, the French-Greeks, wandering about looking confused and holding some more very bad takeaway.
They had progressed precisely 16 miles between the hours of 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. and were nowhere near where they should be stopping for lunch if they wanted to drive around two peninsulas and make Killarney by nightfall.
By the time we got home, there was just time to brace ourselves for two German ladies, who got out of the car in the rain with very angry faces and refused to say hello. They marched up the stairs, took possession of their room and started asking how they could make the hot water come on. ‘It’s hot all the time,’ I said, and they looked doubtful. They asked where to eat, showered in five minutes, and went out early. They were catching on.
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