The plumber was shouting hysterically at me down the phone because I had asked him to install a heated towel rail.
‘Towel rail? Towel rail! Armageddon is coming! Did you fill your oil tank up? It’s tripling in price by Christmas! I’ve got 40 jobs piled up! Forty jobs!’
‘So are you saying I can’t have a heated towel rail?’ I said. I know the plumber only too well. Many a time he has sat at my kitchen table chain-smoking while rambling about the devil, and how the world is coming to an end.
If that is his default setting, you can imagine how he reacts to things going very badly on a global scale. He lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events are apt to put him in a particularly nihilistic mood. Perhaps because of the nihilism, he has no intention of finishing a plumbing job.
The job he started for me two years ago, and for which I paid, remains incomplete. I have a very good boiler and central heating system, for he is an excellent plumber, but only two en suite bathrooms, rather than the four promised, and one minus a towel radiator for some obscure reason.
The guests come and go from the room without a towel radiator and somehow they manage kindly to give it five stars. But a couple came the other day and pulled loose the single chrome bar we’ve fixed to the stud wall to hang towels on.
The builder boyfriend had erected this as best he could, but when he’s away and it comes off it’s very embarrassing. I told the guests it was entirely my fault, but the chap asked for a screwdriver and offered to fix it. I said I wouldn’t hear of it, gave him a washing hanger for their towels, threw in some extra sausage for breakfast, and now I await the review.
For goodness sake, I told the plumber in a text, please will you come and connect this towel rad?
He texted back that he would be there to do it ‘this Friday’, which he has been saying for two years. So I texted again to say the guests were starting to complain and he rang me ranting and raving.
‘It’s Armageddon! This is how it ends! What are you saying about the radiator? You’re making no sense…’
I’m making no sense? The plumber should hang a sandwich board over himself and go around the town squares of West Cork quoting the Book of Revelation.
He’d be happier that way. Instead of which he’s going round people’s houses starting jobs and not finishing them – which is the end of the world for them – then ringing them back to rant about Donald Trump, another man prone to hysteria who starts big jobs and doesn’t finish them.
You and Mr Trump have a lot in common, I wanted to tell him. You are both constitutionally incapable of not biting off more than you can chew. And when desperate people ask you to please get on with clearing up the mess you’ve created, you erupt in a volcanic tantrum, as though none of what you’ve started is remotely your fault. What personality type is that? Borderline? Schizo? Manic depressive? Are you on the Red Bull?
But I didn’t say anything of the sort because then I would have zero chance of getting a towel radiator, and currently I might just have a 1 per cent chance and that is as good as anyone’s chance of getting a plumber in Ireland, so I’d be mad not to stick with it.
It means that one in the 100 times the plumber promises to come, he will come. This is good plumbing odds in West Cork. By my reckoning he has promised to come well over 75 times, so I’m nearly there.
I told him something soothing about Trump, said everything was going to be all right. Deep down, of course, I knew this was not the case.
The cancellations have started coming in since the cost of petrol soared, and the small adjustments down aren’t enough. No one wants to drive around. You’re much better off flying to a beach and sitting on it. Anything that involves either taking your own car on a ferry or hiring a car at Dublin airport to meander around roads that take up three times the fuel with all the curves and hills is insanity.
And it’s not just the tourists cutting back. When I went to fill up my car at the village garage, the owner was sitting in his office with his head in his hands. The locals have stopped driving. These are people who can remember walking to school barefoot (my next-door farmer claims), so they can well cope with walking everywhere now they have shoes.
My plumber lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events put him in a particularly nihilistic mood
It rather looks, therefore, as though Mr Trump may have killed my business. Or rather, finished it off after the Irish tourist board gave it a good kicking by announcing a new licensing scheme, and then Airbnb stamped on its head while it was lying on the ground by announcing a new 15 per cent fee levied on hosts.
Both changes come into place in a few months’ time, helpfully almost concurrently. Then I have to weather the soaring Irish inflation rate, which at 3.6 per cent is losing the plot compared with the EU average of 2.5 per cent. A bottle of mouthwash costs €9 in this village, as does a chicken.
‘How does anyone afford to live here?’ I asked an English neighbour when we met at a café the other day.
‘They all work for cash and don’t pay tax while claiming benefits and EU farming subsidies,’ she alleged, sipping her half of a €9 round of one extra small latte for her and a very old, gnarled tea bag from a jar on the counter in a pot of slightly hot water for me.
But I’ve no evidence to prove this either way, other than to say if it’s not true they must be performing some other miracle. For the café was full of ladies treating themselves to plates full of slap-up cakes and extra-large frothy coffees.
I see the same women at the supermarket checkout with pizza boxes piled up to their heads, at two for €20. A tenner a pizza is considered so ‘cheap’ that they buy six. Whatever it is they’re doing, it’s something much cannier than my collapsing house of cards.
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