Real life

The one question the priest did not ask me, thank goodness, was why I wanted to get married. That might have held up the enterprise indefinitely, and we are already so far behind with this attempted wedding of ours that I dare not risk another hold-up. Since serving the notice at Cork Registry Office, it’s a year down the line nearly and the builder boyfriend and I are no nearer to saying: ‘I do.’ Our only option is to get married, despite all my misgivings about how corny and pointless marriage is I’m nearer to saying: ‘I really can’t be bothered.’ Or: ‘If anything happens to me just bury me in the garden and don’t tell anyone I’m dead. That way you’ll keep the house with no questions asked, and I doubt anyone will notice.

The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often. According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written on the side of his car, his approach does stand as testament to the Irish having a wonderfully earthy sense of humour. The BB claimed that the funeral director eyed him, or rather sized him, as if to assess his dimensions The builder boyfriend met this funeral cabbie, or taxi mortician, when he went to the wake of the elderly man who sold us our house.

Our house was suddenly shrouded in a thick, grey mass of cloud and it felt like a sea fog had descended. The Irish could not give a damn for rules and regs and no one is going to tell them what they can set fire to To some extent it had, but the fog grew in density until it wasn’t feasible that this was coming off the sea. The builder boyfriend came in from the stable yard and reported an acrid smell in the rain. This is what happens when fog descends. People burn their most difficult and illegal waste when visibility is low. ‘It’s the plasticky dew,’ said the builder b, who likes an Irish republican song.

‘We don’t have an appointment for you!’ yelled the woman sitting behind the reception hatch. My 87-year-old father stared back at her. He had made this appointment at his local GP surgery in the Midlands and I had flown from Ireland to be with him and my mother when they attended it. We had the right day and time and he had the confirmation text to prove it. But the receptionist couldn’t find it on her system. ‘You need to move!’ she shouted at my father. ‘I’ve come a long way…’ I tried, to which she shouted back ‘Who are you!’ and didn’t wait for the answer. It wasn’t a question. Then the receptionist looked beyond my father and fixed a very warm smile on the woman behind him in the queue: ‘Can I help you?

‘Life is changed, not ended,’ said the slogan on the lectern as the priest told his flock what to think about a difficult subject, with a reassuring smile. ‘It’s quite a big change,’ I whispered to the builder boyfriend who was staring down at his feet in an attempt to stop the allergic response that was welling up. The service was commemorating those who have died this past year in our corner of West Cork, but the overoptimistic way it was being done was making us feel ever so slightly hysterical. I leaned in to the BB: ‘Have you noticed how Mary has got a halo made of the 12 EU stars?’ I stared at the slogan on the lectern, an excerpt from the Roman Missal, embroidered on an ornamental cloth.

A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon. Lying by the hotel pool facing the seafront, I was watching the surfers, the fishing boats, the palm trees waving on the promenade, and something else. ‘John, I just need to be honest with you,’ said a glamorous, buxom, pink-lipsticked blonde lady in her sixties wearing a leopard-print sarong, sitting on a sunbed sideways facing the back of a slim, frightened-looking man, also in his sixties. She spoke in a soft Scottish accent, coquettishly stirring a cocktail in a poolside cardboard cup.

The empty train seat looked inviting, and all three of us stared at it, then looked away, not daring to either take it, or offer it to the other. This train from Clapham Junction to Surrey was absolutely packed. But when someone got up and there was a seat right next to me, I realised that under the prevailing conventions relating to equality, I could neither take it nor offer it. I was squeezed between two ladies, one quite elderly who looked exhausted and desperate for a seat. She was standing slightly behind me, so, technically speaking, I was in line for the seat. But as she clearly had a good 20 years on me and looked tired, she should have the seat, the way I was brought up.

‘This is a New York strut,’ said the builder boyfriend as he wedged in place a steel bar, bracing shut our bedroom door to prevent us being murdered in our beds. We had been settling in for the night. The BB had been about to close the farmyard gates when a car swept inside them in the pitch dark and a man wound down his window and started chatting. My heart racing, I realised she might have read what I wrote about her – and she had come back for revenge After a while, the BB said this was all very nice but who was he and what did he want? The man said he was booked in here to stay the night. The BB said that could not be right as we were shut for a week while he did some decorating. ‘But come in anyway and we’ll try and sort this out.

‘Printers are evil,’ said the office supplies salesman after I texted him to complain that my new printer was not working. A day earlier he had installed it perfectly, and it worked perfectly – all the while he was standing there. Then he left, and the devilish thing looked at me and thought: ‘I’ll have some fun with her.’ The problem could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work I don’t really understand why we can put men and women in space, but we can’t make printers work unless a tech expert is standing by. Elon Musk says he is going to Mars, and I believe him. I have his Starlink wifi and it’s brilliant. What I don’t understand is why Elon, who can do everything, can’t help make printers work.

The anger management counsellor stormed through the door and shouted at me to turn the heating up. Hello to you too, I thought, but I was polite because I realise we are going to get difficult customers doing B&B in West Cork, where tourists come from all over the world. At first, however, I didn’t know that this woman storming round my house was a psychotherapist. I just thought she was spectacularly rude. She was wearing a woolly hat and big coat, even though it was a typically mild West Cork autumn day, about 17°C. She got right in my face as she declared the house too cold at 11 a.m., having demanded at the last minute to check in four hours early. ‘What’s your heating system?’ she barked, eyeing the brand new radiators in the hallway.

‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared. The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in the supermarket that crushes them down and spits out a voucher – by which I mean about 20 small plastic water bottles, for example, makes you two or three euros, which is enough for a coffee, a sandwich or some money off your shopping bill.

‘I’m making a hedgehog rescue ladder,’ said the builder boyfriend, who was on his knees in the farmyard, drilling a series of mini rungs into place on two mini rails. The builder boyfriend keeps going to check but the hedgehog seems very happy, snoozing away in its comfy box I should have known. Why did I even ask? Of course he was making a hedgehog rescue ladder. The BB doesn’t like to admit it, but beneath the gruff exterior he has such a soft spot for all living creatures that he often bends down to pick up stranded worms from pavements and roads. It is a charming contradiction in his otherwise macho personality, even though worm rescue can be a pain when you are trying to go for a walk. I can’t explain it quite, because he is very pragmatic about animals otherwise.

‘My name is Love,’ typed the help assistant, ‘and I’m a member of the Airbnb community support team.’ I was using one of those chat boxes, where someone from the company you’re grappling with, embodied in a flashing cursor, interacts with you in print on a live chat screen. I am kind and polite, I thought. No one has ever really given me credit for that before Now, I’m a big fan of the chat box. The chat box works when all other forms of customer service fail. Chances are you will get much better service if you stop expecting companies to speak to you on the phone, and start letting them do what they do best, which is to solve your issue without speaking to you, because speaking to you is where all the problems start, let’s face it.

My friend replied to my text with seven sets of animal paw prints, interspersed with pink hearts and rounded off with a cat face. This was in reply to me telling her it had been nice to see her when she stayed with us in West Cork. I squinted at these emojis, trying to make out whether I was looking at ‘What a lovely country house you have’ or ‘What a dump! Cats and dogs everywhere, which is obviously your thing, but I won’t be coming again’. Earlier that day, another friend replied to my message asking how she was with a burst of gold stars, some prayer hands and a smiley face. Was she all right, or had she dropped dead and started texting me from heaven, using the celestial wifi? This is the future.

My passport and driving licence sat on the counter but the girl stared back at me, repeating her demand. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said. I told her I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was on about. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said again, doing her best ‘computer says no’ stare. The Sixt rental office was in the atrium of the Hilton Hotel Gatwick, which for some reason had been heated to something like sauna temperature.

The TV talent show star was due to arrive at 5 p.m., and would be checking into our house long before we were ready to open it as a B&B. I said yes to the lady in the village who organises events, and she told me to expect this singer who is very popular in Ireland, and his band, who would be performing at the local folk festival. Kids, babies, female friends holding babies. I leaned to my friend: ‘They can’t all be staying at mine, can they?’ I spent weeks trying to make our partially renovated Georgian house look acceptable, and then the builder boyfriend had to go to England and I was left in West Cork making up beds and trying to hide cracks in walls.

The sound of the little cart on the lane came first and then the sight of the pony clip-clopping towards our gate. An old woman, as old as the hills, was sitting atop the cart jiggling the reins as she jogged the pony expertly down the road. An old woman, as old as the hills, was sitting atop the cart jiggling the reins as she jogged the pony down the road We waved her down to say hello, because we are always so delighted to see people with horses that we often run out to talk to them. On this occasion, as the weather-beaten old woman in scruffy clothes pulled the pony to a stop, we could also see an old man sitting, or rather lying beside her, all wrapped up. He was stretched out oddly, with one arm stuck out at an angle, and appeared to be strapped in with baling twine.

Every time I have a protracted ding-dong with a big organisation, I put in a request under data protection law to see what they’ve been saying about me behind my back. Anyone can do this. If you get into a row with a charity after complaining they’ve put your direct debit up without telling you, for example, you could then do a subject access request (SAR), asking them to send you a copy of anything mentioning you in their files, and they would send you back loads of emails in which various people in their offices discussed how to handle your complaint. The law requires them to do this, but it allows them to redact certain words, usually the names of those most involved in having you over, and other information they can argue is sensitive.

My neighbour had a surgical procedure and keeps telling me about it. Every time she starts, I shout ‘No! Please stop!’, because I’m squeamish. At the risk of distressing anyone else who is squeamish, I do need to say that she had her eyeball injected, because of what followed. Three people in four days – so having your eyeball injected must be no more unusual than having your hair cut A day after visiting my neighbour and having to cover my ears as she explained her eye op, I bumped into a lady I know outside church and when I asked after her husband she said he was going into hospital because: ‘He’s having his eye injected.

The little toy shop stood at the highest point of a steep winding lane of shops all painted different colours, near the harbour. So quaint, so beguiling and magical was this place, it was like walking into your childhood memory box. On the shelves of games on the back wall I found KerPlunk, Connect 4, Buckaroo, Guess Who, and all the old favourites. I needed some board games because a friend was coming to stay with his four children and we would need to while away the long West Cork evenings which would probably be rainy and windy. We are usually happy doing nothing in front of an open fire but I assumed that kids would not be so sanguine.