Ireland

The Airbnb help centre chatbot kept telling me that she understood how frustrating it must be for me to have all these problems created by Airbnb. But she offered no solution, save for congratulating me effusively on being a wonderful host. After a while I asked this person, allegedly a woman: ‘Are you real or is this AI?’ For the relentlessly upbeat drivel she was churning out bore no resemblance to the furious questions I was typing in. I could have told her I was about to throw myself out of the window because of the rise in Airbnb’s fees and the redesign of their app that stops me from using it unless I buy a new £600 iPhone, and she would have replied: ‘Melissa, we know what a great job hosts like you do for guests!

"Do you know who I am?" said the voice belonging to the lady who used to be my mother, crossly, at the end of the phone line. The truthful answer is no. Since the dementia took hold, a hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body. A hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body No matter what I do, no matter how many times I ring or visit her, this person who used to be my mother is always cross and disappointed. "Oh, you’re alive are you!" the strange voice barks, before asking me what I’m up to, with a sarcastic edge. Whatever I tell her I’m doing, even if I say I’m lying down with a headache, she snaps back: "That’s nice for you. You enjoy!

Assuming it was full of junk, I tried to pull the trunk out of the way but I couldn’t move it, so I opened up the lid and gasped. Whenever the builder boyfriend is away I do battle with clutter. I’d gone through acres of horse tack in the boiler room and was now up the back stairs in the rabbit warren of rough-and-ready back bedrooms which haven’t been used since the last family, who also ran this place as a guest house, made their children sleep there to free up the nicer rooms.

The man in the phone repair shop smiled all too confidently and told me that there was nothing I could present him with that he couldn’t fix. ‘That’s good,’ I said, holding out my smashed phone. But what I wanted to say was: ‘I am a hapless person who jinxes things. You may think this is just another straightforward job, but I want to give you fair warning before you take me on that nothing to do with dealing with me will be straightforward, and you will probably end up throwing me out of your shop. I am neurotic, added to which I have an otherworldly curse on me when it comes to technology, which makes everything malfunction.’ I did not say this, because I badly wanted my smashed phone screen replacing.

The estate agent said that they would send someone round tomorrow and I had to calm them down. Come in two weeks, I told them, because the builder boyfriend is still painting the hallway with the yellow paint I don’t much like any more because it’s taken so long. The new laws leave us paranoid about having anyone step foot in our house for longer than three weeks They love selling these old country piles in Ireland because they change hands so often it’s a licence to print money – not for the owners, but for the agents who keep selling them year after year, after the owners have not been able to afford to keep them going. Usually, it’s the lack of plumbers and tradesmen, but now there is another problem.

The dog café had a pretty pink sign describing its many services and I stood outside it mesmerised as I realised what it was. This was not a café where dogs were allowed. This was a café for dogs. I peeked inside and there were dog baskets for the customers to lounge in as they drank their puppuccinos. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat My friend and I were on our way to dinner on the Fulham Road and we ended up standing by this café as I stared with my mouth open and asked her repeatedly how this could be. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me now when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat.

The panic of another season bore down on me as the builder boyfriend painted the breakfast room with the green paint I’d chosen. But he couldn’t paint fast enough for my liking and we started to have the most terrible rows. Despite us being fully booked last summer, I had come to the view that the whole thing wasn’t viable and we were bound to go under. I started looking up estate agents who market big old piles in Ireland to stupid people in America. This house is like a monster devouring my money faster than I can feed it. I fed the beast by filling the oil tank to the brim at Christmas and it was a quarter gone by the new year.

After two weeks of us heating the house to the temperature my nearly 90-year-old father wanted it, the door to the guest bedroom would no longer shut. The central heating had swollen the wood so much that it had to be planed down. The builder boyfriend and I had been lying in bed each night with the radiators in our bedroom off and the windows wide open. I’d venture out into the hallway at 3 a.m. to investigate why we were still too hot and a wall of heat would hit me. The thermostat I had left on tick-over was rammed to the far right once more and the boiler was at warp speed.

Sitting beneath the looming darkness of the unfinished ceiling of Westminster Cathedral, I found myself praying. I didn’t even know why, but I was walking past during a trip to London and I decided to go in, and I sat down, and then a priest came and began to say mass so I stayed, not knowing what was about to happen back in Ireland to the builder boyfriend, and not having any real feeling that you could call premonition – unless you count an overwhelming urge to be sitting in a cathedral praying, when I have passed there many times on similar trips and never once gone in. It was a lovely experience, except it seemed to me that it was shameful that we Catholics were allowing Jesus to hang on the cross in the dark.

As I was showing a couple from Lincolnshire to their room, I smelt a rat. I don’t mean metaphorically, about them. I mean that halfway down the hallway, as I walked two paying guests from the front door towards the staircase, the most overwhelming stench of rotting carcass wafted upwards from the floor, right next to the fancy dresser displaying the tourist leaflets. I glanced at them nervously to see whether they had noticed. They were telling me about their house-hunting. They wanted to move to West Cork to go off grid and get in touch with nature. That’s handy, I thought, because nature is currently rotting under the floorboards. Trust the darn critter to conk out beneath the main entrance hall just in time for a B&B arrival.