Melissa Kite

The Germans stampeded into the house, overwhelming me with the element of surprise. ‘Incoming!’ I shouted through the main staircase window into the farmyard to alert the builder boyfriend, who was haying the horses. A car was unloading two couples – double the amount of guests I was expecting. They came at me all at once and piled up the stairs, and I ran behind protesting that there were too many of them. ‘It is no problem! They sleep with us!’ said the woman who had booked, as she and her very tall husband and their two friends crowded into Room 4. An en suite double, Room 4 is very comfortable and rated five stars, but I doubt you could fit two extra Germans in there. Two extra Chinese maybe. The BB came running and looked fit to burst.

Halfway through watching the hit Netflix series The Tinder Swindler, I realised I was cheering on the swindler Simon Leviev, who won me over with his ingenuity. I had the same reaction to Jason Arday. ‘Go on my son!’ I heard myself exclaiming as I waded through the outraged coverage of the former Cambridge professor’s extraordinary exploits. Whether or not he even knows it, Jason Arday played the rotten, elitist, box-ticking, minority and sick note obsessed education regime brilliantly When it got to the bit about him running nine marathons with a broken leg it occurred to me that anyone who did not appreciate this saga for its daring and scope was just plain anti-enterprise.

The French socialist must have burst her bladder getting a litre of percolator coffee down her to stop the Dutch couple getting any, but she managed it. She was more than a socialist, actually. I think she was one of those continental communists. ‘Why can’t we all just ’ave what we need an’ live in peace, uh?’ she asked me at one point, with the obvious answer, ‘Because you hate everyone and pilfer everything,’ but I couldn’t say that and I didn’t want an argument with her because she was pretty feisty. Pretending to be Irish for two weeks was wearing me out but I kept it up because I feared she would boil over if she found out I was Crème anglaise.

If you want to know what the ninth circle of Hell is like, join a dating site. I didn’t want to join a dating site, for I am happily ensconced, but I joined one in the interests of research because something very dark is going on in the world of dating apps, and it has something to do with two bugbears of mine: safeguarding and AI. If you could mate two monsters of modern life to produce a deranged creature capable of devouring human rights, then those two monsters would be safeguarding and AI. Recently, I began to notice a deluge of complaints on online forums from people protesting their innocence after being banned from dating apps for no apparent reason.

The couple who were on a climate crisis camping trip in Ballydehob messaged me in a desperate state. ‘We’re cold and wet! Please can we come?’ It was after 7 p.m. and she had asked for a two-night stay, specifying she would be bringing a dog. We do allow dogs, but we make clear that we can only take small ones because we have to maintain some sort of non-dog smell to the rooms. Added to which, people who take their dogs with them everywhere are the worst. They think they are interesting but they are, in fact, colossally boring. I have never met one dog-traveller who is anything other than a pain in the proverbial. We once took our little spaniel Cydney to France and once was enough.

‘We need to get into bed and watch a really good Poirot,’ I said, for I had given him such a hard time I doubted anything else would fix it. The builder boyfriend had cut down a tree I liked while he was working in the garden. This tree was no more than a fast-growing something or other and I’m not really a tree hugger. But I do get attached to certain sprouting things, for not always obvious reasons. We have a vast old twisted trunk in the round garden where the picnic tables are set up, for example, which I love so much, despite it looking half dead, that I have put my own personal Tree Protection Order on it. It is two trunks, in fact, departing from a round base and twisting off in different directions, so you can sit inside it.

‘I’m Native American,’ said one half of the honeymooning couple from Plattsburgh, holding out a small gift as they left. Very sweetly, she had come to present me with a token of her appreciation. It was two maple candies and a small sticker upon which was a sort of flag. This, she explained, was the emblem of her tribe in Quebec. I made all the right noises as the four of us stood in the farmyard where they had come to look for us. Beside the girl, not saying very much, was her new husband, a rosy-cheeked, wholesome-looking boy with a buzz cut. He nodded along as she explained her origins. The builder boyfriend stood beside me in the sunny farmyard, and I took a deep breath and hoped he could cope.

‘There’s a flat rat under the mat!’ I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead rat beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, of indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.

‘Can I go now?’ said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay onto the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favourite neighbour since we moved to West Cork. As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realised he was our sort of person anyway.

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.

‘Something I like to do with all my tables is ask what brings you here today?’ said the young waiter as he sat us down and began to talk. If I’d known he would still be talking nearly two hours later I think I would have got up and walked out. We were in a lovely riverside restaurant in Warwickshire for my mother’s birthday. But we were going to have to run the gauntlet of being served by a smiley young man who was under the impression that everything was about him. He was pale, long-haired, very tall and thin and bendy, as if a gust of wind would blow him over. He didn’t look like he had the strength to serve our lunch, never mind fight a war. That’s something I ask myself whenever I meet a man in his twenties. How would he fight a war?

As the first Americans of the season got out of their car I scrunched up my face and groaned. ‘They’re all like that, remember?’ said the builder boyfriend. ‘What if the bed gives way?’ I demanded. ‘How will they even fit in the bed?’ The BB shrugged. ‘Who cares?’ he said, with his usual sunny attitude. I don’t mean to suggest these people were overweight. I mean they were giants. I’m sure their depth was right for their height. There was just an awful lot of them, and we are not the Premier Inn, with super-king beds that sleep two medium-sized horses. She was in sportif wear. He was tousle-haired and bearded, dressed in a flowing shirt and baggy trousers.