Melissa Kite

Lying by the rooftop pool of the Hotel Sun in downtown Lefkosa, I felt like a cowboy about to stir from slumber beneath his hat to cause a scene. I had turned into someone in an Elmore Leonard story. My view was a mountain range in full panorama with one hill entirely painted in the red and white flag of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The poolside music was country and western. Several times a day it mingled with the call to prayer coming from the minarets along the main drag. In this frontier society where West meets East, I felt like anything was possible. I lay by the pool, watching the scene from under my baseball cap, listening to ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ and ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’, the first song I loved as a child.

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.

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.

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.

What a treat it was to escape to Cyprus for some sun and a last-minute mini-break. I left the builder boyfriend and the cleaner with strict instructions about a booking for a honeymooning couple, and they promised to put flowers in the room. ‘Go, get some sun,’ said the BB, for I was becoming peevish in the Irish rain. I chose Northern Cyprus because it was cheap and because all good holidays surely start with a border checkpoint. It was an hour’s drive from Larnaca, but I sailed into the Turkish republic no problem, in a taxi with disco lights on the ceiling. The hotel was just my thing, not too luxurious because luxury makes me nervous.

‘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.

To B&B or not to B&B? That is the question. Whether it’s nobler to offer breakfast to a guest is not in question, but whether it’s possible has been my dilemma since I started my guest house. After reading Ross Clark on The Spectator website saying that he longs for the traditional B&B, all I can say is I’ve really tried to be that landlady he describes, in pink fluffy slippers, frying bacon in a house with Artex walls. I’ve tried to take people who roll up late at night, I’ve tried to put the second B back into the enterprise, and I’ve tried to cope with customers who, like Ross, want the option of a cooked breakfast but not a fry-up – porridge, made just the way they want it, which is different for every single customer.

‘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?