‘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
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 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
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
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
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 woman in the queue behind us in the supermarket glared angrily as my mother tried and failed to tap her credit card. We had tapped it in the chemist successfully, but she must have been on her last tap, again, and now she was out of taps. I felt my chest tightening. Here we
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
We spent an hour in the Garda station trying to explain ourselves to a flame-haired police lady. She sat with her pen poised over a statement pad on the desk in the interview room. Her uniform was extremely smart and emblazoned with gold emblems. At least the police dress nicely here, I thought. The builder
As we reached the top of the hill and saw the view in front of us my heart thumped so hard I slammed my foot on the brake and declared that we had to turn back. A wind- and sea-battered piece of terrain jutting out into the Atlantic ocean told us very loudly to go
The smashed pick-up truck was delivered back to us after I burst into tears and began wailing at the recovery man. When all else fails, men usually cave in to what I like to call tear pressure. Their brains scream ‘Make it stop!’ and they’ll do pretty much anything. The tears gushed out of my
The garage owner came at me with an angry expression as I pulled on to his forecourt, which was the last thing I was expecting. His employee had just crashed head on into the builder boyfriend while driving a sales car and, in my naivety, I was expecting the garage owner to cover the cost
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
‘Where are you off to now?’ I asked the fellow from Hong Kong as he and his wife stood in the hallway ready to leave, their many suitcases beside them. At first it sounded like he said ‘Ukraine!’ very cheerfully, but he couldn’t have said that, obviously, so I asked again. ‘I mean, now you’re
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
Hanging a pair of gates at the rear of the house gave us so much satisfaction, it suddenly seemed strange that we had waited so long to do it. When we first moved here, I fell so in love with the place, and was so lost in a dream about rural Ireland, that I left
The thoroughbred looked cross, with flared nostrils and a pinched expression, so I should have known what was about to happen. It’s always bad news when the mare’s serene beauty drains out of her face and she affects a look like a female daytime television panel member. She turned round and bit me as I
‘Data-free vegans incoming by taxi,’ I texted the builder boyfriend, to alert him to the possibility of triple trouble. Quadruple really, for they were also American. The young eco-tourists from the West Coast didn’t want to switch on roaming on their phones, for they were interrogating me about the route by text while at the
The house fell silent as the last of the tourists took their oat milk and pretend cheese from the guest fridge. Winter came in the nick of time. I’ve bitten my lip for six months while the B&B guests have forced their pro-Palestine, anti-Trump views on me, while refusing to eat normal food or use
The solar panel fitter was eating his fried breakfast when the talkative vegans came into the kitchen. They surveyed his plate of bacon, eggs, sausage and black pudding with a look of disgust before helping themselves to cereal, which they doused in the soya milk they had gone to the supermarket to buy, because I
