Melissa Kite

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 back of the property ungated, even though the rear of the house almost adjoins a small public road. Not a road, a boreen. A lovely little lane with grass down the middle. What possible hostility could occur on that? I was enjoying such naive notions about how relaxed our existence was going to be that I completely overlooked the fact that people are the same wherever you go. I should have known never to disregard the lyrics of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

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 led her in from the field, and she only ever does that when she’s trying to tell me something. In the barn, she nibbled a strand of hay from her net, and spat it back out. Then she turned herself round in circles several times, before buckling her knees and collapsing herself like a folding sun chair. With a big exhalation she hit the shavings, stretched out on one side with her head on the ground, and stuck her four legs out straight, absolutely senseless from overeating.

‘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 airport. I knew they were lefty environmental types because when the girl booked she told me she was travelling to Europe to learn about ‘natural building’. After the course, she and her boyfriend would be heading to Ireland for what she called ‘some misty time’. I don’t know whether that was a euphemism for sex. She would be too young to remember the jazz standard by Erroll Garner, or the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me.

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 dishwasher because, in leftie parlance, dishwashers cause neurological damage. ‘What does the shower cause?’ I wanted to ask some of them, who didn’t even use one towel or open one wrapped mini-soap in a week-long stay. Is soap carcinogenic now? Are you staging some sort of Gaza protest by not washing? The bookings dried up just before I lost it completely with the next long-haired hipster asking for coconut milk or declaring themselves gluten-free.

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 refuse to stock milk alternatives. What people eat is now a political issue hotter than the Middle East. It would be easier and safer for me to ask a B&B guest’s views on a two-state solution than say: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ When I ask a guest what they want for breakfast, the vast majority tense up, flush red and begin listing what they will and will not eat, with their myriad complicated reasons.

The singer sped past me out of the gate, sending me flying as I tried to say goodbye. We’ve been through some ordeals this summer, but we’ve never had a B&B guest so unhappy that they’ve tried to run me over. We had been hosting performers for a music festival and by the time this singer arrived, we had welcomed quite a few celebrities with no problems. The first to stay with us was a TV star who had driven down from Dublin and insisted we come with him to his gig that night to have pizza in the bar with him before he went on stage. No good ever comes from upgrading people. It makes difficult customers worse, somehow The next to arrive in the boondocks of West Cork was a musician used to working with the likes of Van Morrison.

The Americans wanted an argument and they weren’t going to take no, or indeed yes, for an answer. They arrived late at night and parked their car width-ways across the driveway, blocking it, while ignoring the parking area a few feet further on where there is space for about ten cars around a central fountain. I went out and asked them politely to move and they said they would, when they were ready. But first they wanted to stand on the driveway and complain about the cost of the hire car, the narrowness of the Irish roads, and the fact that their flight had taken nearly two days with three changes because they didn’t want to pay extra for a direct one.

The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show. I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the travelling public all summer, so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism. My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but never both. Only the French can be relied upon to eat everything, followed by the Irish and the Germans. Everyone else can go every which way.

‘Please do NOT wash up!’ reads the makeshift sign I have fixed above the kitchen sink. It instructs our B&B guests to leave their dirty dishes on the side, which sounds ridiculous. But we cannot convince anyone to put their plates and cutlery in the dishwasher any more, because they all seem to have bought into the latest conspiracy theory. The Canadian was making his way through a plateful of eggs like Cool Hand Luke. He was very young and good-looking, so watching him devour eggs at my kitchen table elicited mixed feelings in me. I couldn’t be cross, given how lovely he looked as he performed his bowel-defying feat. I had set the large platter of scrambled eggs for two down in the middle of the breakfast table as he drank coffee, waiting for his wife to appear.

‘Do you want the good news or the bad news about the Germans?’ I asked, and then I offered a few more options. The builder boyfriend got out of his truck as he returned from fixing a gate. He looked askance and sighed. Whatever our latest B&B guests had done, he said, it was obviously going to be bad. But I explained it was not that simple and the options were as follows: ‘If I give you the good news first, it will end on the bad news, which would be depressing, but if I give you the bad news first, it will end on an uplifting note.’ The BB looked uncertain. He made a little growling sound, for we’d had a run of difficult customers. ‘Have they broken the loo seat?

‘Please do NOT wash up!’ reads the makeshift sign I have fixed above the kitchen sink. It instructs our B&B guests to leave their dirty dishes on the side, which sounds ridiculous. But we cannot convince anyone to put their plates and cutlery in the dishwasher any more, because they all seem to have bought into the latest conspiracy theory. You may think anti-vaxers like me are annoying enough. But please give me credit for never being so barmy as to become an anti-dishwasherer. The anti-dishwasherers are way worse than the anti-vaxers for a whole host of reasons. So far they seem to be flying under the radar of the authorities, and no one in a position of power has taken them on to expose their nonsensical rhetoric.

The American girl was listing her reasons for moving to Ireland in protest at Donald Trump. ‘I cannot stay in a country where Roe vs Wade has been overturned. Did you know abortion is restricted in a lot of states? Oh no, I cannot wait to live in Ireland.’ We are becoming used to Americans staying at our B&B while they are house-hunting in Ireland during a fit of pique. We let it all go over our heads. But the question remains. Why are these migrating anti-Trumpers so daft? They are flouncing out of America to come to Ireland in a reverse ferret of how the journey across the Atlantic has been done for centuries. When they explain their reasoning, they couldn’t bark up a wronger tree if they tried.

‘You need a Wwoofer,’ said the guest as he luxuriated in the big armchair by the roaring fire in our sitting room. We looked at him blankly for a moment before I replied: ‘We have a woofer. Two woofers.’ And I nodded to the spaniels lying at our feet. ‘No, I’m talking about the Wwoof scheme,’ he said, a hint of his Welsh accent showing through. ‘World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A Wwoofer is someone who comes to work for you for nothing in return for learning about organic principles.’ The big old house on the hill seduces them with her Georgian charm.

Trapped in the middle seat next to a Dublin businessman in the window seat, I was subjected to a monologue on the ‘far right’. ‘It’s not Islamic extremism we need to be worried about,’ he said. I wanted very badly to say it absolutely is Islamic extremism we need to be worried about, but I kept my mouth shut. If it had kicked off between us, the pilot might have decided to turn around and do an emergency landing. Snakes on a Plane was a silly movie, completely unrealistic. I have an idea for a much more convincing sequel about being trapped on an aircraft with a terrifying menace, and it’s called Lefties on a Plane. This has happened to me twice, both times on budget airlines where the narrowness of the seat made it all the more horrifying.

The guest who thought our farm was in the town centre was very cross indeed. She got out of her car by the old fountain and stood hands on hips surveying the meadows sloping from the big old house towards the rugged mountains beyond. She was wearing knee-length khaki safari shorts, so you’d have thought she’d be pleased to pitch up in the middle of nowhere. But she looked askance at the rolling hills and affected to be shocked by the reality of what was clearly pictured and described on the booking site. She asked how she and her husband were supposed to walk to their drinks party in town that evening. Could they walk there? Not really, I said. Not unless the party was tomorrow evening and they had good hiking boots. ‘Taxi?’ she asked. So we had to explain.

A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip. The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised the big old key was turning and returning in the lock and the handle was rattling but the door was not opening. I ran back into our bedroom and shook the builder boyfriend awake. ‘The people in room 4 are stuck in their room!’ He stirred and when I wouldn’t stop shaking him he got out of bed and put on his dressing gown. That old door with its ancient lock and big old-fashioned key… we should never have left it. We should have taken it off and fitted a modern door with a modern lock.

‘Right, we’re going to book into Pauline’s B&B and give her a four-star rating and that will drop her down from a perfect five,’ I said, in a state of utter lunacy. We were sitting in front of the fire at the end of a rainy West Cork day during which another difficult customer had rated us four stars, which should not be terminal but is, because of the way Airbnb plunges your overall rating the second one guest doesn’t rate you five stars. I was so upset at our latest downgrading that I was comparing myself with other B&B listings in the area with a perfect five, and had become so deranged that I was proposing we level down the competition by spending €124 for a night at Pauline’s, rating her four stars to drop her down too.