Melissa Kite

‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while she moaned to me about it on the phone. ‘How fast do you want it to go?’ I asked, imagining it doing 60mph down the short run of stairs in their little house in Coventry, coming to an abrupt halt at the bottom, then catapulting her across the living-room floor because she never does the seatbelt up. ‘It’s too slow!’ she declared, and I could hear her slapping various bits of it and banging the switches on the arm. ‘When the man comes to service it I’m going to tell him to make it go faster. Come on! Come on!

‘You could mow all this lawn here and it would look a treat,’ said the arborist, returning from a stroll around the grounds, which were looking resplendent in the sunshine. ‘Yes, yes, mow the grass. Good idea,’ I said, for the builder boyfriend has told me I have to agree with the customers. No matter what they say, no matter how obvious their suggestions, just smile and say ‘Good idea.’ Old houses are like horses. Passing strangers feel ownership of them. Once they encounter them, they proclaim how they would care for them, because they decide from their soulful look that the owners must be neglecting them – when the truth is the owners slave day and night for them, getting nothing but a good kicking for their trouble.

Bolting down the back hallway, I realised I was running away from the guests. I shut the door marked private and collapsed on to the dirty old dog sofa in the boot room. ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve done,’ I texted the builder boyfriend who was in London. ‘Left the yard hose on,’ he texted back, for I often risk emptying the well when I’m on my own by forgetting to turn off the stable yard tap after topping up the horses’ water at night. ‘No. Worse. The French people arrived and I hadn’t heated the water. You’ve got to get it on a timer,’ I said, attempting to blame him. ‘I’ll do it when I’m back,’ said the BB. Then: ‘Have you turned the yard hose off?’ Had I?

The builder boyfriend sat nervously in front of my laptop as I logged him in to do his speed awareness course. I sat him at the kitchen table, I clicked the link the speed course people sent him and then, as we waited for them to admit him, I began my pep talk: ‘Do not say anything political. Do not joke. Joking is the worst thing you could possibly do.’ I had already decided this was going to end badly. How could the builder boyfriend button his lip long enough to get through a three-hour online speed awareness course – the result of a trip to the UK to do a roofing job – without being reported to the police for coming out with something you are not allowed to say any more?

‘Our boys went to Lebanon and trained Hezbollah!’ shouted the drunk Irish lad in the fish and chip shop as an Indian man behind the counter silently fried chips. ‘Chucky ar la!’ the lad shouted, or Tiocfaidh ar la, to correctly spell in Irish the slogan of the IRA, meaning ‘Our day will come.’ And he went on shouting this, over and over, as the Indian fellow stared down into the fryer, and the Friday night customers formed a queue in this small fast-food joint in a West Cork harbour town. The Irish lad was not getting the message that the Hindu chap frying chips was probably not a massive Hezbollah or Hamas supporter, and he carried on shouting about Gaza and inviting the man behind the counter to join in with him.

The builder boyfriend returned from a trip to London to inform me he was being done for speeding at 32mph, for crying out loud. He was flashed by a camera crawling uphill in a 30 zone going through the almost middle-of-nowhere in the Ashdown Forest, on his way to visit his sister in Sussex for the weekend. A few weeks after I completed a speed awareness course for doing an improbably incorrect 40mph on a dual carriageway during a trip to see my parents in Coventry, we were going round the same rigmarole with him. He showed me his letter from the Sussex Police on his return to Ireland. It was slightly less obnoxious than the one from West Midlands Police, but it amounted to the same thing: a £100 fine, sorry speed course.

By changing the address on my driving licence, I was somehow signed up to something that began charging my credit card £39 a month and was going to carry on charging for ever. It was Barclaycard that spotted it and warned me it was a ‘scam’ in a text alert. Had I really agreed to a recurring payment to a company called British Drive? I had no idea what British Drive was, and at first suspected it was an insurance policy, or the firm that organised my recent speeding course. Eventually, I realised it could be something to do with going on to the DVLA website – or so I thought – to change my driving licence address. I tried to cancel the payment on the Barclaycard app but it wouldn’t cancel.

The online speed awareness course cost £101, or a few pounds less if you didn’t want to book ‘flexible’ so you could change it if something went wrong, which it was bound to. Quite how companies like the AA, which deliver these courses, divvy up the spoils with the police I have no idea. I don’t want to know. I just want to be left alone once they’ve all got what they want out of me. Naturally, when I logged into this course at the appointed time I couldn’t get the camera working on my laptop. Obviously, I had to phone my IT guy and he had to get me to download a program which allowed him to access my laptop remotely. ‘Slide the slider!’ he kept saying. ‘What slider?’ ‘You’ve got your camera covered! They’ll be a slider!’ ‘There’s no slider!

‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’ leading off the central staircase. ‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. Behind that door is the rear part of the house, unrenovated. So if you open it, the secret is you fall into a gap in one of the smashed floorboards, trip over a box of books or ten, fall against a stack of mattresses and tumble down a rickety staircase that lands you in the boiler and machinery room, where you will find the unfathomable clutter that is the builder boyfriend’s tool collection, the vast water tanks, groaningly driven by electric pumps, and my overflowing baskets of laundry.

Basil Fawlty ended up beating his car with a tree branch after doing B&B for years, and I am very near that point after six months of dealing with customers. Among the many requests I’ve had since opening en suite rooms in my house in Ireland I can now add: ‘I would like a throw.’ An American lady and her husband checked into our largest double room with a king-sized bed, marble bathroom and spectacular view, and she came straight back out, down the stairs calling my name urgently – so urgently I thought she must have found a dead rat in the bed – and pronounced: ‘Ah. Now. Do you have a throw?’ The lady explained that she wanted to take a nap, but she didn’t want to go under the duvet. Basil Fawlty would have said: ‘Oh a throw! Yes, why not! A throw!

The mole specialist was wearing a pink Chanel-looking suit and pink diamanté shoes. By mole specialist, I don’t mean someone turned up dressed in Chanel to deal with moles on our land. I mean I went to see a top London dermatologist about a mole I was worried about, and when I walked into her office she looked so fabulous all I wanted to do was talk to her about her Jackie O miniskirt and jacket, given a twist with the sparkly stilettos. Before I could do that, however, she complimented me on my long striped coat. ‘Villa Gallo,’ I said, sitting down in front of her desk on the first floor of a smart building in Chelsea. ‘And can I say, your shoes are divine.

Over coffee in a seafood restaurant in the harbour, I talked with the most notorious accused man in Ireland and, I have to say, I liked him and thought he was most likely innocent. It was shortly before Ian Bailey died of a heart attack in January 2024, and I had just moved to West Cork. I bumped into him at a market day and asked if he would like to meet for lunch. I had long been fascinated by the unsolved murder of the French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, whose body was found by the gate of her remote West Cork cottage in 1996. After initially working on the case as a journalist, Bailey became the chief suspect and, following innumerable twists in a most bizarre case, he was eventually convicted in absentia in a court in Paris, although he managed to fight extradition.

Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’ Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the merest twinge – in his diaries, along with sentiments to the effect that he knew something would turn out to be serious one day and eventually, at a fairly respectable age to get to, it did. These people are my heroes. They know of what they speak. ‘It’s a two-tone mole!’ I screamed, as I stood in front of the mirror in the downstairs loo, top hitched up to examine a blemish in a most inaccessible part of my torso. How was I supposed to have noticed that there?

My American guest went down with a cough he could not shift and, after a week of protesting that he couldn’t be ill because he was fully vaccinated for everything, he asked me to take him to a doctor. This was an even more complicated request than his desire to call Ubers, and so we set off in my car to drive around the wilds of West Cork in search of medical assistance. I began by driving to the nearest town, and I led him into the A&E department of a hospital where I laid it on thick to the receptionist about him being an American tourist visiting the land of his ancestors, and I gave his Irish surname.

My American guest kept telling me he was going to call an Uber and I could not persuade him that no Uber was going to appear in the wilds of West Cork. I assured him that the only taxi service I knew of was the local funeral director. ‘What? Will I have to go in a hearse?’ said the chap from Philadelphia, laughing. I agreed it was quirky, but the funeral director really was the only taxi. ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’ is his unofficial slogan. The American laughed and laughed and texted his sons back in Philly to tell them the joke. It’s no joke, I thought, as I dialled the funeral home. The old boy answered after about 15 rings and asked me what I wanted in an accent so thick I could barely make out what he was saying.

After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were throwing the book at us because I’d been caught doing 40mph in a 30 in my parents’ car. The photo evidence showed their little silver Peugeot being driven by me on a dual carriageway in Coventry. A dual carriageway. In what world would anyone think they should be driving slower than 40 on a dual carriageway? I was bringing the car back from its MOT, having been asked to please sort this out by my father as one of a mountain of things he had let pile up since becoming progressively sicker over the past few months, and then having a stroke.

My father was discharged from hospital with a plastic bag containing 13 boxes of pills and a vague promise that a nurse would turn up at his house to help him. ‘He’ll have a package of care put in place,’ yawned a hospital functionary, who didn’t sound at all interested. But after he got home, the only package was the big bag of pills that sat on the kitchen table and a sheet with thousands of words in very small print detailing the complicated doses, which my father, who can’t see properly, was attempting to read with a magnifying glass when I arrived from Ireland. I had no more luck than him, even with my reading glasses on.

The hay dealer showed me his latest stock and told me the bright green hay would cost me a staggering €165 a bale. ‘I don’t want to smoke it, I want to feed it to my horses,’ I said, looking doubtfully at what was apparently best meadow hay. It was a very large bale, and it was very green, but even so. I would expect to pay €80 for a large bale, so twice that did not make any sense. I took a handful of it and smelt it and it had a pungent, grassy aroma. There was a strange twang to it. I asked if he could deliver me a couple of bales and he screwed his face up. He explained he had driven it all the way from England to West Cork. He would be happy to deliver me a €5,000 job lot, and he could offer me an arrangement whereby I paid it off in monthly instalments.

My mother was about to be taken to a care home called Willow Trees, and the first thing my instincts told me about that was that willow trees would not be the prevailing feature there. When I looked it up, my suspicions were confirmed. Not only could I not see willow trees, it also had a low rating for infection and safety. I phoned a private company to be quoted a mind-blowing fee for a live-in carer for a week or two, until I can get there, so she can be discharged from the hospital ward where they are holding her – there is no other word for it – while my father is recovering from a stroke. ‘One thing leads to another. If we let the NHS send her to that home, we don’t know what will go wrong next,’ I told my father on the phone, as he lay in his hospital bed.

The US marine left his long johns down the back of an armchair and the next guest complained that she had found ‘a pair of knickers’. I ran upstairs after she told me this, she and her male companion standing in the big Georgian doorway about to leave. I found grey thermals, of the kind you might wear under hiking trousers, completely hidden, dropped down the back of this bedroom armchair and camouflaged against the taupe coloured carpet. I cursed myself for not moving the chair, which I normally do, and bolted back down the main staircase to tell the guest it really wasn’t knickers, but their car was already making its way around the fountain. Off it went down the driveway as I stood there shouting: ‘It’s not knickers!’ Darn it, I thought.