Melissa Kite

Every time I have a protracted ding-dong with a big organisation, I put in a request under data protection law to see what they’ve been saying about me behind my back. Anyone can do this. If you get into a row with a charity after complaining they’ve put your direct debit up without telling you, for example, you could then do a subject access request (SAR), asking them to send you a copy of anything mentioning you in their files, and they would send you back loads of emails in which various people in their offices discussed how to handle your complaint. The law requires them to do this, but it allows them to redact certain words, usually the names of those most involved in having you over, and other information they can argue is sensitive.

My neighbour had a surgical procedure and keeps telling me about it. Every time she starts, I shout ‘No! Please stop!’, because I’m squeamish. At the risk of distressing anyone else who is squeamish, I do need to say that she had her eyeball injected, because of what followed. Three people in four days – so having your eyeball injected must be no more unusual than having your hair cut A day after visiting my neighbour and having to cover my ears as she explained her eye op, I bumped into a lady I know outside church and when I asked after her husband she said he was going into hospital because: ‘He’s having his eye injected.

The little toy shop stood at the highest point of a steep winding lane of shops all painted different colours, near the harbour. So quaint, so beguiling and magical was this place, it was like walking into your childhood memory box. On the shelves of games on the back wall I found KerPlunk, Connect 4, Buckaroo, Guess Who, and all the old favourites. I needed some board games because a friend was coming to stay with his four children and we would need to while away the long West Cork evenings which would probably be rainy and windy. We are usually happy doing nothing in front of an open fire but I assumed that kids would not be so sanguine.

‘Where’s the eye hospital?’ shouted pretty much everyone standing outside a building signposted eye hospital in Irish. ‘An tAonad Oftailmeolaiochta’ read the sign on the brand new building and then in much smaller letters underneath ‘Opthalmology’, which is one of those English words that twists the tongue and isn’t much easier. Good for the Irish, I say, because even though I don’t speak it, I respect the fact they are trying to preserve their own language and identity. In any case, let’s say I did mind, what has it to do with me? I’ve only just got here. There is a funny sort of person who goes to live abroad and instantly demands the place adapts to them.

‘Zip my head in,’ he said, after climbing into a white jumpsuit with a mesh helmet. It was a beekeeper’s outfit, but the effect was less apicultural and more like the scene in E.T. where the special agents in biohazard suits come for the alien. The builder boyfriend was struggling with the zip around his neck so I made sure it was shut. He then fussed with the arms and legs so much, worrying about gaps, that in the end I used gaffer tape to tape his wrists and ankles. ‘Now you look like a Teletubby,’ I said. ‘Foot the ladder, will you?’ he asked. The BB had come home with a beekeeper’s suit after doing a roofing job for a lady living up a nearby mountain who had been trying to live with a vast colony of wasps.

Relationships are about compromise and no wonder so many of us come a cropper in this department when we don’t embrace this central truth. There is a man out there (using the term loosely) who would dutifully follow my orders to go to a fancy boutique during his trip to London and buy me an Ortigia liquid soap in Zagara fragrance, but that man is not the builder boyfriend. All the time the BB has been away the spaniels have pined for him and been hypervigilant, barking at every sound A few years ago, I forced him into a shop called Evie Loves Toast to buy me this posh hand wash for my birthday and he later told me he tackled the girl behind the counter. ‘Who is Evie and why does she love toast?’ I’m sure the girl explained as best she could.

‘Horses – beautiful, noble, intelligent creatures,’ said the neighbour I was having tea with. ‘There speaks someone who has never had to deal with them,’ I said, for I had been run ragged by our four horses since the builder boyfriend had left me at the house in West Cork and had gone to London to do a job. ‘Oh, but they’re so wonderful. I just love to be near them,’ said the lady, who has a left-leaning world view and takes on a faraway look in her eyes whenever animals are mentioned. Horses are intelligent, emotionally. They have a sixth sense we have lost We were sitting on the patio close to where the horses were grazing.

My one finished bathroom featured a sink so small I could only wash one hand in it at a time, as water spilled over the edge. ‘For heaven’s sake!’ I exclaimed, while I stood in the newly installed en suite to the main bedroom, which had somehow got smaller since it was renovated while I was away on a trip. ‘The shower’s amazing,’ said the builder boyfriend nervously, turning the lever to let out an impressive jet of scalding hot water. The new system, with its swanky DeJong cylinder hooked up to two giant water tanks in an outhouse connected to a high-tech pump to drive water around the big old Georgian house, was working very well.

The girl lay slumped against a wall in front of me and someone ran to push the emergency button. I was nearly at the bottom of the Jubilee line escalator when I came across this scene. I found it shocking, but then I’m not used to drama these days. An eventful day in West Cork is popping to the small supermarket in the village to meet my friend June for a takeaway coffee while she sits in her car selling tickets for the pitch and putt lottery. Someone we know might walk past while she’s hanging out of her driver’s window passing tickets to customers, and they might climb into the back of the car with me to tell us some urgent gossip: ‘Did you hear Roisin’s son has bought that big house on the road to Drinagh? It’s got a gate that opens when he presses a button.

You need a personal public service number to get married in Ireland, but in order to get one, you need to be married. It’s one of the most intractable double binds on offer here and it’s very frustrating when you’re trying to beat the Grim Reaper by getting hitched. I got a PPS number when I bought the house in West Cork. My solicitor arranged it. A different but equally bedevilling Catch-22 applied to that. So I thought, all right, I will. I better get married, make a will and prepare for the end In order to buy a house in Ireland I needed a PPS number. But to get a PPS number I needed to have an address in Ireland.

The £80 million super-yacht with a helicopter on the upper deck sat in the harbour, and we sat outside the ice-cream parlour in an old banger that had broken down. Our dear next-door neighbour in Ireland had taken us to chi-chi Glengarriff in the Beara peninsula and had insisted on driving us, because she has her car crammed full of essential clobber, like her walking sticks and a shopping basket nicked from the local supermarket in which she stashes her supply of duty-free cigarettes.

As the disappointingly unmacho South African toddled off after giving us a lecture about hedgehogs, I declared the contest over. ‘You win,’ I told the builder boyfriend. We have been having a competition all week to see who can find the most incongruous leftie. The liberals flock to West Cork from all over the world to get away from whatever it is they can’t cope with, and then stick out like sore thumbs in the farming landscape, totally at odds with the earthiness of the Irish. The builder boyfriend had been working in the yard when this particular fellow walked by our gate dressed in full safari outfit, as though trekking up Kilimanjaro, with a golden retriever on an extender lead.

‘Please, I’ll do anything,’ I told the plumber. ‘I’ll give you all the money I have if you just come back here for one day and connect the new hot water system.’ The plumber said no bother, he would come this weekend. But he says that every week, and every weekend when he doesn’t come he says he’ll come the next week. And the next week he says he’ll come at the weekend, and so on. And this has been going on for months. Which is nothing, apparently. Frankly, the builder boyfriend could go to college and get a degree in plumbing faster than we could get a plumber It is well known, and was made quite clear to us before we bought this beautiful old rundown Georgian house, that you cannot get a plumber in Ireland.

A few days after having Sunday lunch at the hotel where Michael Collins ate his last meal, we found ourselves on the road to Beal na Bla. We had gone to get hay and the hayman was out to lunch, so we followed the heritage signs to the site of the ambush where Collins was shot dead. The events of 22 August 1922 immortalised this picturesque valley in West Cork near to where the builder boyfriend and I have bought an old country house. Beal na Bla, or Blath, translates as ‘entrance to the good land’. The memorial by the curve in the road where Collins was murdered is surrounded by lush pastureland.

‘We thought the house would make the most fantastic centre for climate action,’ I heard myself telling the cat rescue lady as she let the two moggies out of their carriers into the living room. I was trying to reassure the socially conscious liberal who had brought the two cats we were adopting that she was leaving them in what she would consider a good place. I said: ‘We want it to be somewhere schoolchildren can come to learn about biodiversity…’ What was I on about? Still, pretending I was turning my house into a climate crisis hub was a bit much.

A curious letter has been sent to my mother blaming the tumour in her neck on my birth. An NHS consultant has come to this conclusion after briefly looking into this very rare neoplasm on her left bulbar nerve, called a hypoglossal schwannoma. It was discovered during a routine head scan monitoring her dementia, which started suddenly last year. Of course, at 82, these things happen. And although this tumour has only a one in 500,000 chance of developing, I’m prepared to say it’s all to be expected in old age, because what do I know? The medical profession knows best, one would presume. In any case, this tumour was so rare that it had to be assessed by the Centre for Rare Diseases because it so baffled all the doctors at the local hospital.

‘So what you’re telling me,’ said the priest to the builder boyfriend, ‘is that you were brought up by Irish tinkers, moving from place to place, and have no idea whether or where you were baptised or confirmed?’ ‘And you,’ he said, turning his gaze to me, ‘think your confirmation was done by the Pope at Coventry airport on his official visit to Britain in 1982, but it was a hot day and you fainted so you’re not sure if you got to the stage or were carried away?’ With their attempt to spread plant-based living in a cattle-rearing society, this lot are the new colonialists The BB and I shifted uncomfortably in our seats in the priest’s office. ‘Would you like us to just leave now?

A letter from Archie Norman, chairman of M&S, popped into my inbox after I complained that I had run over my foot with a changing room door. It wasn’t a personal letter, rather a generic response, and this was a relief because I would not have liked the actual Archie Norman to have actually seen the complaint email I sent with a close-up picture of my bruised black, grazed and manky-looking foot. When you complain to a chain store about their weirdly heavy and not-quite-coming-all-the-way-to-the-floor changing room doors, the last thing you want, really, is a reply from someone you once had lunch with when you were suited and booted as a political correspondent. Dear me, the former MP would have thought, I never would have guessed this is what her feet look like.