Melissa Kite

‘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.

Pushing through a crowded hospital corridor behind my father, I heard a voice calling me. Then a nurse grabbed me and threw her arms around me. She had heard my father’s name and recognised me, her old school friend from St Joseph’s. As we walked and talked, she told me, ‘We all read your articles’ and I thought: ‘Oh dear I’m about to be exposed as an anti-vaxxer in the middle of A&E while my father’s having a heart attack.’ But she was smiling, pleased to see me. In fact, she was beaming as she said, ‘I remember Alma!’ referring to my maternal grandmother. People would come in for a shampoo and set and book in again for the cabaret I haven’t heard someone talk about my nan for many years but she was a well-known character in my small home town.

‘How does anyone young and stupid manage to get married?’ I kept shouting at the builder boyfriend as I pummelled the keys of my laptop to try to force the website of the registrar to give me a date. It seems I picked the worst possible time to try to serve notice because, as anyone who has contacted a registrar lately will know, they are experiencing unprecedented demand for their services.

The artists and hippies are re-wilding their land, which is to say doing nothing at all to it and watching it fill up with brambles. The builder boyfriend and I are un-wilding our land, which is to say pulling out every bramble we can find and cutting back the overhanging tree branches. ‘Seven hundred trees,’ she said, sipping her fresh mint tea, her artisanal walking crook propped against the wall We have nothing in common with the hippy English blow-ins who come to West Cork, of course. However, I have made friends with a few of the local lefties, including a very nice lady who lives down the lane whom I cannot help but like since she brought me honey from her bees.

The novelty of living in a place where a policeman called Ambrose lives in a house whose door you can knock on if you need him will never wear off on me. I’ve asked around and no one here can remember any crime, aside from years ago they seem to recall there was a murder. But except for the odd murder, policing in West Cork usually consists of an old person having a broken oil burner and Ambrose taking them a portable heater. The doctor reminded me of Dr Meade from Gone With the Wind when he’s about to start amputating limbs It’s rather like an episode of Heartbeat, and feels as though one has gone back in time by at least 60 years. Every time I drive past Ambrose’s house with its Garda sign above the front door, I feel a surge of happiness.

At the Centre for Rare Diseases, the car park was full and lots of people were milling about. I pulled into a private space I wasn’t meant to be in so that I could let my mother out of the car by the front door. I then sat in the car waiting, watching the rare people come and go. On further inspection of the website, it turns out that a rare disease is not necessarily something that happens rarely. A rare disease is a condition affecting less than one in 2,000 people. However, ‘with more than 7,000 individual rare diseases, their collective prevalence is about one in 17 of the general population’. So not rare at all, in terms of how likely it is that you are going to get one. They really ought to put rare in inverted commas.

‘Why are those pipes sticking out of the wall like that?’ said the bathroom fitter, surveying the work the plumber had done. He stood musing over the way the tubing poked through a stud wall at an upwards angle so you couldn’t attach it to a sink unless you bent it round and then he said: ‘Hmm, they do sometimes do that here. I’m sure it will be fine.’ The bathroom fitter is English, the plumber Irish. Who’s to say which one of them is right when it comes to the exact angle that new pipes ought to come through a wall?

Ireland’s best-kept secret is a stretch of toll road through its capital city that was about to ensnare me again. The M50 Dublin toll is located between Junction 6, Blanchardstown, and Junction 7, Lucan. And this is aptly named because the bit where they apparently demand payment is so invisible it is worthy of the name Lucan in every sense. The last time I was caught in this ingenious money trap, I vowed I would never fall for it again The last time I drove to the UK and back on the ferry, Holyhead-Dublin, I was caught in this ingenious money trap and vowed I would never fall for it again. On that occasion, I drove at night off the ferry and into the tunnel leaving the harbour, where I dutifully tapped my card on a toll barrier.

The priest said it would be a short service because he wanted to make an important announcement. After rushing through the Mass so quickly he missed out most of the good bits, he solemnly declared the following: he urgently needed volunteers to say prayers over the bodies. The builder boyfriend agrees with me, but it is possible that the BB and I have gone mad together The number of funerals in this small corner of West Cork has now got to the point where one priest cannot handle the arrival of the coffins at the funeral home opposite the church, where, in Irish tradition, the business of praying begins. He said they also needed volunteers to do the same in the next village. He sounded like he was at his wits’ end.

The oil man topped our tank and said his next drop was to the Ukrainian refugees in the next village who were getting their tank topped for free. I could hear him and the builder boyfriend chatting about this for some time and then the BB came back into the kitchen and put the pink of the invoice into my hand. I looked down to see that I was being charged just over €1,000 for a tank of oil. I don’t want to feel grateful to the EU. It might make me hate it less The electricity bill for the winter pinged into my email barely a few hours later – nearly €700. ‘We’re migrants,’ I told the BB. ‘I wonder if I should ring to place the order from an area of the house where there’s bad phone reception.

The plumber and the builder conversed at top speed, making a combined sound that was so strange it seemed likely only bats or aliens from outer space could make sense of it. The chap who had come to price our new bathrooms was gabbling in a thick west Cork accent, giving absolutely nothing away to me, while the builder boyfriend was machine-gunning him back in extreme cockney. However, while it sounded to the untrained ear like the two men were speaking different languages, it quickly became apparent that they were, in fact, completely in tune with each other and understood each other perfectly.

‘Thanks for calling Tesco bank,’ said the voice, before rather lavishly promising to get me to a member of the team who was going to help me. This wasn’t quite how it turned out, although I would say, up until the moment I asked to change my address I was a very satisfied customer. If any of these questions did not suit me, I would be allowed to object, he said, as though reading me my rights This credit card has a very reasonable interest rate, and a nice big limit. However, it has decided that I do not have the security clearance to change my address because I have never logged into its website. I haven’t felt the urge to. I pay by direct debit and receive a letter each month which is perfectly adequate.

‘What’s wrong with your lot?’ asked the blacksmith as he was shoeing our horses. And we had to admit that we really didn’t know.  Don’t be telling an Irish blacksmith that he might not be good enough for you and your rescue nags We came to Ireland to get away from liberal lunacy but the other English people who come here seem to be intent on bringing it with them. The blacksmith shook his head. He said he had just been to an English lady further down the peninsula who wanted him to trim a few old donkeys and llamas. When he arrived, he got out of the car and she wafted up to him in a kaftan. The blacksmith looked baffled as he explained it.

The plumbers come and go, but mainly go, and I am now so desperate for a bath that I will do anything for a man carrying a pipe wrench. If only I had more Botox in my face and my highlights done, I found myself thinking, as we sat at the kitchen table one night rowing about the seemingly impossible problem of trying to get tradesmen who are also farmers on EU subsidies. Most plumbers walk into our crumbling country house, look horrified and tell us we’re mad The bathrooms in this old Georgian pile are so cranky they might as well not be there. In fact, it would be better if they weren’t. The heating and plumbing is a death trap.

When the clouds come down and the mountains disappear I feel myself disappearing too. As long as I can see the beautiful scenery I never regret coming here, but on days when a white-out envelops us it’s no consolation that the horizon is still out there somewhere. I feel trapped and lonely and lost and disorientated. The frightening things of the world are overwhelming. ‘I need to get out. I can’t sit here all day,’ I told the builder boyfriend who came through the French windows beaming with the satisfaction derived from cutting out old stock fencing to make way for the all-weather gallop he’s promised me.