Melissa Kite

‘Achoo!’ was the first thing the girl sitting next to me on the plane said as I took my seat beside her. She groaned and blew her nose, coughed, spluttered, and apologised. ‘It’s hay fever, honestly,’ she said. She was in the window seat, I was in the middle. The older lady beside me in the aisle seat grimaced. ‘Please, don’t worry,’ I said to the sneezing girl. ‘I’m so over it. I couldn’t care less if it’s hay fever or if it’s Covid.’ She smiled, fumbled, and offered me a Strepsil, that well-known cure for the effects of pollen. I liked her immediately – something about her fidgety energy, her tousled short hair – so I took a cough sweet even though I don’t like them.

The mouse has been eating his way through the medicine cabinet to the extent that I am really quite frightened of confronting him. I opened the cupboard above the sink to find an entire blister pack of paracetamol, several sachets of Solpadeine and some 400mg ibuprofen nibbled away. Also scoffed were two packs of antihistamine, and a packet of high-potency iron tablets. A plastic bottle of Vitamin D was somehow broken into. And my HRT was missing quite a few days. Holy smoke. What manner of mutant thing had he become? That night Mousey came as usual and helped himself to Benadryl Or perhaps it was a lady mouse who was going through a hard time and had been fobbed off with a Zoom appointment and cognitive behavioural therapy.

‘Have you got your passport? Your phone? Your wallet?’ The builder boyfriend patted his pockets and told me not to worry as we drove through the Gatwick drop-off lane where they charge you £5 to open your car door for three seconds and push someone out. When I arrived back home, he texted: ‘I left my euros in the pocket of my work jeans.’ No matter. He could draw out cash when he got there. It had been a last minute rush to get him on a flight to Cork to view this dream farm I had found, in the sun-drenched valley. It was really a modest white bungalow but it had 45 acres behind it, and post and rail fences. If I squinted, it looked a bit like Southfork. It was certainly the closest I was ever going to get to homesteading.

A bay mare was standing over a foal curled up sleeping at her feet. Yawning and struggling to keep her eyes open, she was snoozing herself in the sun-drenched paddock of a small white farmhouse. If I had stopped the car to admire the scene every time the scene was this perfect, then I would not have made a mile’s progress on my third house-hunting trip to Ireland. In the country lanes, drivers slowed and waved to me on every bend. A cyclist put his foot on the ground and grinned as though genuinely pleased to see me. Everyone here has time. That’s how it seems anyway. The shop windows say ‘Closed on Tuesdays’; the restaurants are ‘Open Friday and Saturday nights’ In a market square, I sat on a bench and sipped a takeaway coffee bought in a supermarket.

The lady standing on the doorstep did not need to tell me what she thought of my house, because the look on her face said it all. I was still fussing over the minor details of how the place looked while the builder boyfriend waited for me in the car, engine running, because we get out of the way for viewings. Plumping cushions, sweeping dog hair off sofas, I suddenly noticed that the viewing had arrived and was standing crossly waiting, her back to me. She turned and looked through the half open door: ‘Are you the agent?’ She was fuming, you could see that. I said I was the owner but if the agent was late and she was in a hurry I could show her round.

If we cram any more doctors into our spare rooms we can put a sign outside advertising NHS accommodation. We came by the first one when he answered my ad on a well-known website, booked for a few nights and ended up staying for years. He has a family home elsewhere, but needs somewhere to sleep when he is working late at the nearby hospital. I cannot find a small house with a few acres that I can afford anywhere in Britain He is an anaesthetist and no trouble at all. We see him only one or two nights a week, or sometimes less, depending on his shift pattern. He arrives at night, looking like he’s anaesthetised himself, microwaves a ready-meal, then creeps silently to bed. He leaves very early the next morning and we won’t see him again for days or weeks.

The estate agent flashed a sarcastic smile and said it wasn’t so much that the market was in a bad place, rather that my property got so much ‘negative feedback’. I stared back at her, fuming. I had popped into the offices of this agency to ask for my key back, which I forgot to do last year when I gave up on them being able to sell my house. This summer, I’ve given it to a friend at a smaller agency, hoping he does a better job than the city slickers at this well-known outfit where they all shout ‘Rah-de-blah-de-rah-de-blah!’ no matter what I say to them.

After a day’s house-hunting in West Cork, I texted the builder boyfriend to say that we were too late. The vegans had landed. This was my second trip to view farms in Ireland and I fell even more in love with the rugged, sometimes desolate landscape punctuated by friendly market towns with bunting strung across the streets. Unfortunately, so had everyone else. Two agents had confirmed that my nearest neighbours might be a pair of unwashed British hobbit people  The London lefties have made it to the Emerald Isle. Having laid waste to Devon, Cornwall and Wales with their llamas and yurts and mental ideas about everything rural from farming to hunting, the liberal elite have set sail for the west coast of Ireland, or rather they have got on a Ryanair flight.

We had planted a cluster of daffodils on the spaniel’s grave, but after a few days the weather battered them down. Sadly, the little yellow flowers began to curl up and wither in the force of the wind and hail that was pelting the small wooded copse where we laid Cydney to rest. I chose daffodils because her official name was Byrecoc Cinnamon Jonquil. I went to the farm shop and bought a large pot of the variety sometimes called narcissus, sometimes jonquil, a lovely old-fashioned name. For two days they bloomed on the spot, and then they faltered. But on the fourth day when I visited, I realised, walking towards the place, that a most astonishing thing had happened.

‘Mr Mouse’s days of fine dining are over,’ said the builder boyfriend as he put the finishing touches to his rodent anti-climbing device in the larder. This was a slice of cardboard, gaffer-taped sideways to the shelf to prevent the mouse who has been lodging with us from accessing it after climbing up the metal grille at the back of the fridge, which he has been using like a ladder. His ingenious contraption the BB called ‘the ratinator’. The mouse is so fat from eating our supplies that he is as big as a rat. He has been climbing up the fridge ventilator on to an electric cable trunking which runs along the wall to beneath the food shelves. She sniffed the air, slowly, savouring it.

‘What’s Bill W. got to do with it?’ said one of the committee members to the others as they discussed how best to ban people from meetings. This is a bit like saying ‘What’s L. Ron Hubbard got to do with it?’ at a Scientology convention, or ‘What’s Jesus got to do with it?’ at a church service. Oh no, wait, that’s exactly what they might end up saying at a Church of England gathering. They are moving towards gender neutrality, so at some point Our Father and the Son of God may have to be replaced by Our Heavenly Parent and a Daughter of God called Jess who never existed but will have to be invented to keep the snowflakes happy.

The pony grabbed the bag of carrots and ran across the field with it in her mouth, tail in the air, munching on the entire thing, including, of course, the plastic. She was so pleased with herself there was no way I was getting near her. She ran around in circles, bucking and cavorting and flinging the bag about in her mouth, stopping occasionally to chew, as I ran one way, then another to try to catch her. Mothers nowadays do notapprove of their children beingflung about like rag dolls ‘No no no no no! I can’t take any more!’ I begged her, because the spaniel is under the vet with suspected ‘about to fall of her perch’itis. I’m calling it that because she’s old. She’s eating and going for walks and quite chipper.

The lady who walks her dog past my horses every day was obviously eager to tell me something. I have exchanged only a few polite words with her in the past but as she made her way slowly towards my field gate, she lingered, cutting a lonely figure. ‘Let’s go and talk to that lady,’ I said to the builder boyfriend, who was busy holding Darcy the thoroughbred by her lead rope, scratching her neck as she likes him to do, while I put her rug on. I always like to reach out to locals who seem friendly because the vast majority of passers-by in this neck of the woods seem to be thoroughly obnoxious. This lady always has her dog on a lead and is respectful of the horses. So I made a beeline for her on the basis that she might be the only nice person we ever meet walking by our field.

After they banned horses from the village green and surrounding common land, I set about trying to find out why, for it seemed such a strange thing to do. Forbidding dark green signs saying ‘No Horse Riding By Order Of The Parish Council’ marked every track running through 30 acres of public land, while the bridleways in the nearby woods were almost permanently blocked with fallen trees. They knelt down and used tweezers to pick up the last fragments of horse manure One day, a girl did ride her horse across the green, leaving a dropping outside our house. We watched amazed as our neighbours, the vegans, came out and photographed it, then, after shovelling it away, they knelt down and used tweezers to pick up the last fragments.

‘We don’t take cash,’ said the boy behind the counter in Pret after I tried to hand him a £5 note and two pound coins. ‘My’ ham and cheese baguette and bottle of Coke sat in a brown paper bag on the counter and a woman standing beside me grimaced as she waited to be served in the otherwise empty shop. I say ‘my’ in inverted commas because I have since looked into the legal rights concerned and what I might have said to handle this in an effective way. As it was, I got it wrong. Not one of these people in this queue had any cash on them. It was astonishing ‘You have to take cash, it’s legal tender,’ I said. ‘I’m just following orders,’ he said. I can’t believe people actually say that, but they do.

‘Next!’ shouted the bouffant-haired lady dressed in a terrifyingly crisp green and white skirt suit. She was sitting behind the glass-screened reception desk of the private hospital where my mother had just had her knee replaced. This formidable dame I took to be a positive sign of the excellence of a healthcare establishment where one can simply buy and have competently fitted a titanium knee, without the need to beg the state to botch you one up for free, and throw in MRSA. This place was bright, white and sparklingly clean, and I would be happier to spend a weekend within its walls than at some budget hotels. It was nicer than a Travelodge or a Premier Inn but not quite as nice as a Ramada.

When we put the house on the market, my environmentally conscious neighbours disappeared on a holiday so long I asked another neighbour where they had gone. ‘On a cruise,’ she said, but I thought that unlikely, because these people have a book on climate change on a shelf near their front window, so how on earth could they have gone on a ship for a month, churning out more carbon than the entire village put together? Why would it be scary to encounter fairground people, or adventurers by the public toilets at night? They can’t have done, obviously. But in any case, they were gone a month and when they came back they seemed very happy, wherever they had been.

The man in the phone shop greeted me with what I presume is a look specifically designed and reserved for those asking to cancel their contracts. This look could best be described as ‘You are dead to me. Get out.’ I have been trying to cancel this contract for many years. I never use the phone, I have another one, with another company. But the bill for the old Sim card still comes out of my bank account and I can’t work out how to make it stop. I rang them as usual at the start of the year – this has been my New Year’s resolution for seven or eight years now – and a nice enough man on this phone line explained to me that he couldn’t possibly cancel my contract over the phone, I would need to go into the shop.

Driving through the road widening works at junction ten, I noticed a horse being ridden down a muddy passageway that was about to become the hard shoulder. It had not yet been tarmacked, but the diggers had cleared away the trees from the slice of heathland and it was being flattened, in readiness for surfacing works. A woman with a determined look on her face was coaxing her mount along this clearing, next to the machinery and the workers in their Day-Glo outfits, the Portaloos and logging machines, the lorries taking vast piles of felled trees away, and the hundreds of cones dividing this stretch of cleared woodland from the existing dual carriageway.

‘My pronouns are xe and xem’ said the name badge on the supermarket checkout person’s uniform. And I thought, good for xem, because that wasn’t ruining grammar. How to explain that the transgender community are doing my head in because they are stealing words? (I don’t mind them inventing new ones.) I want to explore my anguish about this in a way that enables me to go on a journey of self-discovery, identifying the way I feel. However, I also desperately want not to offend the trans community, because if I do that I’m done for, because they are the most powerful people on the planet. When I say they, in that context, that is the correct use of a plural pronoun.