Melissa Kite

‘I’m Native American,’ said one half of the honeymooning couple from Plattsburgh, holding out a small gift as they left. Very sweetly, she had come to present me with a token of her appreciation. It was two maple candies and a small sticker upon which was a sort of flag. This, she explained, was the emblem of her tribe in Quebec. I made all the right noises as the four of us stood in the farmyard where they had come to look for us. Beside the girl, not saying very much, was her new husband, a rosy-cheeked, wholesome-looking boy with a buzz cut. He nodded along as she explained her origins. The builder boyfriend stood beside me in the sunny farmyard, and I took a deep breath and hoped he could cope.

‘There’s a flat rat under the mat!’ I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead rat beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, of indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.

‘Can I go now?’ said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay onto the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favourite neighbour since we moved to West Cork. As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realised he was our sort of person anyway.

As the eco-tourism season got under way, the confused-looking French people began to arrive. They come to see ‘la nature’, and they insist they don’t mind about the rain or the terrible food, or the fact you can’t actually access any of this nature because it’s all owned by strapping great Cork farmers who won’t let you near it. After a few days, their faces suggest they’re getting a tad disorientated, but they don’t want to admit it. First there arrived a very nice couple from a town in northern France where the builder boyfriend and I had one of our most memorable holidays together. As I served them their breakfast coffee, they asked where they could go for a walk, for they had tried in vain for days.

‘Something I like to do with all my tables is ask what brings you here today?’ said the young waiter as he sat us down and began to talk. If I’d known he would still be talking nearly two hours later I think I would have got up and walked out. We were in a lovely riverside restaurant in Warwickshire for my mother’s birthday. But we were going to have to run the gauntlet of being served by a smiley young man who was under the impression that everything was about him. He was pale, long-haired, very tall and thin and bendy, as if a gust of wind would blow him over. He didn’t look like he had the strength to serve our lunch, never mind fight a war. That’s something I ask myself whenever I meet a man in his twenties. How would he fight a war?

As the first Americans of the season got out of their car I scrunched up my face and groaned. ‘They’re all like that, remember?’ said the builder boyfriend. ‘What if the bed gives way?’ I demanded. ‘How will they even fit in the bed?’ The BB shrugged. ‘Who cares?’ he said, with his usual sunny attitude. I don’t mean to suggest these people were overweight. I mean they were giants. I’m sure their depth was right for their height. There was just an awful lot of them, and we are not the Premier Inn, with super-king beds that sleep two medium-sized horses. She was in sportif wear. He was tousle-haired and bearded, dressed in a flowing shirt and baggy trousers.

The plumber was shouting hysterically at me down the phone because I had asked him to install a heated towel rail. ‘Towel rail? Towel rail! Armageddon is coming! Did you fill your oil tank up? It’s tripling in price by Christmas! I’ve got 40 jobs piled up! Forty jobs!’ ‘So are you saying I can’t have a heated towel rail?’ I said. I know the plumber only too well. Many a time he has sat at my kitchen table chain-smoking while rambling about the devil, and how the world is coming to an end. If that is his default setting, you can imagine how he reacts to things going very badly on a global scale. He lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events are apt to put him in a particularly nihilistic mood.

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realised that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his lorry and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the lorry fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

The Airbnb help centre chatbot kept telling me that she understood how frustrating it must be for me to have all these problems created by Airbnb. But she offered no solution, save for congratulating me effusively on being a wonderful host. After a while I asked this person, allegedly a woman: ‘Are you real or is this AI?’ For the relentlessly upbeat drivel she was churning out bore no resemblance to the furious questions I was typing in. I could have told her I was about to throw myself out of the window because of the rise in Airbnb’s fees and the redesign of their app that stops me from using it unless I buy a new £600 iPhone, and she would have replied: ‘Melissa, we know what a great job hosts like you do for guests!

The private hospital room in Chelsea was so relaxing I would have stayed for a week if it was affordable. It was more luxurious than the all-inclusive in Tenerife I went to last year, but sadly not in the same price bracket. One night in a hospital with designer soaps, a menu in Arabic and a gorgeous view of the London skyline nearly broke the bank, so I had to let them discharge me as planned the morning after my operation. There wasn’t really that much wrong with me, and certainly not enough to call it ‘a journey’, as all health crises are now termed.

‘I want to learn Iranian,’ said my father, resolutely, as he watched the bombing on the television. ‘Farsi,’ I said, thinking I would talk to him about that very happily on the basis it was better than helping him contact the Ukrainian government so he can fight the Russians. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Farsi,’ I repeated. ‘Parcel?’ he said. But it was pointless trying to explain, for he was up and looking out of the window and telling me to look in the parcel box. We were waiting for the special food I had ordered for the new cat someone irresponsibly rehomed to my parents and which already has a stress condition from living with two dementia sufferers.

After a week in Coventry dealing with two parents with dementia, it would have felt like a nice spa break to go to Guantanamo Bay. The smallest cell at Gitmo and a pair of sensory deprivation earmuffs would have been sheer bliss. I got back from not picking up my father’s car from the garage and my mother was standing in the doorway crying. In the time it had taken me to drive three times the distance to the MOT test centre in a circle of unfathomable six-lane 30mph Midlands bypasses, because that was the way my father wanted to go, the garage had shut and his car was locked up on the street outside. I was rocking backwards and forwards slightly in the car seat making a humming sound as my father stood arguing with the closed shutters.