Melissa Kite

‘Life is changed, not ended,’ said the slogan on the lectern as the priest told his flock what to think about a difficult subject, with a reassuring smile. ‘It’s quite a big change,’ I whispered to the builder boyfriend who was staring down at his feet in an attempt to stop the allergic response that was welling up. The service was commemorating those who have died this past year in our corner of West Cork, but the overoptimistic way it was being done was making us feel ever so slightly hysterical. I leaned in to the BB: ‘Have you noticed how Mary has got a halo made of the 12 EU stars?’ I stared at the slogan on the lectern, an excerpt from the Roman Missal, embroidered on an ornamental cloth.

A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon. Lying by the hotel pool facing the seafront, I was watching the surfers, the fishing boats, the palm trees waving on the promenade, and something else. ‘John, I just need to be honest with you,’ said a glamorous, buxom, pink-lipsticked blonde lady in her sixties wearing a leopard-print sarong, sitting on a sunbed sideways facing the back of a slim, frightened-looking man, also in his sixties. She spoke in a soft Scottish accent, coquettishly stirring a cocktail in a poolside cardboard cup.

The empty train seat looked inviting, and all three of us stared at it, then looked away, not daring to either take it, or offer it to the other. This train from Clapham Junction to Surrey was absolutely packed. But when someone got up and there was a seat right next to me, I realised that under the prevailing conventions relating to equality, I could neither take it nor offer it. I was squeezed between two ladies, one quite elderly who looked exhausted and desperate for a seat. She was standing slightly behind me, so, technically speaking, I was in line for the seat. But as she clearly had a good 20 years on me and looked tired, she should have the seat, the way I was brought up.

‘This is a New York strut,’ said the builder boyfriend as he wedged in place a steel bar, bracing shut our bedroom door to prevent us being murdered in our beds. We had been settling in for the night. The BB had been about to close the farmyard gates when a car swept inside them in the pitch dark and a man wound down his window and started chatting. My heart racing, I realised she might have read what I wrote about her – and she had come back for revenge After a while, the BB said this was all very nice but who was he and what did he want? The man said he was booked in here to stay the night. The BB said that could not be right as we were shut for a week while he did some decorating. ‘But come in anyway and we’ll try and sort this out.

‘Printers are evil,’ said the office supplies salesman after I texted him to complain that my new printer was not working. A day earlier he had installed it perfectly, and it worked perfectly – all the while he was standing there. Then he left, and the devilish thing looked at me and thought: ‘I’ll have some fun with her.’ The problem could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work I don’t really understand why we can put men and women in space, but we can’t make printers work unless a tech expert is standing by. Elon Musk says he is going to Mars, and I believe him. I have his Starlink wifi and it’s brilliant. What I don’t understand is why Elon, who can do everything, can’t help make printers work.

The anger management counsellor stormed through the door and shouted at me to turn the heating up. Hello to you too, I thought, but I was polite because I realise we are going to get difficult customers doing B&B in West Cork, where tourists come from all over the world. At first, however, I didn’t know that this woman storming round my house was a psychotherapist. I just thought she was spectacularly rude. She was wearing a woolly hat and big coat, even though it was a typically mild West Cork autumn day, about 17°C. She got right in my face as she declared the house too cold at 11 a.m., having demanded at the last minute to check in four hours early. ‘What’s your heating system?’ she barked, eyeing the brand new radiators in the hallway.

‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared. The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in the supermarket that crushes them down and spits out a voucher – by which I mean about 20 small plastic water bottles, for example, makes you two or three euros, which is enough for a coffee, a sandwich or some money off your shopping bill.

‘I’m making a hedgehog rescue ladder,’ said the builder boyfriend, who was on his knees in the farmyard, drilling a series of mini rungs into place on two mini rails. The builder boyfriend keeps going to check but the hedgehog seems very happy, snoozing away in its comfy box I should have known. Why did I even ask? Of course he was making a hedgehog rescue ladder. The BB doesn’t like to admit it, but beneath the gruff exterior he has such a soft spot for all living creatures that he often bends down to pick up stranded worms from pavements and roads. It is a charming contradiction in his otherwise macho personality, even though worm rescue can be a pain when you are trying to go for a walk. I can’t explain it quite, because he is very pragmatic about animals otherwise.

My friend replied to my text with seven sets of animal paw prints, interspersed with pink hearts and rounded off with a cat face. This was in reply to me telling her it had been nice to see her when she stayed with us in West Cork. I squinted at these emojis, trying to make out whether I was looking at ‘What a lovely country house you have’ or ‘What a dump! Cats and dogs everywhere, which is obviously your thing, but I won’t be coming again’. Earlier that day, another friend replied to my message asking how she was with a burst of gold stars, some prayer hands and a smiley face. Was she all right, or had she dropped dead and started texting me from heaven, using the celestial wifi? This is the future.

My passport and driving licence sat on the counter but the girl stared back at me, repeating her demand. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said. I told her I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was on about. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said again, doing her best ‘computer says no’ stare. The Sixt rental office was in the atrium of the Hilton Hotel Gatwick, which for some reason had been heated to something like sauna temperature.

The TV talent show star was due to arrive at 5 p.m., and would be checking into our house long before we were ready to open it as a B&B. I said yes to the lady in the village who organises events, and she told me to expect this singer who is very popular in Ireland, and his band, who would be performing at the local folk festival. Kids, babies, female friends holding babies. I leaned to my friend: ‘They can’t all be staying at mine, can they?’ I spent weeks trying to make our partially renovated Georgian house look acceptable, and then the builder boyfriend had to go to England and I was left in West Cork making up beds and trying to hide cracks in walls.

The sound of the little cart on the lane came first and then the sight of the pony clip-clopping towards our gate. An old woman, as old as the hills, was sitting atop the cart jiggling the reins as she jogged the pony expertly down the road. An old woman, as old as the hills, was sitting atop the cart jiggling the reins as she jogged the pony down the road We waved her down to say hello, because we are always so delighted to see people with horses that we often run out to talk to them. On this occasion, as the weather-beaten old woman in scruffy clothes pulled the pony to a stop, we could also see an old man sitting, or rather lying beside her, all wrapped up. He was stretched out oddly, with one arm stuck out at an angle, and appeared to be strapped in with baling twine.

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.