‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’ leading off the central staircase.
‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. Behind that door is the rear part of the house, unrenovated. So if you open it, the secret is you fall into a gap in one of the smashed floorboards, trip over a box of books or ten, fall against a stack of mattresses and tumble down a rickety staircase that lands you in the boiler and machinery room, where you will find the unfathomable clutter that is the builder boyfriend’s tool collection, the vast water tanks, groaningly driven by electric pumps, and my overflowing baskets of laundry.
I tried to explain that this was why it was off limits to our B&B guests, but the flame-haired New Zealander wasn’t having it. ‘I’d like to have a look in there.’
‘What is wrong with you?’ I thought. Kiwis are usually laid-back, humorous, easygoing. Not this one. The first weekend she was staying with us, she returned from a trip to a nearby stately home to complain they had not let her into their basement. She only got to poke around the entire ground floor and first floor, the gardens and tea rooms, where she met the owner serving the tea.
‘Not exictly ickcciss all areas,’ she harrumphed. ‘And I paid €15 for thit!’
This woman was unpleasable. From the moment she arrived she complained about everything, including the roads not having white lines down the middle and a local garage owner sending her the wrong way on purpose because, according to her, ‘he was a misogynistic pig’.
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