As I was showing a couple from Lincolnshire to their room, I smelt a rat.
I don’t mean metaphorically, about them. I mean that halfway down the hallway, as I walked two paying guests from the front door towards the staircase, the most overwhelming stench of rotting carcass wafted upwards from the floor, right next to the fancy dresser displaying the tourist leaflets. I glanced at them nervously to see whether they had noticed.
They were telling me about their house-hunting. They wanted to move to West Cork to go off grid and get in touch with nature. That’s handy, I thought, because nature is currently rotting under the floorboards. Trust the darn critter to conk out beneath the main entrance hall just in time for a B&B arrival.
But I decided it was useful fact-finding for this pair, who probably needed a reality check, for they were having an attack of the self-sufficiencies, a most appalling affliction.
He told me, panting a bit as he carried their bags up the stairs, that he wanted to buy a house with a few acres so he could grow his own veg. Here we go, I thought. This is the strange paranoid mood people have been getting into since lockdown.
Trying to live off the land used to be about turning your back garden into a veg patch like Barbara in The Good Life, which didn’t involve much upheaval. But then it morphed into people moving to Welsh smallholdings to keep llamas and grow misshapen carrots in polytunnels.
I get the feeling those sorts of people have started moving to the Irish countryside since running away to Wales got expensive. And West Cork is ideal because it already has a big drop-out community, which began in the 1970s when the hippies descended because it was deemed the least likely place in the world to suffer from nuclear fallout. Something to do with Irish neutrality and the direction of the wind.
We are in the minority among the blow-ins. Most people come here to be unwashed and paranoid
There’s a hillside near us where a commune of hopeless idealists have been living in filth for years with nothing but polytunnel veg and the odd pumice stone to scrape themselves with. Our neighbours assumed the builder boyfriend and I were part of this hapless ideology when we first arrived, until we set them straight. Although we came here to escape, we pride ourselves on shopping at the supermarket for food wrapped in plastic and we buy electricity from the grid so we can run a nice oil boiler for hot water to wash and keep warm.
But we are in the minority among the blow-ins. Most people come here to be unwashed and paranoid, and even the rich have caught the bug.
The BB has been working for an English millionaire who has run away to a 100-acre sheep farm where she has had solar panels and emergency generators installed in preparation for Armageddon. She’s big into conspiracy theories like me, but there the similarity ends. I don’t kid myself I can be self-sufficient, or live under the radar. The authorities know exactly where I am, so I might as well treat myself to mains electricity.
But she’s really up for it. She came out of her house with a shotgun the other day and said to the BB: ‘Hey! Look at this! If they come for me I’ll blow their…’
This nice couple from Lincolnshire arrived on a golden pink evening, after a day of unseasonal balmy sun, looking like they had absolutely fallen in love with the rolling landscape, which is enchanting when it’s not raining. But it is now winter, and aside from the odd guest, no one comes, for good reason.
I showed them up the stairs to their room at the end of the corridor. ‘Oh this is lovely,’ she said, surveying the cosy double with a fur throw on the bed and velvet cushions.
As soon as they shut their door, I turned on my heels and galloped down the stairs, found a can of cheap air freshener and started spraying the hell out of the rat-infested hallway. As soon as the weather turns, the invasion of scurrying creatures begins.
Luckily, the BB returned home before the couple came back downstairs and I demanded he get the floorboard up.
‘It’ll rot down and petrify,’ was the BB’s first response. What has become of us? I thought. But he looked shattered and had obviously had a hard day working for the outlaw millionairess.
Eventually, he wearily knelt down to prise the board up. ‘Anything?’ I called, from a safe distance. He said there were two massive rats, and he reached in and lifted them out with a plastic bag. They were so big they landed with a thud as he set them down.
We could have gone the Full Fawlty, with a live rodent’s head popping up out of a cereal packet
But it could have been worse. We could have gone the Full Fawlty, with a live rodent’s head popping up out of a cereal packet the next morning.
As it was, he disposed of the long-tailed critters who had grown fat nibbling chunks out of the lagging of our expensive Swiss triple-insulated heating pipes. The floorboard was nailed back in place just in time. The couple came down and said they were going out to eat.
‘I’ll help you find somewhere,’ I said, grabbing my phone to start ringing round. ‘Let me think, Tuesday…’
She said: ‘Oh, we’re used to village life, don’t worry. We’re an hour from Peterborough. There’s nothing near us for miles.’
‘Yes, well, there’s more nothing here,’ I said. ‘We’re an hour from nowhere.’
‘We don’t want much,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll just pop to the pub.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he only serves food until 4 p.m.’ I looked at my watch. It was six.
‘What about the roadside restaurant we passed on the way here?’
I shook my head. ‘Closed Tuesdays.’
‘The inn in the village says that it serves food.’
‘Wednesday to Sunday, if the owner’s there.’
‘We saw a fish and chip shop…’
‘Just shut down. He’s gone off to work at the yoghurt factory.’
They gave up and settled on going to the local bar for a pint of Guinness. I assume if they went to bed hungry, then fell asleep to the sound of rats in the floor, it will have been useful information.
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