‘We’re in the living room with a roaring fire, there’s not a sound for miles, it’s wonderful,’ said the builder boyfriend, phoning from Ireland. I was lying on the bed of a budget hotel room in Surrey, watching TV and eating a packet of crisps. I leapt up. ‘Are the dogs OK?’ I asked, thrilled to hear his voice. ‘They’re curled up next to me…’
The line cut off. The phone reception at the Irish house is minimalist. There’s no wifi until we have a satellite installed.
That morning, when he phoned to say he was there safely, I had to make do with a quick blast of the spaniels barking with delight as they ran around the rambling house. I had waved them off from the hotel a day earlier, the BB at the wheel of the pick-up truck. I then began fretting over weather reports, having stayed behind to oversee the moving of the horses.
Our transporter, Tom, kept telling me in his soft brogue that it would be all right, but I was going to be beside myself until the BB rang to say they were off the lorry and munching the knee-high grass.
Living in a hotel room was starting to wear. The receptionist snapped my head off for not pre-booking breakfast. I told her I was so stressed, could she not just edit my booking?
‘There’s a filling station down the road where you can buy a sandwich,’ she barked. She wouldn’t budge, but the nice Bulgarian lady in the restaurant took pity on me.
In Ireland, the builder b had a stream of visitors. Every soul for miles, which is about five people, called to see him
After a week, the receptionist was calling out ‘Hello lovely!’ when I passed her desk, oblivious to my ordering, eating and paying for breakfast each day in contravention of her allegedly unbreakable rules.
The Brits are so complex, I realise, as I am about to leave them: prickly as hell until they get used to someone. In Ireland, the builder b had a stream of visitors wandering through our top gate looking for the new owner. Every soul for miles, which is about five people, had called in to see him during his first few hours there. Oh dear, I thought, feeling prickly.
He said the lady down the lane had told him all the gossip, including how a new resident was once snooty about muck-spreading, so no one ever spoke to her again. Also, this lady said, there were mad English people living like hippies down the Mizen Head peninsula, eating nothing but nuts and berries, their children running wild. ‘You’ve just described most of the south-east of England,’ said the BB. ‘We’ve come here to get away from them.’
He assured her we’re the opposite of vegan. If a farmer said jump to us, we would be asking how high.
One of the farmers did contact us, via the estate agent, to say the hay he had baled from our land, as per his arrangement with the previous owner, was stored on our driveway. (We have a driveway! With a cattle grid in front of the gate!) I said to tell him he could leave the bales there as long as he liked. The agent sighed with relief and said that was the correct answer.
The house needs quite a bit doing to it, but the builder b isn’t fazed. Within a day he got the back boiler working on the Aga, hot water running to a bathroom and a heater working in one of the bedrooms. He discovered oak boards beneath the orange 1960s carpet, and pulled down curtains to reveal the original Georgian shutters.
When he went to get provisions he texted to say he’d met someone on a horse in the supermarket car park. He drove to the fencing store, and made paddocks out of the fields in front of the house.
Meanwhile, in Surrey, I huddled next to a barely lit log burner, tackling a club sandwich which had the calories written next to it on the menu. ‘It’s the law,’ a waiter explained. ‘It’s so you can make informed choices.’ You would have thought I had ordered a side of crack cocaine, not French fries.
I was googling the progress of a storm on my phone, becoming inwardly hysterical at the thought of loading our four horses on to a lorry bound for the Irish sea. The Bulgarian lady came over.
‘I just had customer,’ she said, arms folded, ‘ask me what I recommend vegan. I told him salad. He say he can’t have, because honey in dressing made by bees. I told him maybe he can eat napkin.’ She pulled her jerkin around her, shivering.
A pile of logs lay next to the burner. I suggested we throw one on. ‘Manager won’t allow. Health and safety.’ Never mind. The BB will be keeping that fire blazing.
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