‘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.
The lefties in West Cork are mad for bees and wasps, to the extent that they will do anything to make them happy.
An artist down the lane who keeps bees and paints with the honey screams at unsuspecting Irish locals doing their front gardens if she spots them spraying weedkiller: ‘My bees!’ she caterwauls, as though this is a sentence requiring no explanation.
It’s exhausting for the locals, of course, but they don’t ever seem to react to anything the mad English lefties do. The BB claims this is because they just block them out, like something that is so far beyond their understanding they don’t even try to process their madness, never mind argue with it.
This lady up a mountain had a massive wasps’ nest in her roof and had tried spraying it with peppermint, which of course didn’t work. I’d say trying to drown wasps slowly in peppermint is more cruel than killing them quickly with chemicals, but what do I know?
She can’t spray them because she is trying to live organically, or holistically, or something. Heaven knows what she’s doing, to be honest. It involves growing her own vegetables and playing an electric violin. She hooks a machine up to the trees to listen to what they’re saying and then writes tunes based on the noises they’re allegedly making. Every so often she pops off to Holland to have a good old smoke. She means well.
But like all well-meaning, liberal-minded individuals, once she got up a mountainside in West Cork she soon proved herself un-able to make any decisions necessary for her own survival.
This nest was swarming and when the BB went to quote her for the roofing work he got quite badly stung. He told her there was no way he was going up there for a week to do a re-roof until her buzzy friends were gone.
She found a specialist wasp and bee re-locator who took the nest away. But as any number of them can be out for the day when you do this – working, shopping, at the cinema, and so on – they then came back once the nest was gone and buzzed around more furiously than before, looking for their home.
Again, I would argue this is more cruel than spraying them and bidding them ‘Goodnight’, but anyway, she evicted them and made them angry and then called the BB back to mend the roof, telling him she had got him a beekeeper’s suit to wear while he worked up a ladder. There were, by her own admission, hundreds of them swarming about.
He went off that morning and I kept text-ing him to find out how he was. ‘Don’t you dare get yourself stung to death trying to do that mad woman’s roof,’ I instructed him.
I heard nothing for most of the day, imagining all kinds of horror, and then late afternoon I received a one-liner text to the effect that he had gone to the hardware store.
He came home that evening with two jet-black potatoes, a small shrivelled clove of garlic (gifts for me from the lady in question) and the bee suit he had been using.
‘She sends these from her vegetable garden,’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s nice, I think,’ I said, looking at the strangest two potatoes I have ever seen. ‘How did you persuade her the wasps had to go?’
‘I said “Listen, love, you can either have a home or you can give the wasps a home. Nature is all very nice, but there’s a place for it, and it’s down that garden. Once they come and take up residence in your house, you don’t have a house, do you understand me?”’
She said she did, and told him to go and buy the spray. Then he came home and put the suit on again and got ready to go up the ladder to deal with a problem he had been meaning to address for a while in a chimney pot on our roof.
As he planted his foot on the first rung, quite against my better instincts I heard myself say, very feebly: ‘Oh, poor wasps…’ He sighed and said: ‘You can hire a specialist re-locator if you want, and he’ll charge you a thousand euros.’ And I said: ‘I’ll foot the ladder.’
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