‘You need a Wwoofer,’ said the guest as he luxuriated in the big armchair by the roaring fire in our sitting room. We looked at him blankly for a moment before I replied: ‘We have a woofer. Two woofers.’ And I nodded to the spaniels lying at our feet.
‘No, I’m talking about the Wwoof scheme,’ he said, a hint of his Welsh accent showing through. ‘World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A Wwoofer is someone who comes to work for you for nothing in return for learning about organic principles.’
The big old house on the hill seduces them with her Georgian charm. She’s a flirt of a building
The simple answer to this would have been to tell him that here at Kitey Towers we follow the opposite of organic principles, which he would have noticed if he had looked out of the window earlier and seen the builder boyfriend with his yellow backpack of pesticide strapped to him, in a state of mesmeric joy, which is how he looks whenever he is wielding a canister of Grazon Pro. It’s brilliant stuff, but of course the organic nuts don’t like it, because it works.
I thought it best, therefore, to charm the B&B guest, who tended to the hippy-dippy, as do all our guests and indeed any guests coming to West Cork for a holiday, by not telling him how much we enjoy using strong chemicals to make our land weed-free, productive and useful, and to produce the lush, grassy meadows on which the horses were grazing, rather than an eyesore of a mess of rancid, toxic old weeds, which is the organic alternative.
The guest turned to his wife, sitting on the sofa next to me, and asked her to agree that a Wwoofer was the most marvellous thing.
‘Ye-es,’ she said with uncertainty. The couple had been running a B&B in New Zealand for ten years and were full of ideas for how we might run ours, though they had now sold up and moved on to very much not running a B&B, very sensibly.
‘Yes, these Wwoofers are marvellous. You have to cook for them. But that wasn’t a problem for us, was it?’ And he nodded to his wife who looked unsure. ‘Well it was a lot of work…’ she started saying.
‘No trouble at all. They just ate whatever you were cooking anyway, didn’t they?’ ‘They ate quite a lot…’ she said quietly. But he was insistent. ‘Yes, you need to get yourself a couple of Wwoofers.’ And he began listing all the ways in which our problems would be solved by a free labour scheme.
We are used to this. Everyone who comes to stay with us has ideas for how we could do it better. This is because the big old house on the hill seduces them with her Georgian charm. She’s a flirt of a building, full of guile and romance. She looks like she might be wonderful to own.
They suggest ways we could renovate her faster, better, and of course more environmentally, with solar panels and air-to-water heating systems that obviously won’t work and will switch back to the electric grid and bankrupt us. They get carried away with the endless possibilities they see, not realising what it means to be up against plumbers on Irish time and suppliers selling materials for the special Irish price, which is more than anywhere else in Europe and indeed maybe even the world.
Nowhere I have ever been has seemed as expensive as Ireland. How they ever managed to get the price of a small steak, for example, up to €15 in the middle of cow country is a conjuring trick.
This year, the Irish sold all their cattle at record prices all at once, then realised they hadn’t any stock left to breed off, so beef became rare, if you’ll pardon the pun. They’ll have to import it back soon, from countries where the cows were live-exported earlier this year, which was as far as Algeria.
And, of course, they’ll have to buy it from other countries in Europe under which process, somehow, inexplicably, despite Ireland being in the EU, the food enters Ireland from the EU and becomes more expensive, because the Irish government taxes the price back up.
I was in a pet shop the other day when the lady told me the price of dog food from Britain had gone up. ‘Brexit!’ she spat. ‘How about I buy some French dog food?’ I asked. She said Royal Canin came from France, but the price of that had gone up even more. ‘So not Brexit then?’ I said, and she said no, she wasn’t even sure why she said that.
It’s just what people say, isn’t it? Blame Brexit when the problem is something else they don’t understand or don’t want to talk about, which in this case is the Irish government taxing the hell out of everything from everywhere.
If you are renovating, you need to salvage materials, which the BB is very good at. We can be driving along and he’ll spot an old bifold door thrown out on to the street.
But it takes time. It means the BB has to do all the work himself, using every bit of ingenuity he possesses to cut corners cost-wise. If we try to employ someone to help, it escalates the costs with years-long delays. We have been waiting for the plumber to come back and finish the main bathroom for so long that the BB has taught himself plumbing in the mean time and is about to finish it himself. According to our guests from New Zealand, if we registered for a couple of Wwoofers we might find a free plumber.
We looked up the website. Gaunt lefties with unwashed hair and bad teeth, waxing lyrical about their ‘journeys’ and their life goals and their dreams.
The idea we’d find a plumber in this lot was ridiculous. The BB was so traumatised at the mere thought of allowing vegan hipsters near us that he had to go to his happy place to soothe himself. He strapped on his pump-action pesticide backpack and went off down the driveway to spray weeds with chemicals.
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