Bolting down the back hallway, I realised I was running away from the guests. I shut the door marked private and collapsed on to the dirty old dog sofa in the boot room.
‘You’ll never guess what I’ve done,’ I texted the builder boyfriend who was in London. ‘Left the yard hose on,’ he texted back, for I often risk emptying the well when I’m on my own by forgetting to turn off the stable yard tap after topping up the horses’ water at night.
‘No. Worse. The French people arrived and I hadn’t heated the water. You’ve got to get it on a timer,’ I said, attempting to blame him. ‘I’ll do it when I’m back,’ said the BB. Then: ‘Have you turned the yard hose off?’
Had I? I ran outside to check, vaguely aware there were guests calling me from the other side of the private door to ask for something unreasonable.
Like my hero Basil Fawlty, I find myself either running away or being horribly sarcastic. For example, as no one eats normally any more, when people start questioning the bread in the morning, and when even the gluten-free option doesn’t end the debate, I mutter: ‘There’s some nice grass outside…’
Luckily, they are too busy rejecting everything on allergy, environmental and/or humanitarian grounds to hear me. All the English want to talk about is their food ethics and intolerances. All the Americans want to talk about is whether you’re going to install a geothermal heat pump. After 20 minutes of either you’re praying for death. The French, German and Dutch travellers are the best. They don’t want to talk about anything. They just want you to leave them alone, if possible, by disappearing in your own house.
When he is here, I push the BB out in front of me. But he is often working in London, the lucky sod.
A man from Hawaii arrived, after telling me on the booking system I was not where I said I was because Google Maps disagreed.
After checking in, he tried to plan a journey to the nearest harbour town that was a 15-minute drive from the gates of the house – but by a Google route, which was sending him a convoluted way that would take an hour yet which looked direct when viewed by a satellite in space. He argued for an hour until I told him his way looked better, and he set off. He came back later, happy to have got lost.
The West Cork clientele mostly come to see something they call nature, mistaking cultivation and industrial farming for accidental greenery. This makes them largely lefty, eccentric to say the least.
‘Your dog has told me he needs healing – I’m a shaman,’ said a ditzy Canadian girl. She came down from breakfast on a cold morning in a pair of skimpy shorts and declared she was looking for an Irish farmer to marry her. ‘Can you cook?’ I asked.
‘It’s his liver,’ she said, feeling up the spaniel. ‘Is it? Is it really?’ I said, as she knelt beside him groping his chest. ‘And his liver has moved all the way up there?’ She made a face and kept feeling.
‘He’s got a blocked tear duct, as I’m sure you know, so if you could sort that it would save me the vet bill,’ I mumbled. ‘There, he is healed!’ she declared, as Dave wandered off.
She said she wanted to keep a pet cow and commune with it. I said I didn’t think her new Irish farmer husband would agree, but she wasn’t listening.
Now and then a reader comes and we have a brief respite. It’s like meeting old friends. But mostly, Basil was right. You realise you’re trying to no avail, so you may as well indulge yourself.
A young couple from Mumbai arrived with a lot of suitcases. He was something big in cashew nuts and said it would have been better if our house was an hour closer to Killarney. ‘I’ll see if we can get someone to move it,’ I said, and he laughed, but I wasn’t joking.
He had ignored instructions to input my Eire code into his satnav, and tried to import the Airbnb dropped pin locator to Google, which was showing a rough idea of the location as a dot in the village half a mile away. Naturally, he ended up at the supermarket.
‘You really need to get this sorted,’ he said, as his girlfriend petted the dogs. ‘Well we did sort it but you unsorted it,’ I murmured.
The man from Hawaii also rejected my Eire code and informed me that, according to Google, I lived in a different place in Galway. I told him to follow the Eire code nonetheless and come to this house, as he might enjoy it.
They sometimes try to arrive by bus and order Ubers that don’t exist. I offer to pick them up from the bus stop. ‘No, I’m a walker. I want to walk,’ said a Swedish girl in her twenties. On the day, her message read: ‘Please help me! I can’t walk any further!’
She had made it 100 metres up the first vertical West Cork hill and was sitting sweating on the steps of the church with a large wheelie case when I found her.
They were all giving us five-star reviews for a while, until the lad from the Midlands who arrived looking miserable, left looking miserable, and decided to rate us four stars, which instantly downgraded us to 4.92.
I nearly cried when I saw the gold laurels removed from the listing for our best room. No amount of newer reviews giving it five stars seems to budge the rating far enough to get our gold laurels back. I’m stuck at 4.94 because of one depressed Brummie. As Basil would say, this… is… typical.
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