My run-in with Greta Thunderpants

The anger management counsellor stormed through the door and shouted at me to turn the heating up. Hello to you too, I thought, but I was polite because I realise we are going to get difficult customers doing B&B in West Cork, where tourists come from all over the world.

At first, however, I didn’t know that this woman storming round my house was a psychotherapist. I just thought she was spectacularly rude. She was wearing a woolly hat and big coat, even though it was a typically mild West Cork autumn day, about 17°C.

She got right in my face as she declared the house too cold at 11 a.m., having demanded at the last minute to check in four hours early. ‘What’s your heating system?’ she barked, eyeing the brand new radiators in the hallway.

‘Er, actually it’s Swiss, with very efficient insulated piping…’ but she yelled: ‘OIL?’ And she pronounced it in a way that made clear she was appalled on an environmental level.

She had long brown hair, and was in her forties, or possibly her thirties; it was impossible to tell with the woolly hat. She said she was visiting her sister down the road and had been told there was no room for her to stay there.

She was so obnoxious I decided there had been some sort of row at the family home and she had been told to check into a hotel. No doubt she had submitted a list of complaints to her sister, as she was doing here, within seconds of her arrival.

After lodging her environmental objections to the way my house was heated, she complained that she could not find anywhere to have a series of beauty treatments. ‘I want my hair done, my nails done and a massage – in the same appointment!’ she barked.

But that was in hand, she said, because she had demanded a local hairdresser accommodate her. She was marching about the hallway looking for the heating controls, so I told her to wait and I went out to the boiler room, fired it up, and came back to find her still pacing up and down.

 I now felt it likely that this ghastly woman was in her thirties because she had to be a millennial to have the gall and stupidity to demand all-day heating at full blast while complaining about oil.

These snowflakes are the environmental problem: they are the big consumers, with their love of luxury and buying stuff online, and they are the weaklings, the ones who aren’t hardy enough to put on a jumper and not have the heating on all day in 17°C, at the first whiff of a winter breeze.

Imagine, if you will, how the puny, vegan Just Stop Oil demonstrators would fare if we all said: ‘Fine, you’re right. We will stop oil. And obviously because we can’t produce enough energy from wind or solar, and we’ve fired up all the coal-fired power stations we have to bridge the gap, we’re just going to bring in new laws to limit everyone to a few hours heat a day.’

Imagine them squealing and shivering. Off this climate warrior stormed upstairs in front of me as I tried to show her to her room, and as I opened the door to reveal the immaculately finished guest bedroom with its new en suite, fluffy towels, luxury linens and complimentary tea and coffee, she stormed round the room barking: ‘What about the wifi code?! What about if I want this radiator turned up?! I can’t be cold!’

I left Greta Thunderpants to settle in and was in the kitchen ten minutes later when she stormed in there, having flung open the hallway door which shuts off the main house from the backstage areas.

‘I have a BIG ask! Fine, if you can’t do it,’ she said, with a face that made clear it would not be fine. ‘I want to do ALL my washing!’ Of course she did. ‘No problem,’ I said, in the name of avoiding bad reviews, and I showed her to the washing machine.

She harrumphed and asked where the drier was. Amazing how these climate activists don’t mind wasting water and electricity on the most profligate appliances.

I said I didn’t have one, but she could use the radiators, which were blasting out heat. She said this wouldn’t be acceptable and she would have to find a garage with a public drying machine.

I felt like asking if she would like me to order her a helicopter or private jet to get her there, but I buttoned my lip.

The next morning she informed me by message on the booking site, while in her room, that she would not be checking out on time as she was ‘on a Zoom call’. When she did leave, she threw open the door with a bang and stormed off, her thumping angry footsteps battering the hallway floor.

As she screeched down the drive, I found everything in her room – the duvet, ornamental throws, wet towels – all strewn across the floor. Rubbish had been thrown vaguely at the bin but not into it. Furniture was, inexplicably, pulled out from the walls. The whole room was pretty much trashed.

It was only then that I looked her up. She was, her website claimed, a world-leading expert in compulsive behaviour, anger, stress, anxiety and relationship problems. She could transform negative unhealthy patterns of relating to people into joyful and meaningful ones. Perhaps she just chooses not to.