‘Our boys went to Lebanon and trained Hezbollah!’ shouted the drunk Irish lad in the fish and chip shop as an Indian man behind the counter silently fried chips. ‘Chucky ar la!’ the lad shouted, or Tiocfaidh ar la, to correctly spell in Irish the slogan of the IRA, meaning ‘Our day will come.’ And
The builder boyfriend returned from a trip to London to inform me he was being done for speeding at 32mph, for crying out loud. He was flashed by a camera crawling uphill in a 30 zone going through the almost middle-of-nowhere in the Ashdown Forest, on his way to visit his sister in Sussex for
By changing the address on my driving licence, I was somehow signed up to something that began charging my credit card £39 a month and was going to carry on charging for ever. It was Barclaycard that spotted it and warned me it was a ‘scam’ in a text alert. Had I really agreed to
The online speed awareness course cost £101, or a few pounds less if you didn’t want to book ‘flexible’ so you could change it if something went wrong, which it was bound to. Quite how companies like the AA, which deliver these courses, divvy up the spoils with the police I have no idea. I
‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’ leading off the central staircase. ‘Yes, sort of,’ I said. Behind that door is the rear part of the house, unrenovated. So if you open it, the secret is you fall into a gap in
Basil Fawlty ended up beating his car with a tree branch after doing B&B for years, and I am very near that point after six months of dealing with customers. Among the many requests I’ve had since opening en suite rooms in my house in Ireland I can now add: ‘I would like a throw.’
The mole specialist was wearing a pink Chanel-looking suit and pink diamanté shoes. By mole specialist, I don’t mean someone turned up dressed in Chanel to deal with moles on our land. I mean I went to see a top London dermatologist about a mole I was worried about, and when I walked into her
Over coffee in a seafood restaurant in the harbour, I talked with the most notorious accused man in Ireland and, I have to say, I liked him and thought he was most likely innocent. It was shortly before Ian Bailey died of a heart attack in January 2024, and I had just moved to West
Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’ Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the
My American guest went down with a cough he could not shift and, after a week of protesting that he couldn’t be ill because he was fully vaccinated for everything, he asked me to take him to a doctor. This was an even more complicated request than his desire to call Ubers, and so we
My American guest kept telling me he was going to call an Uber and I could not persuade him that no Uber was going to appear in the wilds of West Cork. I assured him that the only taxi service I knew of was the local funeral director. ‘What? Will I have to go in
After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were throwing the book at us because I’d been caught doing 40mph in a 30 in my parents’ car. The photo evidence showed their little silver Peugeot being driven by me on a dual carriageway in
My father was discharged from hospital with a plastic bag containing 13 boxes of pills and a vague promise that a nurse would turn up at his house to help him. ‘He’ll have a package of care put in place,’ yawned a hospital functionary, who didn’t sound at all interested. But after he got home,
The hay dealer showed me his latest stock and told me the bright green hay would cost me a staggering €165 a bale. ‘I don’t want to smoke it, I want to feed it to my horses,’ I said, looking doubtfully at what was apparently best meadow hay. It was a very large bale, and
My mother was about to be taken to a care home called Willow Trees, and the first thing my instincts told me about that was that willow trees would not be the prevailing feature there. When I looked it up, my suspicions were confirmed. Not only could I not see willow trees, it also had
The US marine left his long johns down the back of an armchair and the next guest complained that she had found ‘a pair of knickers’. I ran upstairs after she told me this, she and her male companion standing in the big Georgian doorway about to leave. I found grey thermals, of the kind
The pilot of the Black Hawk told me I could recline the seat if I wasn’t comfortable. ‘Oh, great!’ I said, and started fiddling with the rock-hard thing I was strapped into, looking for a recliner handle. ‘Not really,’ he laughed, and his square jaw barely moved. When I say square jaw, I mean he
‘Oggy oggy oggy!’ shouted the Italian flight attendant over his intercom, and all the hen party ladies on the plane squealed with delight. I’m a nervous flier, so as I strapped myself into my seat I was already hyperventilating. It was not ideal that I was sharing my flight from London to Cork with a
The one question the priest did not ask me, thank goodness, was why I wanted to get married. That might have held up the enterprise indefinitely, and we are already so far behind with this attempted wedding of ours that I dare not risk another hold-up. Since serving the notice at Cork Registry Office, it’s
The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often. According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written
