2013/02/11 12:49
We moved out of Cork City a few months later,. The woman next door and her son were very sorry to see us go. When your life is made miserable by a big and vicious dog, and your civilization won’t do anything about it, then sometimes what you need is a bigger and more vicious dog to watch your back.
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I bought a small house, a gate lodge on the Knockduff peninsula, a few miles from a town called Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland, and about twenty miles from Cork City. I would like to say that I fell in love with the place as soon as I saw it. The truth was that I had been looking for a place for some time and things always kept falling through at the last minute, largely due to the vacillation of the vendors. So, when I saw the house in Kinsale and after having looked at it for less than two minute my actual reaction was; it’ll do. I made on offer and had it accepted within ten minutes. The house was a gate lodge built in the 1700s, with three-foot-thick stone walls, rendered white, with exposed stone around the doors and windows. It had brown stable doors at front and back and, because of the thickness of the walls, the window sills were three feet deep. At the slightest disturbance outside, Brenin and Nina used to stand up at the stable doors, big paws hanging out over the edge. Or, if the doors were closed, they would jump up on to the sills and stare menacingly out. They were almost certainly the best burglar deterrents in the world. In fact, they deterred pretty much everyone. Understandably enough, Colm, the postman, was a little reluctant to get out of his van, so he would sit there and beep his horn until I waved him the all clear, eventually; I put up a mailbox where he could deposit the post without stepping outside his mobile sanctuary.
The essence of the house was easily captured in two words: tiny and basic. I think even Brenin and Nina found it a tad primitive. There were only five rooms in total: living room, bathroom, two bedrooms and a kitchen, each of which was very small. By some quirk, whether of history or bizarre intent, the bathroom was the biggest room in the house. There was a central-heating system that worked when it felt like it; and when it didn’t I would have to go outside to the boiler and negotiate with the family of rats that had made its home in the boiler room for permission to fix the problem(Brenin and Nina quickly sorted out that particular difficulty for me). This was the first house I had owned. People thought I was mad: the price I paid for this tiny, damp and draughty house was considered extortionate, even for the fashionable district of Kinsale, “The Gourmet Capital of Ireland”, where, unaccountably, literally scores of upmarket restaurants had decided to make their home. But I needn’t have worried. With the Irish property market the way it was in those days, I could have bought a chicken coop and still made bucket loads of money.
