The plumbers come and go, but mainly go, and I am now so desperate for a bath that I will do anything for a man carrying a pipe wrench.

If only I had more Botox in my face and my highlights done, I found myself thinking, as we sat at the kitchen table one night rowing about the seemingly impossible problem of trying to get tradesmen who are also farmers on EU subsidies.

Most plumbers walk into our crumbling country house, look horrified and tell us we’re mad

The bathrooms in this old Georgian pile are so cranky they might as well not be there. In fact, it would be better if they weren’t. The heating and plumbing is a death trap. We found an old log burner in a back snug that was venting up a chimney stack passing through the main bathroom and when the builder boyfriend took the stud wall out he found a mass of smouldering black timber, half on fire, half dripping in damp, with a tangle of electrical wires wrapped around it for good measure.

Evidently, the previous owner waited so many years for a plumber that he kept taking matters into his own hands. He probably never did succeed in persuading one, because there is a sweet spot here
relating to a very precise sum of money and size of job, whereby the thing is worth a fellow devoting to it just such time and tax allowance as will not interfere with his agricultural hand-outs.

Added to which, the Irish very sensibly do not like old houses. They prefer a nice concrete bungalow with uPVC windows, and easy to wipe down plastic railings out front. When you first see these dwellings you regard them as blots on the landscape.

Pounded by enough wind and rain, however, you start longing for an ugly modern bungalow that holds the heat, and brings in the boiler and solar panel subsidies, which are almost as good as the farming ones.

I understand this now I am permanently covered in mud but also because I have talked to so many plumbers. Most of them walk into our crumbling country house, look horrified and tell us we’re mad.

Some give us hope, banter, and promises about when they can start. Those ones never answer our calls again. One fellow didn’t speak. He walked round the house in one swift circuit and back out the door without uttering a word. Another told us his mental health would never stand it. He was a former caretaker at a school and was looking for a job that would boost his self-esteem after a breakdown. I told him working with the builder boyfriend shouting obscenities down a ladder would do the opposite of that.

But then I found a guy on Facebook who was particularly chatty. When he came to look, he joked that the English couple he was currently working for were rich as Croesus. Money was no object. They had even sent to London for more labourers.

The builder b started to laugh along with him, but I had a better idea. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s how we feel. We’ve decided to throw money at it. Also, we don’t care when you come or how long you take to do the job. Spread it out over a year if you want.’

The BB went to argue and I gave him my ‘shut your trap’ face. ‘You’re not going to get a good deal here,’ I told him later as he berated me. ‘We are going to have to let someone take our pants down and treat us like idiots. It’s the only way.’

What I didn’t tell him was that if the promise of stupidity didn’t work I was going to start flirting with this guy.

I‘m so fed up with the makeshift electric shower dribbling three strands of water on me that every plumber who comes through the door looks like Mel Gibson. So the BB better not force the issue.

He knows only too well that when we first moved here he tried and failed to get hay until I got a delivery by bursting into tears on the phone one night to the biggest hay dealer in the west of Ireland. ‘Please help me,’ I sobbed, and he did.

‘Face it,’ I told the BB, as we argued over the plumbing. ‘You’re not getting anywhere here by knowing what you’re talking about. You’re going to have to leave this to me.’

A few days after me showing him how daft I was, the plumber answered my call. A few weeks after that he said he might be able to start work the following week. One evening that week, when the BB happened to be in London, he said he might pop round. And I sat on the sofa all dressed up, listening out for a car./>