The oil man topped our tank and said his next drop was to the Ukrainian refugees in the next village who were getting their tank topped for free.

I could hear him and the builder boyfriend chatting about this for some time and then the BB came back into the kitchen and put the pink of the invoice into my hand. I looked down to see that I was being charged just over €1,000 for a tank of oil.

I don’t want to feel grateful to the EU. It might make me hate it less

The electricity bill for the winter pinged into my email barely a few hours later – nearly €700.

‘We’re migrants,’ I told the BB. ‘I wonder if I should ring to place the order from an area of the house where there’s bad phone reception. If I say I’m from the UK, they might mishear and think I’m saying I’m from the Ukraine.’

He said he didn’t think it would work. Besides, according to the oil man, you had to sign on, look for work, maybe do some work, and then sign off sick, due to post-traumatic stress, because of the years you lived in a horrific war zone.

‘We lived in Surrey,’ I reminded him. ‘There were days when we literally had to fight the walkers trespassing through our horses’ fields, with our bare hands.’

But while it is undoubtedly so that people hate people like us where we’ve come from, that does not translate into free oil.

We could claim EU subsidies worth tens of thousands to help us do up the house, but we’ve decided not to because we feel that would bring the pen-pushers to our door.

And in any case, I don’t want to feel grateful to the EU. It might make me hate it less, although I doubt it. It’s clear they’ve absolutely crippled Ireland by getting almost everyone hooked on a cornucopia of handouts that make working an outmoded pastime.

After months of searching, we finally found a plumber who drives to us from Cork city where he doesn’t own a farm and can’t get subsidies for putting solar panels on his milking parlour.

An English girl who befriended me after meeting me in a local shop keeps pedalling up to see me on her electric bike to tell me about these solar-panel payments. She is a hippie who ran away to live here. She never accepts tea or cake as she is ‘off wheat’ and ‘allergic to caffeine’, I reckon very much in inverted commas.

She is terribly nice but every time she comes I insinuate as gently as I can that she ought not to put too much effort into these trips she makes up the hill on her electric bike. And I say this to her with the best will in the world, what with her condition, and the bike charge being temperamental, because once she finds out I’m a rabid right-winger she is going to feel gutted.

The English we meet are mostly hippies and artists, liberals and Palestinian flag-wavers. That’s just the demographic of who runs away to West Cork.

There is a group of well-meaning evangelical Christians who keep trying to get us to go to their church, even though we keep trying to explain we’re perfectly unhappy being Roman Catholic, thank you.

Another lady drops by to bring us honey from her bees and is good company but I reckon she’ll be furious when she finds out I’m an anti-vaxxer. The last time she came she asked if I’d had my booster and the BB had to throw himself in front of me shouting about the nice weather we were having.

Obviously, most expats aren’t on our wavelength, which made it all the more miraculous when we were walking the spaniels on the beach and got chatting with an English lady in her eighties who was also walking her dogs.

Over the course of a glorious hour-long conversation, she let slip she believes all my favourite conspiracy theories, while scorning every fashionable opinion and cause. She seethed about deception and distressed herself about hypocrisy until I gave up talking because she was doing it better than me.

Her husband, sheltering from the wind in an old Volvo V70, told the BB he was a former master of foxhounds. ‘Ere, have you seen that lot screaming and wailing at those demos for Palestine in Skibbereen? There’s people in Gaza aren’t as upset about it as they are.’ If I hadn’t looked round I would not have been able to tell that it wasn’t the BB talking. This old couple were so like us, it was like looking at ourselves in thirty years’ time. If we make it to their age, I hope I’ve still got that amount of resistance left in me.