After two weeks of us heating the house to the temperature my nearly 90-year-old father wanted it, the door to the guest bedroom would no longer shut. The central heating had swollen the wood so much that it had to be planed down.

The builder boyfriend and I had been lying in bed each night with the radiators in our bedroom off and the windows wide open. I’d venture out into the hallway at 3 a.m. to investigate why we were still too hot and a wall of heat would hit me. The thermostat I had left on tick-over was rammed to the far right once more and the boiler was at warp speed.

I told my father he might be parboiling us all like frogs, but he refused to entertain the idea of any other temperature than the one produced by the thermostat being all the way to the right, night and day.

Every now and then my mother would declare herself so hot she couldn’t breathe, and I would adjust the thermostat clandestinely. But after half an hour my father would storm towards me, barking: ‘This house is like an ice box. AN ICE BOX!’

One day, he wandered through the back kitchen and found the boiler room, and fiddled with the controls of the enormous commercial heating system until he managed to reset the hot water to boil all day. We found it just in time, luckily, as the DeJong cylinder was about to blow off the wall.

‘Did you have a happy childhood?’ my father asked me suddenly. ‘You were there,’ I said

After that, the BB locked the boiler room door and hid the key. I tried everything to tempt them out of the house and at first my father said that yes, he would like to be taken to Blarney Castle so he could kiss the Blarney Stone. He added sarcastically that the BB could stay behind because he doesn’t need to.

But the next day, he came down the stairs and announced that they did not want to go to Blarney Castle after all. Why? ‘Because we just don’t.’

It might have been because my mother didn’t have any heated roller pins, because they were in one of their seven suitcases that went missing on the way out. They either lost it, or never brought it, or had it confiscated because the amount of bags broke all the Ryanair luggage limits. After the laborious task of getting ready – hair and make-up and outfits – to come downstairs each day, they sat in the drawing room in front of the roaring fire, before announcing a few hours later that they would now go back up again, because the drawing room was like an ice box.

One day, my father decided he wanted to mend a chair of mine that was broken, and I had to take him to the hardware store to buy glue and a G clamp. That would have been nice except for the lecture about how I don’t respect his antique furniture.

Another day he spent going through my vinyl collection looking for records that were his. He does this every time they visit. I had to hide my Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. No matter how many times I explain to him that I own the same jazz records as him, and share the exact same taste in music as him, he cannot understand it. He doesn’t want to understand it.

I can’t face wrestling Kind of Blue off him again. So when he said he wanted to look for his records, I ran to the vinyl case and pulled out all the jazz and hid them in the linen closet.

The nearest I came to pleasing them was when I gave them some old photo albums to look at as they sat by the fire. They quite enjoyed that. ‘Did you have a happy childhood?’ my father asked me suddenly.

‘You were there,’ I said, but he didn’t get the point. He nudged my mother who was admiring a photo of me as a toddler pushing another toddler out of the way as we sat on the floor of a garish 1970s swirly carpet.

‘She didn’t say yes!’ said my father, laughing. Then turning to me, he said: ‘I don’t suppose you’re interested in these photos, are you?’

‘No, I just kept them for 30 years and got them out just now so you could see them,’ I said, quietly.

‘Look at her pushing that other baby around!’ exclaimed my mother. ‘I remember that,’ she added, referring to me and the red-haired child from down the road. They remember the long-ago past, but not so much what happened five minutes, or even 30
seconds, ago.

Barely a minute after laughing at the photo of me pushing the other baby, my mother exclaimed: ‘Look at her pushing that other baby! She was a little bossy boots, wasn’t she?’

And we all agreed that I was. But I don’t remember. The past doesn’t interest me much. I’d rather walk away from it. What’s sad about getting very, very old is that going forward ceases to appeal.

On the day Brigitte Bardot died, my father walked into the kitchen and announced that she was ‘only two years older than me’. I looked at him, waiting for him to laugh, but he didn’t.

‘That was a very funny joke. But he didn’t mean it as a joke,’ I said to the BB.

I retreated into cooking, producing meal after elaborate meal in an attempt to show I was caring for them. But they don’t enjoy food as they once did.

We went out on my birthday and my father ate half a steak, and pretended not to be appalled when the BB asked for a doggy bag. After insisting on paying, which was nice, he produced a £10 note as a tip.

The BB and I looked aghast at each other. I reminded my father we were in Ireland. A brief explanation of the euro and a succinct history of the Irish struggle for independence did not convince him.

‘No, no!’ he said, crossly. ‘I don’t care what they do with it. I will leave £10 and they can decide.’

‘What they’ll do,’ I said, quietly, ‘is not serve us again and this is one of my favourite restaurants.’

I put €10 down and my father harrumph-ed at my impertinence. I could tell he was thinking that he would never understand this strange daughter of his.