The Social World

Category: Real life

  • Solar panels are a waste of money

    Solar panels are a waste of money

    The house fell silent as the last of the tourists took their oat milk and pretend cheese from the guest fridge.

    Winter came in the nick of time. I’ve bitten my lip for six months while the B&B guests have forced their pro-Palestine, anti-Trump views on me, while refusing to eat normal food or use the dishwasher because, in leftie parlance, dishwashers cause neurological damage.

    “What does the shower cause?” I wanted to ask some of them, who didn’t even use one towel or open one wrapped mini-soap in a week-long stay. Is soap carcinogenic now? Are you staging some sort of Gaza protest by not washing?

    The bookings dried up just before I lost it completely with the next long-haired hipster asking for coconut milk or declaring themselves gluten-free.

    I was ready to start beating my car with a tree branch by the time the last of them checked out, and we were just left with the solar-panel fitter, booked in for two weeks while he fits panels to a house on a large country estate down the road. He works all day in the driving rain and returns at night drenched and exhausted.

    We’ve been in a white-out of squally storms for the past week, and solar guy is unable to explain how his clients will be powering their house off the eye-wateringly expensive equipment he has fitted.

    “It all works beautifully,” he announced, coming back in his day-glo work anorak the other day, and sitting down at the kitchen table to a plate of his favorite jumbo sausage rolls.

    But when I asked whether that meant the millionaire’s house would be powered by solar, he pulled a face. “I mean the system works, as in I’ve wired it all up correctly,” he said, munching. Then he laughed, as though the next bit was obvious: “But it won’t produce any power without direct sunlight, obviously.” And at that moment the wind howled, and we all stared out the kitchen patio door at the driving rain and the thick soup of a turbulent sky.

    The weather comes pounding off the sea here, and while there are sunny days, it’s hard to remember a time when there was a run of them together.

    Rain and sun, rain and sun, rain and sun all summer, that’s Ireland. And in the winter, it’s like living in a bowl of mushroom chowder. There are days when you come out the door and you can’t see a few feet in front of you.

    But despite the almost permanent lack of direct sunlight, Ireland is mad for solar energy. Incentives galore scream at you from advertising hoardings, and roofs everywhere get clad in shiny panels so they can be pounded by the endless rain.

    It’s all because Ireland burns so much fossil fuel and oil to keep itself warm that the government has had to tell its EU masters it’s going to be a good boy and do some green stuff. Nearly all new-build houses aren’t allowed a chimney or an oil boiler. Everyone must go electric. The only problem is, there’s no sun. The solar-panel fitter estimated that his clients might get some electricity from their 50-panel system for four or five months of the year. But that didn’t matter, he said. Because they’ve got a big diesel generator for when there’s no sun. And she’s plugging her washing machine and tumble dryer into an electrical point connected to the grid in a farm outbuilding.

    Also, they have another house down the road they can go to in bad weather and that’s on the grid. Of course they do. What was I thinking? These people aren’t amateurs.

    The solar-panel fitter was still munching philosophically because to him it’s all par for the course. He deals with this nonsense every day. It’s his bread and butter to come up with hair-brained systems that don’t work except in theory. He’s not going to point out the lunacy of trying to make power out of sunlight that isn’t there.

    The solar-panel fitter himself lives in a bus which he powers with solar, but a bus is small enough to do that, and also he uses wood burners.

    Another issue he’s discovered, he said, was that you need somewhere to dump all the excess solar energy you get on sunny days because once you’ve used what you need you can’t store the rest.

    The way he deals with this is by having a big hot tub in his back yard which he heats constantly on sunny days. “That’s nice,” I said. “I bet you and your wife enjoy that.”

    Not really, he said. They didn’t use the hot tub much, because you want it on cold days, not hot ones, and on cold days there isn’t any solar power.

    But at least it meant he was dumping all his free energy back into his own property, rather than selling it back to the grid at an extortionately bad rate.

    I said that all things considered, I didn’t want solar panels. He said I could suit myself, and he shrugged.

    But he nodded to the kitchen light bulbs, tutting, and told me we must at least switch to LEDs. I told him our electricity bill is very low, because we don’t leave lights on. Even with the B&B guests, at the height of summer, in a six-bedroom house full of people, our bill was barely £100 a month. And in winter when the guests are gone it’s half that. The builder boyfriend has this wacky idea, I explained, that if we just use less it will cost less money, and do less environmental damage.

    Solar guy kept sucking air through his teeth and shaking his head and warning us that unless we got warm white LEDs we’d be sorry.

    As it happened, I got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water and saw that he’d left his bedroom light on, and was snoring away with his room fully lit.

  • The anarchy of a breakfast buffet

    The anarchy of a breakfast buffet

    The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show.

    I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the traveling public all summer – so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism. My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife-edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but not both. Only the French can generally be relied on to eat everything.

    As a result, I wait until someone tells me what they want before offering them food. You can, however, have a good guess based on the amount of face jewelry. This Portuguese lady had a nose ring and had just come from touring the bottom end of the Mizen Head, in the extreme south of Ireland, where she had been camping in wigwams and tipis for so long that the child had demanded a night in a bed. When they arrived late, the little boy was so happy that he could be heard leaping on and off the king mattress.

    The next morning I cooked a full Irish breakfast for another couple, whose nationality defied me until I narrowed it down to him being Scottish and she French or vice versa. I couldn’t work it out because their accents kept swapping, but they ate everything.

    After they left, the Portuguese lady came down to the kitchen with her boy and said she smelled something wonderful. She did not want to sit in the dining room, so I let them sit at the kitchen table. Here we go, I thought, eyeing the self-service buffet.

    The builder boyfriend insists this is cheaper, and we should only do the buffet. But he has no idea, because he doesn’t watch what happens when guests descend on it. They strip it from end to end, putting into bags what they can’t force down gullets, until you have to restock it daily, making it ten times the cost of doing everyone a fry-up.

    Having successfully steered the Franco-Scottish couple into the dining room to serve them a finite breakfast, I attempted to intercept the Portuguese mother and child as they came down the stairs, but she breached the barricades and wandered about the kitchen, asking what the wonderful smell was. “Bacon and egg,” I informed her. “Would you like some?” She looked appalled. They didn’t eat meat.

    I asked her to tell me, therefore, exactly what she wanted. Two eggs fried both sides, she said, explaining that the eggs must be made to look completely white and must not on any account run or be capable of having things dipped in them. Some brown toast. A cup of tea for her, black. And a cup of warm milk for the child… with cinnamon.

    I began rifling through the larder and found some, to my amazement. They ate several helpings of cereal while I fried two eggs into a concrete-hard structure. One of these they then judged still too egg-like, so I had to fry it harder, whereupon they tucked into them, on thickly buttered toast.

    After that, they went along the breakfast bar again, the child requesting more cinnamon to sprinkle on muesli. The BB came in at this point and gave the dis-appearing breakfast bar such a horrified look that I had to push him out in case he made a sarcastic comment. “Do you see how wrong you are now?” I asked him later. “Your simple self-service breakfast of cereals and toast leads to anarchy. You can’t allow unending bread-buttering and cereal-box-stripping to ensue. It’s anarchy, I tell you. Anarchy!”

    Now that he had seen the bottomless breakfast in progress, I felt I was on stronger ground with my business plan of cooking every customer a fry-up, or nothing, and making them sit at a table in the dining room to eat it and then leave.

    The Portuguese lady made breakfast so long, serving and re-serving herself and her son cereals and yogurts, that in the end even the child got bored with sprinkling cinnamon and went back upstairs to jump on and off the bed. After an hour, in a desperate bid to make breakfast end, I asked her where she was heading next. I already knew, of course.

    They’re all tearing round the Ring of Kerry in a desperate hurry to get to the Cliffs of Moher, before driving cross-country to Dublin to fly home and boast about how they’ve “done” the Wild Atlantic Way, the invention of which is genius marketing by the Irish tourist board, because it spreads the tourist spend around the entire island of Ireland, and inserts an element of panic into it.

    The sheer weight and speed of tourism this summer, with Europeans desperate to get from Dublin to Dingle, Donegal and Derry in the driving rain, for reasons they don’t entirely understand, has meant that people like us in the boondocks are fully booked because we take the overflow from more famous places.

    The Portuguese lady said they were heading to Killarney next, but she wanted to see castles on the way. “You have to see castles when you come to Ireland, don’t you?”

    I said I wasn’t sure that you did. Possibly she was thinking of Scotland. I said there was a small ruined tower nearby. She said she wanted a castle that was big and fancy. Was this nearby castle big and fancy?

    What she wanted from Ireland made no more sense than her egg. So I told her the castle was amazing and she’d love it. And with that, she finally relinquished her grip on the Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut and hurried off to see an old turret with the top missing.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.