Life in an open house for birds and elements requires a tower of strength

IT’S all very well for you, so it is. You can sleep in on a bank holiday.

You can slug it in the bed on a Saturday or Sunday. You have the life of Reilly, so you do. You don’t have to get up at dawn to sweep up the dead mice off your sitting room floor and wipe the pigeon blood off the fridge before visitors arrive.

Not that I’m complaining. Having your home open to the public at weekends can serve as a great corrective to being a natural slob, which I am. One of the completely new phrases my husband bought into my life, a few decades back, was “dressing the bed.” Now, admittedly, I had heard the more citified version of it — “making the bed” — frequently articulated by my mother in a high-pitched nagging tone, but it never really took.

As a concept, I always felt it had flaws. It doesn’t seem logical to tidy up bedclothes when just a few hours later, the sleeper is going to climb back in and disarrange them all over again.

Once we decided to open our stubby little Martello tower to passing visitors, though, I had to re-think everything, including the bed-making. These days, I can practically do hospital corners. The re-think had to extend to the cats, which have a limited appreciation of the responsibilities of living in an historic building.

I gave serious consideration to blocking up the cat flap last Tuesday, when the day started with screams from the office into which the cat flap opens. I thought at least a fox or passing Rottweiler had trapped one of the cats. Instead, Dino emerged and deposited a thrush on the floor.

Who’d have thought a thrush could produce such volume? I yelled at Dino, which upset the thrush even more while not bothering the cat one bit, and made like a girl guide: off came my skirt.

Not that I’m suggesting girl guides strip on impulse, but they’re trained to be resourceful, and the office didn’t offer anything else with which to subdue and capture a visiting bird. The minute the long skirt covered the thrush, the screams subsided and it went perfectly still. Dino went back out the cat flap, bored. I clustered the skirt around the bird, its tiny heart hammering against my palm, and put it in the garden on a flower bank. The minute I lifted the garment off it, the thrush took off in wing-bursts of escape ecstasy.

It couldn’t be blamed for doing what birds do in panic, but it had done it on the skirt, and, back in the kitchen, I was considering my cleaning options when Dino arrived back in with a sparrow. Like bloody Edward Bruce, that cat is. If at first you don’t succeed... same skirt, same sequence. And this all before seven in the morning.

I don’t know the rules around this game. I thought cats killed birds in order to eat them, but our felines rarely kill the birds and never eat them. They just bring them in and hand them over.

Size is no object, which is why I keep finding little traces of pigeon blood after a visit from a pigeon the size of a good Christmas turkey, the subduing of which required a bath towel, rather than a skirt.

I don’t tell visitors to the tower any of this, of course, although I do have to ask, at the beginning of any tour, if any of them has a horror of cats. If the answer is affirmative, the three cats get bribed to go outside, the cat flap gets blocked with a chair, and the tour proceeds against a background of the three of them sitting on the wrong side of the cat flap, giving out.

Just as the cat-quotient is dictated by the preferences of visitors, so is the tour. Older groups from around the area just want to see inside a tower they looked up at from the beach during summer holidays, imagining what it was like inside.

History groups want every bit of available information and invariably leave added value behind them, or remind us of details we tend to forget, like that spiral staircases, from medieval times, tended to be built in a clockwise direction so the defenders at the top had the sword-arm advantage.

This one is easier to explain when you’re at the top of the spiral yourself and can mime swordplay down at your ascending visitors.

Younger women tolerate the historical stuff in order to see the kitchen. Children younger than 12 are bored rigid.

MOST visitors arrive at the door clutching the entrance charge — a fiver, although pensioners and students pay less. What the charge raises in a year covers about a third of the insurance required. Only one company will cover listed buildings, which means that when they accept you (at an enormous price) you feel kind of honoured, but also scared to death to ever claim for anything.

Last winter, the east side of our tower developed a leak. At the receiving end, this wasn’t a drip-drip leak. This was a line-up -the-buckets-and-bail leak. Water poured through every light fitting so steadily that we had to take out all the lights, lest we get short-circuited and go on fire at ceiling height, while paddling lower down.

Some of the questions visitors ask are so easy, it’s like an oral exam for which we’ve done the homework.

“How thick are the walls?”

“Eight feet.”

“Are all the towers the same?”

“No, the ones on the south side of Dublin are built of cut granite. The ones on the Northside are built of rubble.” (Cue smart comment about the Northside.)

“Have you read all the books?” (This in reference to the 15,000 books lining the circular interior.)

“Pretty much, yes. But then, I don’t have much of a social life.”

Every now and then, though, an unexpected question or observation comes up.

A visiting journalist asked me severely how much money we’d made out of the tax relief applying to listed buildings open to the public. The answer was and is: nothing, so far, but we live in hope.

If Revenue ever comes through, we might be able to afford to find the source of the leak, fix it and put the light fitments back in. Reading by torchlight has its charms, but you have to remember to keep buying batteries.

Then there was the time, a week before last, that a female visitor noticed the bockety nature of the fuel stacked beside the black stove.

“Oh, you do actually make your own paper briquettes,” she said. “In real life, I mean.”

She apparently thought I did it as PR. I didn’t like to say that it’d take a lot of paper briquettes to put my tower in contention with Dublin Zoo, yesterday voted Ireland’s top tourist attraction.

But next year, when we’ve located and fixed the leak, we’ll give those old lions a run for their money.