Christine

Well, we're living in Albany, New York.

It's two hours north of New York City.

We love it here.

It's good.

What's the weather like in Albany today?

Actually, it's rainy and dull.

It's very Irish.

Well, I inherited my father's place in South County Kilkenny, a beautiful old place on the banks of a river in South Kilkenny where the family home was and my father's business was.

And my family are Kilkenny people going back for...

as many generations as you could count.

And I had a notion that we'd build a retirement home on the land, demolish the old house and the old business.

And we got an architect on board who was a wonderful person, worked with him and proceeded with the planning process, which took, I'm thinking, a minimum three years and tens of thousands of euro, the whole thing.

We did eventually get planning permission but it was arduous.

They made us do a survey to count the number of cars that drove past every day.

They got us to do surveys on drainage.

They made us do a survey on the old stone bridge just in case our construction lorries building our small house would cause it to rattle around and fall down.

They told us that if we took down the old stone wall

that we had to number all the stones individually and put them back in the same order.

We said, well, we weren't going to take down the stone wall.

And kind of egregiously, they told us that we had to build this big, impressive entrance that was kind of wedged back from the road so that you had this view of, you know, 50 metres in each direction or something like that.