Bonnettstown.

Bonnettstown: A House in Ireland by Andrew Bush

Harry Abrams 1989

Andrew Bush, stumbled across the house featured in this book while he was travelling about Ireland. He met one of the four inhabitants of Bonnettstown, who invited him for dinner. At that dinner he met the 3 other house dwellers and a love affair with these characters and the house are what spawned this lovely book. (I dislike the word spawn. It makes me think of tadpoles breaking out and turning into frogs, but I couldn't think of another word.)

This is what Mr Bush has to say about these people:

"They were an unusual bunch, and their diverse stories reflected their individual natures and temperaments. One told of her escape from peasant revolutions and the Russian invasion of post-Hitler Germany, another of sailing the Mediterranean for thirty years and of commandeering rescue mission in Walruses, another of working for the Tanganyika Police and as a film extra alongside Charlie Chaplin, and another of riding horses and cultivating exotic flowers."

What?! I would like to be friends with them all. I also feel this way about Judi Dench.