Cork

‘Can I go now?’ said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay onto the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favourite neighbour since we moved to West Cork. As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realised he was our sort of person anyway.

As the first Americans of the season got out of their car I scrunched up my face and groaned. ‘They’re all like that, remember?’ said the builder boyfriend. ‘What if the bed gives way?’ I demanded. ‘How will they even fit in the bed?’ The BB shrugged. ‘Who cares?’ he said, with his usual sunny attitude. I don’t mean to suggest these people were overweight. I mean they were giants. I’m sure their depth was right for their height. There was just an awful lot of them, and we are not the Premier Inn, with super-king beds that sleep two medium-sized horses. She was in sportif wear. He was tousle-haired and bearded, dressed in a flowing shirt and baggy trousers.

The plumber and the builder conversed at top speed, making a combined sound that was so strange it seemed likely only bats or aliens from outer space could make sense of it. The chap who had come to price our new bathrooms was gabbling in a thick west Cork accent, giving absolutely nothing away to me, while the builder boyfriend was machine-gunning him back in extreme cockney. However, while it sounded to the untrained ear like the two men were speaking different languages, it quickly became apparent that they were, in fact, completely in tune with each other and understood each other perfectly.

We were riding the two cobs down the lane when I heard the car roaring its engine behind us. I had seen it pull out of a long, winding driveway coming from a house perched on top of the highest point of the hillside, a few hundred yards along from our place. It went the other way for a few seconds, then I could hear it screech, turn and start to hurtle back towards us along the long straight stretch of lane it was evidently using to get up speed. We only had a few yards until we reached the back gates of our house. I looked behind and waved at the white car, expecting the driver to slow because, after all, he was our neighbour. The car revved its engines and kept coming. I shouted ‘Slow down please!’ because Duey was starting to jump about, and he’s fairly bomb-proof.

‘The vet’s here and he’s 12,’ I called over the farmyard gate where the builder boyfriend was waiting with the injured cob. I don’t think the lad heard me as he got out of his car. I hope the Irish ones don’t faint, I thought, because we had a nice gory cut for him. The best you can hope for with horses is that your six-monthly freak injury is a near disaster. So when the smaller of the two black and white cobs reared up into a tin roof it was cause for celebration that he nearly had his eye out. You’ve only got two options with horses. Either they nearly bugger themselves up or they bugger themselves up.

‘We’re waiting for the llamas to turn up,’ said the lady selling lottery tickets from her car in the supermarket car park. She had accosted the builder boyfriend as he walked by, shouting: ‘I want a word with you! We’re all very worried about what you’re going to be doing to that old house up there…’ The BB assured her we don’t have the money to do anything. Aside from tidying it up, we have no fancy plans, and we like old houses. As for llamas, yes, she had that right in terms of what most English people would be putting on the land. But we had brought our horses. The good lady seemed reassured and within a few minutes she was selling him a lottery ticket from the village pitch and putt club: weekly members’ private lotto draw, jackpot €500.

‘You’re only allowed one roll of packing tape per customer,’ said the lady in the local hardware store. The builder boyfriend was holding five rolls, at £2 each, thinking it was reasonable to buy a tenner’s worth, or even that she might be pleased, in line with the normal rules of commerce. But this lady and her husband are notorious for not allowing you to buy the precious things of their shop. I had to beg them to sell me six laundry bags a few weeks ago. Now we had gone through all the tape we had bought from the self-storage firm where we got our packing boxes and we had to do a run to this local store for local people, in a small parade of shops in a chocolate-boxy Surrey Hills village.