As the disappointingly unmacho South African toddled off after giving us a lecture about hedgehogs, I declared the contest over. ‘You win,’ I told the builder boyfriend. We have been having a competition all week to see who can find the most incongruous leftie.
The liberals flock to West Cork from all over the world to get away from whatever it is they can’t cope with, and then stick out like sore thumbs in the farming landscape, totally at odds with the earthiness of the Irish.
The builder boyfriend had been working in the yard when this particular fellow walked by our gate dressed in full safari outfit, as though trekking up Kilimanjaro, with a golden retriever on an extender lead.
The dog lunged at our youngest spaniel Dave, who was sitting quietly in his own yard minding his own business.
Anyone with a big dog on a long lead is going to be a pain in the proverbial. Someone additionally wearing trekking gear to go for a dog walk, well, you’ve got yourself a prize numpty there. But the builder b, ever friendly, grabbed hold of Dave and said ‘Hi’ to the man, who stopped for a chat.
The first I knew about the BB inviting this man in was when I came out of my kitchen door with a watering can to see the two of them walking around the gardens. As I emerged, the man greeted me by announcing: ‘It’s no good. You’re wasting your time.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, as his dog ran and hurled himself at me so I had to flap the dog away as the lead went on and on.
‘The gardens,’ he said, looking at the beautifully manicured lawns, hedges and flower beds we have worked so hard on. ‘There’s no point. You can cut it back all you like but it just grows again.’
‘Who is this Einstein you’ve brought on to our property?’ I wanted to ask the BB, but it would have to wait. I gave him a look. The BB introduced his new friend, who was standing there in safari shorts, pale thin legs protruding, and a wide-brimmed safari hat, which one could only presume was in case the weak Irish sun slightly tinged him.
He feebly clicked the extender, making no difference to the dog, inevitably called Oscar, as he told us he had no sooner moved here quite recently than his wife left him. You couldn’t blame her, I thought, watching him limply click-clicking his extender.
‘Do you have to spray your weeds?’ he asked, in a whiny voice. What a question. I explained that yes, we had four horses so the nettles and ragwort had to be got rid of or they would take over the grazing.
‘You’ll kill all the hidgehogs,’ he said, and it sounded all the more silly when said in a South African accent. ‘Surely the horses know what to eat and what not to eat?’
I assured him they did not. My lip was curling at the edge. I looked like Dave the spaniel as he squared up to the golden retriever.
Safari man was oblivious and started talking about the red deer he was feeding in his garden. I’m fairly sure a low ‘grrrrrrrrrr’ escaped out of the side of my mouth. The builder boyfriend looked nervous.
I decided to talk over the man’s head to the BB. ‘When we go to pick up the horse wormers we must get tick treatment for the dogs. Apparently there’s red deer about.’
‘I’m sorry, we have to go,’ I said to the man. ‘But good luck with giving in to nature, especially the bit where you get Lyme disease.’ He stood there quoting hedgehog statistics, but eventually we managed to get him out the gate, and the BB went off to spray more nettles, strapped into a bright yellow spraying backpack, his favourite new gadget.
Whereupon an English neighbour drove by and waved at me. Now, this lady is posh and tells me she adores our manicured gardens. So it was very much to wipe the last encounter from my mind, and to elicit some sympathy on the horticultural front, that I flagged her down and invited her in for tea.
She parked her car, got out and said: ‘Darling, I’ve just had the most dreadful row.’ ‘So have I,’ I said. ‘What was yours about?’
‘Well, I was driving down the road when I saw a man spraying his front verge with weed killer. He was wearing a bright yellow weed-spraying backpack. Can you imagine? So I stopped and shouted at him: “I’ve got bees! How dare you spray your poison about!”’
‘Let’s have tea in the garden,’ I said, feeling strange. ‘You can tell me all about it.’
When the builder boyfriend came back from the fields dressed up in his bright yellow weed-sprayer backpack, I was going to enjoy whatever unfolded. I would also be informing him that so far as our little competition went, he’d just been pipped at the post.
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