Have the Surrey busybodies followed us to Cork

‘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.

Our new house in Ireland is magnificent in its old-world charm, stuffed full of furniture left behind, and religious paintings, because it was once a priest’s house. We cleared what we did not want and called the lady from the local charity shop who was happy to come up and have a cup of tea with us, tell us all the gossip, which was mostly about us, and load boxes of chintzy china, decanters, tea sets and clocks into her car.

I’ve always said I’ve been house hunting for a place in time, and finally it seemed we had boarded our time machine. Each morning I awake to a view so perfectly pastoral that I fancy someone has fixed a painting to the window pane as I sleep. The hills roll this way and that, a rising sun over the top. On a distant road, a car or tractor can just be made out, driving from one side of the horizon to the other.