My battle to get hold of the good stuff

In the pitch dark, we stormed from the house to the pick-up truck and screeched out of our farmyard with me shouting: ‘Come on! This is our only chance! If we don’t get there now we’re done for!’

‘They won’t sell to us because we’re English. It’s like those stories you hear about idiots who move to Wales’

It was nearly 10 p.m. and I had just scored something on the phone so elusive on this remote hillside that I was physically itching from the desperation of trying to get it. The dealer concerned had answered his phone after I had rung him repeatedly, on the hour every hour, like a stalker.

When it came to it, I burst into tears. ‘I’m desperate,’ I sobbed. ‘Please help me.’

There was a pause before his tone changed and he said in a soft west Cork brogue: ‘Don’t be desperate.’ ‘So you’ll help me?’ I blubbed, pacing up and down the kitchen. And the man laughed and said: ‘Come over now and I’ll sort you out.’

I shouted ‘Get in the truck!’ at the builder boyfriend, who was pottering about fixing a draft excluder to the front door.

‘What? Now? It’s pitch black outside. How are we going to load it?’

‘I don’t care how we load it. I’ve got him to agree to sell us some and if we don’t go now he might change his mind.’ I was yelling, full-on hysterical.

I ran out to the yard so the BB had to push his boots on and follow me, then agree to drive me down the lane.

It turned out that the farmer with the biggest consignment of hay in Cork, if not Ireland, if not Europe, lived 20 seconds down the hillside. I had been ringing him for weeks, and he had been promising to deliver. And when he didn’t, every other hay man for miles had pointed me back to him.