We had to go to the hospital the other day to visit a cousin of Fionnuala’s, who was laid up for a week with a leg broken in two places. I wince thinking about what happened to him.

He is a farmer, and a well-to-do one at that, though of course, you wouldn’t know it.

He looked like he hadn’t a dime, scorching up to the house in a battered pick-up, covered in dung and wearing a boiler suit that made him look like a giant Tellytubby.

And he is comical too, quick witted and playful. When he smiles, his good teeth gleam behind the dirty beard and mucky face.

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He once told me a cracker about sorting eggs one morning in one of his big hen houses, alongside a rough-and ready woman who kept asking him, in an incredulous tone, if he been to the grammar school.

Eventually, when he had convinced her he had indeed, for seven years, she paused and said, well what the hell are you standing here at six o clock in the morning gathering eggs with me?

Hiding his money, like all farmers I suppose, and the more you get to know about farmers – and there are plenty of them in Tyrone – the more you understand their logic.

They are always buying and selling things: animals, machinery, spuds, land. Always driving a hard bargain and brandishing an béal bocht; how could they convince the seller or buyer they are impoverished in a Barbour coat and a Range Rover Vogue?

Yet they all know each other and how much land and plant (their word for machinery) they own – so it’s all a bit of a pantomime.

The pleasure is knowing you can buy the Barbour and the Range Rover – in cash – but decide not to.

The battered pick-up and boiler suit are actually the real displays of wealth to those in the know.

And the ones with their big flashy 4x4s and boastful trips abroad are not in the know – not even on the farmer’s radar.

Farmers can never leave the home for more than a day or two, for there’s always, always, work to be done.

And boy, can he moan. When we’ve been to his house and there’s another farmer there, they whisper to each other in the corner about feed prices and tax and VAT and mart fees and so on, sounding more like fiscal advisors than farmers.

But here he was in the hospital ward, with six beds in the section, and despite his mangled femur he was in great spirits, entertaining all the other patients and having the nurses eating out of his hands, buoyed by his indomitable charm.

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Of course, he knew everybody there through some connection or other and was making friends for life – even with the wee man who was obviously on his last legs.

Only when we got sitting down beside him and the curtain was drawn did he drop the facade.

He declared he wanted us to break him out if necessary and that he was never as claustrophobic in his life; that he now knew what an animal in a pen felt like, and that he had been told he’d have a bad limp from now on after the operation.

He described the accident.

He had a Friesian cow in a shed after calving and she had the run of a yard that had gates at both ends: he religiously closed them.

Knowing how protective cows are, he was vigilant, but for some reason he switched off and shouted at a dog coming round the corner and startled the mother, who chased him across the yard and he got trapped climbing over the gate.

When her temper abated, he was left upside down with his leg snapped in two.

“If I had left the gate open, I’d have got away but them’s the breaks.” He lifted an eyebrow.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t a bull,’ I ventured.

“Less embarrassing I suppose,” he sighed.

“But you never drop your guard with a bull. That’s why a cow is more dangerous.”

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