‘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.

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How was poor Nicola to know about her husband’s embezzling?

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.

Getting chatting to him on the drive one day, after he brought us some haylage he had left over, we discovered he was a fellow conspiracy theorist.

He’s the only anti-vaxxer in the village apart from us, and we don’t really count because we’re blow-ins. Ireland has one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe, sothe builder boyfriend and I kept our big mouths shut when we came here and didn’t let on to anyone that we were lunatic antis.

But then this neighbouring cattle farmer who owns our water supply came round one day and we got chatting, and lo and behold it transpired that he was as loopy as we are.

He didn’t care who knew it either. He held forth on Big........

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