It took moving to Ireland to escape from the EU’s rules

The skip man laughed as he took pity on me, the daft English blow-in who was taking the EU rules on rubbish disposal literally.

‘You put so much concrete in that skip that if I weighed it in properly it would cost you a thousand euros,’ he said.

I told him I really didn’t mind paying the going rate. He said he wouldn’t hear of it.

‘If you’ve got land you can always get rid of concrete blocks by filling holes with them,’ he said. ‘Don’t be putting concrete into skips.’

The builder boyfriend, hard at work clearing the farmyard and barns, was aghast as I trotted outside to tell him his rookie mistake. ‘I don’t want to fly-tip on my own land!’ he said, making a pile of old lino he had removed from a back room, before demanding I order another skip.

It’s disorientating to have re-entered the EU to escape from its rules. But I’m delighted and not entirely surprised to find that the Irish stick their middle fingers up to most of the red tape from Brussels.

We lit a bonfire in our farmyard shortly after we got here and when someone called it in, the builder boyfriend was flagged down by a council official, not to be issued with a fine, but for the official to tell him how disgusted he was that a neighbour should do that to us.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

The glamour and grit of J.K. Rowling

The pair of them stood by the roadside discussing who it could have been. Most likely, the official thought, it was someone with a grudge against the council, trying to give him extra work by making him come up to the house to inspect our fire.