Lefties don’t know anything about farming

The artists and hippies are re-wilding their land, which is to say doing nothing at all to it and watching it fill up with brambles.

The builder boyfriend and I are un-wilding our land, which is to say pulling out every bramble we can find and cutting back the overhanging tree branches.

We have nothing in common with the hippy English blow-ins who come to West Cork, of course. However, I have made friends with a few of the local lefties, including a very nice lady who lives down the lane whom I cannot help but like since she brought me honey from her bees.

She is an artist and deplores hunting and shooting, but in such a melodramatic way – ‘Darling, I cannot bear death!’ – as to make it entirely endearing. So I keep my mouth shut while she is holding forth about the savagery of farming and the barbarity of pest control because she is such good value.

We go to art gallery cafés on the edges of peninsulas where we drink organic tea and admire place mats adorned with wildlife. Mugs and coasters with cuddly squirrels and friendly foxes on them are for sale in these craft-shop cafés. It’s wondrous escapism.

My friend wears a Ukrainian lapel badge but it could be worse. She’s not waving a huge Palestinian flag while caterwauling ‘From the river to the sea’ like most of the English women around here.

I told her I couldn’t be doing with that, to mark her cards, because if she did start warbling about Gaza then we would have to fall out. But to my delight she said: ‘Darling, I so agree. These regimes…’ And she made her ‘I can’t bear death’ face.