Why can’t I just buy a boardgame?

The little toy shop stood at the highest point of a steep winding lane of shops all painted different colours, near the harbour.

So quaint, so beguiling and magical was this place, it was like walking into your childhood memory box. On the shelves of games on the back wall I found KerPlunk, Connect 4, Buckaroo, Guess Who, and all the old favourites.

I needed some board games because a friend was coming to stay with his four children and we would need to while away the long West Cork evenings which would probably be rainy and windy. We are usually happy doing nothing in front of an open fire but I assumed that kids would not be so sanguine.

Every time they go in there to buy something they have to listen to the toy shop owner’s political manifesto

I wandered along the shelves spellbound. As well as games, there were brightly coloured jigsaws and boxes of Lego and Barbie merchandise stacked floor to ceiling.

The man behind the counter noted my accent as I placed down Cluedo, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. ‘Oh you’re from England…’

He then skipped the small talk and said: ‘What are you English doing? You’re mad. You’ve lost the plot. Look at what’s going on in your country. It’s unbelievable.’

I mumbled something conciliatory, assuming I was in for a lecture about the far right, but he launched into a long rant about the English being too left-wing and soft.

He concluded about 20 minutes later, with me barely getting a word in edgeways, by weighing into the English blow-ins waving Palestinian flags in his town on market day. The cheek of them, he said.

As it happens, we have not lately seen so many of the dreadlock-haired, rainbow-outfitted Brits who walk around town squares waving the pan-Arab colours alongside the Irish tricolour.