We’re as busy as a swarm of bees preparing for the next auction in Oldcastle on Tuesday. Have an unfortunate vendor who, having spent enormous sums by way of a diluted trust restoring his seat, now finds himself in the undignified position of some outstanding bills requiring settlement. My last visit saw impatient craftsmen under the portico demanding payment. It’s just the tail-end of (what were) minor bills after a four year project but leniency isn’t on the cards and our man has run dry as a bone. With little in the way of finesse their threats grow louder. His estate manager held the siege that day as the perpetrator sped out the back avenue. Where it’ll end, who knows.

Had a distant relation who, under similar financial pressure, took a shotgun out for a drive one afternoon and pulled the trigger with his big toe. He half missed his target – his brains via his mouth – due to the unleveraged recoil. But he did manage, with heroic but misplaced determination, to retrieve his weapon from the back seat and finally end the matter. But we don’t have to worry about the squire, he’s receiving counselling Irish style. I notice his car parked outside the local pub on my way back to town. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

This whole business reminds me of what the mother of Boabdil (the last Moorish ruler of beautiful Granada) said to her son as he bitterly retreated across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, “why weep as a woman for what you could have kept as a man”.

Damien Matthews