‘Achoo!’ was the first thing the girl sitting next to me on the plane said as I took my seat beside her. She groaned and blew her nose, coughed, spluttered, and apologised. ‘It’s hay fever, honestly,’ she said. She was in the window seat, I was in the middle. The older lady beside me in the aisle seat grimaced.

‘Please, don’t worry,’ I said to the sneezing girl. ‘I’m so over it. I couldn’t care less if it’s hay fever or if it’s Covid.’

She smiled, fumbled, and offered me a Strepsil, that well-known cure for the effects of pollen. I liked her immediately – something about her fidgety energy, her tousled short hair – so I took a cough sweet even though I don’t like them. She popped it out of its blister pack and it flew down between the sticky budget airline seat arms.

I poked my hand down, retrieved it from an absolutely filthy little nook and put it in my mouth. She looked impressed. ‘I am so past all of it, I just couldn’t care less about anything,’ I said. She laughed, nodded frantically.

She was Irish, a nurse. We began chattering and before the pilot had taxied to the runway we were firm friends. She agreed with me wanting to move to West Cork. She was going back there to help her parents paint a post and rail fence. But she loved London, working in a busy teaching hospital. She had kept her clinic open throughout lockdown. We had a grand meeting of minds as we told each other how we felt about people who hid away and were scared. ‘When your number’s up…’ I said, stopping myself because we were on a plane, after all.

She said: ‘Right!’ Then: ‘And anyway, you’ve had all your vaccinations, haven’t you?’

Oh dear. If I told her the truth, this new friendship would be over and it was going to be a very long 50-minute flight. I can’t lie. I just won’t do it. So in desperation I deployed sarcasm.

‘Hundreds of them!’ I said, making a silly face. ‘And I’ve had Covid, like, a million times!’

Look, if she chose not to see that as sarcasm what could I do?

‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘Me too. Doesn’t it drive you crazy when your unvaccinated friends get it once and recover really easily?  You just wish they’d get really ill, don’t you?’

Feeling a tad shocked but having to go along with it, I said: ‘Gosh, those people…eh! It’s nuts!’ Would she work me out? Would she see through me, realise I was one of them? I hoped not. I really liked this girl.

She was horsey. She saw the picture of me riding Gracie on the screensaver of the phone on my lap. She said she grew up hunting with the Duhallow, dreamed of getting back into riding. She was one of those Irish lefties, by which I mean a person with some political affiliation to left-wing causes, while thinking nothing of saying how great hunting was.

The hour flew by and as we were queuing in the aisles to get off the plane into the perfect blue sky of a Cork summer evening she said, so adorably: ‘Thanks for all the lovely chat!’ I even like lefties here, I thought.

There were three places to view: the ruined farmhouse with 20 acres the builder boyfriend said was the best option, a second farm near that, and a big Georgian pile we might run as a B&B but which only had a small parcel of land that would be tight with four horses.

I climbed the gate of the wrecked farm early and took one look at the derelict house, and the fields full of cows where my trainers sank two feet into the rock-hard divots bearing testimony to how sodden the land had been all winter, and I emailed the agent to tell him not to come.

After meeting me at the next farmhouse, which was so small I dismissed it in seconds, he handed me the key to the Georgian pile and told me to hide it under a pot, or something, when I was done. He was tired of showing it to people, he said. An hour later, as I was standing mesmerised in the sun beside this beautiful old house on a sweeping driveway with a broken fountain, he pulled up beside me in his car, having thought better of it. I said: ‘Isn’t she something?’ He laughed: ‘Oh, I see what you’re doing, very funny.’

‘No, I mean it.’ We’ve made offers on so many places and had them rejected, including the dream farm in the valley, that I tried not to attach any emotion to this one.