In the pitch dark, we stormed from the house to the pick-up truck and screeched out of our farmyard with me shouting: ‘Come on! This is our only chance! If we don’t get there now we’re done for!’

‘They won’t sell to us because we’re English. It’s like those stories you hear about idiots who move to Wales’

It was nearly 10 p.m. and I had just scored something on the phone so elusive on this remote hillside that I was physically itching from the desperation of trying to get it. The dealer concerned had answered his phone after I had rung him repeatedly, on the hour every hour, like a stalker.

When it came to it, I burst into tears. ‘I’m desperate,’ I sobbed. ‘Please help me.’

There was a pause before his tone changed and he said in a soft west Cork brogue: ‘Don’t be desperate.’ ‘So you’ll help me?’ I blubbed, pacing up and down the kitchen. And the man laughed and said: ‘Come over now and I’ll sort you out.’

I shouted ‘Get in the truck!’ at the builder boyfriend, who was pottering about fixing a draft excluder to the front door.

‘What? Now? It’s pitch black outside. How are we going to load it?’

‘I don’t care how we load it. I’ve got him to agree to sell us some and if we don’t go now he might change his mind.’ I was yelling, full-on hysterical.

I ran out to the yard so the BB had to push his boots on and follow me, then agree to drive me down the lane.

It turned out that the farmer with the biggest consignment of hay in Cork, if not Ireland, if not Europe, lived 20 seconds down the hillside. I had been ringing him for weeks, and he had been promising to deliver. And when he didn’t, every other hay man for miles had pointed me back to him. He was the man. No one else had supplies like him.

We had driven 20 miles to a guy with some dried-up old first cut. We bought a few bales of that to keep us going, at an eye- watering price. But we needed the good stuff.

The thoroughbred Darcy was getting pinch-faced and sour. She was not happy. Not happy at all. She was starting to flick round and kick one back leg at us when we attempted to serve her the old hay each morning. I was having to fling it into the barn and then run to get away from her before her hind leg or her teeth came at me.

‘This is what happens, isn’t it?’ I howled at the BB, after days of ringing the hay lord to no avail. ‘They won’t sell to us because we’re English. It’s like those horror stories you hear about idiots who move to Wales. The locals won’t deal with them. Maybe it’s the same here.’

The BB assured me I was wrong. Our neighbour, a beef farmer, had told him he couldn’t get a delivery either. It had been a bad harvest.

Everyone was crazy for hay and the cattle farmers came first, because they were ordering thousands of bales.

But I was inconsolable. Every time I saw a wobbly high hay lorry clattering down the road I threatened to run out of the house and throw myself in front of it; lie down in the road and refuse to move until they sold me some.

I upped my order, telling the kingpin of forage I would buy thousands of euros worth. But still he didn’t come.

Ultimately, I had to pull the old female trick. As soon as he heard me crying he said I could come round straight away. He sounded genuinely sorry. He explained he had not delivered to us only because he had been hay-running the length and breadth of Ireland.

We drove down the hill and there, in a valley, was the biggest barn full of hay I have ever seen. This barn was the size of an airport terminal. It was stacked to what seemed like a hundred feet up with square bales and round bales.

The hay runner came out with a torch on his head and walked me round his supplies. He pulled handfuls out so I could sniff the product. He leaned on a tower of bales, held a cat which he stroked philosophically, and sized me up as I made my choice.

I picked a recent vintage, good and coarse with a bit of green in it, and he let us load one bale onto the back of the truck to tide us over. He and the BB had a chat about farming, cars, man stuff.

A few days later, as promised, he arrived in his lorry piled high with our hay. ‘Now we are accepted,’ I thought, as I watched the joyous unloading of this most symbolic cargo.