‘The vet’s here and he’s 12,’ I called over the farmyard gate where the builder boyfriend was waiting with the injured cob.

I don’t think the lad heard me as he got out of his car. I hope the Irish ones don’t faint, I thought, because we had a nice gory cut for him.

The best you can hope for with horses is that your six-monthly freak injury is a near disaster.

So when the smaller of the two black and white cobs reared up into a tin roof it was cause for celebration that he nearly had his eye out.

You’ve only got two options with horses. Either they nearly bugger themselves up or they bugger themselves up. There is no magic third option where they don’t do anything to themselves as a sort of thank you for forcing you into hard labour and eating your money – ‘You’ve gone through €2,000 worth since you got here,’ the hay runner said to us as he unloaded another ten giant bales.

Darcy the thoroughbred and her companion pony are in a huge barn for the winter. The west Cork land is wet and slopes at wild angles so you let a spindly-legged racehorse loose on it during winter at your peril.

She and pony have one side of this barn and the builder boyfriend’s gypsy cobs have the other, with their door open giving them the run of the yard. Miss Darcy can’t be let loose in the same way because she would immediately find something invisible to impale herself on.

So the cobs wander about during the day, mooching over to say hi to Darcy whose affections they compete for. Jim, the biggest cob, has his nose out of joint currently because on the lorry journey here, Darcy and the smaller cob, Duey, were loaded side by side and got rather tight with each other. Whereas before, Darcy and Jim were an item, now Darcy is in league with Duey. This has made Jim very cross and when we’re not looking and he sees Duey standing next to Darcy, touching noses, he hurtles over and takes a bite or a kick at his behind.

The best you can hope for with horses is that your six-monthly freak injury is a near disaster

Darcy does not regard this as chivalry and has not switched her allegiance back to Jim, which only makes him worse.

And because it’s a sloping yard, when the cobs scrap, one of them sometimes loses his footing and gambols down the hill. But they’re hardy things, and they scramble back up.

On this occasion, Jim backed into Duey to hoof him away from Darcy, sending the smaller cob backwards. Duey then reared up precisely inside the barn doorway so that a piece of the corrugated roof edge sliced into his eyebrow like a scone cutter, taking a frilly chunk out of it, about 2mm above the eyeball.

‘That could have been worse,’ said the BB, nailing a piece of wood under the doorway gap after we had assessed our biannual visit from the horse prang fairy.

I phoned the local vets but they were all busy TB testing. Eventually, a practice further down the peninsula said they could send someone and the lad turned up 20 minutes later – incredible, given the rugged terrain. As he got out of his car, I called to the BB, by way of warning, ‘The vet’s 12!’ because whenever this has happened to us before it has ended badly. The young English vets are apt to be fainters.

Once, a pretty girl dropped down unconscious at the BB’s feet as his welly filled up with the blood pumping from Jim’s nostril. She was attempting to stitch it back together after he managed to slice it open on a piece of fencing wire he had worked loose in the night – one of his special projects.

This young Irish vet, called Padraig, surveyed the cob’s face calmly, then went to work sedating him, cleaning and shaving the wound, while talking to us about the TB situation. Almost all the neighbouring farms have been struck down.

‘I blame the English and their llamas,’ I said, holding Duey as his head drooped and his legs wobbled. ‘There are various theories, now,’ said Padraig, refusing diplomatically to slag off the Brits, which really wasn’t necessary on my account.

He injected anaesthetic, then got his scalpel out to cut away a chunk of flesh standing proud.

Duey was out of it and didn’t flinch. With the wound neatly trimmed and only spurting a minor geezer from a vein that would clot soon enough, young Padraig silver-sprayed it, then waited as the blood pooling round his feet slowed to a trickle. I cracked a few jokes and he managed a faint laugh. He looked only slightly queasy and moderately ashen-faced as we walked him back to his car.