I am, at heart, a Hobbit. Other people’s inspirational quotations tend to come from the likes of the Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou and Francis of Assisi. My own is from Bilbo Baggins:

We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!

Factor into the above that I’m of a somewhat stocky build with a mop of unruly wavy hair, dodgy dress sense and big feet, and it becomes unavoidable. No matter how much I may fancy myself as a Dúnedain Ranger, or a Wizard, or a Shieldmaiden of Rohan, the truth is that if I have to take my slippers off to do it, I probably won’t.

All of which is leading up to me saying that I’m the least likely person I can think of to be climbing in a total stranger’s pantry window and falling head first into a Belfast sink.

It started perfectly normally.

I was taking the dogs for a walk. There’s a really nice, not-too-strenuous three mile circuit from my cottage which goes down through Adam’s yard, up the other side of the valley, skirts Hangar Wood and then onto the Firs … a high expanse of sandy heathland that used to be an area of coniferous woodland until the timber was needed during the First World War and the trees were felled. Nothing now remains of the firs except a few stumps and the name, which has persisted, in that oh-so-British way, even though the origins of it are remembered only in folk memory.

From The Firs, if you can keep your feet in the almost continuous south-westerly gale that blows across it, you can enjoy wonderful views of the whole of the Camber Valley including Upper and Nether Camber and the inappropriately named Bellevue Brick Works: a blot on the landscape, but an historically important blot on the landscape and therefore okay.

The path down then takes you back into Adverse Camber via what is prosaically but accurately known as ‘Back Lane’ – a single track road with a few ancient cottages dotted along it which developers have never been remotely interested in because it spends most of the year in the shadow of The Firs and is, in any case, reputed to be slipping downhill at a rate of a couple of centimetres every century due to the ground water seeping through the sandy soil.

I was being dragged bodily down Back Lane by the Boy Dog, with the Old Girl plodding in the rear, when we were brought to a halt outside the cottage of Old Ma Farrish.

Ivy Farrish, to give her her proper name, has been an incredibly old lady as long as anyone can remember, and has forsworn aging in the normally accepted fashion to concentrate instead on shrinking by one inch each year, presumably with the intention of eventually just vanishing. She currently stands about 4’10”, and every inch of it was now standing in front of me, propped up on two walking sticks, in apparent contravention of all the known laws of physics.

‘I’m locked out,’ she announced without any preamble. ‘You can climb in the pantry window. I’ve put the steps there for you.’ She pointed stage left with her chin.

I peered around the corner of the wall in the direction she was indicating, and there, sure enough, stood a pair of battered aluminium steps beneath a small frosted window which I judged to be barely big enough to admit one of my legs.

‘Are you SURE you’re locked out?’ I asked, a touch desperately.

‘You’re a bit big.’ She eyed me disapprovingly. ‘But you’ll fit.’

‘Should I check the door? You know, just in case?’

‘I’ll watch the dogs for you.’

Feeling I was getting nowhere, conversation-wise, I was about to say that I’d tie the dogs up, because Boy Dog was a bit rumbustious, and she couldn’t handle him, when she scuttled forward like a huge spider, and snatched the leads from me.

‘Off you go then. Hurry up.’

I waited with my heart in my mouth for Boy Dog to drag her unceremoniously from her feet and vanish down the lane with her in tow, but to my utter disbelief he just sat down at her side to wait patiently, as if that was a perfectly normal reaction to being hijacked.

Outnumbered, I mooched over to the steps and peered unenthusiastically up at the window. It was a small casement window, and it was part open. Aware of three pairs of eyes boring into my back, I climbed up the steps, lifted the casement stay and opened the window fully. Immediately I realized that, unfortunately, Old Ma Farrish was entirely correct. I could just squeeze through, head first.

With a glance back over my shoulder, and praying that there was no-one around with a camera, I wormed my upper body into the pantry, then paused to look around. It was grim, dark and a bit smelly. Directly below me was a huge Belfast sink – cracked and stained and looking as if it harboured the bacteria of decades. I twisted around and looked above me for something I could get hold of to drag myself inside, but there was nothing beyond a rickety curtain pole – so I had no choice but to wriggle in, try to land with my hands in the sink and  hope a helpfully creative thought occurred to me on the way down.

It didn’t. My hand slipped and I landed in the sink with all the grace of a half hundredweight of coal, my neck at the sort of angle only Gustav Klimt could have dreamed up and the rest of me sprawled  over the draining board and halfway up the wall.

‘Ouch.’

With extreme difficulty, and fearing that no part of me would ever work properly again, I dragged my shoulder out of the sink, straightened my neck very carefully and extracted the remainder of myself from the various bits of the pantry it had landed on.

Then, hobbling pathetically around the cottage and bleating at intervals as parts of my anatomy complained about their treatment, I went in search of a door. Eventually, I found one. Unfortunately, it was not only behind a large dresser, but also nailed shut. Convinced that I’d fallen into the grip of a nonagenarian maniac, I was about to burst into tears when I heard peremptory hammering from the other side of the house.

‘What’s keeping you?’

The back door was actually only five feet to the left of the pantry window, but in my mildly concussed state, I’d completely failed to notice it. When I finally managed to wrestle the lock open, I found the old lady and the two dogs standing outside staring balefully at me.

She handed the leads back to me and kibbled inside, slamming the door on me with the finally benediction:

‘I hope you didn’t break anything in here.’

I limped slowly home, my back stooped and my head tilted to one side to ease the pain in my neck; and as I went I fantasized about waking up after a dark and stormy night to discover that Old Ma Farrish and her cottage had simply slithered down the hill into a sinkhole never to be seen again. She, of course. would be perfectly fine, but the Underworld would never know what had hit it.

The Boy Dog has many excellent qualities. He is loyal, house-trained, easy to please and doesn’t (usually) wake me up when he crawls under the duvet at three o’clock in the morning. If pressed however, I would have to admit that he does have one tiny fault – and it’s one that’s endemic to Jack Russells.

He barks.

He barks at blowflies, passing crisp packets, dripping taps, the Old Lady Dog breaking wind in the next room, a butterfly landing on the window, a sheep sneezing three fields away – absolutely anything, and nothing, will trigger him. No extraneous sound is considered unworthy of his attention. The inevitable result of this, of course, is that whenever he starts barking, I just invite him to put a sock in it.

A couple of nights ago, when I was deeply immersed a rather lovely dream involving Daniel Day Lewis and a waterfall, the Boy Dog suddenly shot out of his basket, hurtled across my stomach and started barking dementedly at the window. Cross-eyed and startled, I threw a pillow at him and scored a pleasingly direct hit. However, apart from making him grunt, it had no discernible effect on him. He just carried right on barking. I made an uncoordinated grab for the alarm clock and tried to bring the wobbling, fuzzy numbers into focus. It was 4.15am.

‘It’s four fifteen in the morning,’ I bleated pathetically. ‘Do you HAVE to?’

The Old Girl raised her head to see what all the commotion was about, then went straight back to sleep. The Boy Dog barked some more.

‘Will you please, PLEASE be quiet!’

He paused for a moment, cocking his head to one side, in that distinctive way terriers have, as he considered my request. Then, to my relief, he nosed his way under the duvet and wrapped himself around my feet. As peace descended once more I settled back down under the covers to see if Daniel was by any chance still hanging around anywhere … but I never found out, because 10 minutes later, the Boy Dog started up again, this time from under the duvet. It gave the barking a sort of muffled, ghostly quality.

‘Do you want to go outside, boy?’ I asked him wearily, resigned to a broken night. ‘Is that what you’re trying to tell your stupid mum?’

At the sound of the magic words ‘go outside’, he shot from under the covers and stood quivering at the bedroom door, ready to rip things limb from limb. Boy Dog contra mundi, – or at least Boy Dog contra anything that happened to be in the garden, outside the gate or anywhere within earshot.

With an effort, I got up, pulled on my dressing gown and slippers and stumbled downstairs, with him dancing around my feet like a dog who’s just been told that sausages are on the menu. My plan was to  let him run around the garden several times at great speed – as is his wont – then haul him back indoors and go back upstairs to bed to sleep for a couple more hours. It was an excellent plan as far as it went, but didn’t take into account the cow outside the patio windows, eating my gazanias.

As it stood there on the crazing paving, chewing contentedly on the half-hardy annuals , I stared at it blankly, trying to cajole my still half-asleep brain into accepting what my eyes were seeing. Boy Dog, who was directly behind me, was MUCH faster off the mark. Screaming like a banshee, he hurled himself at the plate glass, wild-eyed and slavering, and a few seconds later he was joined by the Old Girl who’d woken up to find herself alone and come down to see what she was missing. When it became obvious to them that even acting in unison they couldn’t smash their way through the window, they decided that burrowing under it was the way forward – and that was when I decided they needed to be shut up out of harm’s way, and earshot, in an upstairs room.

With the barking reduced to a level that permitted coherent thought, I opened the back door and examined the problem in the garden more closely. A second cow was ripping up mouthfuls of crocosmias, a third was in my wildflower patch, a fourth had found my sunflowers … and after that I couldn’t bear to look, but a rough head count told me that there were approximately eight cows and calves in the back garden, all laying waste to the greenery. Then, as I watched, a hawthorn bush over on the field boundary began thrashing around in exactly the way that hawthorn bushes don’t, and the next moment, another cow ambled into the garden, dragging a mass of brambles and goosegrass with it.

I bolted for the sitting room and rang the farm. It rang and rang and rang  and no-one answered. I checked the clock. It was almost 5.00am. So much, I thought, for the old canard about farmers being early risers. I dialled again. Same result.

Wandering around the house with the handset, redialling over and over again, I opened the front door out of curiosity and was startled to find a large black cow directly outside, gazing back at me in mild surprise. I looked around. She was not alone. There were another six cows in the front garden.

I dialled the farm’s number again and this time just let it ring, determined to irritate Maggie into picking up. My garden was disappearing down her cows’ throats and she could bloody well wake up was my attitude.

Forty minutes after I first started trying, it was Alec’s voice that finally answered. I didn’t mess around  with courtesies.

‘My garden is full of cows.’

There was silence for a moment, then he said: ‘Your garden is full of cows?’

‘Yes. They’re coming through the back fence.’

‘Oh. Right. I’ll be right there.’

Nothing appeared to happen for a long time after that, and I cynically wondered if they were having a spot of breakfast before them came along … but then I spotted a yellow bucket being waved around in the hole in the hedge. It was being brandished by Alec, who was trying to entice the animals back out the way they came in, by means of a bucket full of calf nuts. My jaw dropped. The nearest cow edged closer, nose out … but then skittered off, crashing through my lavender bed as she went off in search of something better. I threw open the back door again in order to remonstrate with him, only to meet Maggie appearing around the corner of the house brandishing a broom. At the same time, the remaining stock in the field had got wind of the fact that there was a Man with Calf Nuts in their midst, and had started to gravitate towards him – slowly at first, but picking up speed as it became a race to see who could get there first.

‘Alec!’, she bellowed. ‘There are another half dozen of the buggers around the front … go and get Jimmy out of bed, we’ll have to herd them out ….’

She looked at me sheepishly.

‘Sorry. They should have been moved to another field by now, but we’re behind with the silaging because of the weather …’

‘Can’t be helped.’ It seemed churlish to complain about a few mangled and munched plants, a massacred rockery, a lawn like a ploughed field, a wrecked back fence, and several yards of splintered path edging. ‘No serious damage done.’

‘We’ll round them up and fix the fence.’

‘That’s fine Maggie. No worries. These things happen.’

A quarter of an hour later, the front gate closed on the last retreating cow backside and normality was restored.

It was six forty-five am. Upstairs, the dogs were still barking hysterically. I surveyed the mangled remains of my garden and decided that there was really only one thing that would make it all better again.

A  nice, hot, cup of tea.

Today, I met a man who doesn’t exist.

‘That’s one for the diary,’ I told myself as I watched him unloading logs into my lean-to shed, and thought he was pretty chunkily built for a wraith.

It all started when the mid-summer weather (leaden skies, wind and rain) reminded me that I should really be giving some thought to the coming winter and laying in oil, coal and wood for the boiler and the fire. So I wandered down the road to Joey and Mrs Fitt at ‘Conifers’, who always had a mountain of very precisely stacked firewood around the sheltered side of their house.

Joey was out, somewhat to my relief (perfectly nice man, but talks a lot, most about his tomatoes), but Mrs Fitt was in her kitchen cooking up chutney. I knew she was chutney making before I got anywhere near the back door because the smell of vinegar and spices drifting from the windows were starting to eat into the mucus membranes of my nose as I came through the gate.

Mrs Fitt presumably has a first name, but I have no idea what it is, because everyone, including husband Joey, just calls her Mrs Fitt.  She’s a friendly soul: a bit world-weary and frayed around the edges after years spent caring for her husband and their five hulking sons, but always helpful and welcoming.

‘Firewood? You need Adam. He’ll see you right.’

‘That’s great. Where do I find him?’

‘Lower Slaughter.’ She saw the look on my face and allowed herself the ghost of a smile. ‘Out of the village, up the hill, then take the unmarked lane on the left. It’s right down in the valley. I’d walk if I was you.’

‘Isn’t he on the ‘phone?’

‘No, he isn’t … And make sure you have some cash. He doesn’t take cheques.’ She turned her attention back to the bubbling pan on the hob for a long moment, then added mysteriously, ‘He doesn’t give receipts, either.’

Lower Slaughter, once I’d found the unmarked lane and slithered down the hill to the bottom of the wooded valley, turned out to be a picturesque dump of a place with tumbledown outhouses, collapsing fences, a weed-choked cobbled courtyard and a sturdily built farmhouse with thick walls and a roof that looked to be only just the right side of weatherproof. Everywhere you looked there was rusting farm machinery festooned in bedstraw, empty zinc buckets dumped in the long grass and tractor tyres apparently discarded where they fell which provided snug retreats for the chickens and geese that were apparently roaming at will. The tiny front garden of the house was a forest of rotting corrugated iron and barbed wire.

Feeling a bit uncomfortable and fish-out-of-waterish, I called out nervously, ‘Hello? Anyone home?’

There was no response. I tried again, with the same result.

Across the courtyard, through a gate that was hanging on by one hinge, I saw that the front door of the house was ajar, Cautiously, and keeping a wary eye on the geese, I eased the gate to one side and gently pushed the door open.

‘Hello? Adam? Are you home?’

Nothing. The interior of the house was gloomy.The small windows, designed to keep cold out and heat in, allowed very little light into the room, but the back door was open wide and I could just about make out an ancient cooking range on one wall, the tall bulk of a massive welsh dresser on another and a white wood table in the centre laden with pots, pans, crockery and a cat: a huge ginger cat which was curled up in the fruit bowl and glaring at me balefully.

I tried one more time.

‘Adam?!’

To my relief, there was an answering hail from the back garden.

I briefly debated with myself whether it was better to retrace my steps and go around the outside of the house or simply cross the gloomy room to the back door; but remembering the obstacle course in the front garden, I voted for the latter option and headed for the open door, praying that the cat didn’t smell the dogs on my clothes and decide to exact revenge on me on behalf of all cat-kind. It watched me with  a decidedly malevolent gleam in its amber eyes, but I made it to the door unmolested and escaped into the back garden.

What I saw there stopped me in my tracks.

After the war zone at the front of the house, what lay behind was simply unbelievable. Before me was laid out, with mathematical precision, an immaculately cared for and thriving fruit and vegetable garden. Green beans on bamboo frames ran the length of the plot; potatoes, carrots, peas and much else besides burgeoned in the weed-free beds at the front, in the middle were raised beds of salads and herbs and I could just make out raspberries and loganberries ripening in the fruit cages at the back.

And in the midst of it all stood a sturdy, weather beaten man in old but clean tweeds and wellington boots. His dark curly hair was greying, but he could have been anything between forty and sixty.

‘Yes petal?’

I found my voice. ‘Mrs Fitt said you could sell me some logs.’

‘I certainly can. You’re the lassie from Tigh-na-Mara, aren’t you?’ He grinned. ‘The house by the sea.’

‘Also known as Puddle Cottage.’ A bit non-plussed I smiled ruefully back at him as he stumped towards me in his boots, holding out his hand in greeting.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘I’m Adam. The logs are around the side.’

They were in a clearing in the woods, in an open-fronted barn and neatly arranged in order of age: the green logs on the right and the seasoned on the left.

We agreed a price for a trailer load of seasoned logs, money changed hands and no receipt was offered. He promised to bring them up to me in a couple of hours, and indicated a pile of junk by the side of the barn which, on closer inspection, proved to be the oldest tractor I’d ever seen in my life. Walking me back through the house he waved me on my way up the hill and I headed for home feeling as if I was emerging from an alternate universe.

Needless to say, I wasted no time in pumping Maggie for information about him.

‘Adam?’ she said, inspecting the fruitcake for mould before offering it to me. ‘Adam is the man who isn’t there.’

‘Eh?’ I watched her putting the kettle on the hob and felt my brow furrowing. My brow furrowed a lot when I was talking to Maggie, I found. ‘What do you mean?’

‘That farm – if you can call it a farm – has been in his family for generations. His parents were living off the grid before the term was even invented. When Adam was born, they didn’t register his birth. As far as anyone knows, H M Government is totally unaware he even exists. He doesn’t pay taxes, claim benefits, fall ill or vote. He lives on what his parents left him and what he makes from selling logs, garden produce and odd-jobbing. Anything you want doing, Adam’s your man.’

‘And nobody’s ever ratted on him?’

‘He’s our secret. We look after Adam. And Adam looks after us. ‘

‘For cash only.’

‘Precisely. But a word of warning – that psychotic cat of his thinks it’s a rottweiler. If you go in the house alone when he isn’t there, you’re spaghetti.’

I nonchalantly picked a bit of mould she’d missed from my slice of cake, and examined it closely on the end of my finger. ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said casually, feeling the sweat trickling down the back of my neck. ‘If I’m ever in the house alone with it.’

(Image based on a photograph of an abandoned tractor in Northumberland courtesy of Swalophoto on Flickr, under a Creative Commons Licence.)

‘Do you know your bull is eating my rosa rugosa?’ I said to Maggie-the-Farmer across her kitchen table, after chasing Bovine Boris off my front hedge yet again.

She smirked irritatingly over the piece of beef she was wrapping and labelling. ‘You hum it and I’ll play it.’

‘Oh har-bloody-har …’

‘But he’s not my bull. He’s Ronald Benson’s bull. I just borrow him for the girls.’

‘Ronald or the bull?’

She raised a silently disapproving eyebrow and pushed the plate of rock cakes across to me. ‘Just biff him on the nose. He’ll soon get the message …’

The first time I had the questionable pleasure of making Bovine Boris’s acquaintance I was outside my front gate dragging goosegrass out of the rose hedging and wondering if I could eat it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a huge something lumbering down the lane towards me, and when I turned my head to look properly I found myself eye-to-nostril with the most enormous brown and white bull I had ever seen in my entire life. It was as wide as it was tall and you could have eaten a meal off its massively broad forehead.

I peered carefully past it up the lane, looking for an accompanying human, but could neither see nor hear anyone; which is when I started to back, v-e-r-y carefully, towards my gate. Once safely inside the house, I grabbed the ‘phone and rang Maggie.

‘There’s a bull. Outside my gate. What do I do?’ I wailed.

‘Introduce yourself,’  she replied – rather unhelpfully, I felt. ‘That’s Boris. He likes having his nose scratched.’

‘There’s no-one with him.’

‘No. We just let him out and he finds his own way home. He’s harmless. Big dafty, really … especially when he’s been in with the girls.’

Since then, I’ve got used to seeing Boris wandering around, but his fondness for my roses is threatening our budding inter-species understanding. The first time he started munching on them, I tried a few ineffectual ‘Shoo’ noises. The next time, I was braver and actually left the safety of my garden and laid hands on him in an attempt to push him away. I’d have had more luck shoving a pile of bricks – only a pile of bricks wouldn’t have stepped on my foot.

And so it was that I limped up to Maggie and found her at her kitchen table, along with Alec, her farmhand, surrounded by chunks of recently butchered beef and mountains of polythene bags.

‘Biff him on the nose? Is ‘biff’ a farming term, then?’

Alec snorted, reaching for another bag. ‘They have very sensitive noses. Maggie’s right. He’ll get the message.’

‘And he won’t charge at me or anything? Only in a straight contest between Boris and my hedge, I know who’d win.’

‘Bulls are very placid creatures,’ Maggie explain patiently. ‘Not to mention lazy. He’ll just look reproachful and go home.’ At that, she dumped a large bag of beef offcuts in front of me. ‘Here. Put that in your freezer. There’s plenty to go round.’

‘Ooh gosh, how lovely. Are you sure?’ ‘Of course. If you ever grow anything in that God-forsaken wilderness you call a garden, you can bring me your firstborn.’

‘In that case, thank you very much.’ I clutched the package gratefully to my bosom, suddenly feeling much more kindly disposed towards country living, and was about to head back to the cottage when I remembered that the last time I’d been at the farm, the local vet had been there, tending to one of Maggie’s cosseted and much-loved milkers. Bluebell, I was told, had ‘lost another quarter’.

‘By the way,’ I asked, ‘How’s Bluebell?’

Maggie and Alec looked up at me with identical crooked smiles on their faces, and then their eyes came to rest on the meat in my arms. ‘She’ll make lovely burgers,’  said Maggie, consolingly.