Liz Kavanagh, columnist with the Farmers' Journal for over twenty years, is really Cork woman Mary Lynch. In this volume of her collected writings she details the joys and desperations of life on a farm, from husband Eoin's PST (pre-silage tension) to tussles with the Government to the trials and tribulations of bringing up five growing boys. Running in chronological order from January through to December, she tells the tale of a year in her life, from the serious to the wacky. I've always enjoyed earthiness of this sort, ever since the magical day some years ago when I heard on the radio a county councillor somewhere in the midlands, in the midst of a discussion on bringing in artificial insemination, say that he was objecting on behalf of the bull.
Vincent Banville