Hay is nasty stuff. Anyone who harbours romantic notions of making love among the haystacks has clearly not spent a lot of time in close, physical proximity to the evil entity.
En masse, it is heavy, unpredictable, and hard to contain. Unless it has been perfectly and tightly baled, it will slither and weave and burst its way out of its twine constraints, to overflow in an unruly unravelling of spiky spread, covering an area one wouldn’t have believed possible from such a small bale.
A thin layer of it is as slippery and treacherous as tiny ball-bearings on ice (especially on wooden stairs).
Its constituent parts are prickly, scratchy, and as clingy as a kitten’s claws. Its stinging dust gets everywhere – in your throat, your eyes, your clothes, even your dreams. It sticks to sweaty skin like glitter to glue, and leaves your arms smarting with a caustic rash and myriad bitty cuts.
All in all, a day spent with hay is not a very nice day.
At the end of our sweat-and-splinter exertions, I sat on the doorstep for an hour, watching the rain and picking minute pieces of the dastardly stuff out of our t-shirts, jeans, socks, knickers, and the linings of our boots. Hay does not ‘wash out’ in a machine. It merely redistributes itself more widely, and embeds itself more thoroughly in the fibres of your clothes.
Which I suppose might explain why Florian, the rufty-tufty country boy with lots of hay-related experience, tied his sun-bleached dreadlocks in a fetching knot on top of his head, stripped down to nothing but his shorts, and did all of his unloading and hefting with an almost bare (and impressively fit, toned and evenly-tanned) body and bare feet. The day was not all bad.
I am certainly beginning to think that Florian has been sent by the fairies to help us. We only have to think about finding some small bales of hay for the winter, and getting another dog to keep Max company, and maybe finding someone to help us patch up the roof where a few tiles have come adrift in the storms, and suddenly there he is, on our doorstep, offering everything we want.
I am tempted to think of some other totally random thing to wish for, just to see if Florian turns up with it out of the blue. Even if I believe in fairies, the scientist in me will not go away. A hypothesis simply has to be tested.
