Mother Nature knows best when it comes to creating a summer festival

I MAY be the only homeowner in Ireland who doesn’t have custody of their own garden.

I do have visiting rights, but that’s about it. It’s owned, lock, stock and wheelbarrow, by my next door neighbour, Mary Lynders, AKA Mother Nature.

She knew it 40 years before we bought the house to which it’s attached and she could make flowers grow on the dark side of the moon. She tested me out in the beginning and me not knowing a chrysanthemum from a sunflower established, in her mind, that I was good only for weeding. Then she found I had thrown away bulbs belonging to a unique brand of carnation — the ones currently filling the garden with the most wonderful perfume — and demoted me. I was to confine myself to picking snails off the plants and throwing them over the fence into a patch of waste ground.

As a result, I am the best snail-gatherer in Ireland. (Sad claims to fame, these, but better than nothing.) Any spare minute I have, you’ll find me going through the flower beds, ignoring what I’m certain are weeds and picking snails big and small off the plants until I have 10 or 12 in each hand. Remarkably varied, snails are, in size and style of abode, and once they get over the initial shock of being lifted, they crawl (or slither) around your palm quite contendedly.

I’ve been thinking I should go into the snail business. Not producing them to end up as rubbery bits of nothing in a garlicky sauce, but for facials. It’s the new thing. Research shows that the shiny trail left by snails is made up of cells which have a remarkably positive effect on human skin. It’s healing, it stimulates collagen and makes your skin feel much more silky and rejuvenated than does a normal facial. Not that I’ve ever had a normal facial, but the palms of my hands are a joy to stroke because snails have done their work there, free, gratis and for nothing. If any beautician — sorry, aesthetician — is planning to go into snail facials, I’m their supplier. All the snail facial customers have to do is lie on a couch while five snails do their work, with the aesthetician pulling them off (“slllurp”) when they threaten to get into the hair or ears and replace them in an as-yet untouched facial zone.

I haven’t raised this entrepreneurial possibility with Mrs Lynders, because I learned about the snail facials only in the last fortnight and you wouldn’t want to raise such an irrelevancy with Mother Nature when she’s headed into her annual sale. This sale makes one of those summer festivals look like a small family picnic. For weeks beforehand, marquees and pop-up shops that look like the business end of an over-dressed sea monster are hauled into place on her land, and then a year’s worth of donations are unloaded from piled crates, stuffed sheds and arriving vans. Furniture in one area. Kitchen implements, crockery and glass in another. Books by the million along with electronic devices in a third. Clothing and children’s toys in other places.

“This thing started 20 years ago with two tables,” one volunteer told me before the weekend. “And look at it now.”

I didn’t have time to look at it now, because my car was in the way of a truck ready to unload further goodies. I hurled my pathetic contribution into his hands.

“The hell is this?” he asked, turning it over.

“It’s a yoke for making two cakes with deep wells at the top to put stuff in.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“I don’t know what sort of stuff. I bought it when I still thought I’d get around to learning how to bake. It’s never been used.”

I ran and removed my car. That’s the curious thing about Mary Lynders. She could be down the other end of the enterprise in her floral dress and apron, cigarette hanging from her lip (boy, is James Reilly going to have opposition from her to his plans to ban smoking in public places) but everybody involved in her sale behaves as if she was everywhere and had more than one set of eyes in the back of her head. She doesn’t have to say a cross word, although the grapevine says she surely can say several cross words with lively decorations thrown in. Everybody imagines the cross word and sets out to prevent it.

THIS woman is an interesting case study in a kind of leadership we’ve almost lost. She is inspiring without being sentimental. The right thing must be done, full stop. Half the people volunteering this year haven’t a clue about the charity that got her going 20 years ago. They know the target sum for the three days. They know the money goes straight to — they think — an orphanage in Albania run by nuns. They know several container lorries will follow the money with furniture and clothing selected throughout the year as being suited to the charity’s needs. But the cause itself is not why they’re there. They’re there, slaving in sweat-darkened T-shirts and gulping from water bottles, because a born leader expects them to be there.

“I truly hate this weekend,” one frazzled man told me, “but I always end up glad I did it. I think.”

Another volunteer admitted to having slept in the previous morning but enjoined me not to tell Mrs Lynders, who might otherwise not have noticed. He, along with all the others, was there at dawn this morning, bringing out and hanging up clothes not put on sale the earlier two days, and hoisting cartons of biscuits and detergent handed over to her in bulk by manufacturers. She will have been pricing goods, giving out that the jackets are too closely lined up with each other, overseeing the books coming out of cartons that then get flattened and tied together for the recycling centre.

Everything has been thought through in advance. The verges of the road are pock-marked with yellow no parking cones, cord running between them to prevent cars ignoring them. Parking is organised by uniformed wardens.

Former detectives from An Garda Siochána carry heavy items out where potential purchasers can get a better view of them while, all quiet and subtle-like, they keep an eye on visitors to the sale who might take a fancy to one of the pricier, easy-to-secrete items and might take those items away with them without having parted with cash. It happens.

Mary Lynders feeds her volunteers like fightin’ cocks and directs them like a five-star general. They jump to it, whether they’re 11 and female or 86 and male. Tomorrow, they’ll begin deflating the pop-ups and folding the tents and telling weekend war stories.

Maybe next week I’ll raise the snail facials issue with her. Or then again, maybe not...