“Where are you off to looking so shifty?”

IT is time to buy our Christmas tree.

Only this year my husband doesn’t want to buy one, he wants to forage for one. The last time he did such a thing was on Dec 13, 1992, in the third trimester of my third pregnancy, when he disappeared up into the Wicklow mountains with a friend, returning four hours later with tales of a pint in Johnny Fox’s pub and an exhausted-looking twig. I placed the twig at the bottom of the garden and dispatched him to the nearest garden centre. At which point my waters broke.

On the subject of foraging, I’ve not heard a peep out of him since.