Thank god for Rosie, at 16 she still goes by the affectionate family nickname of Rosie the Nun

9am and my youngest sister, who is due to collect my mother from Cork airport at three this afternoon, should be well past her point of departure from Sligo by now.

But instead she is in a shed, with a stricken sheep. And panicking to me on the phone; the sheep has a birthing harness and falling-out womb.

Her four unsettled offspring are with her but her husband is absent, “on the fecking ski slopes in Germany, of all the places he could be”.