Some of you may have read columnist Charlie Flindt’s recent piece in the yellow-covered weekly farming magazine - can’t say the name - where he tells a typically humorous story of a problem with his big toe.

Bizarrely, I too have had a problem with a big toe. So I’ll go toe-to-toe with Charlie and tell you my story.

The yard where we feed the meal to the cattle is Y shaped. Consequently, it can be a right old palaver to get the cattle out of the yard and back to the field if they are in annoying mood. Especially if you don’t have a stick and they know it. There’s always one to test your patience. One morning last September was a case in point. A big Charolais would go anywhere but out the gate and I hadn’t a stick.

Now I know some of you may be shocked by what happened next, but it’s crucial to the story of my big toe.

It’s not my finest hour but this has always been a warts-and-all column and I’ll dress it up so it doesn’t sound too bad.

I took aim with my Hoggs boot at the bit of the bullock’s anatomy which is suspended between his back legs.

But Johnny Sexton I am not and I missed. Instead, my boot crashed into the bullock’s hock with a terminal velocity of 100 miles per hour. There was no give in his hock. There would have been if I was on target. Instead of booting, eh, a bag. I was booting a bone.

My big, long-nailed toe ricocheted around inside my boot like a crash test dummy in slow motion. Unfazed, the bullock skipped gaily out the gate and I hobbled over to the trough to sit down. I’d be alright in a few minutes.

Put my foot in it

I wasn’t. And two months later I’m still not alright. After a few days, the big toe was bright red and hotter than the boiler in coal-fired Moneypoint.

“What on earth happened to you,” exclaimed the doctor. I didn’t tell her. She’d be shocked and besides, she thinks I’m a nice fellow. She might even ring the RSPCA and I could end up starring on the front page of the Meath Chronicle. I brushed it off as a farm accident.

I was put on an antibiotic and told to see a chiropodist, which I did. I didn’t tell her either, but she took out her tools, trimmed and dressed the nail, which had badly fragmented. And yes, it was painful.

“You may need to have the nail removed,” she sternly advised, “but come back at the end of the week.” Well, people will think there’s something going on between me and the chiropodist as I’ve been up the stairs to her that often.

Plough

But there’s a sequel to this little story. Recently I bought a Pöttinger plough from Seamus in Atkins, Birr and he remarked on my limp. He too had a similar experience, but had to have the nail off. “Was it painful?” I asked cautiously, as this could yet be my fate.

“Painful”, he questioned, “wicked, like a plough point being dropped on your toe, every day for a week.” That doesn’t sound great, but it was entirely my own fault.

The bullock became fit and was sent to the factory two weeks ago. With a carcase weight of 485kg and so a price cut to €3.30kg, he had the last laugh. And I got nothing for his unblemished testicles.

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