Any old videotapes? The request came on the phone. The tapes were not for viewing, but for good farming reasons. This was explained in patient detail for the uncomprehending one. You know those huge black rolls of plastic you see in the fields now? Yes. Well, they are expensive enough but a great help to the farmer, as he can keep some of his silage rolled up in them in this field and that field, and near the house itself, according to where the animals are at any time. Very practical and labour-saving. But there is one big snag. Snails get in among the rolls, and birds soon get to know this. So they peck and grub around the heap on the lookout for the snails. Naturally they tear holes in the plastic and thus the silage can seep out, or rather its juices. God knows what creatures could follow in. Anyway, to keep the birds away at least one known farmer has constructed a sort of line you hang out the washing on. But between the two poles, just over the rolled-up piles of silage, he stretches a line of videotape film.
Loose and flapping, you ask? No, in fact quite taut, but it still moves, and probably glitters, and may even make an unusual noise and thus additionally add to the menace - as the birds see it. So some videotapes were to hand and we'll hear word about their success or otherwise in due course.
This was on a trip into Co Kildare, and you wonder how it is possible that the Naas road could for so long remain the atrocity that it is. Bump, bump, weave here, weave there, and most of the time pursued by monsters whose drivers at times seem determined to carry out a cruelty-to-private-motorists campaign. They loom up behind you so close that if, heaven forfend, your motor died or even checked, you would be flat as a pancake on the road. And how is it that the first couple of hundred yards of the road to Blessington from Lawlor's Hotel in Naas are surely the most pockmarked in the country? It's not great at all times until you reach Blessington, but viable. Then, of course, you come onto the luxury of a Tour de France stretch on the way back to Dublin.
Anyway, must take a good look at any other farm that has its piles of black plastic rolls, and see if this device is universal or even common.