Hygiene, is it? Well, there was a time when we weren't too much bothered. For example: the friend who went for the first time to a boarding house based on a big farm in north Antrim. He had just sat down to the lunch table and was addressing his soup when the eldest, grey-moustached member of the family came in and asked urgently would Mr A. kindly come outside to give a hand. He went, wondering how he could be useful around a farm. When he came back halfan-hour later, he told the rest of the table that his job had been to hold hard onto a rope while a cow had a difficult calving. But it was a success.
In the same house, after the butter was made, the churn was left open, with a tin mug hooked onto the edge, from which everyone was invited to get a good drink of buttermilk as they came in from the yard, while it lasted. The kitchen was alive with flies, at least half of them still struggling on the long sticky fly-catching paper that hung around the room. Turnips were staple vegetables and just outside the kitchen door stood the turnip slicer. It was better, late in the year, when the considerable orchard was picked and the apples laid out on the floor of the barn. You could help yourself.
When the harvest was in, there was always a Harvest Home party, and people who had been visitors during the spring and the summer often came back for the weekend in October or whenever. The sister of the man who helped with the cow was the pianist, when possible. Plenty of tea and oatcakes and cold ham and other suitable food laid out.
Down in a small room off the big kitchen there were a few bottles for the men - some of whom protested mildly at missing the good singing upstairs, but usually consented in the end. The farm was not so very far from Bushmills.
You could get lovely, life-enhancing days in that part of the North. As was quoted here more than once, Hugh Shear man's dictum in his book Ulster holds for many visitors: "A powerful, astringent presence seems to brood over a great area of north Antrim. . .When I read that a certain individual, a bishop, claimed to have seen great angels in north Antrim, I did not feel at all inclined to question it".