There is no avoiding the fact that livestock farms are intrinsically smelly places. The farm that adjoins our property is no different; worse, it has been allowed to deteriorate into a barely useable piece of slurry.

The owner is an absentee-farmer who spends the majority of his time in Brasil. He appears to have left the responsibility of running the place to a farm manager who is incapable of organizing a piss-up in a brewery. And he, the farm manager, has surrounded himself with workers that make him look like a rocket scientist. I guess it is all a matter of perception; hire 'dumb' and 'dumber' and you are bound to appear intelligent!

This is the sight that met us on one of our previous visits:

I experienced a feeling of 'mild-rage' when I first set eyes on this. I've never had that emotion about property before. Let's be honest, I've never owned any property before, so I've never felt the need to get worked up about something like this. Apparently one of the idiot farmhands had nudged the wall with his tractor whilst trying to clear the effluent on the other side. This was the result!

I am, nevertheless, a firm believer in the old adage that, 'Every cloud has a silver lining', and I always work hard to try to spot it. And spot it I did. Look at that picture again and take a closer look at the grass on 'my-side-of-the-fence' (wall, if you prefer). Where there should have been an overgrown jungle, inhabited by various species of ferocious wild animal, there was only close-cropped grass. Scraggly, I admit, with a neatly marked 'path' which I assume was made by the farmworkers wandering down to the river through MY property, but cropped grass all the same!

Sheep!

The little blighters had wandered across, because nobody told them they couldn't, and proceeded to help me out with the overgrowth problem. Lovely little lambs!

But the stench was pretty unbearable, and when the wind blew in the wrong direction I could only imagine how unpleasant it would be to try to sit out on our patio and sip our Sangria's at sunset. Something would have to be done about this situation. Probably another trip to City Hall to get a restraining order on an absentee landlord.

And what hope of us getting that enforced?

Little did we know that a solution was about to present itself without any help or encouragement from us ...