The spangled ground

Domenico, down at the garage, gruffly barked at me, You’ll kill yourself working that field with a cultivator.

I said, almost shamefaced, ‘But it’s done now. And we’re short of funds.

It happens, he says. You’d not be the first.

And not the last, I gamely replied in the great theatre of chat that is the garage’s legacy to democratic village life.