Bertie Neely told his son Karl recently that he was thinking about buying a new digger. New diggers aren't cheap.
Karl was alarmed. Swatragh men can be direct, and Karl Neely is a Swatragh man. "How long exactly are you planning on living?" Karl asked his father.
It was actually a fair question. Bertie Neely is 81 years old.
But there is no reason why Bertie Neely shouldn't be thinking about investing in new capital. Compared to another man in Swatragh, he's only a whippersnapper.
Johnny McGuigan is 88 years old and he's still doing a six-day week.
It's a warm Friday afternoon and I have driven to Swatragh to meet Johnny. I know he comes to the Country Café every day for his lunch.
My source has informed me that he'll arrive anytime between 1pm and 2pm. I'm in position at 1.15pm. At 1.36pm, Johnny enters the café with his faithful sidekick, Jamie Doherty (16).
Johnny doesn't know I'm coming. This is guerrilla journalism. This is an ambush. I know there is no way this innately shy man would ever agree to an interview so I don't give him any choice in the matter.
I tell Johnny it's for the greater good – because it is. People should know about men like Johnny McGuigan.
When Johnny McGuigan 'retired' at 65-years-of-age he forgot to stop. After working as a mechanic for his brother Tommy he started on his own.
"Back then I could have been working until maybe eight or nine o'clock at night. Saying I had to start a clutch in a tractor, I would have worked until I finished that," says Johnny.
Nowadays Johnny considers himself more of a part-timer. He still does Monday to Saturday, but only 9.30am to around 5pm. He makes it sound like a pastime.
"Is it only tractors?" I ask.
"Only tractors," says Johnny
"Only Masseys," says Jamie, correcting both of us. Jamie has been helping out "the odd day" for the past three years and it's very obvious the octogenarian and the teenager are very much a partnership.
Yet Johnny McGuigan has been working on tractors before even Jamie's father was born.
"I worked on our farm at home a good while," says Johnny. "I think around the 1950s my father bought a new David Brown Topmaster. We had a Fordson before that. With the Fordson you had no hydraulics."
Johnny is clearly a man of routine. Monday to Saturday he restores Massey Ferguson tractors, reads The Irish News, and eats his lunch in the Country Café. Those are the rituals.
It's easy to imagine that lockdown must have been hell for him.
"I took it seriously at the start," he says. A father of five (Ann Marie, Colm, John Bernard, Niall, and Philip), his family kept him fed and watered.
"Niall's wife took me down my dinner every day and on Sundays, I went up to Ann-Marie's or J B's."
"How long did that last?" I enquire.
Johnny hesitates. I look at Jamie. "I'm saying nothing," says Jamie.
"I wasn't actually that long in lockdown," ventures Johnny as Jamie bursts into laughter.
After further pressing it emerges that Johnny "headed back to the shed after two or three weeks".
"I was the only one in the shed so I wasn't doing any harm. It was just hard not doing what you are used to," says Johnny.
If coping with the changes enforced by lockdown was difficult, it's impossible to imagine how Johnny managed to deal with the loss of his wife Jane, who passed away in May 2004.
Today Johnny never goes to football. When Jane was alive they never missed a game.
"We never went on holidays or anything like that. Every Sunday we were at a match. We followed the county team, the club, and St Pat's. On a Sunday, we could have been anywhere. We were all over."
His two youngest sons, Niall and Philip, won Corn nánÓg and Rannafast Cup medals. JB won a MacRory Cup medal, as did Philip, who also has the distinction of winning two Hogan Cup medals, lining out at corner-forward when only in fifth year.
It comes as news to young Jamie when I inform him that the mild-mannered, gentle soul across the table from us was an altogether different creature at a football match.
Johnny chuckles. "When I look back now, I often wonder how I wasn't killed," he says.
But those days of Jekyll and Hyde have passed on. Johnny's fire for football has long gone.
"I still read about it in The Irish News every day, but if I did go to a game, it wouldn't have the same effect on me," he says.
After finishing his fish and chips and glass of milk, Johnny submits to my request for a photograph. I insist the photo must include a Massey Ferguson tractor.
Johnny tells me to follow him. The trip is about three miles. I know the road but not as well as Johnny. He might be 88, but he can drive like Senna. As we meet a cattle truck, Johnny is forced to move his van very close to the verge. His speed never drops.As they say in these parts, 'he knows the width of her'.
At the shed, Johnny suggests we take the photo with Jamie's Massey. It's notable that both man and boy pay more attention to the appearance of the tractor than to themselves. There is no fixing of hair or looking in mirrors.
Looks don't matter here. These are men who are not in love with themselves. These are men who love the Massey – and their work.
