This is the story of someone trying to extort money unjustly from me. The sum involved was not small, and I was astounded when I first got the request to pay it.
In the mid 1990’s we bought and lived in a lovely property in the West Country of England. It had twenty-six acres of land, and we were able to set aside eleven of them every spring to grow hay for our horses, leaving the other grass paddocks for them to graze on.
The summer before we moved to the States, I asked the farmer I usually employed to come and cut the hay. By then we were about to sell the house and move out of the country, so I told the farmer he could keep the hay.
Stupidly I didn’t discuss this with him, but I assumed the laws of fairness dictated that, if I was giving him an eleven hundred bales of hay crop, he w
