Over the Farmer's Gate (22 page)

The audit may take up to three days and everything you do from field to livestock is put under the microscope. Defra has the ultimate sanction on all this because anything that falls short results in a reduction in your single farm payment. The width of six-metre margins are scrupulously checked and woe betide you if they are less.

That is why they represent good value for money because farmers and contractors alike err on the generous side so that my trip around the farm reveals that, in some cases, the margins are creeping out to eight or nine metres. I’m using this ride around to redefine the boundaries at the right width, but it’s just a bit scary. Get it wrong and it could be like having your agricultural financial throat cut. Never mind all that, I drive boldly on.

I soon discover that our six-metre margin is where hares lie up in the daytime. Hares are starting to take over the world on my top ground and I hope that, when they do, they remember my kindly attitude to them. The keeper reckons there could be a hundred hares up on this hill, which would be a bit over the top because word could get around.

I hadn’t known, until the keeper told me, that hares breed more than once in a season. I’d always thought it just happened in March. There’s a hare in my silage field with quite small twins, which is something else I’ve not seen before. I wonder, as they scamper off, if they’ll survive the winter.

There are buzzards everywhere and I see a pair of red kites every day. The leverets are in handy bite-sizes at the moment, a sort of ‘leverets to go’ on the menu.

AS USUAL I’m writing this in the kitchen in the early morning. It’s quite peaceful and I can get on with the job in hand.

There’s an occasional whimper from Mert, who sleeps in what we call the dairy. It’s an old-fashioned back kitchen with slabs of stone where they presumably used to keep food cool years ago.

Mert is trying to get my attention so that I will let him out so we can go and look for adventures. It’s a big step for Mert to come into the house at night. Neither he nor my wife know it’s the first stop on a road that I hope will see him move into the kitchen. If I can crack that big step, who knows where he will end up - watching the telly in the sitting room?

We live in a fairly comfortable area with regard to crime; it’s not that many years that we have been taking the keys out of vehicles at night. For some reason we still don’t lock them although for most it’s just a push on a button on the key fob.

Likewise we never lock the house doors at night, never thought to, never needed to, yet. But deep down I know it’s a ‘borrowed time’ issue and we will eventually have to become more security conscious.

I suspect that it will be something like a break-in that will jog us out of our complacency. I have a theory that the casual thief will not bother to face an aggressive dog, he will just move on to somewhere a bit easier. If the thief is highly professional, he will
cope with any sort of dog, probably in ways I wouldn’t like to think about.

And if it’s aggressive dogs you are looking for, Mert – he of the impatient whimper in the dairy – is just the man for the job. He’s also very clean in his habits, which is an added bonus. Anyway, that’s my plan but there’s only us know about it.

Stretched out in front of the Rayburn is another dog. My wife’s Corgi. He can be aggressive but he’s far from it at the moment. He is a kitchen dog, he thinks it’s his kitchen and his boundary is the kitchen door-step. If I’m in the house, Mert is always on the kitchen doorstep and on this threshold of respective territories, they have the most horrendous fights.

Every day there’s the walking stiff-legged in circles and growling, and once a fortnight there’s the fight. Mert always wins but it’s the corgi that starts it all off, so he doesn’t get much sympathy as he limps about for a couple of days.

Not until now that is, because the limping lasted a lot longer and the vet thinks he may have suffered an internal injury. He’s on lots of tablets and feeling very sorry for himself.

Everything in life is relative and, about once a fortnight, we have to be extra vigilant in order to be on hand to stop a relatively nasty dogfight breaking out in our kitchen doorway.

I suppose we had allowed that diligence to falter just lately because our corgi, he of the kitchen territory, had been on medication to clear up a nasty abscess, which was the result of a previous fight. But, over the last 10 days, he had got much better and had returned to the aggressive patrols of his boundary.

Looking for a suitable metaphor, I would probably come up with sabre-rattling, that’s almost exactly what he would do, make threatening noises on his boundary, provoke border skirmishes.

The situation is always made worse when I am away from home because my border collie Mert spends more and more time outside
the door, impatiently waiting for me to appear. Recently, when I was away, a border skirmish turned into a full-blown international incident when, unfortunately, a very nasty dogfight was made worse when our bearded collie decided to join in on Mert’s side.

This intervention on Mert’s side tipped the balance and the fight progressed into the kitchen and, I am told, there was blood ‘everywhere’. Today, I am alone in the kitchen, Mert is in his usual place on the doorstep and the corgi is on a drip down at the vet’s, badly beaten up. We’ll have to resolve this somehow.

It is usually customary for dogfights to finish quite abruptly when one dog rolls on his back to signify submission. This is not on the agenda for our corgi which came to us out of Ceredigion, was Welsh-speaking when he came here, and for whom rolling over is simply not an option. Currently England rugby players will be familiar with this phenomenon.

An innocent inquiry of my wife that Mert should be allowed to sleep in the kitchen while the corgi was at the vet’s met with an outburst that left me reeling, given that I have come from such a gentle background.

For some time I have been looking for a good home for the bearded collie who does nothing much except eat, sleep and chase cats (recently I caught him trying to climb up on the bird table).

He is at the time of year and at the stage of coat growth when he closely resembles a Herdwick sheep and he will probably be easier to re-home after his annual clip. Not many people are looking for a sheep to sleep in their kitchen.

IT’S A FUNNY thing, territory. I remember many years ago we went out for Sunday lunch to some friends’ house. My son David was about three or four years old. These friends kept bantam chickens. ‘Would David like a cock and hen for pets?’ It seemed
like a fairly innocent gift. No big deal, we let them loose on the yard and away they went.

Twelve months later I did a head count and we had 73 bantams. They were highly prolific because if you found a nest and took the eggs to eat, which was the idea, they would immediately lay somewhere else and you couldn’t always find the new nest until the chicks appeared.

These 73 bantams split into clearly defined gangs. There was the stack yard gang, the cattle shed gang, the workshop gang, and so on. Just like our dogs, there would be horrific fights in the gateways that seemed to define their territories; there would be blood and feathers everywhere. Most of them were caught and sold or given away. Foxes accounted for the ones I couldn’t catch.

LAST AUTUMN we upgraded a tractor. The finances of dairy farmers are in such a parlous state that swapping a 25-year-old tractor to one half its age is a big deal. I would have liked to have kept the old tractor but couldn’t afford to do the deal without the £5,000 it was worth as part exchange. Ever since we did the deal I have felt guilty. We’d had that tractor about 15 years; it had been a good and faithful servant, and I miss it.

Sometimes I go up to the yard to do some task or other and find myself looking for it. I did make tentative inquiries of the dealer who bought it about its whereabouts. ‘It’s been exported to Greece.’ Greece! What sort of life will it have there? What sort of home has it gone to? I feel really guilty; no proper goodbye, no proper thank you, no gold watch.

WHEN our cows are feeding in a long row there’s about a 2ft space behind them and the adjacent wall.

When I walk this space, as I often do, I am always conscious of a pressure at the back of my legs, which is Mert, keeping close behind me. I know the cows don’t mind me walking close behind them but I’m not sure about the dog.

This confined space is a very good place to get kicked; the kick would be aimed at the dog but he’s so close to my heels there is no doubt at all that I would have to share it with him. But I could turn this to my advantage.

When I take Mert out and about I always leave him shut in the Discovery because not only does he have a fondness for nipping cows’ ankles, he will bite any other ankle as well.

I quite fancy taking him out of the Discovery and letting him meet our public. I wouldn’t put him on a lead, there is no dignity in a lead for a dog like Mert but, if he keeps as close to my heels as he does around the yard, I should be able to control him.

Top of my agenda is the big poodle that lives in the shop where I get my papers. This poodle, fully trimmed up in proper poodle fashion, is a bit full of himself. I bet he’s never met a dog like Mert and I know for certain that Mert has never seen anything like it.

Could be an interesting meeting. Could it be time for the poodle to find out a bit about the real world?