Over the Farmer's Gate (23 page)

FOR SOME TIME I’ve been concerned about my diet. I’m not concerned about dieting, I’ve been doing that for years, to little avail. My first cup of tea of the day, in which I allow myself a spoonful of sugar, is a daily treat, the prospect of which will get me out of bed on many a dark, wet morning.

It’s the implications of our bed and breakfast business on my diet that concerns me. Most of our guests spend weekends with us, which means that, on Fridays, my wife does what she calls ‘a big shop’. As this shopping is put away I receive very clear warnings:
‘Don’t eat these, they’re for the guests.’

At particular issue are fruit and yoghurts, both of which I enjoy. So every week I have a fruit-free, yoghurt-free weekend. For breakfast, our guests have a large bowl of fruit and a wide choice of yoghurts. Come Monday, it’s a different story: ‘That fruit needs eating up,’ says my wife.

I ascribe to the five-a-day theory, but on some days I am expected to eat 10 or 12. Yoghurts are a different story; every week I not only consume yoghurt that has gone past its sell-by date, but push the boundaries on those dates way beyond recognised limits – and I’m still here to tell the tale.

LAST SATURDAY I was grumpy. Very, very grumpy. We have this machine, you see, still fairly new, that we call a straw chopper.

Simplistically, you put a great big bale of straw in the back and it chops it up and blows it some distance to where it makes a nice even bed for cattle to lie on.

But it wouldn’t work a week ago, so we sent it in to the supplier where it spent three days and was returned fixed and ready for work.

I put it on the tractor on Saturday morning and it still wouldn’t work. So I drove it six miles for the dealer to have another look and, after two hours, he once again declared it to be OK. The trouble was that we couldn’t really try it out on his yard because there was a large bale in the back with its strings removed. Not only would his yard have been full of chopped straw but just over the fence is a business that transports new cars and all their lorries were packed full – we suspected that they wouldn’t welcome the new cars being covered with straw and, besides which, a bale usually contains the odd stone.

So, I drove back home to try it again and it still didn’t work. My less than gentle sarcasm on the mobile brought the dealer out but to no avail and we ended up emptying the straw by hand. He went off promising to return on Monday morning, my son had gone off to play rugby, it was lunchtime (what lunchtime?) and I still had about three hours’ work to do before milking.

So I set off with the dog to look at the cattle that were still out, my grumpiness close to being quite nasty. But it was such a nice day I couldn’t keep it up for long.

In the mile-and-a-half I have to travel to our other ground, I passed three different shooting parties. When I got to the little valley where my dry cows are they were just shooting that particular drive. I switched off the engine to watch – it would be bad manners to drive between the guns and the beaters but, even more important, not safe.

It was a spectacular drive, the birds flying out of the acre of maize that I allowed the keepers to grow on one of my fields, back across to the woods they think of as home.

The drive finished and I drove slowly on to see my cows. I had the windows down and all the beaters said ‘hello’, some of the guns waved as I went by, and some of them called out ‘All right, Rog’. But some of the guns ignored me; too up themselves by far. I came across the one who runs the shoot and stopped to say hello.

He was ecstatic about the drive they had just had. I let him dig himself a hole and then I said that if it was such a good drive I’ll want £1,000 next year if I am to allow them to grow another game crop. His face was a picture and he laughed nervously at my joke. The grumpiness may have gone, but I was still not in a good mood. A couple of hundred yards further on, I met my friend the keeper, a transformation in his posh shooting outfit – he usually goes around disguised as an urban guerrilla.

In the mirror I saw him watching me go, thinking about it. I bet I could get a bit more money out of them when the time comes.

A couple of hours later and I was making a similar journey to put out bales of silage for the cattle still out. There was only one shoot still active, it was plenty late enough in the day; pheasants need some time, after being so violently disturbed, to get their bearings and to find somewhere safe to roost.

There were small groups of pheasants everywhere, on full alert, some standing in the middle of fields they’d not been in before, some scurrying down lanes trying to find their way back home. Lots of pheasants in lots of places where you would not normally expect to find pheasants so near to dusk.

SO I’M getting on the train again to go to London, to Westminster, this time as part of a presentation to MPs of the wide range of dairy products available in the UK dairy industry and the innovation that is going on all the time to produce new lines.

This is a very important occasion for me, as no-one from our village has ever been to London twice in one year. I remember about 20 years ago organising a trip from the pub to the Smithfield show at Earls Court. Seventeen of us went and only two of us had ever been to London before, but that’s another very long story.

So I get on the train, which is very full, and the only seat I can find is next to a young girl, probably in her late teens. Well, it’s only half a seat really, because she’s asleep with her head against the window, her coat as a pillow and her bum half across the seat I paid for.

Anyway, I squeeze in as best I can and, about 20 minutes later, we stop at a station and this disturbs her.

She wriggles about a bit trying to get comfortable, gathers
her coat up, folds it into a better pillow shape, plonks it on my shoulder, reverses her position and goes back to sleep couched up next to me.

I don’t mind really, she’s a very pretty girl, but doesn’t need those piercings.

The train pulls into Euston; she wakes up, stretches, gives me the sweetest of smiles and says ‘thank you very much’. And off we both go wherever our lives will take us, the only evidence of our meeting some make-up and a whiff of perfume on my shoulder.

As usual I had no breakfast so I go to one of those fast-food outlets which purports to be French but which is always staffed by Asians and East Europeans and order a latte (keep the milk sales up) and a cheese croissant (very sophisticated) and sit at a little table on my own to watch the world go by.

‘Is anyone sitting there?’ asks a very smart lady of about my own age. This is another big event in my day; no one usually wants to sit by me.

I think I dress about right for my age, go with the flow – you can’t stop life’s clock. She’s putting up a bit of a fight – she’s trying to look 15 years younger. She’s very elegant, although the elegance is fading a bit.

She’s got coffee and a croissant as well but she’s finished before me. She gets a tissue out and dabs around her mouth and discards it. Then she gets another tissue out, takes out her top set, wipes it clean, applies some adhesive and pops it back in again.

I’m too fascinated by this to pretend I’m not watching, but she just gives me a smile and goes on her way. That’s two smiles already this morning and it’s not 11am yet.

THIS MORNING I went for my pre-operation check-up, before surgery on my bad knee. I’m sure I’ve told you about my bad
knee. I’ve told everyone else.

For people-watchers like me, there are rich pickings to be had in hospital waiting rooms. I’m very early for my appointment but the waiting room is almost full, probably because everyone except me seems to have someone with them. There are about four different people to see in this procedure, and I’d been sitting there only a couple of minutes when my name was called.

Lots of questions here. Have you had this and have you got that and I’m soon back in the waiting room. But only for another couple of minutes, because I’m called again.

This time it’s blood pressure and ECG and stuff like that. Finally, the nurse says she’s going to take a swab of my nasal passages. ‘What for?’

‘To check to see if you have MRSA.’

My alert antennae are on full stretch now. ‘Do you have MRSA in this hospital?’

‘No, and we intend to keep it that way.’

So she pokes this long cotton bud thing up each nostril and then she says: ‘I can’t believe you’ve done that.’

I think: ‘What have I done now?’

She goes on: ‘I’ve been doing the MRSA testing in this hospital for five years now and up until you, every single person that I’ve approached with a nasal swab has opened their mouth.’

She obviously thinks that I’m a bit special now, which is something my mother and I have always known.

Back in the waiting room and the original whispered conversation between companions (which are, of course, a British tradition) have developed into full-blown conversations with fellow patients, with such lines as:

‘Where do you come from? Oh really! Do you know so-
and-so
?’

Two down and two to go. I reckon I’ll be out of here soon;
then I see a notice that says pre-op checks can take up to four hours!

A man comes in on his own; he’s carrying a briefcase-sized box. The front of the box is transparent and you can see that it is subdivided inside into 12 compartments. The sort of thing that I would keep electric drill bits in if I could find any.

A hush goes over the waiting room as the spectators take in all this medication – there’s pills in every compartment. This must be a proper patient, really ill. Apart from being about five stones overweight he looks as fit as a fiddle to me.

I’m sitting there for two hours now. ‘Doctor’s delayed in the wards’ they say; that’s fair enough, no problem to me.

This is a renowned orthopaedic hospital and some of the things you see here really put life into perspective.

There’s much to-ing and fro-ing of the other patients, though, and as each successive couple is called, there are cries of ‘good luck’, and when they come back they are greeted like heroes.

People are also whispering to their companions and then slipping away on their own to do the ‘sample’. They think I can’t see the sample pot hidden in their hands. Mine is empty in the breast pocket of my shirt and, at the moment, I’ve never felt less like a pee in my life.

It’s my final call to the surgeon, and we have a look at my
X-rays.
‘Mine used to be like that,’ he says, and we spend 10 minutes talking about rugby.

That’s it then, only the urine sample now. It’s a bit of a struggle and I soon get it over with.

When I come out, all the nurses are having a bit of a gossip and I am introduced as ‘the one who knew his nose wasn’t in his mouth’. It’s a job to squeeze past the waiting room door as people say farewell to those they’ve known only a few hours. I can see that a lot enjoy the attention and are almost loathe to go home.
Me, I can’t wait for the operation, full fitness again and going back to being bionic.