Over the Farmer's Gate (27 page)

I look down at their feet and see traces of chicken muck stuck around their boots from crossing the grass fields where we were spreading it yesterday.

‘It does, doesn’t it?’

And on they go. If they are happy thinking they’ve got silage on their boots, who am I to tell them what it really is!

I RECENTLY popped my head through the door of the hairdressers and quipped: ‘Any chance of a quickie?’ (The old jokes are always the best.)

There were a lot of women in there – it must have been a Friday, though I’m not really sure.

There’s a lot of sexism in a ladies’ hairdressers. Various ladies take it in turns to go behind a curtain across the end of the room. I can see a couch in there but little else.

The curtains are put very carefully back into place after each client so I can’t see what is going on, but I note that I never get invited in. My haircut took about five minutes and cost £5 and a lot of banter, (my vet charges a pound a minute as well and I ponder on that).

I was quite disappointed when it was finished and readily accepted the cup of coffee that’s offered. There were four women sitting in a row in a sort of halfway stage in the hairdressing process – they all have silver foil randomly arranged in their hair.

They listened, fascinated, to the conversation between me and the girl who owns the shop: our talk was, at the same time, both risqué and flirtatious.

As she was about 30 years younger than me I suspect it does more for my ego than hers.

‘How come,’ I asked, ‘I never have that silver stuff in my hair when I have my hair done like all these others?’

‘No need for it, there’s plenty of silver in your hair already.’ she replied. Thank you very much.

THERE’S been a lot in the media this week about milk prices. A leading UK banker told me last summer that 30 per cent of his dairy farming clients were actively looking for a way to leave the industry.

Last week at a conference in London, a leading European banker told us that at current milk prices, anyone who had invested in dairying recently was very vulnerable.

As the production of the 50 per cent who have left dairying in the last eight years has been largely taken up by people who have invested in expansion, we could have a situation where more than half the dairy farmers remaining could leave quite quickly.

There’s plenty of money between farm gate and the supermarket checkout, it’s just not shared out equally.

We don’t produce nuts and bolts, we can’t switch on and off at will. When you switch cows off, they usually end up in an abattoir.

WE HAD a big day out in Cardiff for the rugby. The final of the Six Nations Championship is as big as it gets – especially when there’s a Triple Crown, Grand Slam and Championship title on the line.

The tension was building up nicely – and it had plenty of time to because it was a 5.30pm kick-off. But we all tried to make the best of it.

I always go to the same bar, always drink red wine and always
have the same meal – I’m set in my ways.

Lots of people I know came to the bar that day and as I was to find out to my cost later in the day, too many of them bought me a drink.

But there were also opportunities to be had. All the women that came up to my table to say hello seem to want to be kissed, some of them several times, so I had to go along with that.

But the surgeon who did my knee operation last year was also present and he came across to say hello. I reminded him I had an appointment to see him in a couple of weeks’ time, when he would decide whether to do the other knee.

I told him that the other knee seemed fine now that the knee that was operated on is back doing its fair share of the work. So we decided, he down on one knee by my side, and me sitting on a chair (chairs being very precious and vacated at your peril) that we would cancel the appointment for now and if the knee becomes a problem, he will put me back in to the system. I quite liked having a professional consultation amid all the noise, drinking and excitement that was going on around us.

Many years ago there was a dentist in this area who would go around the pubs quite a lot in the evenings, and he would pull teeth in the pub should the occasion demand it.

Payment for this service would be part-cash, part-drink, and I suppose that in some way it was a sort of predecessor of the supermarket home-delivery service, only years before its time.

Anecdotes about this dentist were abundant. I remember one story of the farmer who had a really bad tooth but was much too busy to leave harvest to have it attended to. So the dentist was summoned to the harvest field.

The most convenient place to perform the operation was to lie him on the bed of the binder they were using (I told you it was many years ago!) Trouble was, the anaesthetic didn’t work very
well and the dentist only had enough for one injection with him.

So the poor old farmer was lying on his back on the canvas of the binder with the dentist and various helpers sitting on him to hold him down while the tooth was removed. They reckoned that you could see the bloodstains going round on the canvas for two or three harvests before they were worn away. I just love these sorts of stories; they are a part of rural folklore.

When I first came to live in this area I was young and fit enough not to have much need for doctors and dentists but inevitably, in time, I needed a dentist, and had no hesitation in deciding to go to the dentist I’ve mentioned. ‘You can’t go to him,’ says my wife, ‘nobody goes to him.’ But I did – I knew where he lived and so I just went and knocked on his door. There was no answer at the front so I went around the back. I knocked on the door and a voice told me to come in.

He was sitting there at his breakfast, and I told him I thought I needed a tooth removing. He paused with a piece of toast half way to his mouth and his expression said ‘Me?’ as though he was astonished at my request.

If he was astonished, he was also delighted. ‘How did you know about me?’ he asked. ‘Someone told me you were a very good dentist.’ And he glowed with happiness.

He took me upstairs to a bedroom which was his surgery. The first thing that struck me was that the dentist’s chair had a certain age to it; the second thing that struck me was that the floor was littered with dental paraphernalia, most of which was false teeth.

Without seeming to pause he made his way to the chair, one leg seeming to do all the walking while the other made sweeping motions as it cleared a path through the debris for me to make my way to the chair.

The syringe for the anaesthetic was also old, older than anything we used on the farm, and stuck a bit. I wondered for a
moment if he would have to apply WD40 to lubricate it.

But he took the tooth out skilfully without much trouble and I made my way home none the worse for the experience.

We were out that evening and my wife was telling everyone that I’d had a tooth out that day; they didn’t show any real interest until she told them where I went.

Everyone was amazed. ‘But no one goes to him,’ they said. And for a couple of hours, well, I was something of a hero.

I’M WRITING this on Sunday morning. The milking is nearly finished and I’ve snuck into the house for another cup of tea. My demeanour this morning is best described as disconsolate. If I had to put it to music, it would be called ‘
The Pissed-off Dairy Farmer Blues
’.

I switch on the television and the main news item this morning tells the story of a hard-drive containing the personal details of prison officers. It has been lost, or stolen. You’d have to have a pretty sad life to want to read that on a Sunday morning. Now, if it were the bank statements of some of my neighbours, that would be very different.

Yesterday afternoon, before I went out to milk, I checked our ‘close to calving’ cows. They are put in a shed for the purpose, with plenty of room and plenty of nice clean straw – the bovine equivalent of having a baby with BUPA.

Two of our best cows have calved since this morning, unaided, obviously without too much difficulty, and now the calves are up suckling their dams. They are by a dairy bull and are beautifully marked.

I didn’t go any closer until this morning and, as I approached the calves, I thought they would make really smart cows. But they won’t, ever, because they are bull calves and have no sale value whatsoever.

But that is not the real loss. We aspire to have a healthy herd of cows that are all home-bred, self-contained and not exposed to any disease risks that might arise from bought-in stock. To do that, we need to have about 40 heifers coming into the herd every year. For the second year running, we look like getting only 20.

Nature usually sends a 50/50 split of heifers and bulls and we ensure we always have at least 90 cows in calf to the dairy bull to achieve our target.

As nature is still probably sending along the equal-sex split, who, I ask myself, is having all my heifers?

OUR VILLAGE blacksmith passed away a couple of years ago. He lived to a good age and in his latter years he only did a bit of pottering about, which was fair enough.

But you did see the door to his small shed open, so that you knew he was about. His blacksmith’s shop has stood empty and quiet now for those two years but recently it has been sold with planning permission to convert to a dwelling.

It is the start of these new works, fencing a garden in and altering the access, that has a finality about it that is, in a way, more eloquent of the end of an era than his passing away.

They were never very auspicious premises, the first part where he kept most of his equipment, just about large enough to take a small car but that led in to the forge proper which was a treasure trove of forge, bellows and traditional blacksmith’s kit that was a joy to see.

All that, they tell me, is still there and supposedly there is a condition of planning permission that it must remain so. It would be a devil to dust! It would be far better to put it somewhere where everyone could see it on a regular basis.

It’s the passing of an institution. Years ago it was an important meeting place where you met your neighbours while you waited your turn to have something made or mended.

We would all contribute to the job at hand, with advice or actually assisting in the mending, if it was harvest machinery that needed mending urgently.

Employees would enjoy the social side of the visit and employers would get tetchy about how long they were there.

There was always an unspoken rule that you could jump the queue if your job was urgent and depended on the weather.

Our late blacksmith’s great skill was in wrought iron work and I know of several great country houses where his gates grace an impressive entrance.

I often wondered what he thought about having this great skill, yet spending most of his life looking in the scrap pile in the nettles for a piece of broken sheep hurdle to mend someone’s mower.

When I first came to live around here there were two blacksmiths, father and son. Father was in his 70s and thought they should make their living shoeing horses. Son wanted to make gates and mend farm machinery and there was great competition between them. It could be quite scary at times.