Over the Farmer's Gate (29 page)

Sometimes I go to a dinner and can’t remember what I’ve written; this time I couldn’t see what I’d written, either. A candle, I discovered, is not that handy in a shower.

Showering, shaving and dressing in the dark were not easy so, when I eventually got to the dinner, I was pleased to see that I had the right suit trousers on with the right jacket and most of my three-day beard had gone, though there was still a lot more on one side than on the other.

You never really know how a speech will go, it’s all part of a sort of masochism that drives you to do it in the first place, but I thought it all went really well considering the indifferent start to the evening and I drove home well pleased with myself.

It was a late night and an hour less in bed next morning but I’ve learned to take that all in my stride and, I suppose, as I went about my work next morning I was still rather a bit full of myself.

In particular, I was thinking about the story told to me by the lady sitting by me at the dinner that night who worked in a local town’s bridal shop and had sold a wedding dress to a 57-year-old man that week – for his own use.

Before I let the cows go down the fields to graze, I had to sort a cow out for artificial insemination.

When cows are in season they exhibit a sort of nymphomania with their herd mates. Sometimes they can be quite shy and it takes some spotting; sometimes it is at the other end of the scale and is shamelessly blatant and boisterous.

This cow, one of the biggest we’ve got, was well in the latter category. I knew I would need to hold her back with a companion to keep her company, but that wasn’t good enough, she wanted to stay with the whole herd. Three times I tried to drive her in to the holding pen; three times she got past me.

The fourth time I tried I was wholly concentrated, thoughts of last night’s dinner were well gone, it was time to test wills and
determination. I got her on her own and reopened the pen gate.

The cow had two choices, through the gate into the pen or through me. She went through me with some ease, not so much brushed me aside as sent me flying. I tried to break my fall on to the concrete with some sort of a roll which served only to make sure I had a more comprehensive covering of the three-inch deep brown stuff that I was now lying in.

As I lay there, feeling the cold wet seep into my clothing, I fleetingly had to acknowledge that when I stood up I would present a very different spectacle to the one a few hours earlier entertaining at a Saturday night dinner.

At the fifth attempt to sort out this cow, cold, wet, filthy beyond belief and not without quite a few bruises, I felt fully entitled to search for a stick. The cow could see the stick in my hand and allowed herself to be sorted as good as gold.

My mistake was that the slurry on my trousers has the chance to run down to my socks inside my wellies which, until then, had been the only dry bits I had.

Anyone arriving at our back door over the next hour would have been greeted with a pile of filthy clothes topped with my best boxers.

‘You didn’t strip off outside the door!’ scolded my wife.

I suspect I would have been in a lot more trouble if I’d stripped off in the kitchen. She put the clothes in the wheelbarrow and threw some buckets of water on them and left them for Monday morning.

SOMEWHERE at the back of my mind lurks the vague memory that someone, probably going right back to an old music hall song, used to sing words to the effect that there were ‘40,000 feathers on a thrush’.

If I’ve imagined it then I’ve probably got a bit more of a problem than I thought. If it were true, then how many of my precious brain cells have I tied up remembering that?

Whether there are, in fact, that many feathers on a thrush I’ve no idea, but I do know that there are also a lot of feathers on a pigeon. The evidence of that is here in the grass before me, where something has made a meal of a pigeon.

There are feathers everywhere. I’m left with the thought that it must be a very sharp fox or cat that can actually catch a pigeon. Over the next week I find about a dozen dead pigeons, which seems quite remarkable. I ask the young lad who drives the tractor for us and he says he’s seen a lot as well.

He’s in love at the moment and has a job to find the tractor some mornings, so if he’s seen a dead pigeon it’s even more remarkable. I start to see odd pigeons standing about on the road that look really sick so I begin to suspect they have a disease problem. I prefer not to contemplate that it is bird flu but the next time I find a dead one I stop to examine it. It’s plump, so it can’t have been that sick, well not for very long, anyway. I pull some feathers off and find an oldish wound that looks as though it were caused by an airgun pellet.

Presumably someone, somewhere, has a kitchen garden that is suffering from the depredations of pigeons and is defending his crop with an airgun. It just seems a pity that he (or she) doesn’t get a better airgun, one that will kill the bird outright rather than condemn them to the slow, lingering deaths that I have been witnessing.

I haven’t seen one of the ‘second crop’ leverets for three weeks now. I’m a bit disappointed as I have been looking for them and as I also said, there is less cover for them now so they should be easier to spot.

On Saturday mornings the keeper is always busy about the shoot and so I ask him. He says that foxes have had them all and
that he hasn’t seen any either. He goes on to say that there are three ‘new’ foxes on the estate and in his words they are ‘lamp shy’. This means he’s been out at night with a powerful lamp and rifle but that the foxes won’t stand and look at him. If they do he will see two reflective red eyes and that, as they say, will be that.

Keepers are always busy at night with lamps seeking to reduce the large numbers of foxes that are about, and I suppose that disturbed foxes will move to other areas, thus the description ‘new foxes’. Shame about the leverets, though. I’m showing partiality to species again. This will almost certainly become politically incorrect with the passage of time. How long before a wild boar or a wolf released into the wild (‘because wolves are a native species’) kills a child? How long before a town fox kills a child? Not that long, I suspect.

I AM convinced that the world as we know it will slowly but surely come grinding to a halt. Not because of global warming, not because the fuels we presently use will have run out, not because of pestilence and disease and not because of nuclear war.

It will be because of a lack of common sense and too much risk assessment. I used to be very involved in our village school but your children grow up and your own life moves on. There used to be two arrangements in place at the school that benefited the wider community. For decades the children made their way up the village about 150 yards to the village hall to eat their lunch. The road they walked is unclassified; the only real traffic on it is traffic to and from houses within the village. There was an extra bonus because the village hall benefited in the form of revenue so it was the sort of commonsense, win-win arrangement that worked all round.

A risk assessment on the dangers of the walk itself has stopped
the practice and the children now remain in school for their lunch.

Fifty yards away from the school in another direction is the school playing field, it’s not big, it’s of primary school proportion, but it’s got goal posts and you can have a decent game of football there. And for generations that’s what the youth and children of the village have done. (Played football there myself.) But that’s been stopped as well. If someone were injured there out of school hours, would the school be held responsible? Of course they would, in the sort of society we live in today. But children will be children, and children will continue to play football, so where do they play football now? On the main road through the village of course. Wouldn’t you know it, it all defies belief and leaves people of my generation lost for words, words that you could print anyway.

TO MY great delight there are a group of seven curlews to be seen in the area. They cover quite a large range but turn up on my ground several times a week and will, I hope, become a regular feature in my life, most especially to hear their call.

I’ve seen four lapwings making a fuss of just one chick. So at the end of term let’s hear it for the curlews, well done, 10 out of 10. Lapwings, you will have to do better.
THE STRONGEST relationship on this farm is, by some distance, me and the dog. He idolises me; in my shadow, always there for me, the one I can confide in and trust.

But like any honest relationship, there are areas where we struggle – the main one is when I have to go on a tractor, because he wants to come with me.

When I get on the tractor he’s tight behind me, poised to jump up into the cab. If I’m not going far, or for long, then he often joins me. But if I’m going off to do a job that will take a few hours, it’s not that handy.

The only place for him to lie on most tractors is down on the floor on the right hand side, and if he curls himself up, that’s fine. But after a time he often wants to give himself a bit of a stretch, and that in itself is quite reasonable.

The trouble is, he’s lying on the foot throttle. It can be quite disconcerting if I’m approaching a hedgerow and looking out of the back window at the implement I’m using and Mert decides to shift himself to a more comfortable position, which includes lying across the throttle, so without any warning I find myself travelling at twice the speed I was into a fence or hedge.

Harsh words have been exchanged on these occasions and the dog, without any knowledge of what he has done wrong, gives me a crestfallen look that breaks my heart and makes me feel guilty for the rest of the day.

I don’t like fall-outs, especially with the dog, so when I went off on the tractor recently he had to stay behind.

But I can’t just drive off and leave him; I have to shout at him to ‘go and lie down’ and he slinks off, looking over his shoulder at me with a look that says ‘bastard’.

So I went off without him for the day and when I was returning home several hours later, in a gateway about 100 yards from our farm lane, I could see a little black head looking down the road towards me.

I was still a fair distance away but Mert recognised the tractor and was off towards home down the middle of the road, tail wagging and as pleased as could be to see me.

What could I say? How long had he been there? Doesn’t he realise that most of the traffic is doing more than 60? Has he had a copy of
Greyfriar’s Bobby
from the library and got the idea of a vigil from that?

I just had to pat him on the head when I got off the tractor and be a bit proud of him.

But the next day I was off to top a field of docks. It’s the second crop of docks on that field and I wasn’t taking any chances. I put him in his shed, gave him some food and made a fuss of him.

When I finished topping the docks, the cattle in the field followed me to the gate. Despite my best efforts, one of them popped out on to the road as I took the tractor out of the field.