A View from the Tractor E-Book

Roger Evans

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

Roger Evans, everyone's favourite dairy and poultry farmer, is back with his daily account of rural life, full of laughter, grumbles and witty observations about what makes life tick in the real countryside. From his own farmyard, or looking down on his village from his tractor, or on a stool in the local pub, Roger tells it like it is.

Leseprobe

APRIL 21ST 2012

For the first time ever we have three bulls. There’s Peter the British Blue bull who lives here at home. We have a Limousin bull who always lives at a place we rent a couple of miles away. He’s never actually been home, which is quite sad, and because he’s not been home and has not had the opportunity to develop the sort of closeness our other animals have, he doesn’t have a name, which is even sadder. Then we have a young Friesian bull that I bought as a calf last year at the dispersal sale of a well-known herd in Gloucestershire and whose name is Ben.

I suppose Ben is half-grown now, he lives in a shed on his own and is quite friendly. But there’s a very considerable chance that he won’t always be friendly. In fact, for reasons of safety, we have to assume that he will be dangerous. So there’s two jobs to do with regard to Ben. We have to build somewhere for him to live that is safe. It has to be safe to feed him, to put bedding under him, to clean his pen out and for us to bring cows to him that he can get into calf, so some of the excellent breeding that is his background in Gloucestershire, transmits to our herd. And we have to put a ring through his nose. I don’t ever see us leading him about on that ring, but should we ever need to handle him, it’s an important piece of control mechanism. It’s also a signal to everyone, ‘Here is a bull, take care’.

I raised this issue in the pub. The advice was unanimous. ‘Don’t do it yourselves, he’ll always remember who puts the ring in his nose, he’ll remember that it hurt like hell, and about four years later when you’ve forgotten about it and you drop your guard, he’ll have you.’ I do not know if this is true but it’s advice probably worth heeding. The conversation moves on to lambs and lambing, and I do a quick scan around the table to see who I will get to put the ring in his nose. There’s three could do it but they are old friends and I like them. There’s some ‘newcomers’ on another table, now there’s a thought...

***

Two of my grandchildren used to have an old Shetland pony, they never used to ride him because he had ‘attitude’ but he was a pet they thought a lot of. He had to be put down in the end because he suffered from laminitis on spring grass and they had endless complaints to the RSPCA from ramblers. The pony’s opinion was never sought on this issue but I suspect that, given a choice, he would have toughed it out for a month and carried on for another year. My little grandson wasn’t too bothered about the pony’s demise (it used to bite him) but his sister was. So I bought her a poultry arc and three rare breed pullets. Other people gave her hens out of a battery unit and she built up quite a little business selling eggs in the village.

Meanwhile, we’ve just had our point-of-lay pullets go out and with nearly 40,000 to go, there are sometimes escapees. This time there were six so I put them in a box and took them down to Katie. I hadn’t really taken much notice of her poultry enterprise lately but I was amazed at the difference between her original rare breed hens and the others, which are brown egg-laying hybrids. The three original are huge in comparison. They have quite a large grassy enclosure and these three reminded me, for some reason, of galleons under full sail as they made their way sedately about. I think they are Buff Orpingtons.

***

The week before Easter, I spent a couple of days putting electric fences up for the cows. It was so hot I took my shirt off. Not a pretty sight but only me and the dog to see it. Electric fencing without your shirt on is not without its dangers. A big armful of fence stakes can pinch your skin. I lost my left nipple years ago, not a big issue; I never really knew what it was for anyway. But your shirt off in the hot sun tops up your vitamin D levels, starts off your tan and as it’s still only March, feels quite good. A week later and there’s four inches of snow outside. But that’s not all that’s outside. Where are my overalls, where are my wellies, where’s my coat, where’s my hat? They are all out and about somewhere, in sheds, on tractors, possibly lost forever, wherever they have been discarded. It’s a long cold wet half hour that gets most of them back together.

APRIL 28TH 2012

I used to have a yearning to keep sheep. There’s so much pleasure and pride in it. To drive around inspecting your ewes and lambs in the evenings in the spring. To look at your ewes all penned up in a group the day you put the tups in. To put a pen of 40 lambs in the market and note that they look as good as anyone else’s. I miss all of that. I miss being able to contribute to the ‘sheepy’ conversations in the pub. There’s something about a sheep that makes it always test you. It might do that by just getting out of the field where you seek to confine it. It might present you with two fit healthy lambs with ease, but it much prefers two lambs that are all jumbled up together, heads and tails all this way and that, and it much prefers that you should be required to sort this tangle out at three o’clock in the morning. Sheep constantly challenge you and, in a perverse way, overcoming those challenges brings with it much of the satisfaction. The ultimate sheep ambition is to die, so just keeping it alive is part of the challenge. There’s a lot of that that I don’t miss. I don’t miss staying up all night. I don’t miss going around with bottles of milk, topping up hungry lambs. So let them talk about sheep as much as they like – anyway, I’ll soon change the subject.

***

I share with you the things I see when I’m out and about on the tractor. What I see, other people see. Sometimes they leave me feeling envious. Stephen who works here had a day spreading fertiliser and reports back next morning. ‘Saw some curlews yesterday.’ ‘Where?’ (You have to drag it out of him.) ‘They came up out of the stream.’ ‘Which stream, how many of them?’ Seems he saw a pair of curlews in the stream that borders the field next to the house. I hadn’t seen curlews here for years, yet he sees a pair 300 yards from the house! I don’t ask him if they got up and made that beautiful call of theirs. I’d rather not know. But there’s more to come. ‘Those two deer were up the hollow again.’ There’s been two deer hanging about here for some weeks now. I’m yet to see them either. They pop in and out of the wood to eat my grass if they want to. ‘One’s got a broken leg.’ Deer are the ultimate free-range animal around here, and I suppose all over the UK. They pop over fences with ease. With such ease that they sometimes become careless and drop one hind leg just a bit. The leg catches the barbed wire that is usually found at the top strand of a fence and the foot goes under the next wire down, and snap! I used to have a business that exported game to France and we often used to get deer in that had broken one leg in this manner. In lots of cases the piece at the bottom of the leg had broken off and they had made the best of things going around on the stump.

***

It’s Easter Sunday evening and it’s freezing. Can’t expect much else, there were four inches of snow here on Friday. But it’s dried off now and I’m cutting the lawns. The sun has come out giving an illusion of warmth, but it is only an illusion and I am freezing. I should have put my overalls on and a jacket but it looked quite pleasant when I looked through the kitchen window. Overalls and jacket are only 20 yards away in the kitchen but I won’t stop to fetch them – it’s that bit of me that won’t be beaten. Some people call it stubbornness. So I shiver and persevere and am quite pleased when I get to the last patch, ten minutes should do it. And then there’s a bang and a puff of smoke and we stop in our tracks.

I’m not much of a mechanic so I don’t know what’s happened but I know quite a bit about death and this lawnmower is very dead. I walk away and leave it without a backward glance and I’m soon in the welcome warmth of the kitchen. But when everyone’s back at work on Tuesday, I have to do something about it because the grass is growing and we need the lawns trim for our bed and breakfast guests. I take it to where we bought it. There’s something in their culture that seeks to blame you for what has gone wrong. ‘Have you ever tipped it on its side?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘To put new belts on.’ ‘Ah well that’s your trouble, the oil has got on top of the piston and when you try to start it, the oil won’t compress and you’ve broken the rod.’ There’s a smile of satisfaction creeps in with this explanation: it’s the customer’s fault! ‘That was two years ago.’ ‘Oh!’ That’s not so good. ‘What do you think is wrong?’ he asks. Why ask me, I’m not a lawnmower mechanic. ‘It could be that a valve has broken off and smashed the piston,’ I venture. Turns out I’m right. ‘What you need is a new mower.’ A new mower is £2,000, a new engine is £1,000.

There was a time in dairy farming when you would shrug your shoulders and buy a new mower, you wouldn’t be happy about it, but you could cope. These days you have to give it some thought. Which is what I do. At home my no. 2 grandson is lounging about doing nothing and he’s soon on eBay looking for a mower. Since he found me what has turned out so far to be a good car, he’s a bit full of himself. He’s soon found a mower and we’ve bid £500 for it, but I’m a bit uneasy about it.

I sleep on it and next day I ask him to pull the bid back out. ‘Can’t do that.’ ‘What happens if you make the top bid but you don’t follow it up and buy it?’ ‘The police come and get you.’ Luckily someone tops our bid by £10 and I breathe a sigh of relief. He might very well be good at buying cars but he could be crap at lawnmowers.

MAY 5TH 2012

I’ve got this second-hand lawnmower on trial and I quite like it. It’s bigger than the one that died, it’s in better nick and it’s doing a very nice job. I ask a few questions about it, it’s about the same price as a new engine for my old one and I am quite tempted. So I ask a few more questions about it: what’s its age, where does it come from, the sort of stuff Cilla Black used to ask on her dating programme. They are a bit vague about its age and even vaguer about where it comes from – there’s a wave of the hand: ‘Someone the other side of the hill.’ There’s lots of hills around here so this is no help at all but I don’t really need that sort of help because I already know that it came from a nephew of mine who wanted something a bit smaller for his young son to drive. What the dealer doesn’t want is for the two of us to get our heads together and work out the deal he has done and the deal he is trying to do with me. But he’s too late for that.

Of more immediate concern is its size. It’s all very well having a bigger machine and getting the job done quicker but it has a two-cylinder engine and I wonder how much petrol it uses? And who would ever have thought that there would be a time when we would have worried about that? Have you seen those old photographs of horses with sacks on their feet pulling lawnmowers? It’s only a matter of time.

***

When my son was single he would disappear with his rugby kit late on Saturday mornings and reappear sometime on Sunday mornings. The time that he reappeared would depend on all sorts of things, such as where he’d played rugby, where he’d crashed out for the night. Because licensed premises would have been involved, that would have had some bearing on what time he considered it safe to drive home. We were always interested in what had gone on whilst he was away, starting with the rugby match itself and then what had gone on during the evening out. We called it ‘giving his report’.

One Sunday morning he ‘reported’ that as he had returned home that morning he had seen a camel’s head sticking out over the hedgerow looking at him. We teased him that he’d had more to drink the night before than was good for him and that he’d imagined the camel. But we knew he hadn’t – there’s been a small family circus around here for as long as I can remember and their animals have spent the winter at various locations in the neighbourhood ever since. They were performing just up the road last week and I took two younger grandchildren to see them.

A circus with performing animals is controversial with some people these days – what isn’t if it involves animals? – but for children who spend so much time with toys that are linked to modern technology, to see their delight in such simple, basic fun, makes it all worthwhile. And if the ringmaster in his top hat and splendid red coat looks a bit like a person in the kiosk who took your money as you came in, and bears a close resemblance to a little boy who went to the village school 30 years ago, it’s because it is the same person. Just the same as the lady on the tightrope looks very like the lady who sold you your popcorn, who looks like the little girl who came to your daughter’s birthday parties years ago and it’s quite confusing because she looks exactly like the lady going around the ring bareback on a horse.

So I settle down to watch. I watch the circus and I watch the children’s faces. The youngest boy I have with me is quite nervous to start with because we have ringside chairs and are very close to the animals. But he’s soon bold enough to go into the ring to meet a Shetland pony that can tell children’s ages by pawing the ground. The pony thinks he’s six and he’s actually five but his elder sister tells the ringmaster that the pony has done very well because he’s six in a fortnight anyway.

Having a local circus has always been ‘interesting’. There’s the incident with the camel’s head through the hedge and over the years, there have been escapees. Local people have always taken it in their stride, very much as if someone’s sheep are out. ‘Newcomers’ have always taken meeting baboons on the road more seriously and ramblers who come across a camel and a couple of llamas are on the phone to the police in a trice. The circus used to have a brown bear and you would often see him being driven about sitting in the front seat of a Land Rover, belt on of course.

But there was a third dimension to my visit to the circus. There was the obvious pride in what they do of successive generations of the family that run it. It can’t be easy these days keeping all those animals looked after and all that kit to move about.

Mindful of the many critics that circuses have, I looked very hard at the animals. After all, I do know a bit about them. Firstly their condition, regardless of species. They were all in fine fettle, not too fat and nowhere near thin. Then I looked at their feet: feet are important. Their feet, again regardless of species, looked perfect. Then I looked for signs of stress and could detect none. We had a wide spectrum of species, from pigeons, cats (though not at the same time), dogs, goats, ponies, horses, a zebra, snakes, llamas and a camel (probably the same one) and nowhere could I detect a stressed animal. The only animal that looked unhappy was the fox riding the mule around the ring, but if you were a fox and you knew the hunt kennels were only two fields away, would you look happy? So I know the animals are well and happy, I know the family who own them to be kindly and friendly, so where’s the harm? Because it would appear to be harmless, yet these circuses do have their critics.

There are those that would ban them. There are plenty of people about that would ban things. And if you want to ban things with animals involved, a circus is a relatively easy shot. It’s picking at the low fruit before you move on to your next objective, and there will always be a next objective. Who is to say that getting animals to perform in this way is any worse than tipping a cow on her side to trim her feet, or running a horse at Cheltenham? It’s probably not, but that doesn’t mean they should all be banned. Someday, some time, those of us who see ourselves as fairly normal, will have to say that enough is enough and make some sort of stand and stop this headlong journey along the animal welfare vegan road.

MAY 12TH 2012

It was Black Friday for Dairy Farmers last week with the news that a major milk buyer is about to cut its milk price by two pence per litre. The rest of the buyers will follow suit so quickly you won’t believe it. This could be the defining moment for some dairy farmers, the final straw. I don’t expect any public sympathy because a lot of folk are having a tough time at present but the difference is the animals. If I made nuts and bolts I could switch the factory to a three day week or close it down, knowing that in better times I could start it all back up again. But now lots of good milking cows could end up as beef burgers for the Olympics over the next weeks which is a shame and a waste of valuable resources. If you took a long-term view of life, you wouldn’t let the national dairy herd reduce in this way, but people take short-term views and dairy cows and dairy herds will be fewer, never mind the dairy farmers.

When I was first bitten by the farming bug you could probably make a living on a rented farm of 50 acres by milking 20 cows and keeping 200 hens in a deep litter shed. You might keep a few sows instead of the hens or you might keep a few sows as well, but there was a living to be had. This is very much how I started farming albeit with 80 acres, 30 cows, 200 hens and a few sows. My mother-in-law bought me the 200 hens as a wedding present but there was no money in eggs at the time so I sold them back to her. But pigs were OK. You could sell eight weaner pigs off a gilt and they would make a fiver a piece. Sell two litters of pigs and you had enough money to buy another cow. It wouldn’t be the very best cow, but it was a cow nonetheless.

Within about four years I was milking 100 cows on my 80 acres and buying most of their winter diet in the form of straw, a diet, I might add, that you wouldn’t dream of feeding today. At the height of my output I was selling 240 gallons of milk a day out of the milk tank and putting ten churns of milk on the communal milk stand in the village. Three others used that stand and my ten churns were more than theirs altogether. This was the stuff of legends, this sort of output off a small farm.

What the story serves to illustrate is that this is how it has always been, requiring more and more output, just to stay in the same place. The 80 acres is still my base unit and it’s not been enough for some time. So you have to try to enlarge it and the only way is to rent more ground. That’s what I’ve done over the years. I’ve had bits of land all over the place during that time which is what this particular story is all about. But we’re not ready to get to the purpose of the story just yet. It’s a great feeling when your son decides to join you on the farm. You always say you didn’t push him to do it, but you probably, very subtly, did. So that’s great, he goes to college, and now he’s back home and he gives new resource to the business. And he’s happy as well. All he wants in life is a Ford Escort, plenty of beer money and his mother’s cooking. But gradually that changes. It usually changes when the regular girlfriend turns up. A few years later and he’s got a house and children and the farm is stretched to cope with keeping two families instead of one. It was the search to make the business bigger that took us into poultry some years ago, establishing a unit on the farm that didn’t use precious acres. Except that 200 hens didn’t do it anymore, we had to keep tens of thousands. Now we can get started on the story.

MAY 19TH 2012

I’ve just come back from a week’s family holiday. I organised it and it took some organising. My sister-in-law wanted to go on a cruise. My sister didn’t want to go on a cruise because she unfortunately is in a wheelchair and the main purpose of our holiday is to get her away whilst she still can. She didn’t want to go on a cruise because she wasn’t sure about handling a wheelchair on a ship. My brother didn’t want to go with my brother-in-law and my brother-in-law didn’t want to go with my brother and my wife didn’t want to go at all. So I thought I’d done well to organise all that.

We went to the Italian lakes again. After two days I could have cheerfully hit my brother-in-law, and after four days, my brother, so when a boat man on a ferry fell out with me on the fifth day, there was no way he could have known how close he was to ending up in the lake. If ever you get the chance to go to these lakes, take it, the scenery is spectacular. But it’s the small detail I tend to focus on. In a week I only saw three animals in a field and they were horses. I saw the back leg of a goat but that was cooking in a fast food outlet in a street market. I’ve never seen such a clean hotel. It was pristine, clean sheets every day, if a petal fell off a flower in reception, the receptionist would come rushing out to pick it up. It was a small modest hotel, reasonably priced, immaculate in all respects except one.

There was a very small bar in the lounge and on the wall at the corner, the corner that sticks out to join the wood of the bar, was an endless two-way procession of ants. It fascinated me. There were always a hundred in view, some going up, some coming down, I couldn’t work out which way they were carrying and what it was they were carrying. They went under the wood of the bar and they disappeared into the ceiling, and as far as I could tell, no one paid them a scrap of attention.

***

We’ve got this free-range cockerel, his name is Neville. He attacks people. He is quite good at attacking, he sneaks up on you and he has been known to knock over unsuspecting grown men, including me, as they carry a couple of buckets of calf milk. Grown men don’t like rolling about in the mud with milk all over them, it’s not very dignified and it’s not very good for your ego when the story is related in the pub at some later date, although everyone else thinks it’s very funny. It’s all worthwhile in a way, because he attacks the unsuspecting visitor, he’s had several salesmen and who knows he might get a farm assurance man one day.

But I worry about Neville’s future. I’m worried about him attacking a small child and I’m worried about the possibility of retribution. He has a clearly defined territory and I have put an eight foot piece of hazel stick conveniently against the gate post. It has a whippy end so I can drive him off without doing him any real harm, except to his ego. There are people here who have threatened him with heavier objects and I am concerned about his possible demise.

So I try to work out a strategy that will save Neville’s life. Years ago we had a free-range turkey stag called Boris. Like Neville he became one of the family. He used to come to the kitchen door every morning for some toast and every Christmas day I would stand him on the kitchen table for a minute or so, then get him off again. I would tell him that not many turkeys could say they had done that. He danced the night away at my son’s wedding in a marquee on our lawn. He ended up inside a fox but I still miss him. So my thought process is that, if I get another turkey stag, he will distract Neville from his human attacks and inadvertently save Neville’s life. My daughter works at the farm museum down the road where they filmed Victorian Farm. They’ve got turkeys (and it’s Father’s Day soon).

A few days later and I’m on my way to fetch some turkeys. We can’t find any boxes to put them in so I just put them loose in the stock trailer. I get a stag and three turkey hens, big black ones. I leave them in the trailer for a couple of days to settle in, then I put them behind a gate in the calf shed. The hens are very tame, you can pick them up to stroke, and they can get out straight away but the stag is not as agile so it works quite well. The hens explore their new home but they don’t go too far because the stag calls them back. He gets out next day and the day after that they are all on the main road but they’ve settled down now and stay on the yard.

And so far the plan works. Neville has cut down the size of his territory and he is completely distracted by his new wives. But there’s a bonus, the turkey hens are laying, and by Saturday night I am taking orders in the pub for Christmas dinners. There’s great merriment in the mixed company as they hear the story of Neville and the turkeys – they all know about Neville in the pub; the landlord has written a poem about him. Then we move on to more practical issues. Where will I hatch out the eggs? ‘Have you got an incubator?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you got a broody hen?’ ‘No.’ In the end I suggest that there would be no better place to hatch some turkey eggs than within the bosom of the young lady sitting opposite me. She, and all there, agree that there could not possibly be a better place, she assures us the eggs would be warm and comfortable. So that’s sorted, I’m just making a list of volunteers to go and turn the eggs every 24 hours, there’s quite a lot of volunteers. This isn’t meant to be sexist, boobs are boobs and turkey eggs are turkey eggs, a fact of life. And you’ve got to hatch them out somewhere.

MAY 26TH 2012

I’ve spent most of the last week on a tractor working ground down with what we call a power harrow for crops of turnips and kale. It’s a slow dusty job, I only travel at about 2mph and it could be boring if it weren’t for the wildlife. There’s eight hares on the field and I wonder why they are spending time on a bare ploughed field when all about them is greenery. It could be they have leverets there, but I’ve not spotted them yet. Then there are the rooks, dozens of them, looking for grubs that I disturb as I pass by. Then a buzzard turns up. At close quarters, and you get up close on a tractor, they are quite an attractive bird. With each pass of the tractor another turns up and we are soon up to eight, if it keeps on like this it will get scary and I’m glad it’s tea time and time to go home. The final job is to roll it all down. The rooks all turn up because they have seen the tractor but with the roller on I’m not disturbing soil and they can’t work it out: why no fresh grubs? So they stand and watch me go up and down and I can tell they feel cheated.

***

It’s after milking on a Saturday afternoon and two of us are taking 25 turkeys eggs to put in an incubator. It’s a pleasant task. It doesn’t need two of us to transport 25 eggs but we are going to the local farm museum where the turkeys came from and that’s always worth a visit. A couple of 100 yards from a neighbour’s farm, this big white van pops out in front of us, and speeds off. ‘Wonder where he’s going, looks as if he’s late.’

This farmer does pig roasts and although we keep about 200 yards behind him, our truck is soon full of the smell of roast pork. So much so that Mert stirs himself in the back of the truck thinking he’s about to get a treat. The 200 yards distance we keep behind him is very critical. Two weeks ago another farmer on a similar errand went over a bump in the road a bit quick and the back door of the van burst open and a roast pig popped out onto the road. But there were no rich pickings to be had because there was an articulated lorry very close behind and it quickly flattened the pig out for the magpies and crows. We are not about to make the same mistake and if this pig drops out in front of us we at least expect to get some crackling. But it’s not to be our day and we have to turn off. The smell lingers in the truck for a long time. Wonder if you can buy roast pork air-fresheners?

***

We’ve got this gateway into a field. It’s off a narrow unclassified lane, the grass verge is wide there and from the evidence, it’s a popular place to stop. It’s a very quiet road and the view from there is wonderful. If you are not used to the view, it is probably spectacular. The evidence that it is used a lot is disappointing. The evidence is litter. It accumulates on a daily basis, fast food wrapping, bottles, you name it. I pick it all up, I don’t think I should have to but I dislike picking it up less than I dislike seeing it. So last week I’m going past there and there are a couple having a picnic, and a very dignified picnic it is too. Sensible Volvo car, two folding chairs at the rear, a nice little folding table, quite a pleasant scene.

When I come back by half an hour later they are just packing up to go. The chairs and table are going into the back of the car but all the debris off the picnic table is still on the floor. So I stop. They are a couple in their late 60s, (nothing wrong with that) quite poshly spoken, (probably from Bath) and I point out the litter they have left and ask if they are going to leave it there. They seem very surprised that I should even ask the question, ‘We don’t want all that rubbish in our car.’

This is a testing time for me. I tell them that if they don’t pick it up I will phone the police and that we, the dog and I, will make a citizen’s arrest until the police get here. They pick it up with very bad grace; they can see that I’m very angry, though I’ve not lost my temper. I notice that the rubbish is put on the floor on the front passenger side so I bet it’s back out of the window as soon as I’m out of sight. I’d always assumed it was young people doing this; quite surprised that it is all ages.

Next day, same gateway, and there are three Tesco bags just inside the gate against the hedge, they are out of sight of the road but it is litter nonetheless. I get out to move it with a sort of groan. But the bags are quite heavy so I look inside. They are each full of pre-packed cheeses, quite a lot of cheese in fact, the three bags probably weigh 25lbs. It’s curious, but my mind soon works it all out. It’s obvious to my fertile imagination that this cheese has been dropped off by a home delivery van driver, who has nicked it at the place he works and has left it here to be collected by an accomplice. I put it all back exactly as it was and decide that I will keep a closer eye on this gateway for the next few days, I think they call this sort of thing a stakeout.

A week later and the cheese is still there so I pick up the bags again for a closer look. It’s all four to five years old! I have to have a solution, so I decide that someone has been clearing out a freezer. Quite why they have to drive out into the country to dump it is beyond me. By now the mice have made a start on it, so I leave it there for them to finish, it’s still litter but I expect there will be some more tomorrow anyway. Some of the litter, I can’t even tell you about.

JUNE 9TH 2012

Though we’ve plenty of hares on our away ground, they are not so plentiful here at home. I saw three at home two years ago but not one last year. Stephen was out putting fertiliser on our grazing land this week and I was delighted when he reported seeing four adults and several leverets. There were a set of tiny twins, ‘no bigger than little kittens’ he said. As he moved across the field the little leverets would scamper a bit further on as they sought fresh cover in the next clump of grass. One was only ten yards from his tractor wheel when it was snatched by a buzzard and carried off to its nest in the adjoining wood. I’ve seen this happen several times. I always find it upsetting.

***

As a part of the distraction needed to steer pub conversation away from foxes and the safety of important cockerels, we are now full on with shearing stories. Groups of men working together invariably produce anecdotes and an element of fun but there’s no glossing over the fact that it is desperately hard work, mostly done, these days, by gangs that travel around shearing huge quantities of sheep. It’s hot, hard, dirty work and I wonder sometimes if some of these top shearers will suffer in later life with all that bending and exertions. There are plenty of young shearers who go to Australia and New Zealand to shear as well, making it a 12 month occupation.

I always remember a first rugby match of the season and we were playing a team from a city in the Midlands. One of our centres was a bit late, he’d been shearing that morning, a slightly built lad, wiry but very strong. He lined up in his position, he looked a bit tired, there was still sheep muck on his forearms. His opposite number was almost as big, strong, had a nice suntan from his holiday abroad, bit of a poser, he’d got the collar of his shirt turned up (always a giveaway), I don’t think he could believe his luck when he weighed up his opponent. First chance he had he put the ball under his arm and ran straight into our man. Our man didn’t really move; his opposite number ended up on the floor whimpering and had to have attention before he could carry on. Another player asked me what had happened. I said, ‘Well from where he comes from I don’t expect he meets many people who can shear 400 ewes a day.’

I didn’t start to keep sheep in any sort of numbers until later in my life, but I was determined to be able to shear. I used to get two others to help and we sheared in a field with a machine driven by a petrol engine. None of us were brilliant shearers so we sheared two heads and would catch our own ewe, shear it, wrap the wool and then it would be your turn to catch another ewe. Unfortunately the field was next to the pub so I would run a tab for drinks and crisps at lunchtime, drinks after we finished, same again next day. With the wages, the food and the drink, it was an expensive two days’ hard work. My helpers couldn’t come one day, and a very shy, quietly spoken Welshman in his mid-forties slipped unobtrusively into our yard. He’d done the lot by 2.30 in the afternoon. His bill was just about half of what it had cost me the year before; it had taken less than half the time and all I’d done was get the sheep in, wrap the wool and put a red ‘E’ on their backsides.

It’s hard work catching sheep, far better if you can get someone else to catch them, and I remember the story of a friend of mine, in fact it was he, the rugby player. When you shear, the last thing you want is the sheep straining against you all the time, so an important part of the skill is how you balance the ewe and move her about while you remove the wool. One of the worst things that can happen while you shear is for the ewe to get away before you have finished. She does a runner, possibly out into the field, half her wool is dragging along behind her and half of it still attached. There’s usually a mad scramble to catch her again before there’s bits of wool everywhere.

My friend was shearing with a gang of three others at a place he described as ‘up in the hills owned by two little old boys’. These ‘two little old boys’ couldn’t resist the golden opportunity presented by someone else catching their sheep so as the ewe sat on her backside being shorn, they would attempt to trim her feet at the same time. So as the shearer tried to control his sheep, every few seconds she would struggle and kick because her feet were being trimmed by a penknife. It wasn’t long before the shearers had had enough of this and at a given signal the four of them let their sheep go. The little old boys couldn’t catch four ewes at the same time; they ended up with four half-shorn ewes out in the field and handfuls of wool everywhere. They had to get their dogs and get all the shorn sheep back in, in order to catch the four while the shearers sat down and had a cup of tea. There was no more foot trimming done after that. I don’t miss shearing, life has moved on, mine in particular, but I do miss sheep washing. Nearly everyone used to wash their sheep a week or so before shearing, years ago. The wool would ‘rise’ and they would shear easier. There was a pool or a place where you could block a stream in most localities and usually someone would end up in the water with the sheep. I don’t know of anyone who washes sheep now. Think I’ll suggest it in the pub. I bet ‘they’ wouldn’t let you do it these days.

JUNE 16TH 2012

The fox has had two of my turkeys so I’ve only got the stag and one hen left. ‘Serves you right,’ they all say, but I wanted my turkeys to be truly free range and they settled down nicely in the calf shed roosting at night on a gate. Now I have to go up the yard every night and shut them in the stock trailer, which wasn’t the original idea. And it isn’t ‘them’ any more either, it’s just the stag because the remaining hen has disappeared and we presume she has some eggs somewhere and she only turns up once a day for some food. We’ve looked for her everywhere but just can’t find her nest. You can’t get much more vulnerable to fox than sitting on some eggs all night, goodness knows where. The fox, or foxes, are only doing what foxes do, I just wish they wouldn’t do it around here. And there’s plenty of rabbits about, why don’t they get them?

***

We’ve changed my wife’s car. We moved her up about six years and moved her down about 80,000 miles for a modest three figure sum. ‘This new car is very good on petrol,’ she says. Next day she runs out of petrol on a major trunk road. She’d been looking at the temperature gauge.

***

So the Queen’s Jubilee has come to an end, gone. For reasons I’m not sure of, I was on the village committee. I was put in charge of risk assessment, which everyone thought was hilarious, so hilarious that I started to find it quite hurtful. The Monday evening celebrations, pre beacon lighting, were a disco and hog roast at the pub. I was put in charge of events at the pub as well. ‘Roger is always in the pub, he can see to that.’ Then something happened that makes it all worthwhile.

A ‘newcomer’ comes up. I’ve never met him before but decided some time ago that I didn’t like him. ‘Are you Roger Evans?’ ‘Yes I am.’ ‘Do you live at ______ Farm?’ ‘Yes I do..’ ‘Well I’ve been to your farm twice now with poppies for Remembrance Day. I’ve never got close enough to deliver a poppy but your dog has bitten my twice’. I tell him that my dog is a good judge of character and this produces a scowl. Makes me feel good knowing that Mert continues to live up to his reputation. When I get home Mert gets a pork pie for his supper. Anyway I get my poppy off a girl in the village, he should know that.

JUNE 23RD 2012

I told you I had rented some ‘new’ fields and a large cattle shed, didn’t I? Well the farm where it is, has been split up, and there’s another man rents the farmhouse. The man in the farmhouse has a few hens roaming about the yard and one of them started to lay in the shed of one of my neighbours. He was delighted with this and went out and bought a dummy egg to put it in this hen’s nest. So the hen goes to her nest everyday and there’s always an egg there (even if it’s a rubber one) so she keeps on laying there and as hens aren’t big on counting, she doesn’t realise that the eggs don’t increase in number.

We get the story every Saturday night in the pub, it’s told with great glee because the husband and wife are getting a free egg every day. ‘We had six lovely eggs again this week, beautiful they are, lovely brown shells.’ ‘You should see the yolks, really rich, golden they are.’ And husband and wife go ‘mmm’ to try and convey to us how tasty the eggs are. I had a look in their shed one day and I couldn’t find the nest. But you just have to be patient in life and the story will eventually unfold. On Saturday they say ‘We had two eggs this week, she’s laying between two bales of straw and I’ve got some black plastic sheet over them and the hen pops under the sheet to lay but no one can see her nest.’ I find the nest easily next day, there are two real eggs and the rubber one, I remove all three and replace them with two Cadbury Creme eggs.

There’s been no mention of eggs since but if you watch their faces, you can see their eyes darting about looking to see if someone will give the game away. I look in the nest again four days later, the hen is still laying but the chocolate eggs are gone. I put the rubber egg back in the nest and in a minute I’m having the two real ones I lifted for my breakfast. I haven’t decided yet what the next step will be, I’m trying to locate a big left-over Easter egg. Or hard boiled eggs in the nest could be the next answer.

***

I don’t know how we got around to the subject, but get around to it we did, we were discussing National Insurance contributions in the pub. Thursday night in the pub is farmer’s night (and Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday nights) but Thursday night is the main night. It’s only really dedicated farmers like me that go four nights. Sometimes non-farmers pull up a stool and try to join us but I always tell them they will struggle intellectually with the conversation. We talk about tractors and sheep and the price of red diesel, heady stuff like that. Now I think about it, I think we came to National Insurance via banking on-line and direct debits and stuff like that, then someone says, years ago they used to have to buy stamps and put them on a card.