Over the Farmer's Gate E-Book

Roger Evans

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 313

Beschreibung

Roger Evans has built up a large cult following over the last 25 years with his hugely popular column in the Dairy Farmer, for which he won the prestigious PPA Columnist of the Year Award in 2000. He also has a huge following every Saturday in the Western Daily Press. An articulate Shropshire dairy and poultry farmer all his life, Roger Evans' lively prose sheds light on the joys and daily challenges of his work. He is well-informed, realistic and funny in his comments about all aspects of his life as a farmer today. Popular at all the agricultural shows and a hot-ticket as an after-dinner speaker, Roger is widely regarded as one of the best modern spokesmen for the British farmer.

Leseprobe

To all of my family

CONTENTS

Title PageDedication1. Spring2. Summer3. Autumn4. WinterCopyright

Spring

I’M A DAIRY FARMER and I live and farm in a particularly beautiful part of the country. People often say how lucky I am to live around here and that I probably take it for granted.

A day never passes when I don’t appreciate what I have around me, and in some ways this book offers an opportunity to share how and where I live and what I see about me. I see myself as a privileged spectator, observing what goes on among the people, wildlife, the animals I live and work with and a countryside that I cherish.

I work long hours, often on repetitive work and watching wildlife is often a welcome distraction. I’ve got this mobile hide that I use as a vantage point. It’s very unobtrusive; birds and animals have become used to seeing it about, it’s got glass all around, it’s green so it blends in and it’s called a tractor.

It’s a life and death struggle for the wildlife out there. You can watch something flourish but there’s usually a predator lurking in the background. When I see an aggressive species gaining the upper hand I long to intervene, to provide some balance. Balance is a theme I will return to often.

And then there are the people. Sometimes I use the tractor to creep up on them as well. The people around here have changed beyond belief as more seek to live in this sort of area.

There was a time, when driving the tractor through the village, that if I saw a stranger I would slow down and stare at them. These days I can see lots of people I don’t know but they all seem to know each other and they’re staring at me.

Thirty or forty years ago, there were a couple of farms within the village and the movement of stock and farm vehicles within the village was an everyday occurrence. The farms are gone now, and the buildings have become homes.

I kept a flock of sheep for many years and their summer grazing was the other side of the village, and we had to bring them home regularly for shearing and dipping. Farming life is full of ironies and sheep are particularly adept at irony. They used to graze a succession of fields, the furthest parts of which were nearly a mile away from the roadside gate. The sheep would be in what an auctioneer would describe as ‘flock ages’, meaning that at one end of the scale you would have the young fit ewes you had bought the previous autumn – yearling ewes – and at the other end you would have the old granny ewes.

Sheep are a bit like humans: the young ones could go drinking and dancing all night, the old ones are getting a bit broad in the beam, starting to lose their teeth, and are definitely unfit. The irony was that when you went to fetch the flock home, the yearling ewes all seemed to be close to the road while the old ewes would be at the other end of their range.

I would put the dog around, very gently, but the effect was always the same, a breakneck gallop to the road, the old ewes trying to keep up with their lambs, who thought all this was great fun. When you opened the gate, the yearling ewes would be off down the road.

Eventually, out through the gate would come the granny ewes, puffing and blowing. There was nothing cruel about this, but if you’re 65 you shouldn’t go jogging with 18-year-olds.

By the time we would get to the village some of the old ewes would be starting to struggle. Just when you had about 10 cars behind you, some of them would flop down in the road for a rest.

This would present a dilemma, but there were sanctuaries you could use. We used to pop half a dozen into the school playground, a couple in the phone box and local people would recognise whose they were and know that you’d be back with the van to pick them up later. These days the RSPCA would be there long before you could get back with the van.

The sheep have long gone. I kept the land on for a few years and used to graze my in-calf heifers there. I used to walk them there in the spring and back in the autumn. When you are taking heifers through the village, past an open plan garden, and they’ve been shut in a building all winter and there’s a nice bite of grass on somebody’s lawn, they can take a bit of getting off and back on to the road. The heifer that’s gone into the greenhouse can take a bit longer.

I used to know the names of all the children who attended the village school and names of all the young mums who took them there. I don’t any more. Times change. There was a time when I used to take 15 children to swimming class in a Morris Oxford, with three in the boot, and only two were mine. I don’t do that any more either.

AT LONG last, a friend has come to set some mole traps in the garden. I’ve tried to catch them with little success (well, none really) and my grandsons complain that the molehills spoil the football and that cricket is completely out of the question.

We’ve now caught one, but there are three new areas of mole activity. The dog tries to help by digging for them but this doesn’t help the sporting activity and as far as I know, he’s less successful than me.

Next time I buy a lawnmower I will have one with a blade on the front like a bulldozer to level the molehills.

Round here they are called ‘unts’ (moles, that is) and a molehill is called an unty tump.

THERE has been a lot of publicity recently about farmers being subsidised with what is called a single farm payment. The publicity centred on the fact that the money was due at the end of last year but the Government, for a variety of reasons, had failed to pay it out until recently. Without labouring the late-payment problem, the publicity it generated did flag up the subsidy issue and, as a farmer, I was on the end of quite a lot of teasing about receiving hand-outs, particularly from people involved in other businesses. Most of the teasing was thinly veiled sarcasm; I’m quite good at sarcasm myself but resisted the temptation, because deep down I would prefer not to receive this money. I would rather receive adequate returns from the market place, but I don’t.

Historically, money was directed towards the production of food, resulting in the food mountains that have long gone and now exist only in the minds of some politicians.

We are now paid to look after the countryside and the environment, which we do, and I hope that something of my own caring and responsibility comes across in this book. The reality is that few farm businesses would survive without this money. My milk at the moment is worth about 17½p a litre. Ten years ago it was worth 25p. Ironically, milk prices are under huge pressure at the moment and are likely to go down even further.

We produce broiler chicken here as well as milk. I love to see a new batch of chicks running about on nice, clean sawdust. When they are ready to go you can hardly walk between them. I would like to be able to reduce stocking density but if I did we couldn’t compete with imports. A friend of mine criticises the way we rear our poultry yet enthuses about being able to buy a ready-cooked chicken for £3.

I have to go to London on the train about once a month and there’s a farm we pass that hasn’t been ‘farmed’ for several years. To start with, it looked like several fields of dead grass and weeds; now it’s all briars and thorn bushes. Soon it will be an impassable eyesore. I don’t think the public want that.

In the pub one night, a local garage owner was waxing eloquent about farmers’ payments. I kept my own counsel but couldn’t help thinking that if I could have for my milk what I was getting 10 years ago, and he was charging for his petrol what he was getting 10 years ago and all the other products I buy were at the same level, he could have my single farm payment with pleasure.

WE’VE GOT quite a lot of cats about this farm. There are two that are sort of house cats that live in a utility room. We can call on these two if we get any unwelcome furry visitors with long tails in the house, which old farmhouses often do.

And there are the other cats. I don’t know how many there are, they seem to come and go. Two years ago, there were 22. We give them milk every day, so that’s when I count them.

I prefer to think of them as feral cats because farm assurance seems to think I should care for them. You can’t touch them because they never come near enough. I suspect that if you did, you could lose some fingers.

There’s a beautiful grey, half-grown kitten that lives up with the young calves. I give it food and milk every day because I would like to tame it, catch it and give it to my granddaughter for a pet. Most of them are ginger, a legacy of a ferocious ginger tomcat that used to visit here at one time. If you met him in a doorway he would snarl at you and it would be a question of who had the bottle to keep going. I don’t like the ginger cats because they remind me of him.

We’ve got a couple of tabby cats. One is very old with a bent ear but she’s always working away. We’ve got four or five nice black ones as well. What we haven’t got are rats. We used to have a lot of wrens about but I suspect the cats have had them as well.

Then there are the dogs. If not on farming duties, the dogs busy themselves keeping the cats busy. We have a bearded collie who was brought to work the cattle and he can do the whole thing, the outrun, the fetch and the pen, but only with cats. He spends his day working with the cats. The cats, for their part, being fiercely independent, take very little notice of him. So when he thinks he’s got a couple cornered up in a ‘pen’, it’s only because that’s where those particular cats have decided to go. Sometimes he is joined by Mert our border collie and when I hear prolonged barking and I go to investigate, it is always because a new cat or a new kitten has turned up.

It has always intrigued me that the dogs can differentiate between new cats and their regular cats. At night, the corgi lives in the kitchen, the bearded collie runs loose (I wouldn’t be that bothered if he ran away) and the border collie is chained up. Dogs are a bit like young boys, leave them to their own devices and they will get up to mischief.

The border collie lives in what used to be a henhouse situated in what used to be a walled kitchen garden. He has a nice long chain so he can go into the henhouse or quite a way outside. In the summer, wet or dry, he sleeps outside. Last week, I tidied up his shed and gave him a thick wad of nice clean straw to sleep on. Next morning, when it was still very dark, I went to release him to come with me to fetch the cows. He had made himself a cosy nest in the straw and at first glance in the torchlight he looked a lot bigger than usual.

The reason? There, curled up with him in the same warm hollow, were three black cats. They were so close together that you couldn’t tell where the cats finished and the dog started. An hour later there was a standoff between a collection of dogs and a collection of cats around the milk dish. Confrontation by day, cuddles at night, bit like being married.

I HAVEN’T seen the keeper for about a month; he’s been busy with the lambing at the farm where he works full-time. But that’s all finished now and he’s done his spring sowing so his zest and enthusiasm are focused back on to his part-time job as a gamekeeper.

We have a meeting planned today, Saturday morning. Every year I allow him to grow two acres of game cover on my land and today we meet to decide if I will allow the arrangement to continue, and for how much.

He’s fairly confident on the continuation issue but the cost is a bit more sensitive. I often think that members of shooting syndicates expect the shoot to run on a shoestring.

Shooting is very expensive anyway but I had a theory when I played rugby that whatever it cost to go on some trip or other would actually cost you double that, because your wife would spend the same amount on herself and, in reality, there wasn’t much you could say about it. I am sure that the same applies to shooting.

‘How much rent will you want this year?’

I’m straight to the main issue, I haven’t time to hang about today as my Discovery has a poorly clutch and I’m in my son’s car and he’s off to play rugby at 11 o’clock. ‘I want £1,000 up-front and a 200-bird day’s shooting for me and my friends.’

I get one of his thin smiles. That’s way over the top but people say I have a very convincing style when it comes to winding them up. We eventually agree on £100 more than last year. He doesn’t seem over-pleased but I’m sure the shoot expected to pay more, so why disappoint them?

That done, he moves on.

‘We were foxing last night and I reckon there were over 40 of your hares in that wood.’

I’ve seen hares about, but not that many.

‘Tom Lewis was standing in that corner by the stile and there were 18 went past him.’

Now I know the Tom Lewis in question, and his tendency to exaggerate, so there were probably four or five.

‘You like your hares and I keep an eye on them for you.’

Slowly but surely they’ve become ‘my’ hares – and it’s true, I do like them. It’s just that I suspect that if another tenant complains to the keeper about hare damage they will be Roger Evans’ hares that are causing the trouble.

‘Many foxes about?’ I ask innocently.

‘A few.’

Strange that he knows, or he reckons he knows, exactly how many hares there are about, but he’s not going to tell me how many foxes they shot.

I WAS PUTTING some fertiliser on the winter wheat the other day and I spotted a tiny leveret scuttling along on an adjacent tramline.

When we drill a field we miss drills on a regular basis so that we have somewhere to drive the tractor in subsequent operations without damaging the crop.

Leverets travel down these tramlines; scuttle is the right word because they travel flat to the ground, trying to keep out of sight.

As I watched, a buzzard swooped in and carried the unfortunate leveret away in one easy motion. Left me a bit sad really, but life and death are all around in the springtime. I’ve seen this happen before, but never this close.

Spring has finally burst upon us in just a few days. We suffered a really raw day with a biting east wind and temperatures stuck at three degrees centigrade and the next day it was 18 degrees. In just a few days since then I have seen my first swallow, my first house martin and heard the cuckoo. There is a suggestion within the family that I hear the cuckoo all year round.

Nothing epitomises spring more than the sound of larks on a sunny day. We are well blessed with larks around here and in the last few days of warm weather they have really been making up for lost time.

SOMETIMES I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Given the choice I prefer to laugh - there’s plenty to make you cry as a dairy farmer - so when something is within your own remit, a chuckle is better than tears. I was moving some dry cows in a trailer. They’d just completed lactation and were now going off for a couple of months to our other land. A couple of months to recuperate, replenish body reserves, off concrete on to a nice grassy field, a time, as it were, to use my grandchildren’s jargon, to chill out. Because the lane is a bit narrow where I was dropping them off, I have to park the trailer at right angles to the gateway so that as the cows come out of the trailer they have to turn 90 degrees into the field. This shouldn’t be any big deal; with me standing in a strategically suitable place and the sight of a grassy field in the other direction, it should be, grandchildren jargon again, a no-brainer. The only slight negative to this carefully planned scenario is that there are already nine in-calf heifers in the field.

As I pull up they are all lying down at the far end of the field so that shouldn’t be a problem. As I park up, the cows in the trailer, three of them, decide to re-establish some sort of pecking order. This apparently involves a lot of pushing and shoving, probably a bit of a fight, and lots and lots of clatter and an element of trailer bouncing.

If you are an in-calf heifer lying down, chewing your cud, this sort of commotion is irresistible, so you jump smartly to your feet and race up the field to the gate just as fast as you can. Getting the cows out of the trailer is now just a bit more difficult.

There is an unavoidable sequence to events now. I have to open the field gate first whatever I do, and then run smartly to the trailer, let down the tailboard, open the two stock gates within the trailer and get back into my strategic position just as quickly as I can. Alas, smartly and quickly are not smartly and quickly enough and two of the in-calf heifers are out of the field and away into the distance.

People sometimes ask me what it’s like getting old. Well, it’s OK just as long as you don’t try to run anywhere. So I’ve got two heifers about a hundred yards away now and seven heifers and three dry cows in the field and quite a dilemma. But help is at hand. Under the tailboard of the trailer is Mert my border collie.

He just loves moving cattle in the trailer and at loading and unloading, he is always under the ramp. Apparently, this is a good place from which to bite a wayward ankle; mostly it is cattle ankles but it could just as easily be mine. So eager is he to get under the trailer that there’s a good chance he could get run over one day but that’s his problem.

But now is his big chance to shine and he takes it. ‘Get on by Mert,’ I cry, pointing down the lane at the two disappearing heifers. And he does, he does get on by, he goes into the field and fetches the other 10 cattle as well. The only plus here is that they set off in the same direction as the other two.

The first two heifers are out of sight now but Mert is still my only chance unless I start to make frantic mobile phone calls home for help. Not keen to admit that I can’t unload three cows into a field on my own I try once more: ‘Get on by Mert’.

And once again he does. He’s off down the lane, past the big bunch and out of sight after the other two. Moments later they are all coming back towards me, the two that caused the trouble at some speed, high-stepping it like Welsh cobs at a show. Obviously there’s been a bit of ankle-nipping going on. Into the field and shut the gate, job done.

My relief is huge. The next junction down the lane is a place we call Five Turnings, for fairly obvious reasons. Goodness knows where they would all have ended up if they’d got that far.

The fuss I make of the dog is at a level he’s not experienced before and he’s so grateful that, returning home, he tries to sit on my lap instead of his usual place between the two front seats, and I can’t get the seat belt around the two of us.

But it’s not quite ‘job done’ – there’s another load of four cows to move yet. This time I take a bit more care. I back the trailer a bit nearer to the gate so that I have a bit less of a gap to cover. The cattle already in the field are by the gate but I think I’ve got everything covered. Mert is in his usual place under the trailer. I open the gate and leap to the trailer ramp. On the previous occasion opening the trailer smartly wasn’t quick enough. This time my ‘leap’ is lacking in speed as well, because without a word from me the dog is into the field and has the 12 cattle out on the road quicker than I can say the F word.

With an air of resignation I let the four cows out of the trailer to join them. At least I have them all in the same place, even if it’s the wrong place. And the dog? He’s away down the lane, still unbidden, and fetches all the cattle back with an air of self-satisfaction.

There’s 16 cattle in this group now and it takes some bottle for a dog to pass them in a narrow lane, stop them, turn them and bring them back. I know that, the dog knows that, and he presents himself for the fuss he’d had at the previous incident with some pride.

He gets his reward and, as I drive back, I look across at him and wonder just who is in charge here. I’m still not sure of the answer. I get back into the yard.

‘Everything OK?’ my son asks.

‘Yes fine.’ I don’t tell anyone I’ve just been on an adventure.

THE CALVES being born here now were fathered by the Belgian Blue bull we bought last year. There is a good demand for this beef-cross calf, so we are hoping the revenue will help to alleviate milk prices, which are on the downward slide.

We try to give all our calves a good start in life. They spend the first 24 hours with their mum and then they are put with all the other fresh-calved cows in our loose-housed shed, where there is plenty of room and nice fresh straw to lie on twice a day.

In theory, they can stay here for several days if they behave themselves and it is luxury living while it lasts. It’s the nearest they will get to post-natal care with BUPA.

Twice a day these cows go down to the parlour to be milked and it can be very difficult parting calves from mums to achieve this, especially if half the cows in the group think it’s their calf.

Having persuaded the cows out of the shed, you have to persuade the calves to stay there. But usually this can be done because it’s a natural instinct for a calf to go and lie on its own while its mother isn’t about. This can be a real problem when calves are born outside in the summer, as they will secrete themselves away in clumps of nettles and the like and you can spend ages looking for them.

Anyway, with luck the calves in the shed will go and lie by the walls until mother returns from the milking parlour, which will be only 15 minutes or so. If they go and lie quietly, you can file the mothers back there uninterrupted after being milked. But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, at a signal I cannot detect, four or five calves will kick their heels up, frolic around the shed a couple of times and then it’s off down the yard at a hundred miles an hour causing chaos everywhere they go. It’s then that they get taken from mother.

We had a good calf that would go and lie down at milking time, its mother would leave it for the short time without any fuss, and so it stayed there for about a week and grew and thrived. One day I went to get the group of cows to milk them and there was no sign of the calf. The mother was lying there chewing her cud, completely content. I walked around the shed again – there are 40 cows in this group, so I could have missed it. But experience told me where it was. I got the cow up and there was the calf, cosy and warm, flat and dead. Mother had been sitting on top of it like a broody hen trying to hatch some eggs. Sometimes animals will contrive to die despite your best efforts.

We had a cow once that lay on three calves in succession; she’d killed them as soon as they were born and before we ever saw them alive.

WHEN WE came to live here, in 1964, there was a man living in one of the cottages who had worked on the farm for 47 years.

He used to tell me that his first job here, with others, was to construct a grass tennis court by the farmhouse. They had to excavate by hand into the sloping garden and then work a fine tilth on a nearby field and cart the top two or three inches of fine soil back with horse and cart to create the seedbed they needed.

If ever you read that fine book Farmer’s Glory by A G Street, you will find that the playing of tennis was an important part of the life of a yeoman farmer, whose lifestyle brought them close to the leisured classes.

This was quite readily achieved if you had lots of staff and paid them just enough, but only just. We’ve never used this part of our lawn as a tennis court but it has seen lots of use as a football pitch and I have constructed goalposts at one end so that my grandsons can practise their goal-kicks for rugby, as well.

This year, large parts of the lawn resemble a war zone, as the lawn has been taken over by moles. The trouble is, I’ve never been any good at catching them. Until this week, the only mole I have ‘caught’ for years was when I spent the whole of a sunny evening sitting in the garden reading the Sunday papers with a shotgun in my lap.

I’ve tried all sorts of traps, smoke bombs, pills, windmills in bottles, the lot. Expert mole-catchers use traps but they never worked for me.

My heifers are away on another farm and the manager there is always catching moles successfully. Eventually, the lure of a can of cider and £5-a-mole brought him to our garden.

He surveyed the scene of destruction quite nonchalantly and then found a run along the wall at one side and another along the fence and he put two traps down.

I couldn’t see how he detected these runs but it was done in no time at all. Next morning there was a mole in each trap so I re-laid them and the next day there were two more.

I’ve not caught one for several days now but there are still new molehills every morning, albeit at a reduced level of activity.

I had a man working here many years ago who was good at catching moles. He claimed to know something of a mole’s psyche. He had a theory that it was impossible to catch a mole in the normal course of events; they were too clever and could easily detect a trap. You could catch them only when they were running away and a mole will run away only from mating and fighting. He didn’t use the word mating; he used another word, a word that connected with fighting as an example of alliteration. He didn’t know that alliteration existed but it had a certain eloquence to it. How he knew all that, goodness only knows. We can see what the birds of the air and the beasts of the field get up to, but what goes on underground is more of a mystery.

It wasn’t for me to tell him he’d made it all up – the way he told it, it was a good story and anyway, he could catch moles.

I had a good look at the first one I caught. They are quite remarkable little creatures, their little ‘hands’ able to dig away all that soil. I bear them no ill will; it’s just that I don’t need them on my lawn.

Truth be told, we don’t need them in fields, either. Too many molehills in a field and your silage can be contaminated with soil and the cattle can die of listeria. Not a lot going for it, really, old mole.

THERE ARE only two sounds to be heard at this time of the morning. The most obvious one is the non-stop tinkling of the cow bell attached to my brown Swiss cow.

It’s a constant in our lives now; you can hear it as you go out of the kitchen door, ringing to the cow’s slightest movement, even, it seems, as she breathes.

I like to hear it, but my wife thinks it’s cruel. ‘What,’ she says, ‘if the cow doesn’t like a bell ringing around her neck night and day, 24/7?’ She has a point, and I may take it off and put it on another cow to give her a break.

There’s another noise and I like to hear that as well – the sound of barn owls hunting. If you see one close to, even if it is stuffed and in a case, you wonder if you ever saw such beautiful plumage.

Some people around here call owls ‘hullards’. I’ve no idea why – perhaps it’s a sort of dialect name – but it doesn’t stop there. If your name is Howells, and there are a goodly number of Howells about this area, Jimmy Howells, for example, can end up being called Jimmy Hullard!

I used to be in a group of pheasant shooters and one of the members used to bring a guest regularly who was ultra-conscious of a step he mistakenly thought he had taken up the social ladder, and he used to attach an ‘H’ to all sorts of words as he tried to posh himself up.

We would often see owls when we shot away in the woods. The first time he saw one it was a ‘howl’, and that’s what they all became after that.

Just to complete the bird theme, when my brother first started school there were two girls in his class who caught his eye, one called Hazel Pigeon and one called Hazel Dove. He thought they were sisters. But then life has always been a struggle for him.

IT IS OFTEN brought home to me the strange phenomena of people in towns and cities who don’t talk to each other. They may not know them, but surely they see the same people every day on the same train, so what’s the problem?

Talking to the people I meet daily is an important part of my life and I struggle to imagine a life without it.

But sometimes it can be a bit of a nuisance if you are in a rush. Once, memorably, I was sent into our small local town on Christmas Eve to get some chestnuts. I came back three hours later with one chestnut!

This week I had a similar experience. I’ve been busy with my dairy co-op work lately and although a recent day involved a drive to the top end of Lancashire, there were a couple of jobs of my own I needed to do before I went.

So I set off a couple of hours early and my first stop was the shoe shop. The shop keeper is in his late 60s, owns three or four shops, does a bit of farming, and is a third-generation cobbler and proud of it.

I drew his attention to the black shoes I was wearing with a broken shoelace and a sole showing a bit of a gap from the upper.

We had a bit of banter about the shoes still being under guarantee, but eventually he told me to get them off while he put soles and heels on them.

I pulled up a chair and watched him at his work. It took him about 40 minutes and in this time we had a good chat about farming and shoe-mending.

He told me how he spent most of his National Service mending army boots. He still has examples about his shop of footwear of yesteryear, including those old football boots with leather nail-in studs, and hob-nail boots for a small child, all of which he made himself.

I’m always telling him he should make more of this memorabilia with a small display area within the shop but he doesn’t seem to be motivated to do that.

Throughout his life he envied farmers, thinking they made a fortune, so he bought two farms. He’s not found it as easy as he thought, but he still thinks he’s missing a trick somewhere.

Job done, I drove a couple of hundred yards up the street to get my new glasses. There was a time when my glasses were quite safe within the breast pocket of my shirt, where they lived with my mobile phone. I seem to have several shirts now without this important accessory and my glasses became seriously damaged in my trouser pocket.

They’ve spent two weeks held together with Sellotape and I’ve had to drive with my head tilted on one side to keep my world level.

My daughter suggested holding them together with Elastoplast, saying: ‘Then you’ll really look like Jack Duckworth.’

My new glasses had arrived and the optometrist and her assistant were all over me as they determined that the new glasses fitted correctly.

I found the close proximity to these two women a bit disconcerting, because when I say close, they really were close. It’s probably because I’d showered and got clean ‘going out’ clothes on, whereas when I came to have my eyes tested I was in my working clothes and rather ‘mucky’.

It is not such an enjoyable experience when they touch me for £260 for the new glasses and the bits they have bought to mend my old glasses, which will now become my working glasses.

As I went out of the shop I tried to evaluate the elements of cost that I had to pay for the traces of perfume that still linger about me, so I decided that the glasses were quite reasonable.

Across the road from the opticians is the florist and the florist, who I know well, is outside the shop talking to another woman, who I also know.

Spotting me washed and tidy they came across and wanted to know where I was off to. I took the opportunity to get the florist to come and turn the volume up on my new sat-nav. I could do it on the old sat-nav but haven’t worked out how to do it on this.

The florist remarks on the nice female Irish voice I have on it. I told her I chose it because it reminds me of the lady who kept the pub in Ballykissangel – I think I’m falling in love with the lady on the sat-nav.

The florist told me she’d done the flowers for four funerals already this week but my love for the sat-nav lady was about the saddest thing she’d heard. Suitably put down, I finally set off on my journey.

IT WAS A lovely sunny Sunday morning and the sumptuous breakfast I prepared – beans on toast – had been consumed and I was back out in the yard.

There’s only me about at the moment and my first job was to let out the group of lower yielding cows who, for a week now, have been going out in the daytime to lie in the field in front of our house. This left two separate groups of high yielders very envious, and I could see them contemplating a bit of gate-jumping as they watched their colleagues make their way out.

It was such a nice day (it could easily have been May) so I decided to divert the low yielders on to a fresh field of grass. I let one group of high yielders on to the field in front of the house and the other group of high yielders out into what used to be a two-acre orchard.

None of them needed any bidding to embrace this new regime and within just a few minutes the buildings were empty of cows.

One group was soon busy grazing and the two others were lying down, soaking up the sunshine.

It was the first time for more than six months that the buildings had been empty of cattle and there was strangeness about it. There’s been births, deaths, cows mooing against gates, ringing their bloody bells, and now just silence.

I’ve noticed this before in a lambing shed. Two months of activity and then it’s all gone. Just the debris is left; bits of wool, the empty isolation pens, a dead lamb slung over a gate. The flock, and their incessant bleating, move on to the next stage of their annual cycle and, like the cows, they are pleased, as it takes them back to the fields where they belong.

THE FIRST bunch of cows we milk in the morning – they are the group we optimistically call ‘high yielders’ – have to be fetched home by torchlight.

The second group is usually further away and fetched in a sort of half-light, not quite light, but, then again, not really dark enough to take the torch, especially if you’d rather fetch them with your hands in your pockets.

When I arrive at the gate of their usual night field – they have the run of 12 acres going up to the wood – I can only see the very white cows. More importantly, I can’t see the dog.