by Roger Evans
This is a renowned orthopaedic hospital and some of the things you see here really put life into perspective.
There’s much to-ing and fro-ing of the other patients, though, and as each successive couple is called, there are cries of ‘good luck’, and when they come back they are greeted like heroes.
People are also whispering to their companions and then slipping away on their own to do the ‘sample’. They think I can’t see the sample pot hidden in their hands. Mine is empty in the breast pocket of my shirt and, at the moment, I’ve never felt less like a pee in my life.
It’s my final call to the surgeon, and we have a look at my X-rays. ‘Mine used to be like that,’ he says, and we spend 10 minutes talking about rugby.
That’s it then, only the urine sample now. It’s a bit of a struggle and I soon get it over with.
When I come out, all the nurses are having a bit of a gossip and I am introduced as ‘the one who knew his nose wasn’t in his mouth’. It’s a job to squeeze past the waiting room door as people say farewell to those they’ve known only a few hours. I can see that a lot enjoy the attention and are almost loathe to go home. Me, I can’t wait for the operation, full fitness again and going back to being bionic.
THERE’S A HILL near here that is something of a local landmark. If you lived on the plains of Cheshire or the wetlands of Somerset you might call it a mountain but everything in life is relative, and around here it’s called a hill.
It’s a big old hill mind, goes about 10 miles down. Most of it is owned by the National Trust and it provides common grazing for the farms that adjoin it. The people who make a living off it, with their natural this and natural that, project this and project that, outnumber the farmers and very probably their sheep by some distance.
There are lots of sheep on the hill; I’ve seen grouse on there, hardly any cattle and a few ponies, although there used to be lots.
I’m never really sure what these various bodies are looking for in their ideal of vegetation on the hill.
We read a lot about ‘overgrazing’ that will ‘spoil’ everything but what is there now is the result of what has gone on before, in the way of livestock, so it doesn’t really tie in.
But then if you earn your living running a project that is running a hill and you say everything is OK, well you don’t need the project, do you?
Hill-sheep production used to be subsidised on a headage basis, so the more sheep you had, the more subsidy you got. That’s all stopped now and farmers are paid a lump sum based on what they received historically, so there are nowhere near as many sheep on the hills today.
I read somewhere that there are now four million less sheep in Wales, for example, than just a few years ago.
IN THE SUMMER, at weekends, the sound of motorbikes intrudes on the peace of early mornings. Almost everywhere we go in the country these days we are implored to ‘think bike’, as we drive about.
But unfortunately, the bikers themselves don’t seem to read these notices, because our local newspaper always has reports of accidents and deaths over the previous weekend.
Yesterday there was a new sound, gunfire, marking, or at least reminding me, that shooting started at the beginning of September for partridge and duck.
However, the natural world that I see every day is slowly being taken over by the pheasant. In just a few weeks, they have transformed themselves from the shadowy shy birds that hung around the release pens, to getting larger and bolder and now they can be seen everywhere.
Their comeuppance, gunfire, will start in November. It is ironic that when I note these preludes to the shooting season that I have just seen a hen pheasant with a nice brood of poults, and a partridge with a hatch of chicks. If they’ve got any sense, and they probably haven’t, they’ll leave off learning to fly for six months or so.
One day I saw five red kites on one field. I don’t know if kites have a collective noun to go with them but it was a nice sight.
What had brought them there I don’t know – perhaps they were a family on some sort of outing.
Out there in the media world that knows more about nature than those of us that live amongst it, they have just woken up to the fact that your average badger is very partial to a hedgehog supper. I’ve only seen one hedgehog run over on the road this year but lots of badgers.
I’ve been looking out for hedgehogs on purpose and I drive a lot of miles. The run-over hedgehog used to be almost a given on any journey and the disappearance of the one and the proliferation of the other is a clear indication of the populations of both species.
It is also a given that farmers are bracketed in with badgers, for destroying the hedgehog habitat, which is a shame because they probably have more habitat than they’ve ever had for a generation. Two metres are now left untouched around every field, six metres around lots. Am I expecting too much in hoping that the ‘experts’ will finally wake up to the fact that badgers also decimate the nests of ground-nesting birds?
A quite reasonable and probably justified law to curb the activities of badger baiters has inadvertently let the badger population get out of control with a negative effect on other birds and animals.
THESE DAYS, when I get in to the car to go off somewhere, there’s something of the airline pilot, pre-flight check about my preparations.
Firstly, I have to get my phone to connect to the hands-free kit fixed to the sun visor. Sometimes it connects first time but mostly, it doesn’t. There’s quite a lot of buttons to press and I don’t always get it right.
Next is the sat-nav. I don’t usually need this until the last few miles of my journey and that’s only if it’s a new destination but it’s still a bit of a novelty so I switch it on.
I’m used to women telling me what to do. I suppose it’s something of a comfort zone. I’ve chosen an Irish female voice. I’ve always been a bit of a soft touch for softly spoken Irish women. I was deeply in love with that woman, I think she was called Assumpta, who kept the pub in Ballykissangel.
I suppose it was just a crush, an infatuation, and as we get older we learn that we have to shrug these things off and move on with our lives, but for a time it was a very real love and very important to me. I think I was in my late 50s at the time. I used to fantasise about going to live with her in her pub and enjoying the party in the bar.
I’d probably have a couple of cows in the field behind the pub that I would milk by hand so that she always had some nice fresh milk to put on her cornflakes in the morning and if we had spare milk I would make it into cream to put in to our Gaelic coffee night caps just before we went up.
Enough of that, I can fantasise about that when I’m stuck on a tractor all day.
Anyway, the first time my wife comes with me in the car when I have the sat-nav working and she hears the first instruction ‘turn left in 400 yards,’ she snaps at me: ‘I suppose you chose that voice to remind you of that damned barmaid in Ballykissangel!’ Can a man have no secrets?
IN A PREVIOUS life it is highly possible that I was a buzzard. There is an undeniable logic to this.
To all of us who observe what goes on about us in nature it is quite clear that crows hate buzzards. From dawn to dusk they harass and torment them and, as the buzzard moves from area to area, there are always ‘fresh’ crows waiting to take up the challenge.
So, when a particular buzzard eventually dies and is reincarnated as a farmer, namely me, the persecution goes on.
I have come to this conclusion quite easily; today we have completed the planting of about 60 acres of winter wheat.
From the vantage point of my high ground there are freshly drilled fields as far as the eye can see. Everywhere I look, tractors are ploughing, working down and drilling.
We farmers are ploughing the fields and scattering the good seed on the ground as never before. Could it be something to do with wheat prices at record levels?
On all of those fields there is already an opportunity of a harvest for the birds. Worms, gr
ubs, spilt seed, easy pickings, full stomachs. And where are all the birds? The ground is black with crows.
There is a feeling of persecution about it, much as a buzzard is persecuted throughout its life.
MOST OF my life, no that’s wrong, almost all of my life, has involved getting up early in the morning. There’s no genetic reason why dairy farmers should be able to cope with less sleep than everyone else but we do and, invariably, we are always tired.
Sometimes there’s an opportunity to ‘top up’: wet lunchtimes at weekends, for example. Just half an hour can be a real help. But woe betide anyone who wakes you up during that half-hour. Children for miles around go about on tiptoe while I have my snooze. Last Saturday, I had just closed the second eyelid when I was disturbed by a knock on the door. I had been woken up by a young van driver.
Showing amazing restraint, I listened while he told me his story, which brings me to another pet hate of mine: the proliferation of road signs in rural areas. Some villages have about eight signs at each end to tell you that you are approaching a 30mph limit. We have an unclassified council road through our farm, most of it impassable except by tractor or 4x4. But a few years ago, the council put a sign at the other end indicating it as passable. There is a no-through road bit incorporated in the sign but it doesn’t tell you where the bit is that you can’t get through.
Two years ago, a big articulated lorry tried to get through and we had to cut half a tree down to allow it to pass, there was no way he could back up one and a half miles on a narrow track through a steep field. This was my van driver’s problem. His satnav didn’t know little local details like that either, and he had gone off the road and become stuck. It was amazing that he hadn’t turned his van over.
I took him back in the Discovery but that wouldn’t look at it and it took an hour to pull him out with a tractor. I don’t think he could believe that we didn’t try to touch him for £20 for our trouble, but it wasn’t his fault. I’ve never had a problem with giving people a helping hand.
IF YOU TALK to people who are involved in animal welfare organisations they are always eager to see the number of journeys that animals actually have to make kept to a minimum. They will cite stress and the possibility of injury as good reasons why this should be so. We have to transport animals most weeks as they make the journey between our two areas of land.
The cows, for example, are well used to going off for their ‘holiday’ when they are not milking and stroll into the trailer quite readily. When it’s time to bring them back we can usually load them easily in the corner of a field somewhere. Part of making sure that they don’t injure themselves is to drive very gently round corners and when we stop and start. Inevitably, this causes a queue of traffic to build up behind you that usually includes some very aggressive, impatient drivers. So we become quite unpopular and, because of this, we very rarely move cattle on the road on foot, but two weeks ago we had to.
We had a group of 22 cows in a field. Two of them had calved and five others needed to come home. As this was quite a big ‘sortout’ we walked them down the road to a neighbour’s yard where we could manage the job a lot easier. There were two calves, two mothers and 20 doting ‘aunties’, so progress was fairly slow as each cow in turn took the opportunity to eat some of the roadside grass before dashing back to check on the welfare of the calves.
After 100 yards we acquired a car following us. It was a narrow lane, two cars can’t pass on it without getting on the verge, but nevertheless he made several attempts to try to pass us, eventually giving up and turning round and roaring off the way he had come. It’s one of the downsides to being a farmer as you go about your business: if you put cattle in a trailer it’s wrong; if you move cattle on the road it’s wrong.
People have been moving cattle on roads for hundreds of years; you would think that by now we would have established some sort of right. If you are patient, and occasionally I am, life will reward you, because half an hour later when we were returning the 15 cows we didn’t need to their field, who should get stuck behind us, but the impatient driver of earlier on? He stuck it out this time and as the cattle turned into their field I gave a very friendly wave and ‘thank-you’. I’m no lip-reader but I’ve got a good idea what he said. I won’t share it with you because I know you are all much too nice to upset by profanity.
FUNNY THINGS peacocks; who would think such a beautiful bird could make such an awful noise? We used to keep them and I could never get over how hardy they were. Percy and his pea-wives used to live about 30ft up in a tree next to the house. It can be no mean feat to hang on to a branch all night, with about 6ft of tail hanging down behind you.
You’d have to roost facing the wind, that’s for sure.
The strange thing was that if we had a bad spell of snowy weather, Percy and his wives would transfer to the small henhouse we had.
They might sleep there for several days if it was really cold and windy, but one night you’d go to shut the hens up and the peacocks wouldn’t be there, they’d be back up their tree. Sure enough, next day a thaw would have set in: how did they know that? I miss Percy, but I don’t miss the terrible noise he would make if someone put a light on in the night to go to the bathroom. We do farmhouse bed and breakfast here and you’d hear guests say: ‘Oh look at that beautiful peacock.’ Next day, you’d hear them say, angrily: ‘Did you hear that peacock in the night?’
OVER THE last few weeks, thousands and thousands of sheep have moved homes about the country. Autumn is the time of year when, traditionally, young yearling ewes, bred to produce future lambs, would move from the upland areas to better land in lowland areas to produce prime lambs for the table. It has always been good practice to go to higher land to buy your ewe replacements so we have had our hill ewes, wherever they lived, crossed with rams of a lowland breed to produce a ewe that would produce a good crop of lambs. It is all quite simple. The hill ewe would usually produce just one lamb, but because that lamb had a lowland father it would hopefully produce lots of twins. I think there are more than 30 native breeds in the UK, so there are a huge range of crosses available and within that, crosses within crosses.
There are fashions in sheep as well. Forty years ago, the two most popular breeding ewes came from the Welsh borders. They happened to be pure breeds, the Clun Forest and the Kerry Hill. Both breeds would come close to the rare breed category today. I always thought the Kerry to be a particularly attractive sheep with its white face and distinctive black nose. The Clun has a woolly head and legs, loathed by some shearers because they take longer to shear and for which they may charge an extra 50p.
There’s something compelling about sheep. There is huge pride in ownership and visits to the great sheep sales can be compulsive. When I kept sheep I would often get a phone call to say: ‘I was thinking of going to such and such sheep sale. Do you fancy coming for a ride?’ You bet I did, and off we would go, not intending to buy anything, but we often did. A local friend of mine used to breed Welsh half-breeds, which were the result of a cross between a Border Leicester (a white-faced sheep with a Roman nose) on his Welsh mountain ewes. It used to be a big important day in his farming year, particularly from a financial point of view. A few of us would go to ‘help’ him and inevitably we would end up in the market bar. If there had been a good trade there would often be some singing going on by 5 o’clock.
Sheep sale anecdotes are endless. The same friend and I went in his car one Saturday to a small local sheep sale where he encouraged me to buy three Suffolk ram lambs because they were cheap. He also had no problem with putting them in the back of his car to get them home.
‘It isn’t far, they won’t have time to make a mess’, but they did, and when we let them out of the back door of his Cortina ten minutes later he didn’t think it was such a good idea.
Another friend of mine decided he wanted to try a bunch of ewes called Llanwenogs, native to West Wales. There were five of us in the car and, as we got nearer to the sale, the fri
end who wanted the ewes confessed that he had always envied the aura of the big sheep buyers who came to our own area and today’s journey was the closest he would ever get to that.
In order to look the part we had to stop at a garage to buy him some cigars. When we got to the sale, he went first to the auctioneers and told them he was looking to buy a lot of sheep that day (he actually wanted 20-30) and would there be enough lorries available to take them home? The auctioneers made frantic phone calls to local hauliers while he leaned on their office counter and puffed nonchalantly on his cigar. Then we went to see the sheep. There were thousands there, but we couldn’t find any Llanewenogs. In the end we had to ask.
‘There aren’t any here today, their big sale is next week.’
It was a disappointment, it was an open-air market, it was pouring with rain and by 11am we were in the pub. We spent several hours in there, stopped in a couple on the way home and got back to our local by 10 o’clock. We were thrown out by a quarter past 10 and that was as close as any of us actually got to buying that particular breed of sheep. Next morning, while milking, I wondered how many hauliers actually turned up looking for these so-called big sheep buyers that were in the area.
LAST YEAR, a lady arrived here in a new Audi to stay for a couple of nights’ bed and breakfast. She was immaculately turned out – smart suit, new hair-do, perfect make-up. Not all, in itself, that remarkable, except that she was in her mid-80s. I thought at the time: if that’s growing old, I’ll have some of that.
What had brought her to our front door was the fact that she was researching her family tree, and she had discovered that her ancestors had lived in this area in the 1500s and, in fact, some of them had lived and farmed on this farm. She had a copy of the family tree with her, a huge piece of research, about three pieces of A3, and for 200 years her relatives had lived, worked and bred in this area.