by Roger Evans
MANY YEARS ago, I used to breed Labrador pups. I had one bitch to start with, and over a short time the vets gave me two more that had been left at the surgery to be put down.
We used to get a similar phenomenon to the handbag scenario. This was explained to me by a friend of mine: if a woman gets out of the car with her handbag, she’s come to buy. If she leaves the bag in the car, she’s just making an enquiry.
When I had a litter ready, Mum, Dad and kids would turn up to see the pups. The children would soon be knee-deep in adorable yellow or black Labrador pups. All that was missing to complete the scene was unravelling toilet rolls. ‘How much did you want for them?’ the woman usually asked. ‘We haven’t decided yet if we’ll have one or not.’
‘I bet you haven’t,’ I’d think. ‘I’d just like to see you go away from here with those children without a puppy.’
The last time I deliberately bred a litter of pups it was out of a most remarkable border collie bitch I had. She was the best working dog I ever had (it’s OK, Mert won’t know I said this, he’s not big on reading and writing) and I thought I would breed a bitch out of her in the hope that mother would teach daughter in her ways of working. So we chose a good working dog and, in due course, a litter of pups turned up. I chose a bitch that I would keep and advertised the rest for sale.
Our local daily paper comes out early afternoon onwards depending on how far you live from the head office. The first purchaser was on the yard at 3.30pm, a very attractive young lady wearing a very smart business suit. She took the jacket off to reveal one of those very pretty white blouses that ladies sometimes wear that is see-through enough for you to see what very pretty lingerie they have underneath. I don’t tell you this to titillate, just to complete the picture.
The pups were in a shed and she asked for them to be let out so she could see them better. Farmyards can get muddy. One after the other, she picked the pups up to hug them to her bosom. Should she have a dog or a bitch? One or two? As she deliberated, others turned up and bought pups, and after two to three hours she had to settle for the only pup left.
You should have seen the state of her.
THERE is a part of my life that finds me speaking after dinners. It’s not something that I ever sought to start with; it’s just something that sort of crept up on me.
For many years I organised our rugby club dinners, including the speakers. There were countless rugby internationals with just a handful of caps who would want thousands of pounds to come to your dinner. I thought ‘I’ll have some of that’ and for a time, indeed, I did charge a fee.
But the agricultural community has its feet very firmly on the ground and will not pay anything like that amount for a speaker. I would ask for a fee that, per hour away from home, wasn’t much at all, to be met by the response: ‘How much?’
You’d be surprised how many people expect you to drive 200 miles for nothing.
Could it be that the dial on the petrol pump goes around so fast these days you can’t see the figures anyway, so they think it’s for nothing.
These days I confine my after-dinner activities to requests from my friends or members of the dairy co-operative I am involved with, so don’t construe what has gone before as some sort of advertisement for more appearances.
What I do now is ask for a donation to the NS PCC, which is a bit close to my heart because I think children are so special and some have no chance at all in life.
I had to speak at a friend’s birthday party last Saturday (and very generous he was, too, to the children) and while I spend some time thinking about what I am going to say, I have a habit of making my notes at the last minute which, if something goes wrong, can make me a bit tetchy, and infuriates my family.
Last Saturday, I chose the hour between the end of milking and time of departure for this very important part of my preparation. I laid out pens, cue cards, started to write and the electric went off. The rest of my preparations were done by candlelight and torchlight.
Sometimes I go to a dinner and can’t remember what I’ve written; this time I couldn’t see what I’d written, either. A candle, I discovered, is not that handy in a shower.
Showering, shaving and dressing in the dark were not easy so, when I eventually got to the dinner, I was pleased to see that I had the right suit trousers on with the right jacket and most of my three-day beard had gone, though there was still a lot more on one side than on the other.
You never really know how a speech will go, it’s all part of a sort of masochism that drives you to do it in the first place, but I thought it all went really well considering the indifferent start to the evening and I drove home well pleased with myself.
It was a late night and an hour less in bed next morning but I’ve learned to take that all in my stride and, I suppose, as I went about my work next morning I was still rather a bit full of myself.
In particular, I was thinking about the story told to me by the lady sitting by me at the dinner that night who worked in a local town’s bridal shop and had sold a wedding dress to a 57-year-old man that week – for his own use.
Before I let the cows go down the fields to graze, I had to sort a cow out for artificial insemination.
When cows are in season they exhibit a sort of nymphomania with their herd mates. Sometimes they can be quite shy and it takes some spotting; sometimes it is at the other end of the scale and is shamelessly blatant and boisterous.
This cow, one of the biggest we’ve got, was well in the latter category. I knew I would need to hold her back with a companion to keep her company, but that wasn’t good enough, she wanted to stay with the whole herd. Three times I tried to drive her in to the holding pen; three times she got past me.
The fourth time I tried I was wholly concentrated, thoughts of last night’s dinner were well gone, it was time to test wills and determination. I got her on her own and reopened the pen gate.
The cow had two choices, through the gate into the pen or through me. She went through me with some ease, not so much brushed me aside as sent me flying. I tried to break my fall on to the concrete with some sort of a roll which served only to make sure I had a more comprehensive covering of the three-inch deep brown stuff that I was now lying in.
As I lay there, feeling the cold wet seep into my clothing, I fleetingly had to acknowledge that when I stood up I would present a very different spectacle to the one a few hours earlier entertaining at a Saturday night dinner.
At the fifth attempt to sort out this cow, cold, wet, filthy beyond belief and not without quite a few bruises, I felt fully entitled to search for a stick. The cow could see the stick in my hand and allowed herself to be sorted as good as gold.
My mistake was that the slurry on my trousers has the chance to run down to my socks inside my wellies which, until then, had been the only dry bits I had.
Anyone arriving at our back door over the next hour would have been greeted with a pile of filthy clothes topped with my best boxers.
‘You didn’t strip off outside the door!’ scolded my wife.
I suspect I would have been in a lot more trouble if I’d stripped off in the kitchen. She put the clothes in the wheelbarrow and threw some buckets of water on them and left them for Monday morning.
SOMEWHERE at the back of my mind lurks the vague memory that someone, probably going right back to an old music hall song, used to sing words to the effect that there were ‘40,000 feathers on a thrush’.
If I’ve imagined it then I’ve probably got a bit more of a problem than I thought. If it were true, then how many of my precious brain cells have I tied up remembering that?
Whether there are, in fact, that many feathers on a thrush I’ve no idea, but I do know that there are also a lot of feathers on a pigeon. The evidence of that is here in the grass before me, where something has made a meal of a pigeon.
There are feathers everywhere. I’m left with the thought that it must be a very sharp fox or cat that can actually catch a pigeon.
Over the next week I find about a dozen dead pigeons, which seems quite remarkable. I ask the young lad who drives the tractor for us and he says he’s seen a lot as well.
He’s in love at the moment and has a job to find the tractor some mornings, so if he’s seen a dead pigeon it’s even more remarkable. I start to see odd pigeons standing about on the road that look really sick so I begin to suspect they have a disease problem. I prefer not to contemplate that it is bird flu but the next time I find a dead one I stop to examine it. It’s plump, so it can’t have been that sick, well not for very long, anyway. I pull some feathers off and find an oldish wound that looks as though it were caused by an airgun pellet.
Presumably someone, somewhere, has a kitchen garden that is suffering from the depredations of pigeons and is defending his crop with an airgun. It just seems a pity that he (or she) doesn’t get a better airgun, one that will kill the bird outright rather than condemn them to the slow, lingering deaths that I have been witnessing.
I haven’t seen one of the ‘second crop’ leverets for three weeks now. I’m a bit disappointed as I have been looking for them and as I also said, there is less cover for them now so they should be easier to spot.
On Saturday mornings the keeper is always busy about the shoot and so I ask him. He says that foxes have had them all and that he hasn’t seen any either. He goes on to say that there are three ‘new’ foxes on the estate and in his words they are ‘lamp shy’. This means he’s been out at night with a powerful lamp and rifle but that the foxes won’t stand and look at him. If they do he will see two reflective red eyes and that, as they say, will be that.
Keepers are always busy at night with lamps seeking to reduce the large numbers of foxes that are about, and I suppose that disturbed foxes will move to other areas, thus the description ‘new foxes’. Shame about the leverets, though. I’m showing partiality to species again. This will almost certainly become politically incorrect with the passage of time. How long before a wild boar or a wolf released into the wild (‘because wolves are a native species’) kills a child? How long before a town fox kills a child? Not that long, I suspect.
I AM convinced that the world as we know it will slowly but surely come grinding to a halt. Not because of global warming, not because the fuels we presently use will have run out, not because of pestilence and disease and not because of nuclear war.
It will be because of a lack of common sense and too much risk assessment. I used to be very involved in our village school but your children grow up and your own life moves on. There used to be two arrangements in place at the school that benefited the wider community. For decades the children made their way up the village about 150 yards to the village hall to eat their lunch. The road they walked is unclassified; the only real traffic on it is traffic to and from houses within the village. There was an extra bonus because the village hall benefited in the form of revenue so it was the sort of commonsense, win-win arrangement that worked all round.
A risk assessment on the dangers of the walk itself has stopped the practice and the children now remain in school for their lunch.
Fifty yards away from the school in another direction is the school playing field, it’s not big, it’s of primary school proportion, but it’s got goal posts and you can have a decent game of football there. And for generations that’s what the youth and children of the village have done. (Played football there myself.) But that’s been stopped as well. If someone were injured there out of school hours, would the school be held responsible? Of course they would, in the sort of society we live in today. But children will be children, and children will continue to play football, so where do they play football now? On the main road through the village of course. Wouldn’t you know it, it all defies belief and leaves people of my generation lost for words, words that you could print anyway.
TO MY great delight there are a group of seven curlews to be seen in the area. They cover quite a large range but turn up on my ground several times a week and will, I hope, become a regular feature in my life, most especially to hear their call.
I’ve seen four lapwings making a fuss of just one chick. So at the end of term let’s hear it for the curlews, well done, 10 out of 10. Lapwings, you will have to do better.
THE STRONGEST relationship on this farm is, by some distance, me and the dog. He idolises me; in my shadow, always there for me, the one I can confide in and trust.
But like any honest relationship, there are areas where we struggle – the main one is when I have to go on a tractor, because he wants to come with me.
When I get on the tractor he’s tight behind me, poised to jump up into the cab. If I’m not going far, or for long, then he often joins me. But if I’m going off to do a job that will take a few hours, it’s not that handy.
The only place for him to lie on most tractors is down on the floor on the right hand side, and if he curls himself up, that’s fine. But after a time he often wants to give himself a bit of a stretch, and that in itself is quite reasonable.
The trouble is, he’s lying on the foot throttle. It can be quite disconcerting if I’m approaching a hedgerow and looking out of the back window at the implement I’m using and Mert decides to shift himself to a more comfortable position, which includes lying across the throttle, so without any warning I find myself travelling at twice the speed I was into a fence or hedge.
Harsh words have been exchanged on these occasions and the dog, without any knowledge of what he has done wrong, gives me a crestfallen look that breaks my heart and makes me feel guilty for the rest of the day.
I don’t like fall-outs, especially with the dog, so when I went off on the tractor recently he had to stay behind.
But I can’t just drive off and leave him; I have to shout at him to ‘go and lie down’ and he slinks off, looking over his shoulder at me with a look that says ‘bastard’.
So I went off without him for the day and when I was returning home several hours later, in a gateway about 100 yards from our farm lane, I could see a little black head looking down the road towards me.
I was still a fair distance away but Mert recognised the tractor and was off towards home down the middle of the road, tail wagging and as pleased as could be to see me.
What could I say? How long had he been there? Doesn’t he realise that most of the traffic is doing more than 60? Has he had a copy of Greyfriar’s Bobby from the library and got the idea of a vigil from that?
I just had to pat him on the head when I got off the tractor and be a bit proud of him.
But the next day I was off to top a field of docks. It’s the second crop of docks on that field and I wasn’t taking any chances. I put him in his shed, gave him some food and made a fuss of him.
When I finished topping the docks, the cattle in the field followed me to the gate. Despite my best efforts, one of them popped out on to the road as I took the tractor out of the field.
Dilemma! One on the road and 37 in the field trying to join it! Then I could have done with a dog! I stood in the gateway to stop the 37 and waited for help.
After five minutes it arrived in the form of a very attractive lady in an Audi convertible. She wound down her window and asked if I was in trouble. I explained the situation to her and suggested that she get out of her car and run up the road to fetch the heifer back while I stopped the others coming out on to the road.
Fair play, that’s what she did, and very fleet of foot she turned out to be, with a smile to go with it.
If the dog and I are a strong couple, the threesome (if you pardon the expression) are the dog and me and the Discovery. It’s how we travel about, it’s how we go on adventures together, it’s how Mert is able to put his head through the window and scare the living daylights out of joggers and cyclists.
The Discovery out on the yard cost me £1,300 three years ago. They’ve been three hard years and recent events have taken their toll. Most of the windows are now permanently open, which means wet bums for passeng
ers.
The front right wing met a neighbour’s pick-up in a lane so the headlight on that side shines about a yard in front of you.
Worse than all that, we are milking our cows three times a day now and the evening milkers have taken to using the Discovery to fetch the cows in.
I don’t mind that so much but they leave it parked overnight in a gateway where all the cows travel. Cows like a good rub and a scratch. Half-a-ton of cow having a bit of a rub on a wing or door soon puts a few dents into a panel. If you are a cow and want to have a good scratch, what better than a wing mirror?
Appearance is important for MOT purposes, however. We once had a farm van that failed its MOT because it was mouldy.
The MOT is due at the end of this month. Last year I took it and was told the body underneath needed £700 of welding, besides anything else that needed doing. I took it home to think about it; you have to think about it if that’s all it’s worth.
I told a friend of mine in the car trade about the dilemma. Lest you should think having a friend in the car trade sounds pretentious, he’s a sort of Arthur Daley-type who lives in the countryside – an Arthur Daley with nettles.
He said he would take it and have a look at it. Half a day later it was back, all MOT’d, with just the fee to pay. Obviously he’d got a tame MOT man somewhere, which is alright, but then, of course, it isn’t, is it?
So I’m not going to waste time this year. This Discovery will join its predecessor in our nettle patch and out on the yard is yet another replacement – £1,700 this time, but only 10 years old.
It’s pristine, with air conditioning and leather upholstery – almost too good to be true!
We’ve not used it yet (I will tax it at the start of the month), but the dog has already pee’d on all the wheels and we, the dog and I, can’t wait to start another round of adventures.
THERE is a man of my acquaintance, for whom I have great regard, who is much given to singing on licensed premises. He has a fine voice, although his repertoire of songs is quite small.