A Farmer's Diary

by Sally Urwin

  Saturday 4th November

  A brand-new pond has appeared in the wettest part of our recently planted barley field.

  Steve has just noticed it has seagulls floating on it, as if it was a proper, permanent lake. He’s now marching around the house shouting about the weather.

  Sunday 5th November

  Today it’s pouring down with heavy, continuous rain. The ground is so wet that when you drive the quad bike the grass ripples in front of the wheels, as if you were riding over a bog.  All the hedges and trees are dripping wet, their bark and leaves dark and glossy with water. The ewes look sodden, their fleeces grey and heavy with rain. Every few minutes they shake themselves like wet dogs and shower the grass with water droplets.

  Thrusty and Randy the tups have gone to meet their harem of ewes.

  The kids have eyes like saucers, and I reckon there is no better way to teach the facts of life to two Northumbrian children than watching a randy tup work his way through a flock. Lucy was completely matter of fact: ‘Dad, look at Thrusty – he’s working really well!’

  Thrusty was balanced on top of a lugubrious ewe, with his ears flapping backwards and forwards energetically.

  ‘Why are they having piggybacks?’ asked Ben.

  Thrusty and Randy have been given around forty-five sheep each to service, and we all stand out in the bucketing rain for a few minutes, furtively watching them ‘work’ through the flock. Some of the ewes are very interested in the tups and follow them around, sniffing their fleece and bottoms. Others are completely uninterested and refuse to even look at the boys, grumpily running off when Thrusty or Randy come up to say hello. We leave them to it and go back inside the house, shedding a layer of waterproof jackets and hats and leaving them to steam dry by the radiator.

  Monday 6th November

  Today Thrusty is looking ill. The terrible weather, plus the exertion of chasing around a flock of grumpy ladies, has given him a cough and a wheezy chest. Steve has diagnosed pneumonia, so the kids and I herd all the sheep into the pens while Steve catches a feeble-looking Thrusty and gives him the most enormous injection of antibiotics I’ve ever seen. It goes straight into the muscle on his bum, and he starts to perk up almost immediately.

  After all their hard work tupping over the next couple of weeks, we should hopefully have lambs in the first week of April … fingers crossed.

  Wednesday 8th November

  This morning Steve trudged off up to his field of oilseed rape, to put up the ‘Terror Hawk’ bird scarer: a hawk-shaped kite on the end of a very long piece of string.

  Steve spent a good twenty minutes untangling the string – it reminds me of Christmas tree lights. No matter how carefully you put Terror Hawk away at the end of spring, he tangles himself up into a tight ball for the next season.

  The point of Terror Hawk is to stop the pigeons from eating the crops. What they do is peck out the middle of the baby oilseed rape plants, and it stops the little plants growing into bigger plants. Every year we declare war on the pigeon army that descends each morning and evening to decimate our fields.

  We have a noisy bird scarer (or ‘bangerbanger’ as it’s called by the kids) that we use on the bigger wheat fields. It’s a gas-powered cannon that goes off with an alarmingly loud retort (like something out of World War II) every forty minutes during daylight hours. We carefully position it as far away as possible from the road, and point it away from houses, but it’s so loud that any horse riders in the vicinity tend to spin round and go off down the road like the clappers. We’re all used to it now, but it’s a bit of a trouser filler if you’re standing next to it.

  Friday 10th November

  I’m sitting on my garden wall in the bright autumn sunshine, with Mavis our border collie.

  She’s beautiful, small and slim with a dainty pointed face and a sleek, long black coat that curls down over her white belly and feathered legs. We bought her from a lovely lady on Twitter, who named her after her Welsh Granny. Mavis has impeccable pedigree and is absolutely worth her weight in gold on our farm.

  She’s very gentle, with big brown soulful eyes and a long fringed tail that curls up on itself over her back.

  Today she’s filthy, as she’s been helping Steve check the flock and it’s deep in mud in some places on the farm. She flops by my side panting happily then potters off, tail wagging, to the field fence to stare at the ewes. They stamp their feet and stare back.

  Mavis could never be a family pet. She’s too focused and obsessed with working sheep. She runs about 4–5 miles every day alongside the quad bike. She doesn’t like riding on the back, preferring her daily exercise no matter how wet and muddy the ground – unlike our previous collie dog, Nel.6

  Mavis likes people but isn’t interested in pats or strokes. She’ll come and say hello but will then slope off to find some sheep to stare at. That’s what she lives for. I used to try and make her stay in the house with me while I worked, but she hated it, and would sit on the mat in a sulk, occasionally hurling herself against the closed door while making a constant whine/grumble.

  Mavis lives in her own cosy kennel and run, which is inside the main passage of the sheep shed. She’s warm and dry there in her basket and can supervise any poorly sheep that might be recuperating inside. We have given her dog toys but I’m not convinced she plays with them, as they usually sit ignored at the far end of the run.

  Her breeder said that right from an early age she had an amazing ‘eye’ and instinct for the sheep, and while other pups would roll and tumble with each other she would prefer to sit and watch the flock.

  She’s a beauty. And priceless when we move our ewes. In the interregnum between Nel passing away and saving up to buy Mavis, the kids and I had to belt around the field to gather the ewes, and it was exhausting. Mavis nips and darts around the sheep, and is fast enough to turn back a runaway animal or cut off a stroppy ewe trying to make her escape. We couldn’t manage the flock without her.

  I give her a whistle and she runs back towards me, but then spots Steve in the distance and shoots off to see him instead. She’s really Steve’s dog. They’ve built a strong bond, and she much prefers to work with him, especially as he’s more likely to be doing something interesting with the sheep flock. I can see her in the distance lying a few feet from where he’s tinkering with the tractor, her eyes trained on the ewes in the paddock.

  Sunday 12th November

  It’s a clear, bright day, and Lucy and Ben have just disappeared off to their ‘favouritest’ place on the whole farm: a den next to a very old ash tree at the bottom of the front field. The tree has grown around the field wall, and is so thick around its widest part that it must be at least 150 years old.

  Next to the tree is a deep translucent pool that has frogspawn in the spring and clouds of tiny minnows in the summer.

  Lucy has built a pretend sleeping platform in the ash tree, and Ben has his den underneath the holly bush beside the pool. They spend hours down there, carefully collecting berries and leaves and sweeping their dens clean with bunches of twigs.

  Today I’ve given them a packed lunch and a drink and Lucy has taken her mobile phone. I’ll see them in a couple of hours, probably with wet feet and muddy trousers.

  Tuesday 14th November

  Candy is in disgrace again. She spent all night carefully untying the gates around her pen, undoing the shed door and letting herself into our feed store. She then spent hours chewing a very small hole in one of the feed sacks until she could suck sheep nuts out one by one, like a small but very powerful hoover.

  As soon as Candy heard us coming this morning she whipped back into her pen and stood behind her hay net, pretending she’d been innocently standing there all night.

  There were cross words: ‘Bloody hell! These bags cost a tenner apiece you know! I’m not wasting them on that blasted field ornament!’

  The field ornament pretended to eat a bit of her hay net, but her bulgy tummy was a giveaway. We’ve got the vet comi
ng on Friday to do her teeth, but also to check that the extra feed hadn’t done anything terrible to Candy’s insides.

  Steve is less convinced. ‘Perhaps it’s for the best if she did conk out! She doesn’t bring any money in. If she did something, then fair enough, but she just eats her head off and farts a lot.’

  Thursday 16th November

  Robert is a retired farmworker who lives with his mother in a local village. He’s never married and has made a living doing odd jobs for local farmers in the district. He’s now in his 60s, and every day, whatever the weather, he walks the road between Stamfordham and Corbridge that goes past our farm. When you see Robert striding around the corner, thumb stick in hand, flat cap jammed down over his brow, the best thing to do is to leap back into the hedge or duck behind a wall. He’s a lovely chap, but the biggest gossip this side of Hexham.

  All the local farmers know him and have various ‘Robert avoidance’ techniques. I’ve seen Steve duck behind the wheelie bins to try and escape.

  Today, I got completely stuck.

  Robert had caught me as I was walking back to our house and he settled down on the farm drive for a nice long gossip. He was very animated, as he’d spotted our new tups in the front paddock and wanted to know exactly how much we’d paid for them, who they were from, and how they were doing. Robert is especially interested in the price of things, and who has paid under or over the odds for beasts or machinery.

  As we were chatting, our next-door neighbour drove past and saw us both. He gave a sarcastic thumbs up. Bastard.

  Robert and I eventually got on to subsidy payments, and how much he thought all the neighbours had received that year. He was angling to find out how much our Single Farm Payment had been, but I managed to head him off. At one point I was going to offer to fetch our farm accounts so he could see for himself how we were doing.

  Eventually I was rescued by Steve, who had seen me outside the window, took pity and gave me a call to pretend that he needed my help in the sheep shed. Robert cheerfully strode off, probably straight to the next farm to tell them all our news.

  According to local lore, Robert and his mother don’t have a television or the wireless, but prefer to spend the long, dark winter evenings cutting up the Hexham Courant to make sheets of toilet paper for their outside netty.

  Saturday 18th November

  Sumo the farm cat and I are in a standoff. He refuses to eat anything but very expensive gourmet cat food. I’m telling him he’s a farm cat and he’ll eat Whiskas. He’s just done a dirty protest outside his litter box. I’m not giving in.

  … I gave in, after hours of endless yowling for food. Sumo is now tucking into a pouch of cat food described as ‘the best quality responsibly sourced cod, marinated in an aromatic sauce with tender vegetables for optimum feline health’.

  This is the cat who regularly kills and eats full-grown rabbits on our front doorstep.

  Winter

  Traditionally, winter is the quietest time of year, when dark nights and cold weather stop us working long days outside. However, this is also the most vulnerable time for our ewes, who are pregnant and need careful checking and extra feed to ensure their unborn lambs are growing properly. Winter is a chance to sell last year’s lambs at the Mart and (hopefully) make a bit of profit and prepare for lambing in the spring.

  Sunday 19th November

  There are warnings of major winds and heavy snow in Northumberland. Which means I put Candy the pony out at 9 a.m., and at ten past nine she’s standing pathetically by the gate asking to come back in.

  The snow is heavy and has formed a thick white crust on Candy’s back. I tell her that she’s supposed to be designed for weather like this. She scrapes at a snow drift, exposing the grass below and starts to mournfully nibble on strands of grass.

  She has a very thick coat, which is great insulation, proven by the fact that the snow currently heaped on her back isn’t melting at all.

  At 2 p.m. I look out the window and Candy is standing behind a bush, tail clamped tightly down, head and neck horizontal under an increasing load of snow. The snow is balanced evenly across her back and neck and an icicle hangs from the end of her forelock.

  I can’t stand it, and go out to call her in. She gives a welcoming whicker, shakes off the snow and plodges across the paddock for a sheep nut. I lead her inside her stable and leave her knee-deep in warm straw with a feeder full of fragrant hay. Before I leave I give her a lecture about her Shetland ancestors, who lived out all the year round, and ate anything they could find, including seaweed and patches of moss.

  Monday 20th November

  The kids adore snow days on the farm. Today there’s a heavy layer of white like the top of a wedding cake. After checking the sheep, we attach a plastic sledge by a long rope to the back of the quad bike, and then drag it after us around the field at top speed. Lucy and Ben adore it and scream and laugh at the top of their voices. It’s probably a health and safety nightmare but if Steve drives the quad, I can perch backwards on the seat and make sure that the sledge doesn’t slide under the wheels.

  Ben keeps falling off when we slither around a corner, and it makes me laugh watching his pink cheeks and hat and gloves covered in ice and snow. Back home, everyone leaves their coats, scarves, boots, hats and gloves in a big sodden pile on the hall floor, and we all drink cups of tea and hot chocolate.

  Tuesday 21st November

  When Steve is at work on a Monday and Tuesday,1 Mavis and I have a nice long walk through the farm. We like to trundle down to our wood, and poke among the bracken and brambles to see if anything interesting has happened since our last visit.

  Today I was trudging along the side of the wood, lost in thought, and I spotted something that looked like a crumpled-up blue sleeping bag snagged in the undergrowth.

  I moved a little closer, and Mavis shot across my path, from left to right, dragging what looked suspiciously like a human thigh bone.

  With breathless visions about murdered hikers, I managed to call Mavis to heel, and take a closer look at the bone. When I got closer I saw that it still had an articulated hoof at one end. Mavis proudly took me to the carcass of a roe deer, with the skull and a few scraps of hide still adhering to the bones. The blue ‘sleeping bag’ turned out to be an enormous deflated ‘CONGRATULATIONS!’ party balloon that had become stuck in a bramble thicket.

  Mavis settled down happily to chew on her bit of dead deer, and I had a rest on a tree stump for a while to recover.

  Friday 24th November

  We’ve started our Christmas shopping. Steve doesn’t really get the excitement of the run-up to Christmas Day, but I absolutely love it. Our tree goes up on the 1st of December, and I run around the house throwing greenery over pictures and mantelpieces. Our Christmas tree usually looks like Santa has sneezed on it – there is no carefully thought-out colour theme here. All the tinsel and baubles are layered on, with the occasional cotton-wool-and-cardboard angel made by the kids at school.

  Steve does enjoy shopping, especially for tools, machinery and technical gadgets. We very rarely get out to Newcastle, and when we do we tend to walk around in a daze staring hypnotised at the lights and sparkly decorations.

  Today, we’ve been shopping at Fenwick’s store in Newcastle city centre. Steve keeps shouting ‘look at the shiny things!’ and dragging me to stare at displays of headphones and other techie gadgets. It’s bedlam; I’ve never seen so many shoppers. Random people keep treading on me. I discover from one of the shop assistants that we’ve chosen to come shopping on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day in the year. That explains it all. Exhausting. We manage a couple of hours then drive home, breathing a big sigh of relief when we hit the A69.

  Saturday 25th November

  Slight problem today. The heating has gone on the blink. There’s no hot water and the house is icy cold. Steve crashes around upstairs shouting about stopcocks. We quickly light the wood stove and settle the kids in front to get into their school uniforms
and eat their breakfasts.

  I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for everyone to keep warm before central heating. When I was younger my parents didn’t have radiators, and we lived in a tall, thin, four-storey Victorian house with big rooms and high ceilings. I well remember the mad dash from warm sitting room to my icebox bedroom, clutching a hot-water bottle before cuddling down below the icy sheets, curling up round the heat and trying to keep warm.

  Originally our farm cottage used to be two rooms – one up and one down. It must have been warm at least, looking at the enormous fireplaces with the heavy stone lintels. Where would they have stored the wood? How did they keep the fire on all day? Our outside shed was originally the netty, so it must have been a freezing dash to go to the loo. How did they keep clean? Maybe they didn’t. I’m certainly not washing anything more than my hands when there’s no hot water.

  Steve is now staring into the fuel tank and has discovered that although we’ve ordered the oil, the delivery man hasn’t been, so the tank is empty. We wait on tenterhooks all day, looking out for the tanker, who has promised to get to us before nightfall. Of course, the temperature barely rises above freezing so by 4 p.m. I’m wearing a vest, two pairs of Steve’s shirts and a huge, shapeless jumper.

  Monday 27th November

  The heating oil has been delivered and the radiators are blasting away. I’m having a bad day, so I’ve wrapped myself up in my old flannel blanket and am lying under my duvet. I haven’t brushed my teeth or hair and I’m not answering the phone.