by Sally Urwin
A lot of people are talking about mental health and farming on social media and the radio. I’ve had struggles with anxiety since I was very young, but it’s taken me until my fourth decade to speak honestly about it. It’s hard to admit to problems when you’ve tried to mask them for a long time. But constantly pretending that everything is OK can be very, very tiring. I don’t want to sound like I’m indulging myself, but it’s been bad lately, and the usual ways of squashing it down have stopped working as well as they used to.
I worry about everything and anything. Sometimes I worry that I haven’t got much to worry about. And sometimes I worry about how much I’m worrying and worry that I’ll end up with some awful disease and worry myself into an early grave. I do wonder if by the time I’m 60, I’ll be wearing a tinfoil hat and gibbering about aliens at the postman through the letterbox.
The things that do work for me are: exercise (although I really, really hate it and avoid it as much as humanly possible); lying on the carpet wrapped in a blanket; sitting in a patch of sunlight; talking to the fat pony; having a break from social media; seeing my mum and friends; reading many, many books; and not rushing around too much. Mindfulness also helps, although I force myself to do it. I have a nifty little app on my phone that bings to remind me to do the practice each day. It stops me being so fidgety and cross and doing weird stuff such as cleaning under the bath with a toothbrush.
Things that don’t work are: having long, imaginary conversations with people who once said something unkind to me ten years ago; eating a lot of sugar; ruminating over everything I have done wrong at work since 1999; thinking obsessively about being bullied at school; rehashing conversations in my head to check if I said something weird; and compulsively refreshing Twitter or reading the Daily Mail.
Once you’ve got excessive anxiety yourself, it’s easy to identify other people with the same problem and the things they do to try to keep it in check. I’m very much in awe of those who have these problems and still achieve stuff: keeping a good job and a nice home and looking like proper grown-ups with brushed hair and teeth and everything. I can only imagine that sometimes they’re just like me – lying under the duvet trying to speak sternly to themselves.
I’ve always been told that only the best type of people get anxiety – the most intelligent, high-achieving, Type A personalities. Or maybe that’s what my GP tells me to make me feel better. I prefer to be friends with people who are thin-skinned and worry a bit too much. People who appear to breeze through life make me very jealous. But maybe they’re also fighting their own hidden demons that I know nothing about.
Anyway, I’ve managed to give myself a kick up the arse and got up to write this diary entry. It feels nice to finally talk about it. I like my life a lot, but sometimes it just gets a bit too much. But I count my blessings that I’m still fairly sane, have lots of support and help and can see the funny side (sometimes).
Tuesday 28th November
I am still tired today but feeling a bit better after doing bugger all yesterday.
I’m forced to get up early, as at first light we had a phone call from Katie, who lives next door.
‘I’ve just seen a small, grey pony trotting up the road. I think it might be yours?’
Bugger. Of course it’s ours …
We stagger outside (in –7°C) and eventually find the fat pony, standing in our next-door neighbour’s farmyard, staring thoughtfully at his cow shed.
She is very pleased with herself. Mavis the collie and I herded her home, and she trotted along the road, throwing in the odd farty buck.
As she has pretty bad arthritis, she’s finding it hard to get around and bend her front legs. She’s been prescribed horse paracetamol (phenylbutazone) to help with the pain. It’s like pony speed, and it’s given her a new lease of life, and she’s now happily bobbling round the farm, undoing bolts and getting in the way.
Last night she’d managed to undo two locked stable doors and, judging by the small pony hoof tracks, had been to visit the sheep, Joey the hunter, our hay shed and then decided to branch out and visit next-door’s cows.
She’s probably eaten 3 million calories in high-quality cattle silage.
Tonight I shall be shutting her in with the locks tied up with baler twine. No doubt she’s already planning her next escapade …
Wednesday 29th November
The cold weather has made me break out my comfort food recipes. Today I made liver and bacon for lunch … as it’s good for you. Now the whole family is hiding upstairs, refusing to come down and pretending they’re not hungry.
Steve loathes stews, casseroles and baked potatoes. Ben won’t eat anything ‘with bits in it’, or ‘sensibles’ (he means vegetables), and Lucy hates pasta, chicken and fatty beef. I don’t like fish pie, beans or avocados.
Trying a new recipe is a bit of a minefield. Eventually I bribe everyone into trying dinner by promising ice cream for pud. They all pick over their plates and finally compromise by eating the bacon, mashed potatoes and broccoli and scraping the liver into the bin.
Friday 1st December
I ring my mum every day and see her about three times a week. I love her to bits. She’s a smidgeon over five foot, hates cold and wet weather, laughs uproariously at the ridiculous things in life, and has spent her entire life looking after Dad, my brother and me.
Today she’s come for a cup of tea and a natter, and is now on at me for not stocking my fridge with the right food.
‘Look at that ham. You always get the cheapest ham. It’s awful ham, all thin and anaemic-looking.’
‘But Mum, we like that ham. I have it every day in sandwiches,’ I retaliate.
‘Why don’t you cook a proper ham joint? Then you can carve a bit off each day. It’s much nicer for the children.’
A few years ago, when the kids were small, she was convinced that I should ‘boil a chicken’ every week, which would give us all nutritious broth and a way to feed the family every day.
‘But I don’t want to boil a chicken, Mum,’ I used to say plaintively, while refusing to open the door of our fridge so she couldn’t see what was inside as she made disparaging comments about my shopping ability.
‘Oh, you always get the most boring shop,’ she often says, while inspecting my weekly delivery, as if she goes shopping at Harrods delicatessen each week. But then she’ll make me pies and cakes and bring them up with a ‘I thought this would be useful’ comment. They are always needed and much appreciated, especially when I don’t have time to bake or cook proper dinners.
I’m not exactly skilled at cooking. My mashed potatoes are never fluffy and my Yorkshire puddings are flat as a pancake. Steve is a much better cook than I am, except he lays everything out at the start of each cooking session, all split into little bowls, with his tools lined up on the bench. I find this infuriating.
I tend to just go for it, and hoy in the ingredients that I think will work, as I’m too bored to check the recipe. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. If I won the lottery, I’ve decided that I would need to invest in a chef so I’d never have to cook chicken nuggets or baked beans again.
Sunday 3rd December
I’m still eating too much, not losing any weight, and today I’ve decided to give up going to the slimming club in the village. Dad still goes and has lost about a stone. I’m all depressed about it. I can imagine him headlining their next newsletter: ‘LOCAL PENSIONER LOSES HALF HIS BODY WEIGHT!’
And in smaller letters, ‘HOWEVER, DAUGHTER STILL LOOKS LIKE A BLIMP!’
He loves the meetings, and now has a small coterie of ladies that laugh at his jokes (which seem to be the same ones each week) and cheer him on when he’s managed not to eat his usual cream scone on his weekly bike ride.
Monday 4th December
I’m checking the sheep in the back field. This flock are made up of ewes that are two years and older. Some of them are much older, and some of them are bordering on the geriatric. My favourite s
heep are in here: Mabel, the tea-coloured ewe; Spotty Nose, an old distrustful matriarch; and Fatty, the enormous oval-shaped sheep that produces one spindly lamb a year.
While I’m walking down the side of the field I spot Mabel standing on a hillock stuffing her face with grass.
‘Mayyyyyyyyyyybeeellllllllllllll!’ I holler at her.
She picks up her head and stares across at me, squinting her eyes against the winter sun to see who it is. She recognises my face,2 then starts lumbering towards me over the riggs. Some of the furrows are so deep she disappears from view at the bottom before popping up again on the other side.
When Mabel reaches me she’s panting like a pair of bellows, and starts snuffling in my pockets for sheep nuts. I always have a supply, and I’m so chuffed that she ran across to me that I give her three huge handfuls.
She gulps them down then reaches up her head and delicately sniffs my face. All sheep seem to do this. It seems to be their greeting/recognition system. I huff back at her, and then spot Fatty galloping across for her portion of nuts.
Fatty is round like a beach ball and isn’t as athletic as Mabel. Her galloping is more of a wobbly canter, with her belly swinging from side to side with each stride.
She plunges her nose into my pocket and Mabel steps to one side as if she’s embarrassed by her greedy flockmate.
Spotty Nose won’t come over. She’s very suspicious of all humans, and remains aloof even after some fairly intense ‘sheep-taming’ sessions involving sheep nuts and the odd apple core.
After some time petting Fatty and exclaiming at the width of her arse, I wander back home. Afternoons like this are glorious. It’s frosty but dry and still, and I can hear the flocks of jackdaws chattering in the trees in the hedgerows. It gets dark now just after 3 p.m., but this evening there’s a stunning sunset, all vivid pinks and glowing oranges. It usually means it’ll be a bright day tomorrow, with at least some watery winter sunshine.
Thursday 7th December
I’m doing the late-night check on the animals but I’ve forgotten my torch. Luckily it’s a full moon, and the light is so bright that I can make my way around without ricocheting off any projecting stone walls.
The moon is low on the horizon and looks bigger than usual. It’s so clear that the field fences are throwing ‘moon shadows’ over the frosty grass. The stars are bright, and I can pick out Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper. There’s hardly any light interference here, and although I can see the pinkish hum of light from Newcastle on the horizon, the skies above our farm are completely dark and perfect for star-watching.
Looking at the sky makes me feel very small, and I start to think about the generations of farmers and farmworkers that have done the same as me every evening and walked the same tracks and fields. Some of our field footpaths have high banks, where the track has been worn down by generations of farmers and labourers checking their stock and crops.
I’ve read somewhere that there are signs of Hadrian’s Wall being built directly over freshly ploughed fields.3 I’m convinced that the footpath running from our farm to the wall is much older than we think; the farm might have even been there when the wall was built.
I love learning about the ‘small’ history of a place. What happened to the peasant farmers and families, trying to raise children and grow enough crops to tide them over through the colder months?
There’s an abandoned medieval village around the corner from us, with a big village green and lots of little rigg and furrow strips in-between each bumpy house plot. I’ve read the Historic England report, but it’s a dry document, all about church lands and local big-wigs. It seems the villagers didn’t abandon the village due to the Black Death but were ‘moved off’ by the local landlord and settled on other small farms. I want to know about the minutiae of their lives. Where did they go to church? Who brewed the village ale? Where did they wash their clothes? Where did they keep their sheep and horses? It must have been a huge undertaking to decide to move your hearth and home from a well-known farmstead to a new one. I wonder what they were like. I wonder what their animals were like. Probably miniature sheep and the odd scrubby-looking horse.
I try to imagine these long-ago people. Sometimes, while walking around the farm on a frosty moonlit night, you feel as if they are walking behind you, or to one side, just out of eyeline and earshot. I wish I had the benefit of their generations of experience and knowledge of animal husbandry. Shivering, I finish my late-night check and go back into the house, shutting the cold night out behind me.
Sunday 10th December
My brother has come to visit. He’s older than me and works as a GP in Yorkshire. He’s thin as a rake, is desperately worried about the NHS and is the funniest person I know. He’s very good at his job and has been promoted to training student GPs or whatever you call apprentice medical students. His latest complaint is the fact that I never go down to see him and his family.
‘But I have so many animals to look after! I can hardly schlep down to your house with a car full of chickens, sheep and the dog, just to come and see you,’ I say.
‘Come down for just a weekend and we’ll go to lots of second-hand bookshops and get a curry,’ he replies.
That’s very tempting. My brother is married and has two sons. Alex, the eldest, is 14, and I’m trying to get him to come up for his Easter holidays next year, so he can help me with the lambing. I’m not sure if he’s convinced. I keep texting him desperately jolly messages, such as ‘You will enjoy it alex. It will build character’, and eventually ‘I will pay you money. And feed you lots of nice things’. So far, I’ve not heard a squeak back.
My brother works in a very busy practice, and the number of patients he sees each day is staggering. He starts telling me about his World Swivel Chair record, which involves seeing how many times he can spin round on his chair between each patient. So far he’s managed fifteen rotations …
Later in the day I find him in our wood, sitting on a tree stump enjoying the peace and quiet and generally communing with nature.
‘There’s a blue sleeping bag over there with a dead person in it,’ he tells me warily.
You’d think a doctor would know the difference between a person’s thigh bone and a deer leg.
Monday 11th December
The holly trees and bushes are bursting with berries.
‘Aye, it’ll be a hard winter,’ prophesises Robert on his daily walk past our farm, ‘if there’s loads of berries it means that we’ll have deep snow.’
The frost is already cracking the puddles and making the farmyard into an ice rink.
All the outside troughs are frozen, and the inside troughs are beginning to freeze too. Making sure the animals have water is now our main priority.
Outside, the cold makes the plastic troughs fragile, and Steve warns me to be careful when cracking the ice. Except it’s so thick that I have to hammer a hole in the ice using a pointy stone; after bashing it half a dozen times the ice is still completely solid. I end up climbing onto one trough and jumping up and down to make a hole big enough for the sheep to drink.
One morning it was –12°C, and my just-washed hair started to freeze under my hat.
This morning, the fat pony is standing sadly next to her completely frozen water bucket while the outside pipes are locked up with ice. I end up hauling tepid water from our kitchen across to the farm to fill buckets in the stables and sheep pens. It is hard work.
Later on I cut some sprigs of holly, but being careful to ask each tree’s permission before I take off a branch, as per Steve’s direction. Holly is supposed to ward off evil, so I put the red-berried twigs above our fireplace and windows and weave the others into a Christmassy wreath which goes on the door.
Wednesday 13th December
This morning, when I feed the lambs inside the hemmels, Scabby the ewe hurtles up to the front of the pen and demands to be hand fed sheep nuts.
She’s put on some weight, but I can still feel her backbone
jutting out from her fleece, and her legs are as spindly and thin as twigs.
When she eats from my hand she gobbles as fast as she can, but she still spills many of the sheep nuts. Her mouth is so deformed that she can’t seem to pick up the nuts correctly, and relies on a scooping motion to suck them into her maw.
Ben is still very attached to her, and goes to sit in the hemmel with her, stroking her curly forehead and whispering sweet nothings into her fluffy ears. I’m not sure how she’ll cope in spring if she can’t chew the grass properly. I’m cross that we didn’t spot her problems before we bought her, but it’s impossible to check every sheep that you buy in a bigger flock.
After blogging about Scabby I receive an email from someone who lectures me about the role of a farmer as the ‘upholder of animal welfare’ and how money should be no object when ensuring every animal is looked after to the best of our ability.
He’s never been near a farm in his life. I want to reply and tell him that we still need to make enough money to keep the farm as a viable business. That of course animal welfare is at the top of our agenda but, yet again, we don’t have unlimited pots of money to spend on the health of one animal.
I know plenty of farmers who would quietly put down Scabby without a moment’s thought. Steve and I can’t bring ourselves to do this, so Scabby continues to hoover in expensive sheep nuts and fail to get any fatter. I’m in a quandary. She can’t be put in lamb, and she can’t be sold at the Mart. The options are: a) keeping her as a pet and feeding her concentrates all year round or b) asking the knacker man to put her down.