You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2007.
Yesterday felt special.
Blue sky streaked with soft mare’s tails left by watery brush strokes. Clean, bright air full of warm honey-bread-fragranced grasses and delicate green-tea scented blossoms – a day when you breathe in, and in, and in. The colours clear and crystal-sparkly. Bird song filled the air, the soft lowing from a cow calling to her baby and the distant humming drone and clank of a tractor working. It made me smile.
I walk, the dogs scuttering and bounding in front of me, surprising the odd hiding pheasant which explodes into the air with loud chuck, chuck, chuck. Spears of southern marsh and spotted heath orchids peeping through young green stems of purple moor grass. Meadow thistle, bugle, tormentil, hay rattle and ragged robin flowering amongst the earlier lousewort and vetches. Huge dragonflies blunder past me with the whirr of old propeller aircraft as butterflies flit and dance silently overhead.
My life seesaws from the sublime to the ridiculous…
I’ll just explain to those of you that don’t work with livestock the effect that persistent, heavy rain can have on sheep. Bear with me, those of you that know.
Rain, rain, rain.
Sometimes life throws a bit too much at you all at once…
I was excited- looking forward to a quick weekend visit to Ben, my son, his partner Berengere and baby Camille…
It was around nine the other evening when the phone rang - it was my neighbour from a mile or so down the lane. I heard the hesitation in her voice and asked if that ‘wolf’ pup had been on the loose again. No, she said, not Ness, but was I missing a cow and calf?
That flummoxed me - all cows, calves and bull were grazing peacefully in the River Meadows when checked late afternoon. Inca-Rose, a young heifer, and her calf were tucked up in the cow palace and I’d just seen the down calving heifers in Little Hill. Well, she said, what other cow and calf round here would listen to a woman asking them to do something! She had kindly opened the gate into the River Meadows for them. It was getting dark and if there was a problem it needed sorting pretty fast. I jumped in the truck and beetled down to the River Meadows.
Let me take you back a few days. Read the rest of this entry »
Will, my son, said I had to watch Lie of the Land - the Molly Dineen documentary broadcast on Channel 4 last week - as it was just what I was on about. He even left instructions as how to record it and phoned me again on the evening to make sure I hadn’t forgotten. He phoned again during the second interval…’it’s awful.’ he said ‘I don’t get it. Hunting is not the whole reason for rural life and farming. And all the killing – it’s using shock tactics. most urbanites will have turned off by now.’ He phoned again at the end…‘It’s biased and one sided and I don’t think it will do farmers any favours.’ He also added that he didn’t like the camerawork. Let me explain – Will was born and bred on a farm, he’s seen and experienced life and death and understands the gore and grit as well as the joys and beauty. He now lives in London and works, successfully, in the media.
What did I think? I felt distinctly uncomfortable.
I’m in love! Yes, head over heels in love with the countryside! These few weeks in late April early May are stunning. Not only are they beautiful to look at but to smell and listen to as well. Probably it’s special because it’s so fleeting. And the icing on the cake has been this glorious weather.
But something very strange has happened…
We needed to get off the farm…beautiful though it is sometimes all you can see is the next job. Winter takes its toll too. Nature has done the spring thing but my body certainly hasn’t. Robert wanted to take some photos of blackthorn hedges so we headed off to a part of the north Devon coast that has an old green lane. I remembered it well even though I hadn’t been there for about fifteen years as it was the last walk I had with my now frail mum.
