In need of a bib

 Is it just me?  It can’t just be me, surely? So why don’t I know anyone else over the age of, say, nine, who is in need of a bib?  I’m excluding the need for maximum coverage when sucking one’s way through a rack of spare ribs draped generously in the sauce du jour be it hot, barbecue or sticky; not only do you need to be covered in a tablecloth to eat this stuff but finger bowls have to be bath sized.  No, I’m talking about daily meals, the usual breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the cooking, prepping and eating of same.  

It seems fair enough to expect that you can keep yourself and your clothes neat and clean while in the kitchen, but I am literally unable to handle food without smearing it on my clothes, most commonly my sleeves and upper body.  OK, flat-chested I am not, which clearly creates a platform for drip-catching, but why am I dripping stuff with what appears to be major abandon, in the first place?  

I know that aprons exist – I have many of them – and that other people wear them successfully, but the putting on of an apron is normally a precursor to baking (flour gets everywhere) or roasting (dropping meat fat on your best jeans is painful as well as sartorially inept).  And I do wear my aprons to cook in.   And still, I’m covered in gobs of this and dabs of that.  If, unusually, I am wearing something smart or new I actually have to change into old clothes to cook because it will be an absolute dead cert that I will embellish my new favourite top with something that will leave a semi-permanent stain directly between the boobs.  This does not cheer me.

I don’t think I eat like a ravening Henry VIII, tossing half carcases of game birds and whole legs of lamb over my shoulder after violently sinking my teeth into juicy flesh, or perhaps I do.  My chin is only occasionally decorated with a splat of gravy or flake of fish, so again, why am I such a food clutz, unable to ferry the contents of my spoon, fork or chopstick daintily into my mouth without creating leavings that adhere, which the dogs will delight in licking off me later in the day?  

I‘m thinking that perhaps I should get an extra farm boilersuit just for wearing in the kitchen, or perhaps a wetsuit would be better, although that would make standing and stirring stuff over the Aga unbearably like tending to hell fires.  Or more eccentrically, one of those all in one things that astronauts wear to moon walk, complete with helmet.  With an extra bib to keep the airpipes unclogged.

The Thoughtfully Dressed Farmer

Linda Grant, a writer who has me entirely in her thrall, mentions smallholders in passing in her book The Thoughtful Dresser:

 “It would be something if I could learn to live with sensible shoes.  Lady traffic warden lace-ups, Doc Martens, T-bar children’s sandals in primary-colour leather, clogs.  But to wear those shoes is to stand to one side from life (or life as I want to lead it), which doesn’t involve a smallholding in Wales, with obligatory rain over the low hills, and clucking, shitting chickens). I want beautiful fashionable shoes which I can nonetheless walk in...”

 This made me laugh, of course, as I considered the shoes I own.  Shoes that you can walk in are a pre-requisite for life on the smallholding and the farm, but long gone are the days of wooden pattens, which must have been just as uncomfortable in medieval times as the elegant pointed toes and stiletto heels that Grant craves now.  What made me chuckle though, was not just the neatly categorised and passed over life of the smallholder, but my realisation that shoes for the farm, unlikely as that may seem to many, also have a hierarchy of beauty. 

Let me start with wellies, which, bizarrely, held a place in fashion not so long ago and always looked entirely weird and ridiculous on London streets on anyone other than toddlers being taken out in the rain. I am as picky about my wellies as Grant delightfully is about clothes, shoes and handbags.  Spend a tenner on those pale green farm wellies with toffee coloured soles available in all agricultural merchants?  No chance. That would be the equivalent of traffic warden style.  I want wellies that come to an inch below my knee, no lower, with a gusset and a buckle so I can fix them over winter or summer thicknesses of jeans or thermal cyclist’s leggings or bare legs.  I want them to have fabulous fit around the ankle so my feet don’t slop about in them and are secure for walking many miles.  I want thick, heavily cleated soles that stop me sliding on the slippery Devon clay, and I want them neoprene lined, thank you very much, preferably in pillar box red to cheer me up as I slide my feet inside.  The rubber outer should be dark brown or deep green or possibly black, although I‘ve yet to find a good black wellington boot. I should not feel as if I have slippers on and be able to detect every lump or stone I walk on, so they should be well heeled as well as soled.  All this, and utterly workmanlike too – I expect them to last me at least a couple of years with daily, aggressive wearing.  Wellies like this are not cheap. They are probably my most important tool, so why should they be? And to my biased eye, they are aesthetically pleasing.  But unlike gorgeous suede wedges, they should not be box fresh; a lack of soil or wear declaims the naivety and charming ignorance of the newbie. 

When it’s not raining there’s walking boots for on the farm or in any weather for 10km jaunts on Dartmoor.  They are clunky, chunky, comfy.  They tell a story about intent and journeys past.  They are leather, reliable, also non-slip (a recurring theme with much of my footwear) and have interesting laces.  The laces are long and in some unknowable way, technical.  They never seem to get wet, they rarely come undone, they give a bit of visual light relief to the tan boots; they are ineffably fit for purpose.  Would I choose pink walking boots, or sky blue or anything other than natural leather?  Of course not.  I have standards too.

It’s really hard to wear slinky shoes or high heeled anything on the farm (although I’ll come to that in a minute).  But I don’t wear wellies or walking boots all the time.  I have several pairs of what I call everyday boots.  Some are ankle boots, usually lace-ups, preferably lambskin lined, although I do have a pair of zipped boots that I love because the leather is intriguingly aged.  These are what I wear to go shopping – to buy livestock feed, do the monthly food shop, go to market and so on.  If I find a lamb out on the road, these are sturdy enough to cope with puddles, slush and mud, so don’t hamper any rescue efforts, but tidy enough to be seen out in public without me looking like some rural hermit who doesn’t get out much. I also have leather wellies that I use to visit other people’s farms or agricultural shows so I don’t risk transferring disease to or fro on my everyday wellies.  I could wear these in London quite happily, although I haven’t, yet.   I do love boots, always have.  I have knee high ones that work with dresses or jeans.  I even have suede pointy-toed kitten heeled ones, but I can’t wear them going from the house to the car across the farmyard, so because I am lazy and can’t be bothered to change boots once I’m in the car, I don’t wear them as often as I’d like.  Talking of boots, I’d not be in Linda Grant’s good books – I have several pairs of sheepskin boots, knee high and ankle height, for wearing indoors from autumn to spring.  My office is cold, the heating is reliant on my remembering to throw more logs on, so warm boots are as essential as bootees on a baby.  I know summer is here when my feet get too hot for sheepskin.   

I do have some high heeled shoes and boots.  I used to wear them in the house when we had friends over for supper.  But the scullery (yes, there are aspirational benefits in having a house outside of a city) is cobbled directly on earth and I’d get my heels stuck between the stones and leave deep pits in the floor.  

There is one pair of shoes on the shelves in the boot room that warrant the full disdain of Ms Grant; my practical, ever useful, but rather ghastly embarrassment, the Birkenstock plastic clog.  I can quickly slip them on to go outside to collect the post, ferret deeply in a freezer, check on a farrowing pig or stop the dogs bothering a delivery man.  But no, even though they are covered in colourful flowers (perhaps because they are covered in colourful flowers), they do not please my eye, do not offer joy, they just play a functional role that suits a life that includes clucking, shitting chickens,  mooing, shitting cows and bleating, shitting sheep.

Back to the land

I've been ruminating.  Spending too much time with the cows, obviously.  But it's not possible, so I find, to spend too much time with the cows.  And that's the point, or at least I'm getting closer to it.  The point is, why do subsistence farmers spend their whole lives trying to get away from the land and acquire a modern lifestyle (you know, things like easily accessible and more varied food, water on tap, a pair of trousers, education), whilst those who achieve success in their modern lifestyle yearn to get back to the land?
Working every hour of daylight to reap a harvest barely adequate for your own needs, literally breaking your back to support a family, it's not surprising that subsistence farmers crave a less knife-edge existence.  But why do so many people have such a strong desire to get back to the land?  Is there some sort of as yet unfound rural gene?  A farmyard chromosome?  Is modern, urban life ultimately so unsatisfying that we require, after all, a simpler life dictated by seasons and the inevitable turn of sowing and harvest?
The stories of celebrities turning farmer are endless: Jeremy Clarkson, Rosie Boycott, Alex James, Jody Scheckter and Janet Street Porter, to name a few, and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Adam Henson and Jimmy Docherty are household names. And the only difference between most celebrities and the rest of us is that they have the money to do what the rest of us would like to do, only more quickly, on a more lavish scale, and certainly with more help (aka employees).
So, is the meaning of life only to be found in growing your own herbs,  rearing your own pigs and plucking an egg fresh from the nest?  Have we all been watching too many episodes of Lark Rise to Candleford?  Are we succumbing to some ghastly social engineering of bucolic brainwashery?  I don't think so. 
There are times in life when your gut twists with worry and working at a computer or hanging on the phone to yet another call centre worker is no balm.  But walking the land, breathing the air, handling livestock, producing your own food, working outside til dark, having something beautiful to wake up to in the morning, these are things that genuinely do ease stress.  It's not about brain (city) versus brawn (country) either.  I have found nothing as intellectually challenging as farming; there is always more to learn, more to observe, more to discuss.  And as for brawn, I'd rather handle 150 sheep than fill 150 boxes for an office move, any day.

Of course, living in this beautiful place, running a farm, I enjoy that happiness that only the land and nature seems able to give, and have been lucky enough to realise it.  Running our smallholding courses, we meet hundreds of people who are also convinced that an office based life is basically drudgery, no matter how well paid, and that wielding a shovel or a sledge hammer is truly satisfying if that shovel is being used for some smallholder or farmer task; a pickaxe used for mending roads on the other hand is just hard labour.
Can I pinpoint why we want to be on the land, want to farm?   Well, discussing it with our course participants and friends, there would appear to be some fundamental truths, not all of which would be shared by some large scale commercial farmers, many of whom seem to never eat their own produce. But that aside, what are those drivers?

• Having an absolute sense of the seasons soothes in that it creates routine as well as change -  there are summer tasks such as haymaking that happen every year, but then you shift to autumn and your chores alter, keeping your interest, calling up different skills.  I suspect people thrive on this mix of routine and variety.
• Being in control of your own life and not worrying about starving as a consequence - in tougher times I might not be able to buy a pair of shoes but there's always meat in the freezer and veg and fruit in the garden.
• Knowing exactly where your food has come from, what it contains and what you are putting in your family's stomach - and rearing and growing what you like to eat best; asparagus and steak, chillis and cheese, petits pois and omelettes.
• The absence of concrete, and therefore of the manufactured.  When I'm in the city it feels as if I'd need to dig down for yards to find earth. At home there is soil, and the grass grows up to the front door.  I know that a farm is a completely man-made environment, but if farmed sympathetically it develops with, not against nature.  Lay a hedge as a livestock barrier and it regrows, sprouting green a few months later.
• The annual round of birth - lambing, hatching, calving, farrowing.  It might be destined as meat but there is real joy in being responsible for healthy births. And death too; on a livestock farm it is inevitable and with that comes, perhaps, a more relaxed acceptance of your own mortality.
• An extraordinary sense of achievement, not just once in a blue moon, but regularly.  Every egg you collect, every lamb or calf that grows on well because of good husbandry, the hedges you lay, the wildlife that thrives, the trees planted, the orchard that fruits.  So much more rewarding than a "well done" from a boss. So necessary to a worthwhile existence.
• And you get that sense of achievement because it's challenging.  It's not easy, doing many of the jobs on a farm.  You need a number of skills and a can do attitude.  It doesn't pay to be smug (is it ever?) because there will be something even more challenging just around the corner that could well trip you up, financially or literally. 
• Time.  Yes, we can work very long days, but if it's a nice day we can take the dogs to the beach or up on the moors.  We can stop and chat with friends not for two minutes but for an hour, if nothing is too pressing.  The to do lists are crazy, but if it's monsooning it down, you go and do something in a shed or the house. 

So, do I think that everyone wants to live on the land, given the chance? No.  Do I think that everyone wants to get soil under their fingernails? Definitely not.  Do I think living in the countryside is better than living in a city? For me, definitely yes, but for you, possibly not.  But do I believe that there is something in most of us that is incomplete without nature? Oh yes - look at the popularity of gardening, parks, nature programmes and rambling.  And do I think that the next logical step for those who can make it happen is a patch of land they can work and rear things on?  Yes, yes yes.  And that's why I can sit in a field with my cows for the longest time, wondering about their herd instincts, their communication, their hierarchies, their lives.  I have so much to learn. 

Not another resolution

When the ground has turned into Willy Wonka's chocolate river but I continue to refuse my Oompaloompa stripes and add to the poaching, rather more time is spent indoors than desirable. But it feels like a fitting beginning to a new year, taking it a bit easier for a change. The bringing in of the new cows to winter accommodation means the morning chores take a couple of hours, a significant increase, mostly spent dealing with muck of one variety or another. So I still get that morning blast of fresh air and exercise, but I'm currently hibernating from then til 4.30pm when it's time to do all the evening livestock stuff. Most of my arts clients aren't back in the swing yet either, so I actually have some time on my hands.
It's a wonderful feeling, after what has been the most extraordinarily busy year. And what's particularly pleasing is that it's quite clear that the plans for the past few years have been mostly achieved and that 2012 needs to be a year of polishing what's already there rather than creating new baubles. I don't say it will be a year of consolidation (I truly hate that word; to me it means stasis, can't be botheredness, a lack of imagination and joy), but I hope it will be a year of pulling together all the things set up in recent times and making them work just that bit better.
So there is no overly exuberant wish list for 2012, no ridiculously ambitious plans to shove three years' work into one. If I'm part of creating any new baubles they'll fundamentally be someone else's - supporting a smallholding dream here, a sustainable arts organisation there.
But then again...

Cows, cows, cows, cows, cows, cows, cows, cows...

You get the idea? We have COWS! The glorious, wondrous, huge, beautiful, desirable, brilliant, scarily large, extraordinary tasting Devon Red Rubies. A small pedigree suckler herd, which we hope to add to before the winter kicks in.
There's matriarch Willow with her new bull calf; Bollie, a year younger also with her calf; and Peaceful, a heifer with some growing to do before she has a calf of her own.
For now, Bollie and Willow leave Peaceful in charge of their calves when they want to drink, graze, hang out. And then the old gals nudge her OFF the calves and tell her where to go. It's pretty much in line with bullying the au pair and still knowing she'll not pack her bags and leave you in the lurch.
We bought them at auction at a very local farm, from an acquaintance who needed to get rid of her herd, so they came here with their auction stickers slapped high on their rumps. Bollie still has hers and looks like she's wearing a new summer outfit with the labels still attached.
The auction was not that nailbiting; after having been to several sales recently and either not bid because of the quality of the stock or bid and been trampled over by gobsmackingly high prices, this was a pretty calm affair. We liked what we saw, a more knowledgeable pal gave a helpful opinion, we set a price and that was it. Out of more than a hundred people present I think only half a dozen were bidding, and none were prepared to get carried away. Lucky auction number 99 took me through to winning the 3 lots we wanted. And then the nailbiting started.
Everybody has said to me that after sheep, cows would be a walk in the park, but blimey, I can turn over a sheep and take physical control. Those cows must weigh nearly a tonne. And they are naturally protective of their young. And we've never done this before. And and and.
But we have great big pigs, and that's fine. And we'll take it slowly, and today Peaceful came up to me to be patted, and Willow looked thoughtful about the prospect. Bollie, with her first calf, is entirely suspicious, looking strict and superior, keeping her distance. Winning her over will take time.
This afternoon I watched her calf lick at an itch, but Bollie couldn't resist and rasped her tongue all over her calf, showing him how it was done. I also watched the cows engage in synchronised grazing, shitting, calf suckling, pissing and drinking. It was a well directed opera of activity with all basics covered.
This is the start of a big adventure. It reminds me how the people on our smallholding courses feel when they take their first tentative livestock steps. It reminds me how much we've learned over decades of keeping sheep, pigs, poultry and more. It reminds me how little I know about cattle, no matter what I've read, no matter what I've heard. Ultimately you have to do something to know something. And now, I'm doing it.