Jim Webster's Blog, page 37

The Genuine Cumbrian Hyperspace Experience

The last two days have been remarkably wet even for Cumbria. Strangely enough I missed it as I headed south as far as Kenilworth. So on the Wednesday when I drove south it was throwing it down, until I crossed the county boundary into fine weather. Driving home on Thursday it was fine, a few …

Shaking hands with a traffic warden

The day you get need not necessarily be the day that you expected when you woke up. Certainly Sal had an interesting morning. I was feeding sheep and a lamb attacked her. In this case the ‘lamb’ weighed forty kilos and is nearly a year old. It was standing a couple of yards away from …

Retreating back into the shed

I often wondered about the that generation. They’d been through a lot; they’d lived through the war even if being in a reserved occupation meant they never got called up. By and large the ones I met were decent working men. What struck me, looking back, is the way they lived their lives. Quietly, without …

Facing the wrong way

It’s been a day of small surprises so far. I was on the quad taking feed to sheep. Because sheep will follow the quad and trailer, I led them over the hill into part of the field out of sight of sheep in other fields. This is because sheep in one field will occasionally crash …

The problem of the badly herded taxi.

I’m not somebody with a down on taxi drivers. Frankly given the standard of driving you see on the roads, I’m just surprised that professional drivers who spend a lot of time coping with the rest of us haven’t resorted to drive-by shootings to cull the worst offenders. But anyway, there was this taxi. I …

Cultural Dissonance

  What’s the similarity between electric guitars and bank managers? An interesting question and one which I discovered doesn’t necessarily have the same answer to a younger generation. Indeed somebody once accused me of not being au fait with our modern culture. Not merely did I admit that they were right, I clasped their comment …

Home comforts

After a while what was once a vague suspicion becomes an outright certainty. Our lambing ewes are far too comfortable. So comfortable that they have no intention of doing anything so socially disadvantageous as giving birth! At the moment those ewes furthest from lambing are still outside. Yes their diet is supplemented with some concentrate …

The milk of human kindness

With cattle, especially dairy cows, you tend to deal with them as individuals quite a lot of the time. As you get to know them, you learn their little idiosyncrasies. Some are brighter than others, some curious, some laid back and placid. With sheep for the vast majority of the time they manage to blend …

Cute animals frolic for your delectation and delight

The advantage of the lowest common denominator is that it is a common denominator. Admittedly some denominators are more common than others but still, who am I to cast the first stone when discussing the peccadilloes of  the unsophisticated? Similarly I am not going to direct aspersions at the Philistines. (A people whose grave goods …

After the ball was over

  So what happens after UK agriculture when we leave the EU? Perhaps a history lesson first; in the UK we’ve relied upon imported food to keep prices down since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Before the First World War we imported vast amounts of food, and there was a major effort …