Philip Pullman on being a yeoman, swallows, the value of analogy, and a few other things

At last I have discovered what social rank I am. Not that I ever wondered very hard about that, but still. I am a yeoman. We recently bought seven acres of rough land right next to our house. It hadn’t been looked after for 25 years or more, and it was full of chest-high thistles and nettles and hogweed, and the ground was ankle-twistingly covered in hummocks and tussocks and anthills and molehills and rabbit holes.

Naturally, I had to have a tractor, and very fine I feel sitting on it, bumpin...