Michele Hewitson
You can learn a thing or two by standing, doing nothing, looking over a gate.
In the days when I pretended to be a journalist – I am entirely untrained, in anything – I used to read books about journalism.
My favourite, by a journalist who preferred to call himself a purveyor of the “vituperative arts”, is Auberon Waugh’s autobiography, Will This Do? It is very good and very funny, but the title is the thing. I used to email my weekly column to my now-retired editor, The Headmaster, with “will this do?” in the subject line. On the odd (odd!) occasion when he was feeling cranky, he would email back: “No. Start again.” This always made me laugh, nervously.
Now that I am pretending to be a farmer, I read books on farming and animal husbandry. I have just finished a cracker of a book about sheep and the farming life, The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District, by James Rebanks. I knew it would be good, because it has an endorsement on the back by Alan Bennett. Bennett, also a Northern lad, said of The Shepherd’s Life:
“A very good book.” This made me laugh, immoderately. You don’t get more laconically Northern than that.
Rebanks is from a farming family, who have run sheep on the fells of the Lake District in north-west England for 600 years; we have been on our land for eight months. Miles, the sheep farmer, has been running some of his sheep on our land for a lot longer, so he knows our land much better than we do or ever will.
It is Miles who tends the pasture, lovingly. Good grass makes for happy sheep and happy sheep make for good cheese. He sprays the rampant thistles – the bloody sheep who will eat anything, including my roses, will not eat thistles. He sows the paddocks and fertilises them and tears up and down on his tractor in gales. He knows every dip and cranny in our paddocks because he was walked them hundreds of times.
He is a lovely farmer, who loves his sheep, which is why he is such a good farmer. But I don’t really know what farmers do. A million different things, writes Rebanks, most of which are invisible to the non-farmer. “Good stockmen spend a lot of time looking, watching and thinking. That’s what they are doing when they seem to be standing, doing nothing, looking over a gate as you pass them on the road.”
Iam beginning to learn to tell a good sheep. I am learning from Miles, from my books and from standing, doing nothing, and looking over a gate. Sometimes the sheep tell you, Rebanks writes: “… my best ewe stood up like a statue in front of us, as if to remind us that she is the boss. The best sheep have a sense of their specialness and this ewe seems to know that she is one of the stars.”
I will never know even a smidgen of what Miles knows about sheep, but I have, for the first and no doubt last time, been able to tell him a thing he didn’t know about sheep.
He is by now quite used to my phoning him with mad questions, the latest of which was: “Do sheep like plums?”
He has never run sheep in a plum orchard, so he didn’t know the answer. We have an embarrassment of plums, so could I try feeding the ewes plums? He didn’t see why not.
The ewes, I was able to tell him, go ape for plums. I feed them buckets of the things and they end up with red plum pulp all over their faces. They look like drunk ladies who have applied their lipstick without the aid of a mirror. Now that really makes me laugh my head off.
Farmers do a million different things, most of which are invisible to the non-farmer.