Pecking order blunders have me spitting feathers
My wife Liz laughed out loud when reading a book recently. Nothing unusual about that as we both still manage a frequent smile and quip in spite of a nation on the skids and us all heading for hell in a handcart. But what she laughed at was nothing to do with the efforts of the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
It was that on one page and obviously in a temper I had crossed out where the author Marina Lewycka had written “hay” and written “STRAW”.
I don’t remember doing that although I remember reading the book, a well-written bestseller a dozen or so years ago, and not finding a great deal in it about tractors. Buyers of magazines such as Classic Tractor and Big Tractors for Big Boys, or similar, would have been as disappointed with the book as those railway enthusiasts naive enough to buy Trainspotting when it first appeared.
But I knew instantly why I had done it. It’s the same impulse that had me shouting “Wild oats!” at the first TV screening of the first Superman film as the camera panned across an American prairie, and bawling “Tramlines!” as the eponymous Memphis Belle bomber in the film came in to land in 1940s Lincolnshire.
Farmers will understand these reactions, even if my family were unimpressed and simply rolled their eyes. The wild oats should have been maize and tramlines in crops didn’t appear until the 1970s.
The mistakes aren’t on a par with the film extra wearing a wristwatch in
0 Making hay while the sun shines, or maybe not
one Hollywood biblical epic or the actor required to rush in and shout, “The Hundred Years War has just started”, but they’re still mistakes and someone should point them out.
Or perhaps not, because a) in spite of my best efforts the public will never master some farming basics, and b) does it matter?
The hay or straw question is one of the most obvious examples. To the general reader and the public passing a field, those big round things are hay bales. Several million acres of grain might be harvested in Britain each year and tens of millions of STRAW bales produced compared with not a lot made from dried grass, but to the public it’s all hay.
The same is true of cattle. The most basic distinction is between male and female cattle and each can then be subdivided into numerous other categories depending on age, sex and the ingenuity of auctioneers. To the public they are all cows even when the rear-end evidence is incontrovertible.
Calling everything with wool sheep regardless of size, colour and shape is easier to understand although even here I was astonished to hear the weather forecaster Tomasz Schafernaker admit that, until well into adulthood, he thought lambs were another species rather than younger, smaller sheep.
Anything with feathers
is, of course, a chicken. The number of times I’ve seen confusion, at every level of intelligence, between the millions of chickens destined for the plate and hens that produce eggs is past counting. The saying that “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck” has been misappropriated as “If it’s got feathers and a beak and doesn’t fly, it’s a chicken”.
And even the best can make mistakes. Jessie Kesson captured farming and rural life in Northeast Scotland wonderfully well in a sadly short list of novels, but in one she talks about someone being gored by an Aberdeen Angus bull. Crushed, perhaps, but Aberdeen Angus don’t have horns. It’s a naturally polled breed.
Did it spoil her story? No. Does anyone care, apart from me? Probably not. I only note that when the public don’t understand, and don’t worry that they don’t understand, some of the basics of farming, is it any wonder that they understand or care even less about the problems farmers try to argue they have?
Such as the disadvantageous intricacies of the European Union’s common agricultural policy, less favoured areas, beef premiums, short term tenancies or stewardship schemes? Or what the possible effects of Brexit will be on our food supplies? That might sort the wheat from the cha … oh, forget it.