Down in the English Midlands, my biological home if not my spiritual one. Have to admit that it's nice to see a bit of real agriculture for a change. It brings back a lot of memories. There is a certain feeling of, well, not superiority but close to it, when you are charging over the fields in a huge tractor hauling grain or silage into the wee small hours. The imperative to get the job done, the knowledge that you must go on as long as there are things to do. The responsibility for crops and livestock. It's a wonderful way of life, but hard.
In many ways I'm glad to be out of it, words, trees and deer having taken the place of combines, wheat and dairy cows but there is a portion of me that will always hanker for farming. But for now I am happy in the Highlands. The screaming gales, weeks of rain, the midge clouds - and then that one perfect crystal day. On that day you can forgive it anything and there is no finer place to be. You may just walk the dog, you may paddle the canoe out into the bay and come home with a leash of tiger-striped mackerel, perhaps you'll rise early and grass a perfect roe buck. Foxy red in his summer pelage and even tastier than the mackerel. Whatever you spend the day doing it will be a day not wasted.
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