 |  | October 2002
The leaves are now blowing about my ears and the winter hat has firmly taken root, covering my solar panel.
I enjoy the autumn with it’s seesaw weather, the balance slowly tipping toward winter. Getting the livestock shuffled about as the grass growth slows and the prospect of winter feeding looms.
Not that I enjoy getting cold and wet one jot. I just enjoy the primal motion of my days work being driven, in part, by the changing seasons.
I’m hoping to have given up a fairly hefty charitable commitment by the time you read this. It has involved my taking phone calls of varying levels of sense, day and night, for several months now, recently reaching a crescendo.
The biggest drawback to it all has been the dried up toast. You know how it is, you come in for a bite mid-morning and the phone goes while the toaster is doing its thing.
A lengthy, in depth conversation with someone who is positive the grass is greener on the other mans patch * and….hey presto! another 30 minutes of my life have vanished and I’m left with toast that could be used to rub the old paint off a railway bridge along with a mug of cold coffee.
(*The guilty parties know very well who they are and I would remind them that the green grass in question may very well be concealing a blanket bog)
It's a dog's life
A snippet of rural goings on that caused a certain stir recently has involved the antics of a Jack Russell.
The big problem with these creatures is, of course, that no-one has thought to tell them what small dogs they actually are.
They remain, as a breed, convinced that they are not only big but bad as well.
 | | You looking at me? |
The Jacko in question is now in a lot of hot water, for (allegedly) grabbing hold of another dog by the .. um … er... parts! And holding on until it is questionable whether the parts are salvageable.
The other dog in mention is a Rottweiler!
Fred'll fix it
The months dealings with DEFRA are many and, in the main, ugly. I won’t go into them just now, you really wouldn’t credit the levels of beaurocrappic mean-ness they will stoop to and it depresses me to think about them and the power they have over us.
I will instead relay a little story from those nightmare days during march of 2001. (There are many stories untold from then but we’ll stick to the one for now).
We received a lot of supportive calls with varying offers of help, including one from my pal ‘Fred’, (that is what we shall call him for reasons that will become apparent).
I’ve known this raffish gentleman for some while, he’s quite obviously a cultured and educated man who now pursues an existence as an "artisan" and he is, as well as being a lovely man, quite a case.
He was a soldier in his long ago youth, a Marine I believe, although you wouldn’t guess from his whiskery, even bohemian, appearance. ( There are other expressly distinctive features to the man which we’ll leave out).
He has a tremendous store of great anecdotes including several from his time in Her Majesty's Armed Forces. My favourite being the effects he and his fellows experienced when training and left out in the woods to fend for themselves:
 | | Character forming? |
After a short while they were ready to rob some poor chaps veg garden. After a few days they were fighting each other for the remains of a squirrel they’d caught. (Grown men coming to blows over the carcase of a rat with a bushy tail is apparently very character forming - Well it certainly was in Fred's case!)
Anyway, Fred phoned one night when things were pretty black.
He was very sympathetic, offering any support he could think to offer. He was, like a lot of local onlookers, appalled by - and angry about - what he could see happening.
After a while, having carefully identified who was doing what, and where responsibility might lie, he paused and quietly asked if I wanted him to go and "do" them.
He and I knew exactly what he was alluding to and I have wandered what would have happened if I hadn’t said he didn’t ought to.
I doubt very much if the individuals concerned knew what a narrow squeak that may have been. I guess we are both happily still at liberty to get together over a bottle and compare anecdotes.
I’ll look forward to it, "Fred".
Anton
PS. This diary entry is obviously a work of complete fiction and any similarity the characters portrayed bear to real people (or dogs), alive or dead, is purely co-incidental - honest!
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