Spaniel Eyes Part 2

Spaniel Eyes Part 2

It was clearly important to get Myrtle (see Spaniel Eyes part 1) used to sheep as quickly as possible.

After all there are usually two or three hundred of them in the Orchard (see By Hand or by Brain) where she was going to spend a good deal of her time.  And every dog’s natural inclination seems to be chase sheep.  Every dog that is except Myrtle.

Last week I was sitting having a cup of coffee in the Land Rover while Myrtie was lying on the ground by the open door hoping for a doggie treat to be thrown.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see a curious sheep approaching.  Usually they get to within a few meters and then decide discretion is the better part of valour where canines are concerned and back off back to their friends.

Not this one.  She just kept on coming. Once she was within about a meter Myrtle looked up and they eyeballed each other hard.  But the woolly one continued cautiously on until they were within touching distance.  And on yet further until their noses actually met. I’ve seen a pair of dogs rub noses.  I may even have seen a pair of sheep rub noses. I’d never before seen a sheep and a dog doing it.

Myrtle seemed to think it was all perfectly natural and waited until the sheep got bored and walked away.  Which I took to be A Result.  Those first few weeks of training her, walking regularly together among the sheep, insisting she concentrated completely on me and didn’t even so much look at the sheep, seem to have paid off.   And it’s pretty important as you’ll see.

It’s 8.30 am on a Sunday morning and I’m just sitting down to breakfast and wondering when the papers will arrive (this IS the country and newspaper deliveries can be a bit erratic) when the phone rings.  It’s a woman who’s a neighbour at the orchard, clearly in some distress.  Do I have a phone number for the sheep farmer?  Yes, Why?  Her dog has just come back covered in blood. Apparently it has jumped a fence and savaged a sheep.  It was a rescue German Shepherd.  Where is it now?  The sheep’s dying in a ditch,  the dog, securely back inside the house.

The farmer’s landline is on answerphone and he doesn’t like anything as intrusive as a mobile so I leave a message and get back to breakfast and the Observer which has, by now, arrived.  Later I’m up at the orchard putting in an hour’s pruning when I bump into the farmer.  I’m surprised he’s so calm.  No, it could have been much worse, he tells me.  The rest of the flock didn’t seem at all agitated so the dog almost certainly hadn’t chased them, but had just gone straight for the throat of the one ewe and then returned home.  And that’s good?  You’re right it is.   A dog chasing an entire flock of pregnant ewes can cause multiple miscarriages which can be a real disaster.  As it is the owner has offered to pay and will be in for rather over £100 for the pregnant ewe, £40 for disposal of the corpse, plus the farmer’s time and petrol.

Unpleasant as that experience was, it wasn’t as bad as the ‘blood in the boot’ episode I witnessed a month or so later.  I’d gone to buy some apple bins from a farm up near the M20.  I was just returning to my car and its little trailer, trying to work out how to secure two bins on such a conveyance, when I noticed a reddish liquid seeping – no, flowing – out of the back of the Farmer’s 4X4.  “You’re losing diesel” I told him.  “No,” he said mater-of-factly, “it’s not diesel it’s blood.”

Perhaps my raised eyebrows suggested that further explanation was required.  After all he probably didn’t want me phoning the police with tales of dead bodies in backs of cars up at “Tom’s place”.

“Yes, a dog got in among the flock and killed five ewes.  Just ripped their throats out.  For fun.”

“God, how awful.  Did you find its owner?”

“No”, he said, “didn’t need to.  The dog won’t be doing it again, if you catch my meaning”.

So you can understand why farmers don’t much care for dogs, or even dog walkers traipsing over their land – even if they are on a public footpath.  But sometimes they can take it to extremes.

Myrtie and I have followed the stream along from our house across half a dozen ploughed fields and come upon a footpath leading towards the road that goes up to the orchard. We’ve not used the path before and we follow it across two open fields.  There is a notice from the footpath authority requesting that dogs be kept on a lead, but since there’s no livestock in either meadow there seems no reason to.  We’re half way up to the road when I hear a faint bellow  “put that dog on a lead”.  I look round.  There’s nobody in sight.  I’m clearly on a public footpath.  There are no sheep.  Myrtle’s sticking to within half a dozen meters of me.

“PUT THAT F****ING DOG ON A LEAD.”  This time I don’t look round.  I can hear the shouting is coming from a rather ugly bungalow some distance away. We reach the road and I consider whether to go to the bungalow and confront the rude man.  But it’s a nice day and we ought to be getting on and I don’t really want any more aggro, so I leave it.

Couple of days later I mention it to someone who lives just along the lane from the bungalow.  Be careful,  she says, he’ll shoot first and worry about the consequences later.  I’ve lost one dog and had two cats wounded by shotgun pellets.  I’ve complained to the police and he’s on a final warning, but it won’t stop him.  Another neighbour confirms her story.  I check the law. It an offence for a dog to “be at large (that is to say not on a lead or otherwise under close control) in a field or enclosure in which there are sheep.” But under close control is not defined.  And Section 9 of the Animals Act 1971 provides that the owner of livestock, the landowner or anyone acting on their behalf, is entitled to shoot any dog if they believe it is the only reasonable way of stopping it worrying livestock.

So, I tell Myrtie, we were perfectly in the right.  But later I reflect you might feel that was little consolation as you carried your dead dog home having been unable to convince Mr Angry of such legal niceties.

Spaniel Eyes - Part 1

A friend was walking alone in her small village in Somerset recently when a concerned passer-by asked: “What’s happened to your dog?” My friend’s reply that she didn’t have one, and didn’t particularly like dogs, was met with blank incomprehension. How could one not have a dog in the country?

It’s not quite that bad around here in Kent, but there is a definite doggie fraternity along the lanes and footpaths.  Perfect strangers who would otherwise have passed with the merest of nods or an embarrassed sotto voce “hello” will, if you both have dogs, stop and discuss anything from the weather to the state of the economy while the hounds sniff each other’s privates.

I know this because I have recently acquired a canine companion.

She’s called Myrtle – the litter was named after Harry Potter characters – and she was meant to be a Springer Spaniel.  I quite wanted a Springer.  I’d done a lot of research into breeds and the Springer – English or Welsh – seemed the right sort of size and to have the right sort of temperament.  I was aware that she would need a lot of exercise  (as a friend said, “the tail wags the dog’) but since part of the point was to get me out of the armchair and into the countryside, this seemed a positive benefit.

There was much discussion as to whether I shouldn’t take on a rescue dog rather buy from a breeder.  But I was adamant.  I wanted a puppy that I could train and whose temperament would be a known quantity.  I knew it would cost a lot – £400 and up for a Kennel Club certified pedigree breed, but I thought if that were averaged out over 10 or 15 years it wasn’t a massive amount.  My biggest problem was finding one without a docked tail.  I’ve never understood docking, indeed I disapprove of it rather strongly.  It’s always seemed a bit like foot-binding your daughter.  Dogs use their tails to express themselves and mutilating them immediately after birth seems to me cruel and wholly unnecessary.

So the ad in the local paper for undocked Springer pups at £200 each seemed too good to be true.  And disregarding my favourite adage with which I bore my son to death – that if a thing seems too good to be true it usually is – I went along to see the litter.  Of course they were gorgeous – puppies are almost invariably cute.  But what impressed me most was the mum, Billie (after Billie Piper).  A stunningly attractive, perfectly proportioned, beautifully marked English Springer.  The sage advice to look at the mother if you want to know what your girlfriend will look like when she’s older seemed pertinent.  I was told Billie had been served by a pure Springer over in West Sussex, far enough away to ensure a clear gene pool, but neither dam nor sire had a KC pedigree hence the very reasonable price. 

Now, at this stage I need to declare a certain amount of ignorance about dogs and puppies.  We had a Fox Terrier when I was young, and my mother acquired a black mutt called Othello after I’d left home, but other than that my experience of dogs had been confined to petting other people’s pooches, and trying to keep them away from my cat/s. So I was certainly no expert on puppies.  Myrtle was a loveable-looking ball of fur, mainly black with a white line up her nose, a white chest, and grey socks more pronounced on her fore paws than her hind legs.  She was certainly a good deal darker and less mottled than her mum but her siblings were similar and I assumed that was normal and her characteristic Springer markings would emerge as she got older. So I paid my money and Myrtle came home, the excitement only slightly mitigated by her being violently sick in the car.

It was at puppy training classes a few weeks later that the experts took one look and said she couldn’t possibly be a pure Springer and seemed much more like a Collie.  Had there been a Collie on the farm from where I’d bought her? Hmm… Actually I HAD seen a Collie lurking in a barn.  But I’d been assured her sire was a Springer from West Sussex.  Then another similar dog arrived for training and it transpired that it was Myrtle’s brother, Hagrid, from the same litter. But his owner said she’d been told from the start that Hagrid was a Springer/Collie cross, and that the breeder knew that the farm Collie had got to Billie, but had hoped that some at least in the litter would be pure Springer.

Well it was a bit of a blow.  I was already fond of Myrtle and we’d worried about her at night and cleaned up her accidents and been to the vet and spent money on shots and posted her picture on Facebook.  But I HAD wanted a Springer, and few of Billie’s features seemed to have made it through to Myrtle.

A carefully worded letter to the breeder elicited an immediate phone call in reply, full of profuse apologies, tales of how she’d guessed the others in the litter might possibly have been the Collie’s but how she’d hoped the West Sussex Springer had managed to impregnate at least one of Billie’s eggs. 

And she offered to take Myrtle back. 

But after just a moment’s reflection I realised it was too late.  I’d fallen for her.  So I took up the promise of a full refund and told Myrtie that I loved her anyway, despite her mixed parentage.  And as she looked up at me I realised that at least one characteristic had been passed on from mum – those doleful Spaniel eyes.

To be continued …..

Of Chainsaws and Hedgelaying.

The first glimmers of spring.

Daffodils are out, Snowdrops have been and gone, Crocuses (Croci?) - either way ugly little plants - are polluting herbaceous borders.

And the woodlands and hedgerows are alive to the sound of … chainsaws. 

It’s a country convention that you don’t cut hedges between March and August in case of disturbing nesting birds. (Indeed it’s actually an offence under Section 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 to intentionally take, damage or destroy the nest of any wild bird while it is in use or being built.)  So hedge cutters are busy trying to beat the deadline, while woodsmen are trying to tidy up and prepare next year’s firewood before the sap rises and the leaves are out.

We hosted a traditional hedgelaying course at the orchard a week or so back. A five man and one woman team from the South of England Hedgelaying Society arrived complete with staves and binders and billhooks and … chainsaws.

I was rather disappointed.  I thought that this ancient and noble craft would eschew anything so modern as a chainsaw.  But once I saw (no pun intended) how much time and effort they saved I was converted.

The first job is to clear out all the old and deadwood in the hedge and snip through any brambles or blackthorn.  Then one post is put in at the end and with careful use of your bill hook you slice three quarters of the way through a stem as close to the ground as possible and bend it over towards the post.  This is the art.  Cutting just the right depth into the stem.  Too much and you sever it completely. Too little and it won’t bend,  but snaps in half.

The trouble is that the stems of old hedgerows come in all thicknesses.  Anything up to a couple of inches diameter you can do easily with a bill hook, but for anything much over that, out comes the chain saw.

Anyhow a few hours later and you’ve got a succession of semi-severed stems leaning over in the same direction.  Then you drive posts in between them at 18 inch intervals, and then weave your binders along the top.  A few bits of tidying up and you’ve got a beautifully laid hedge which is, pretty much, sheep-proof.  I say pretty much because there were a few holes through which I thought an ambitious lamb might just make a bid for freedom.  So I tentatively asked the chief hedge layer if he would be insulted if I put back the old wire fence that we’d moved at the start of the operation.  No, he replied to my surprise.  We’d be insulted if you didn’t.  The new buds and shoots need to be protected from the sheep while they grow.

It’s a pretty labour intensive job though. Six of them and we three trainees managed just 40 yards in a day.  But extremely satisfying.  Ant it does look beautiful.  Apologies though to anyone disturbed by the angry buzz of our chainsaws first thing on a Sunday morning.

Rural Mail?

 

We country dwellers rely on the postal service certainly no less than our urban counterparts and arguably rather more.

The odd republican may object to the anachronistic title of Royal Mail,  but those on the left (and there are some hereabouts) rejoice that one public service at least remains wholly in national ownership.

As did I did until a Saturday morning trip to my local Post Office a week or so back.

Up until a decade ago this would have meant a half mile walk up the hill to the local shop in our hamlet.  But the shop and its post office counter closed and the shopkeeper now runs a rather more profitable business providing chiropody services.

A decade before that, in the main village a mile further on, the fine weather-boarded Georgian building on the village green that had been home to the local Post Office for generations was closed and sold to a speculative developer.

So now it’s a five mile drive to the nearest town.  But at least here is a proper establishment pretending to be nothing other than a post office. With a proper post mistress (is there a gender neutral term?) who, eventually, turned her attention to me after finishing a lengthy conversation with the previous customer.

I put my small package on the scales and enquired casually what time the next collection was.   “Just gone” sad she, glancing at the clock which declared it was  just a smidgen after 10.35.  AM . “He was on time today” she said with a hint of either pride or malice.  It was difficult to tell which.  And the collection after that?  “Monday. 5.00”.

Now I knew we’d lost our Sunday collection some time ago but I had, perhaps naively, thought that the Saturday pick-up might be towards the end of the day.  Or at very least noon.  When I dared moot this, the response was swift, a shade patronising, and somewhat tautologous. “This isn’t the city. We’re in the country here”.

So I asked if  there was a later collection anywhere near-by.  She told me there might be.  In Cranbrook. Eight miles further away.  But she wasn’t sure.  Could she possibly call Cranbrook and ask?  No.  Sorry. She didn’t have the number.  Why didn’t I just drive over there?  Because I didn’t want a 16 mile round trip with no guarantee that the post wouldn’t have gone from there too. “You could call the Royal Mail information line” she said, helpfully.  And the number?  No, she didn’t have that but I could surely look it up in the phone book.

So I did, when I got home. And called it. And after the obligatory lengthy recorded message about customer service, I was told the help line was not available on a Saturday. Or a Sunday.  And search as I might there appeared nowhere on the website which gave details of collection times.  Anywhere in the country,  let alone in my area of darkest Kent.

So the small package with its first class stamp that I’d bought for 52p (nearly 10/6d) in order to ensure it was delivered by Monday morning would now not even start its journey until the only collection on Monday. At 5.00 in the afternoon.

Maybe, I reflected, the Royal Mail just simply no longer deserves its monopoly.  And like the telephone service before, might actually become a service if privatised.  But I hardly dare say so round here.  In case I’m mistaken for a Tory.

By hand or by brain?

Former broadcaster Kent Barker exchanged his white collar for a blue one, and extols the advantages of manual work.
 
 
It’s one of those lovely summer evenings.  The sun is dipping across the orchard, lengthening shadows from the apple trees and radiating warmth on the sheep below.  Birdsong fills the air.  At least I’m pretty sure it does.  I can’t actually hear anything above the clatter of the tractor’s massive three-cylinder diesel engine. But the noise notwithstanding, it’s a pretty perfect evening and my most pressing decision is whether to pay a visit to the Woodcock or to the Bull for a pint on the way home.
I’d never driven a tractor before a couple of months ago.  Now here I am mowing a meadow and grappling with power take-offs and hydraulic lifts.  As the topper (a huge rotary grass cutter) pulverises the thistles and nettles, there’s plenty of time to reflect on my change of circumstances.  Not so long ago at this time of day I’d have been elbowing my way through homebound commuters at Oxford Circus after ten hours squinting at a computer screen and side-stepping office politics. I suppose I must have spent the best part of 30 years in jobs involving suits and desks and telephones and meetings and coffee machines.   I had a meeting the other day. A man from the Soil Association came to the orchard to discuss progress on our transition to organic status.  We both wore Wellies and wandered round the 50 acres discussing non-organic sheep (yes, there are organic flocks) before sharing a coffee from my thermos flask.
There’s a nasty grinding sound from the topper and I yank back on the hydraulic lever by the right of my seat and peer over my shoulder to watch the assembly lift into the air and pass safely above a tree stump. On the next run down the rows of our mature fruit trees I get to thinking about the recent book by Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good.  The title may be lugubrious but pretty much sums up my current thinking about work. Not that a few hours a week pruning and mowing in a community orchard can really be described as a job.  But tomorrow I’ll be working as a carpenter, building an elaborate tree house for the children of a local GP. I’ve always been keen on amateur building work (I hate the expression DIY which makes it sound as if you can just about assemble simple flat-pack furniture) and have renovated the various houses I’ve lived in, getting progressively more ambitions installing RSJs, demolishing supporting walls and turning attics into loft living spaces.  But that was all for me and all done in my own time.  Working for a client is a different matter.  I’ve become far more self critical, and can’t help feeling a bit of a fraud, charging good money when I have no qualifications whatsoever.​
But looking back I suppose I had no qualifications when I started in broadcasting. I’d borrowed a Uher (reel to reel tape recorder) from a friend and blagged my way into a press reception for the opening of the film That’s Entertainment. There were Gene Kelly and Liza Minelli hanging around looking for someone to talk to – even if it was an unkempt 21year-old who clearly had trouble mastering the controls of his recorder.  Despite my inept questions they were just wonderful, and I managed to persuade Capital Radio’s evening news programme to run it.
From that moment I was hooked, and by dint of considerable perseverance and a lot of luck found myself working in local and then national radio, at Westminster, in New York, and then for ITN.  And great fun it was too.  Mostly.  But it still meant an office environment, and often windowless rooms and studios. Entire summer’s days could pass me by without ever seeing the sun except perhaps briefly on the walk to and from the tube station.  Now I’m intimately involved with the weather and the seasons and, perhaps more importantly, have much more control over all that I do.  Broadcasting is essentially a co-operative venture with a large number of cogs whirring to produce a bulletin or programme.
Michael Crawford, a Ph.D in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, compares this type of modern day office work to mass manufacturing and argues that many if not most office jobs are increasingly debased into factory roles where each person does only part of a job. As result the job satisfaction disappears and the work is less intellectually stimulating.  His satisfaction, he says, came from running a motorcycle repair shop or working as an electrician.
There are two rows left to mow and the tractor is bouncing over a warren of foxholes.  It has no suspension, but the seat in the cab is mounted on springs, so every jolt sends you bouncing up and down like a demented Zebedee.  If I hurry I can get to the Bull before 7.00 and take advantage of their early-evening cheap beer.
​It is certainly true that a few hours tractor driving or a day’s carpentry here or there doesn’t bring in a banker’s bonus. But I can actually make more money now on an hourly or daily basis working with my hands than I could get in my last incarnation as a freelance radio reporter at the BBC where the rates were pitifully low.  And for a long time any plumber I’ve used has charged more than I could make behind a desk.  What it means is that I now do many of the tasks for which I previously paid others.  I sweep my own chimney, service my own Aga, and do almost all the maintenance around the house and garden. In fact I find myself calculating whether I can save more by doing it myself even if it means forgoing orchard or carpentry work rather than having to pay someone whose hourly rate is higher than mine.
​On the other hand there’s no doubt that the satisfaction of completing a physical task whether it’s a precise carpentry joint or a neatly pruned apple tree is much more immediate than an annual review from the office boss. One must beware, of course, of  creating a sort of Laurentian romantic view of the dignity of manual labour.  I know an awful lot of physical jobs are sheer drudgery, poorly paid with awful conditions.  But perhaps William Morris was nearer the mark when he said “A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.” And Morris’ contention that the division of labour removes craftsmanship from work and de-humanises the worker precedes Michael Crawford’s similar theory by a century and a quarter.
​So as I park the tractor by the hedge, clean the grass cuttings off the topper, and listen to the now fully audible evening songbirds, I reflect that I don’t miss office life, commuting or city living one bit. Intellectual stimulation may be a bit rarer than it used to be.  But the reason I took up the orchard work was to provide a counterpoint to writing the fiction that I’d left broadcasting and moved to the country in order to try.  Had an agent or a publisher taken up the first novel with any alacrity I might never have found myself up on my tractor.  I could have been financially richer, but spiritually certainly poorer.  And at least I do now have plenty of time in the tractor cab to ponder the plot of the next book.
 
Kent Barker’s first novel is available for download at www.RevolutionCuba58.com