No time for sentiment

After shovelling silage and feeding his sheep on a damp October morning, John Lewis-Stempel takes aim at a grey-squirrel drey in a bid to warn off its absent occupants from targeting songbirds

- John Lewis-Stempel

OCTOBER arrived yesterday, or perhaps it was the day before. I don't mean the calendar month of October, but October weather, drizzle, falling in fine curtains up and down the valley. This morning, the view of the black hill opposite was still furred and the thick damp air clogged the nose. Annoyingly, it was not quite so wet that it demanded waterproofs-yet, without them, my Dickies boiler suit was clammy and wrapped around my legs like clingfilm.

I'd only been outside for 10 minutes, shovelling silage into the transport box on the rear of the tractor. The silage comes from a long round clamp, covered with black plastic, like a giant liquorice stick. Uncharacteristically, I'd woken late, but the sharp vinegar smell of the silage had defibrillated the system, so I was shovelling like Stakhanov, trying to make up for lost time on a day of jobs without end. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that farming is an example of The Red Queen Syndrome, where, as the mad monarch says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, 'it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place'.

Above me, a single buzzard wheeled in blurred circles, mewing pitifully. Beside me, the dog sat with its bottom held off the wet ground and a longing for the fireplace in its eyes. Nothing does mournful quite as well as a black labrador.

When the box on the tractor was full of the pickled grass and I, too, had had enough, I got in the cab of the tractor, which is doorless in a fit of romantic wanting-to-beclose-to-Nature I had got rid of the doors.