'Raddling black sheep is not very successful for obvious reasons'

New diarist Paul James is a doctor in a busy NHS hospital, but home is a smallholding in Derbyshire complete with sheep, poultry and a Welsh Mountain pony called Malty

- Paul James

It has been a little over a year since we have been able to ‘properly’ call ourselves smallholders — in so much as we now have a growing menagerie of animals, a burgeoning orchard and, of course, the obligatory plans, schemes and wild dreams. It is along this journey that I have acquired an appreciation for the hitherto unmarked seasons (at least what passes for seasons in our wet and windy slice of the world) and the changes they bring.

First spring, like a much beloved but long-time errant friend, arrives in a riot of colour and growth. All around nature seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief. New shoots spring forth, new life erupts with playful abandon and birds return with joyful and heartening song. Grass grows and the drudgery of eking it out, or hefting hay up the hill to the ponies, dwindles to a dim and distant ache in my lumbar region.

Along bowls summer. Fruits ripen (fingers crossed that the malicious rabbits haven’t destroyed the fruit bushes), drinks cool and the smell of back garden barbecues pervades the length and breadth of the country. Long, languid, seemingly endless days offer boundless possibilities to complete the myriad tasks around the holding, teamed with just as many excuses to put them off for another day. Shorts are worn and anaemic legs are aired. At precisely the same time, the biting horseflies make an appearance, raising many an unsightly welt and turning my legs knobbly like two oversized twiglets. Somewhat bemusingly, summer’s paradox finds us spending as much time and energy fending a potentially laminitic pony off growing grass as winter does the obverse.