Where there's Muck . . .

The snow's gone for the moment - although the weather forecast this morning threatens more. Looking at these photographs taken a couple of days ago you could be tempted into thinking about spring. Sun on the fields, blue skies, white clouds floating across the sky. But the wind is bitter and in places that don't get much sun the ground's still frozen. These pictures seem to show a peaceful, quiet world, a flock of sheep, calm winter trees. Which is true up to a point but also an illusion.


In reality, the lanes are full of busyness - tractors carrying bales of hay to the sheep, muck sprayers shooting great fountains of muck over the fields, soggy gobbets of it falling on anyone daft enough to be walking down the road on the other side of a hedge. The roads are smeared and slimy, the air filled with a warm stink as the tractor opposite our house winds up and down the steep hillside turning it from pale winter-green to rich shit-brown. Most cattle are inside at the moment but every now and again there's the sound of a beast making a noise that echoes around the village and sounds like pain. Labour probably.

All this activity makes me aware of how ignorant I am about the proper country - where people have to make a living from the land. I don't want to make too much of the ignorance of townies. I've listened to enough episodes of the Archers to know that the mince in my freezer is minced cow, and having seen Springwatch a few times I could maybe have a stab at pulling out a stuck lamb if called on, which I hope I'm not.

I remember some of the debates a few years back when some of the countryside alliance lot were banging on bad-temperedly about how much cities needed the countryside but knew nothing about it and should therefore butt out and shut up about hunting, shooting and pesticides. I thought then and still think, about how mutual this dependence is, farming and other rural pursuits needing industry and urbanised infrastructure for manufacturing, energy transportation, etc. You can bet that tractor was made in a city somewhere, some of the parts transported here by container, through the global market.

There may be a tendency to romanticise rural life, but the opposite is also true. People can demonise the cities - gun-running on the streets, drug dealers on every corner, crime out of control, etc., whereas the reality is that the huge majority of people in cities, live quiet, productive lives, focused around family, work, pleasure - just as they do here.

Still, we may all be interdependent and equal but there's definitely a lot more muck here than in the city and we've been carrying it in and out of our house attached to shoes and boots for weeks now and need something to avoid it turning our floors into versions of the fields. I'm also planting a hedge around some of the garden which involves even more earth moving.

I finally understand the need for those metal things that you sometimes find outside pubs and stately homes which I used to think were for eighteenth century olde-worlde effect and tripping up the peasants - but I was wrong. There they all are on Amazon - more boot scrapers than anyone could ever need.  The ones shown here are the simplest and cheapest but there's one multiple scraper that costs £350! Obviously plenty of brass in muck.

As well as muck in Brassington.

(Sorry - couldn't resist it.)