The Irishness of the Long Distance Runner

It’s like the Irishman said when asked for directions, “Well to get there I wouldn’t start from here.”

I know just what he means. We live down a series of narrow (ish) lanes and they tend to be so quiet that when I go into a field to feed sheep I can leave the gate open blocking the road because nobody will come along.

Wherever you’re going, I wouldn’t start from here.

But that’s not to say we don’t have excitement and see strange and unusual things. Like the day the bus came through. But that’s another story.

It’s just that some years back my father and I were doing some hedging. In the local vernacular the technical term is ‘laying a dike.’ I’ve been warned about using that phrase. Apparently for some of our colonial cousins who no longer speak the old tongue in all its richness and purity it means something entirely different.

Needless to say I’m not adverse to pandering to the unlettered, and thus I will take time out from the tale to explain that ‘laying a dike’ is where you work your way along a hedge, partially cutting through and bending over each upright stem, to thicken it and ensure it remains a stock-proof barrier.

Anyway there me and my Dad were, busy away, and along the lane comes a pack of runners. We nodded to them, friendly like, and they ignored us. I can only assume that for some people, expending effort on courtesy when you’re striving for a dopamine high is counter productive. Or perhaps they just don’t mingle with the peasantry? Who knows, obviously I don’t because they wouldn’t talk to us.

But actually, there was one runner, at the back of the pack, who did wave back and say ‘Good afternoon’ in a broad Irish accent.

Anyway Father and I thought nothing of it. Ignorance is common enough and you no longer get upset by the ostentatious display. We carried on working away, until, about half-an-hour later the runners passed us again; heading in the same direction. Now if they’d been coming back you could understand it. They’d run ‘out’ and now they were running ‘back’; but in the same direction? Obviously whatever it was involved big laps.

And of course they ignored us again.

Except for the Irish lad who stopped, looked at us and said, “We’ve been past here before haven’t we.”

Neither my Father nor I were going to lie to the lad, so we admitted he had. So he said, “And this isn’t the road to Leece is it?”

We agreed with him that it wasn’t the road to Leece.

“So which is the road to Leece?”

Admit it, I couldn’t not say, “Well to get there I wouldn’t start from here.”

But we relented and gave him directions

He muttered something under his breath which might have been some ancient Irish charm for all I know and then he sprinted off after the pack. Five minutes later they appeared again, going ‘back’ this time.

And of course they all ignored us, except for the Irish lad, still at the back, who gave us a cheery wave.

♥♥♥♥

Now available in Paperback as well as ebook

As a reviewer commented, “This is a selection of anecdotes about life as a farmer in Cumbria. The writer grew up on his farm, and generations of his family before him farmed the land. You develop a real feeling for the land you are hefted to and this comes across in these stories. We hear of the cattle, the sheep, his succession of working dogs, the weather and the neighbours, in an amusing and chatty style as the snippets of Jim Webster’s countryman’s wisdom fall gently. I love this collection.”

Horsing around

A man in a cinema notices what looks like a horse sitting next to him.

“Are you a horse?” asked the man, surprised.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing watching a film?”

The horse replied, “Well, I liked the book.”

I’ve always loved the work of the cartoonist Thelwell. But once, just once, I felt I might be sitting on the edge of one of his cartoons.

He was better known for his pictures of small girls on fat ponies, but he also catered for what we might call the larger lady. (I know that makes him sound like a manufacturer of structural hosiery, or garments noted for their ‘firm underpinnings, but you know what I mean.)

Our farm sits on a ninety degree bend in a quiet rural lane. At times it even warrants the term ‘leafy’. So we regularly get horse riders going up and down it and they’re not normally a problem.

But one winter’s morning I was clearing up the silage face and making sure our dairy herd had plenty to eat. Some cows were watching me with what passes for eager anticipation amongst middle aged bovines. The rest were just waiting, which is something milk cows can do really well.

One was leaning on the gate, looking along the lane to see if anything more interesting was happening there.

And for once, there was. Two ladies rode down the lane towards our gate. These weren’t chits of girls on ponies; these were serious ladies on proper horses.

The first horse trots happily past our gate, glances at the cow, metaphorically shrugs and ignores it.

The second horse sees the cow and comes to a halt. Whether it had ever seen a cow before I don’t know but it wasn’t impressed and wasn’t willing to go past. The rider (you know, the one in charge) urged it onwards. There may even have been cheerful cries of encouragement, it’s a few years back and memory fades. But the horse wasn’t convinced. On the other hand, the cries and general kerfuffle attracted the attention of another cow. She joined the first one to see what was going on.

Obviously if one cow is bad, two are worse, and the horse was even less impressed. So the lady rider became even more strident in her demands that the horse moved on.

The sole effect of this was that several more cows came to line the gate. Street theatre is rare in the bovine world and chances to enjoy it should be grasped enthusiastically.

With this the horse took a pace backwards. The other rider brought her horse back and endeavoured to display to the wary horse that there wasn’t a problem.

More cows were enticed by this to leave their contemplation of me forking silage into a barrow and made their way to the gate. This was now lined, two deep, with interested dairy cows.

By now the horse that had previously passed the gate without turning a hair was having second thoughts. It started walking sideways to get away from the gate and the rider did technical stuff with the reins and issued verbal commands which merely attracted more cows.

The rider of the more recalcitrant horse decided to get firm, she had dismounted and was going to lead the horse past. The cows at the gate were now four deep and the horse was having none of it. She was, no doubt, a fine figure of a woman, but the horse was at least four times her weight. It took one step forward, thought better of it and took three back.

The language coming from the two riders was growing choice. It has to be admitted that milk cows are not entirely unused to hearing such terms. But as the volume, and to some extent the pitch, climbed higher, the rest of the herd abandoned me for the performance laid on for them at the other side of the gate. Indeed our cows were now drawn up so deep at the gate that those at the rear couldn’t see and there was considerable ill-mannered jostling going on at the back.

At this point the two horses decided that enough was enough. Walking sideways and/or backwards they determinedly headed away from the gate. Their riders remounted and rode, grim faced, back the way they had come.

Me? ‘Tarbaby, he said nothing’.

Had I appeared it was only ever going to be my fault.

But apropos of nothing in particular, it is probably experiences like this that made me the man I am today.

If you wish to make some small financial contribution towards the counselling deemed necessary; you could do worse than purchase a copy of

 

as the reviewer said, “This book continues from where ‘Swords for a Dead Lady’ ended and makes for a rollicking good – three adventures – tale.
Benor recounts how he met his wife.
Benor and Kirisch travel 4000 miles to find said wife, then take a side trip to deal with a troublesome Tyrant.
We meet some familiar characters, some new ones, and even a few monsters.
We learn how an Urlan Knight and a Cartographer get involved in the fashion trade, how beauty and love can be found even in the wilderness, and how one particular paddle boat is powered.”

Coffee, sheep, tractors, fine literature and bad rock’n’roll

Coffee, sheep, tractors, fine literature and bad rock’n’roll

My lady wife and I were following a tractor and hedge-cutter down a lane. She commented that it didn’t look like a desperately exciting job. My reply was along the lines that tractor driving wasn’t at all exciting. Obviously when things go wrong it can get far too exciting but when done properly it can be a case of chugging along, working long hours and surviving on coffee and with bad rock’n’roll coming out of the radio.

But this morning I discovered that the task had been so soporific that the driver using the hedge-cutter had casually chopped through an old gate that we had used to block a gap. This reopened the gap and over a hundred ewes had wandered through to see what the wider world had to offer.

So I blocked the gap and when to bring the ladies back. This involved me chasing them through the gate and out of one field, onto the lane, and then taking them down the lane through another gate and back into their original field. Both gates opened to block the lane so it was a job I could do on my own.

This was lucky, because these ladies are heavily pregnant. Thus they are pampered. The dog isn’t allowed anywhere near them in case she is a little bit too firm or things get too excitable. Everything is done nicely and quietly and gently.

So I go into the field to drive them out, I’m riding the quad bike. Instantly half of them follow me because I might have food (I told you they were being pampered) and the other half stand and watch because they don’t think I’ve got food so aren’t going to waste time following me. But be damned if they’re going to miss out if suddenly food appears.

So I’m trying to follow the ewes who’re following me and at the same time not upset anybody and also get them to move as a group out through the gate.

So eventually they all turn round and move out of the gate. They have to go the correct way down the lane, because of the gate. But across the lane is a fence. Someone had to take a digger through the hedge and there’s a fence of hurdles across the gap. It’s fine, it’s kept sheep in place for months. No problems.

Except this morning these heavily pregnant ewes who’re not supposed to get too excited hit this fence of hurdles like the tide and just poured over it, flattening it. Shouting the distinctive vernacular phrase “Ya bluidy auld witch” I’m left in the other field watching the chaos develop. So I had to shut the gate behind me, re-arrange the hurdles and get the sheep out of this field and back onto the lane.

Of course at this point some of them started following me again. I suppose you could see their point. Perhaps it was this field that I was going to feed them in. From the sheep point of view this adequately explained why I hadn’t fed them in the previous field. The fact it was them who’d smashed down the fence so they were in this field passed them by entirely. Cattle know when they’re ‘escaped’ or are in the wrong place, and can get all excited or guilty about it. Sheep have no concept of having escaped. They’re just where they are.

So I finally got them moving again, back into the original field that they’d first escaped from. At this point they discovered the food that was waiting for them. A feeder full of silage and a bucket of molasses (when we pamper, we pamper) and they immediately piled round these and started eating. Occasionally stopping to look at me with the sort of expression which said, “About time as well.”

The fact that they’d abandoned both silage and molasses to go ratching about in strange fields was apparently my fault.

But anyway I spent the rest of the morning before the rain hit fixing things they’d damaged in transit. This meant that it wasn’t until dinnertime that I had a chance once more to turn to creating deathless prose.

Admittedly today fine literature and tackling the eternal verities will probably be something on rural fuel poverty but we cannot have everything.

But if you fancy a bit of quality writing and have the princely sum of £0.99 to spend, ‘The Cartographer’s Apprentice’ is still available.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Cartographers-Apprentice-Jim-Webster-ebook/dp/B00ECZIM4A

Ya bluidy auld witch

It’s a phrase I’d never come across until I started working with sheep. It’s normally directed at the misbegotten mule ewe who wiggles, burrows and climbs through or under netting, snapping off posts and generally creating a gap which the rest come pouring through.

From experience the Mule (normally round here a cross between Blue faced Leicester and Swaledale) is the worst culprit. They’re the normal ‘breeding sheep’, the mothers of this year’s lambs. They have the toughness and mothering ability of their own Swaledale mothers, and because their mothers are fell sheep, they’re prone to wandering.

Down breeds aren’t such a problem, and they provide the sires of this year’s lambs, because they’ve better confirmation, grow faster and taste better. But they’re not as hardy and aren’t such determinedly good mothers.

And we’ve fetched a batch home because they’re coming up to lamb. In another month the first of them will have lambed and things will be hectic. So we fetch them home, pamper them a bit, make sure they properly fed and generally treat them as you’d expect expectant mothers to be treated.

But their condition doesn’t stop the bluidy auld witches ‘ratching’ through every fence looking for better grazing.

The problem is, there is one field with a little bit of grass. We’ve been saving it for them, so they can go on it after they’ve lambed.

But of course they’ve found it now, and they just keep breaking fences down to get to it. And of course I just keep putting them back up again, strengthening the weak spots and generally trying to make sure the fence is as stock proof as I can. But it’s a fair length of fence and bits that appeared OK yesterday were the ones they went through last night.

So after I’ve posted this I’m back out to have another go. There are things I should be doing; after all they’re robbing the world of my deathless prose. (Or alternatively saving folk from having to read my petty scribblings.)

♥♥♥♥

And talking about deathless prose……

 

The fourth of these collections of anecdotes, rants, pious maunderings and general observations on life. Yes we have dogs, quads, sheep and cattle, but in this one we follow the ‘lambing year.’ It starts with ewes being put to the tup in late autumn and finishes in summer with the last of the laggards lambing. But as well as this we have endless rain, as well as sleeping in a manger. Be brave and you’ll meet young ladies in high heeled cowboy boots, Sir John Moore of Corunna, brassieres for cows, and, incidentally, David Essex.

As a reviewer commented, “Should be mandatory reading for anyone moving to the countryside for the first time. Charmingly accurate and educational. Utterly first class.”

Egg boxes, Border Collies and First Class Travel!

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. Anyway I had to go south and the problem with going to London from here is that if you’ve got stuff to do on Tuesday and Thursday, it’s not worth coming home because you’ll barely make it before you’ve got to go back again.

So anyway I was in London and had time to kill. So I’ll wander round and see what I can see.

There were various things that struck me. One was listening to people on the train going down. Now it wasn’t that I wanted to listen to them, it’s just that they were sitting behind me and I couldn’t not hear them.

But I discovered just who is doing rather nicely at the moment. A small group of thirty somethings, living in the Preston area were heading for a meeting down in London. They’re all working for a company which pays London wages because it has to be competitive. So they’re living in Preston and being paid London wages. One lass was moving house, and discovered that she didn’t need to sell the first house to be able to afford the Mortgage on the second. So she’s just renting out the first house and slowly building up a property portfolio. There was general agreement amongst them that this was the way forward. The opinion was that by the time they get to retiring governments will have reneged on the idea of providing a state pension anyway and the other pensions schemes are great if you’re a pension provider but less good if you’re looking for a good way of saving for the future.

But anyway, in London you can tell it’s a cosmopolitan place. The graffiti in one toilet was written entirely in Chinese characters. (And I haven’t a clue what it said.)
Then I walked past the church of St Magnus the Martyr, and as it was open went in. They have a four yards long model of the old London Bridge. Apparently it’s build of egg boxes, but it is an excellent piece of work and well worth a look.

Then in St Paul’s Cathedral I wandered across to look at the nativity scene. The models are round and about normal human scale. You’ve got Kings, and Shepherds, mother, father and baby. But there are also two lambs and a dog.

And the dog is a Border Collie. The person who created it obviously knew their dogs. This one has the perfect pose. It is utterly focused on the two lambs. There, in the presence of Kings, shepherds, the saviour of the world, our Border Collie, with absolute certainty, focuses entirely on the thing that matters to it and ignores everything else.

It is a beautiful piece of work and I suspect that there’s a metaphor there for anyone who wants to look for it.

And finally, home. I arrive at Euston station, make my way down the platform, show my ticket at the barrier and am let through. As I walk past the train it occurs to me that at this point I really ought to check which carriage my seat reservation is for. So I fished it out of my wallet. Coach H.

Hang on, Coach H is a First class carriage and I’ve bought and paid for a standard class ticket! I examined it, yes, it even says that it’s first class.

Right, so I wandered along, found the train manager and showed him what I’d got. He just congratulated me on getting lucky, told me to take my rightful seat in coach H and make sure they plied me with the free coffee (and it is rather good coffee to be honest) sandwiches, cake etc etc.

Now you might wonder why I’ve rather laboured this point; that I ended up travelling first class by accident. Well you see; I’d hate my many fans to feel that success has made me stuck-up, and that I’m turning my back on them.

 

Still if you want to help me aspire to a jam tomorrow lifestyle! Treat yourself

More tales from a lifetime’s experience of peasant agriculture in the North of England, with sheep, Border Collies, cattle, and many other interesting individuals. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is just one of those things.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

 

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

(Voltaire)

Is it wise to believe too much that you see posted to Facebook? Can you rely on what people say they believe in?

Voltaire has had quite a good week this last week thanks to the madness that we’ve seen in Paris. Several people have posted his saying

“I may disagree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”

Now that’s good, that’s commendable. I entirely approve. But still I wonder. How sincere is this sudden conversion to the principle of “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend?”

I thought I’d try an experiment, but at that point I remembered another quote from Voltaire. “I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.”

So I’m not trying the experiment, I’m going to ask you, dear reader, to conduct a thought experiment.

Try saying the following things, obviously some of them will be more difficult for some people than for others, but hopefully you’ll be able to sincerely work your way down the list and come out at the end able to cope with them all.

“I quite understand that you might find Tory philosophy offensive and why you would not wish to entertain people who believe in it in your own home.”

“I quite understand that you might find homosexuality offensive and why you would not wish to entertain such people in your own home.”

“When looking back at the miners’ strike one has to accept that the members of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers took a decision which I disagree with but I defend their right to make that decision.”

“Whilst personally I feel that Margaret Thatcher may have been wrong in some of the things she did, this is no reason to demonise her and those who still respect her actions.”

“Whilst I personally have not suffered economically from immigration, I realise that there are those who have and their opinions are just as valid as mine.”

“Ched Evans has served the sentence imposed upon him by a court of law, and thus should be free to take up his profession again.”

And so our American cousins don’t feel left out

“Whilst disagreeing with much in the Democratic/Republican agenda (delete as appropriate) I have no doubt that those in favour of it are decent people, sincere in their beliefs, and whilst they may be wrong, they have the best interests of our country at heart.”

Well can you say them? Are you willing to defend to the death the right of others to say them?

Funnily enough Voltaire said a lot of things

♥♥♥♥

 

As a reviewer said, “This is a selection of anecdotes about life as a farmer in Cumbria. The writer grew up on his farm, and generations of his family before him farmed the land. You develop a real feeling for the land you are hefted to and this comes across in these stories. We hear of the cattle, the sheep, his succession of working dogs, the weather and the neighbours, in an amusing and chatty style as the snippets of Jim Webster’s countryman’s wisdom fall gently. I love this collection.”

It’s not fear and greed, it’s fear and contempt

There’s an old Wall Street saying: “Financial markets are driven by two powerful emotions – greed and fear”. It might be true, but our society is driven by two other emotions, fear and contempt.

Let’s start from the beginning. The phrase “All men are created equal” was included in the US Declaration of independence.” John Ball, the Lollard Priest included in a sermon preached during the peasants’ revolt the phrase “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” We have to give him points for political correctness over and above Thomas Jefferson, but still not a bad effort for both gentlemen.

Then we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”

Are we agreed on these? Because frankly, if we aren’t, then you’re probably wasting your time reading further.

So actually then, if all people are equal, if all people are of equal worth, (In the old phrase created alike in the image of God) then they are equally worthy of respect. If they disagree with you then their opinion, whether it is right or wrong, is just as worthy of being aired as yours is. You might disagree with me on this, if so, I respectfully disagree with you but fair enough.

Except as a society we don’t respect it. Various groups, various subgroups are regarded by the leading core in society with contempt. I’ve blogged about this sort of thing before in https://jandbvwebster.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/the-rebirth-of-secular-religion/

But things have been thrown into starker relief because of the atrocities in Paris.

We use contempt to ‘monster’ groups. They stop being people; they become ‘rednecks’, immigrants, wags, chavs.’

And as groups turn inwards the fear starts. Oppression comes out of fear. Various churches oppressed others because they feared that they would be swept away by the new interpretation. Islam lives in fear, in the East they’re losing people to Christianity, in the West they see their sons and daughters being secularised. They can see the writing on the wall and they are afraid.

But then we fear as well. We’re surrounded by these groups we’ve ‘monstered’ and we’re afraid of them.

We have now got groups in our society that have been so marginalised by contempt that they no longer belong. The contempt of the metropolitan elite of the ‘white van man’; the contempt of those who regard church people as homophobes.

Indeed it’s been fascinating watching the intellectual gymnastics that have gone on over the ‘Black Churches’ and their absolute refusal to tolerate Homosexuality. Eventually it seems that their refusal to tolerate homosexuality (obviously bad) outweighs the fact that they are by definition from an oppressed ethnic minority background (obviously good) which is compounded by the fact that they’re Christian churches, (obviously stupid.)

It’s interesting how completely we monster groups and deny them any legitimacy. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Someone like Winston Churchill could be interested in Islam, could study Islam, and indeed could be so impressed with it that his family wrote to him pleading with him not to convert to Islam.

Or look at Kipling with his Fuzzy Wuzzy.

We’ve fought with many men acrost the seas,

An’ some of ’em was brave an’ some was not:

The Paythan an’ the Zulu an’ Burmese;

But the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot.

We never got a ha’porth’s change of ‘im:

‘E squatted in the scrub an’ ‘ocked our ‘orses,

‘E cut our sentries up at Suakim,

An’ ‘e played the cat an’ banjo with our forces.

So ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;

You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;

We gives you your certificate, an’ if you want it signed

We’ll come an’ ‘ave a romp with you whenever you’re inclined.

Both Kipling and Churchill could see merits in others who they fought both with and against.

But then they were men comfortable in their own skin. The desperate need to monster others, to create groups of ‘untouchables’ and ‘morally reprehensibles’ is fear. The fear that actually history might show that we aren’t right, the fear that we’ll not keep our place in the sun, the fear that unless we grind down others, others will grind us down. When we’re frightened we lash out.

♥♥♥♥

But then what do I know, I’m just some simple farm boy

 

As a reviewer kindly commented “This is a delightful collection of gentle rants and witty reminiscences about life in a quiet corner of South Cumbria. Lots of sheep, cattle and collie dogs, but also wisdom, poetic insight, and humour. It was James Herriot who told us that ‘It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet’ but Jim Webster beautifully demonstrates that it usually happened to the farmer too, but far less money changed hands.

I, for one, am hoping that this short collection of blogs finds a wide and generous audience – not least because I’m sure there’s more where this came from. And at 99p you can’t go wrong!”

Blow your nose in your handkerchief.

You know what it is, one of those occasions when you’re not sure whether you want to laugh or just disappear quietly and hope everybody else is too embarrassed by their part in the events ever to mention them again.

But it was really just one of those things. I’d be about fifteen and like pretty well every farmer’s son (or at least livestock farmer’s son) when not at school I tended to help out a fair bit. Indeed there were various jobs which were planned around school holidays.

But one job everybody ends up doing is standing in junctions making sure that livestock turn in the right direction. So it was no surprise that at about 4pm one Saturday afternoon I was standing in the lane at the top of our drive turning dairy cows into the yard as they walked down the road.

What was a surprise was that at this point, the headmaster of the school I attended should walk down the lane with his wife and daughter. Now Fred Robinson might not have been the best headmaster in the world.  I genuinely wouldn’t know, I never worked for him. But one thing he did was he made sure he knew every boy in his school. In the first year (we had 90 boys a year come into the school and they were divided into three classes) he taught one class Biology, one class Chemistry (because they’re what he taught before his elevation to the pinnacle of absolute power) and the third class he taught Religious Education. So at the end of the year he knew every boy in that year.

All this meant for me on this occasion was that there was no way I could fain ignorance of who he was.  Also in spite of my jeans, torn shirt and battered baseball cap (the perfect accessories for dirty wellies) he was going to recognise me.

So he said ‘Good Afternoon’ and I explained why it wasn’t wise to proceed, due to a herd of dairy cows somnambulantly meandering down to road towards us and he and his two companions stood next to me to watch the spectacle.

Now cows are inherently curious. They will walk up to people who appear non-threatening. They will sniff them, they will even try and curl their tongue round the edge of a garment and pull it into their mouth whilst they chew it, meditatively. Anyway half a dozen stopped to look at these people I had with me and one walked that step further, stuck its neck out and lowered its head to sniff the headmaster.

Now there’s no point sniffing something if your nose is blocked is it. So it snorted out what seemed like a pint of the stuff all over his coat.

I kept my eyes firmly forward and made sure I didn’t see it. The rest of the cows came along as did my father, accompanied, for the purpose of training, by young Lassie, our young Border Collie. She wasn’t really old enough to work, but was a bit more than a pup. But she could learn her trade walking behind dairy cows. Now Border Collies can be a bit standoffish, I’ve been told it’s because they have a small natural ‘pack’ size, and anyone not in the ‘pack’ (which is basically just the family they live with) is to be regarded as hostile or at least a damned nuisance.

But when they’re young, especially when they’re on farms and don’t see many people anyway, strange people are an exciting novelty. So Lassie bounded over towards this group of strange people. Now it has to be admitted that I was probably too traumatised by what had happened previously to realise what was going to happen next. Young Border Collies like their ears tickling, they like to talk to you, to look you in the eyes and be friends. But they’re not what you’d call a big dog. So they achieve this by jumping up and placing their front feet on an appropriate part of your anatomy. The fact that Lassie hadn’t wiped her feet after following sixty milk cows down a muddy lane explains the state of her feet, and the muddy footprints she left on the trouser suit of the Headmaster’s daughter.

My Father restored order with the words “Siddown ya bluidy dog,” and she trotted back to look after the cows. I made my excuses and left.

Obviously I am on the road to recovery from this experience, however I’m self-funding the counselling by selling books at a reasonable price. If your conscience has been troubled by this story then you can help by purchasing one of these books.

Perhaps you’d like to look at

As the reviewer said

“I am a keen reader of the fantasy genre and looked forward to reading this book. The story is engaging and there’s lots of action, some humour and a little pathos. The characters all worked well for me, especially Benor, Cartographer (and much else!) The story deals with a land which has its own races of people, its own herds of animals and I found it interesting to imagine this other world which is in many ways an equivalent of our medieval world. There’s plenty of intrigue here and the story has potential for a sequel.

Jim Webster has an engaging story telling style and a good knowledge of this genre. His writing has a gentle humour which comes naturally from the characters and their dialogue. It’s not played for belly-laughs but is very effective. There were some real gems, which I very much enjoyed. ‘He spat on the floor and missed’ really tickled me! I look forward to more of the same.”

Do you believe in fairies?

I was only a child at the time and probably shouldn’t have been there, or just wasn’t noticed. But three middle aged ladies were discussing some village scandal with a much older lady. The three younger women were all suitably and enjoyably shocked and horrified, and then one of them noticed the older lady didn’t seem quite so caught up in it all.

“Aren’t you shocked?” One of them asked her.

The older woman dryly replied, “I’ve lived through two world wars and a great depression, what’s going to shock me?”

Strangely, after all these years, I can no longer remember what on earth they were talking about but I do remember the older lady’s reply.

All this came about because for some reason, the words and tune of Henry Clay Work’s song, ‘Marching Through Georgia’ kept running through my mind. That’s the problem really; you wouldn’t believe the songs we were taught at school back then. Check the words

Bring the good old bugle, boys, we’ll sing another song
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along
Sing it as we used to sing it, 50,000 strong
While we were marching through Georgia.

Chorus
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia.

Verse 2
How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground
While we were marching through Georgia.

and so it continues…..

But then I can still remember when Sunday’s child was ‘bonny and blithe, and good and gay.’

I can even remember the year that the meaning of that changed; I was in the upper 6^th so it’s about 1974 that the new meaning or gay hit a northern industrial town.

But then I saw all those TV comedies that are banned now, the Tom and Jerry Cartoons which they no longer show and even the Black and White Minstrel show, (which bored me rigid back in the day because it just wasn’t my kind of music.)

Now then I’d hate of offend anybody by accident, but the problem with erasing the embarrassing bits of the past is that you no longer understand the present.

I remember about twenty years or more ago a lad came to the more senior members of the wargames club (of which I was one) and told us he had to write something for history, they were  covering the American Civil War and the teacher wanted him to write something ‘empathising with the defenders of Richmond.’ Perhaps she’d just watched ‘Gone with the Wind’ or something.

Anyway we dug out some stuff for him and talked it over with him. He came across one bit that struck him as getting to the real nub of the mindset of the lads on the ground at the time.

Somebody had walked through the ‘defences’ and asked one of the defenders why there was no trenches and similar.

The young male southern defender (sorry to be sexist here but it does seem that the defenders were predominantly young males) just shrugged and said “Digging is for African Americans.”

Well obviously he didn’t. He used another word, which the lad in question, quoting his genuine historical source also used. And got absolutely slated over it.

But if the teacher hadn’t wanted the answer, she shouldn’t have asked the question.

If she wanted her pupil to empathise with a bunch of racist, sexist (and doubtless homophobic) young men, she can hardly object if he then does.

Still, where does that leave me? Well I’ll play nicely and try and remember the proper formulae. I’ll try and keep up with whatever’s the new ‘correct’ way of doing things. But that isn’t to say that if it embarrasses you I might not inadvertently slip into an older ‘correct’ way that was de rigueur a decade ago.

I suppose one advantage of being a farmer is that we’re so politically incorrect we’re beyond saving. One advantage of being a writer is that once you recognise the phenomena you can play with it. It becomes almost too easy to create characters that the ‘right on’ reader will cheerfully boo and hiss at, but then you can subvert things by twisting things slightly so that suddenly people are forced to think.

Never wise to get people thinking, once they’ve started who knows where they’ll stop

Oh and I’ll offer one piece of advice. It’s unwise to try and rewrite history too often. All the rubbing out and rewriting just wears the paper thin and eventually people start to see stuff through the hole and at that point you’ve no control at all over what they’re going to believe.

Happy New Year

 

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If I were you I’d just settle down with a good book 🙂