The Fine Art of Knowing when to Quit

Marvellous as they are, my ice tyres don’t quite manage to cope with the situation where all the snow in the surrounding fields has been blown into the road where it has gone just slushy enough to make even the most intrepid cyclist have to deploy God’s stabilisers just to stay upright.

I had a feeling that every dip and hollow between Nearest Village and the Papershop was going to be similar and so, not being all that intrepid, I turned round and deployed the other half in a car instead.

It’s going to be fun when this lot melts…

But after dire stories in the news about buried sheep, I was relieved to see these little chaps looking so chipper. Clearly right inside the feed bucket is the place to be this March…

And Little Lambs Eat Ivy

After the first few bleating woolly blighters were spotted earlier this week … suddenly our fields are full of lambs. I’d been meaning to post earlier but only managed to get self, camera, camera’s SD card and lambs all into roughly the same place this morning.

And obviously, given I was on a bike, aka the scariest thing in the world, by ‘same place’ I mean me on the edge of the field and sheep and lambs as far away as possible on the other side, testing the limits of my zoom.

Although one family was rather more inclined to pose

Until Mum decided enough was enough and led her pair away from the limelight

Some of the lambs were already forming lamb gangs all the better to start their assault on any gaps in the walls. I suspect my rides down to the papershop are shortly going to be punctuated by futile attempts to keep them off the road and safely in their fields. And it’s not just the sheep, either. I was stopped on my way back from the pub last night by the local sheepdog breeder and trainer who’d lost one of his best bitches.* I don’t know if he found her or not, but if not, perhaps she can join me on my mission …

* as in female dog, not something to go with his hoes.

Springing an Escape

Spring continues – not that you’d know it from the weather – and the lambs are getting ever more inventive at getting out of their fields, and no brighter at getting back in. On my way to and from the papershop today I stopped to usher a total of six lambs into three separate fields, two of which had escaped via a drainage culvert. At one point, I was standing there looking at one particularly dim specimen saying ‘under the gate. You’ve got to go under the gate you stupid creature’ as it tried every other combination of non-lamb-sized gaps without working out the obvious huge gap underneath (in fairness to myself, it did keep looking at me as if to say ‘now what?’ and it seem impolite not to stand there offering any advice, even if I don’t speak sheep).

I’d leave them where they were to get on with it but I’d hate to come back and find one I’d left to its own devices lying broken on the road. This morning, just after I’d seen three lively ones back into a field and was heading towards the village, I met a car coming the other way going way too fast for our road. I mean, I know that technically the speed limit on our roads is 60mph but anyone who thinks doing that on a road that’s too narrow to have a white line down the middle has to be an idiot. Quite apart from all the lambs around at the moment, I saw at least one deer on the same road – and it’s not unknown for there to be straying cattle around either, not to mention other cars. You’d think people would have a thought for their bodywork, if nothing else. Most people drive responsibly but every so often you get someone who sees the road widen out a little (and by ‘widen out’ I mean ‘still not wide enough for two cars to pass each other without going on the verge) and just puts their foot down as if the .5 of a second they’ll cut off their journey time is worth running the risk of having Larry the Lamb impaled on their front windscreen wiper.

In fact, I really have no idea why the speed limit is 60 on that road. I’d hate to see loads of new speed limit signs going up, but it surely isn’t beyond the wit of man just to say that if the road’s not wide enough for a white line, it’s not wide enough to go above 40? It wouldn’t cost a penny and it would mean I could spend less time anxiously shepherding juvenile sheep back to their fields. Either that or I have to work out some universally understood hand signal for ‘little woolly bundles of cuteness up ahead, please slow down’. Or possibly just ‘try not to drive like a twat, eh?’

Suited and Booted

Cycling down for the paper this morning on a day the Met office had cheerfully described as offering the ‘best weather for the week’, so only hailing a little bit, I couldn’t help but notice some of the lambs in one field were wearing what I can only describe as a tiny see-through lamb pac-a-mac.

I am certain that those of you out there who know about such things will be quick to tell me that it’s no such thing and that there are sound animal husbandry reasons why a lamb would have a clear plastic raincover on, but until that time I shall rejoice in the fact that there’s a farmer out there who’s even more soft hearted than I am.

Although, frankly, if it’s going to keep hailing, they’ll need something a little more robust. Maybe a fleece?

To the Rescue

Cycling down for the paper today, I happened across a lamb that had managed to wriggle under a gate and out of the field but hadn’t managed to wriggle back in again. Mamma was standing bleating at it, while it attempted to hurl itself through the wire fence, looking a bit frantic. After a quick look round for any actual rural people who might know what to do I decided to stop and see if I could get it back into its field without making the situation any worse – which is never a sure thing when it comes to country matters.

The problem seemed easy enough: open the gate, usher the lamb in, close the gate. But that assumed that the lamb would come near me when I was standing by the gate – or that the sheep that were already in the field wouldn’t come out of the field if I wasn’t standing by the gate. With visions of a road full of escaped sheep and an embarrassed townie in the middle of them explaining how it had seemed like a good idea at the time, I opened the gate a little bit while the lamb continued to attempt to fling itself through a mesh fence as if it was determined to turn itself into a kebab prematurely. Then I shut the gate and retreated while the lamb sprinted to the other end of the fence and tried to hurl itself through some wooden slats. This at least meant I wasn’t between it and the gate opening so I swung the gate open a little again, and inched backwards, glaring at the other sheep in a discouraging manner while making what I hoped were encouraging noises to the lamb. It took a while – during which time I considered cornering it and just chucking it over the fence – but eventually it saw the gap in the gate and bolted towards it and I was able to shut it behind it and cycle off feeling like a cross between Kate Humble and St Francis of Assisi.

I’ve a feeling that proper country folk would have just left it to get on with it though…

Slow Down, you Move too Fast

Alert readers may have noticed blogging becoming rather thin on the ground recently (some of you may even care) but the truth is I’ve simply been going flat out. Spring always seems to bring an upsurge in activity as everyone comes out of hibernation and things which had been ticking over in a manageable way suddenly explode into life, usually all at once. Which is one way of saying I’ve managed to massively over commit myself. It turns out getting involved in not one, or two but three simultaneous cycling campaigns may just be one cycle campaign too far. And not only have I been barely able to find time to blog, I’ve not really had time to do much bloggable stuff. Well, maybe a couple of things but you’ll have to just wait for those.

Meanwhile spring has been springing away in a way that’s been increasingly difficult to ignore. Oystercatchers returning, daffodils blooming, days lengthening … and the garden just sitting there making me feel guilty. I was so stressed yesterday the other half even went out and did a bit of digging for me, until it started raining. Other than that I’ve been mostly burying my head in the sand about it but today, cycling down for the paper (and it’s been the first time I’ve managed to do that for over a week) I heard the unmistakeable sound of baa-ing lambs and came across a field full of them, with their mums, all at the adorable pipe-cleaner legs and wobbly cuteness stage. If the lambs are here then spring is here, there’s no getting away from it. I’m going to have to get my act together, and soon because my garden isn’t going to wait for me to be ready for it.

Typically, I didn’t have my camera with me – and I didn’t have time to go back for it either, so you’ll just have to hang on for lamby-cuteness for a while, and with any luck I’ll manage to photograph them before they’re practically mutton.

By way of compensation, I leave you with what happens when I leave the other half, the cat, and my camera together unsupervised. Cuteness of a different order.

I don’t think cats even know what ‘busy’ means…

Too Cute

I was cycling down for the paper this springlike morning, slowing down a fraction to watch a farmer and his dog skillfully corner a sheep and manhandle it (the dog didn’t take part in this bit, obviously, or it would have been doghandling) into a quad bike trailer when I heard a bleating noise coming from the farm yard. Out of an assemblage of outbuildings came a tiny grey lamb – all pipecleaner legs and knobbly knees and quite obviously too young to be out alone. As I stopped to warn the farmer that one of his flock was straying, I thought it might turn tail and flee at the sight of me – I was, after all, on that scariest contraption known to modern sheep, a bicycle – but no, it made a beeline right for me and started nuzzling my bike in a hopeful way that suggested it wasn’t entirely clear it wasn’t its mother. I didn’t want to leave it loose out in the road and so this was why I spent a good five minutes this morning standing in the middle of the road with a lamb nibbling gently on my trouser leg while I scratched it behind the ears. I can tell you, I’ve had worse morning commutes.

Sure Signs of Spring…

Gambolling – or rather, fleeing – lambs,

Nectarine blossom in the landlord’s  hothouse,

Pulmonaria flowering

And weeds growing faster than I can yank them out.

And some wee biting beastie (you see how I’m bilingual now) has bitten me on the leg. Yup, it’s all go now suddenly, just got to try and catch up before spring gets entirely out of hand

The New Season Lamb est Arrivée

So the plan for the blog today was to go down the road and take some pictures of the incredibly cute ickle lambs that are currently infesting the fields around here. Easy peasy. The only problem was that I was on my own and I don’t exert some strangely magnetic attraction on sheep, unlike the other half who only has to appear at a gate for all the sheep to come running from every corner of the field to gaze longingly at him through the bars (do you think I should worry?). All I could see was some woolly blobs rapidly disappearing over the horizon and the sound of frantic bleating – ‘run away! run away!’ – as the lambs got themselves out of camera range. And I wasn’t even on my bike. But they were cute, you’ll just have to take my word for it. And if you don’t believe me, there’s always Lambing Live*.

* And, incidentally, what on earth were the BBC thinking when they commissioned this to appear at peak supper-in-front-of-the-telly time? I mean, I’m as fond of gangly bouncy woolly-headed slightly ungainly charm as the next viewer, but even Kate Humble isn’t going to reconcile me to watching someone or something give birth while I’m eating. Or is this Auntie’s way of getting us all to sit up and eat at the table like civilised people?

‘Paradise, this is. And we’re living in it’

Oh dear. It’s been a while since I did anything more adventurous on my bike than the ride down to Papershop Village and back, and even that’s not been as regular as it ought to be. Busyness and rain and trips to London and even going bicycle shopping have got in the way and I haven’t been out to make my Wednesday rendezvous with the cycling club since early March. But today the weather was fine, albeit breezy, and I had run out of excuses. I worked out my route – actually I worked out slightly the wrong route, but never mind – and set off with the wind for once on my back, although I didn’t realise quite how much effect this was having until I started for home and wondered where all the downhill bits had gone.

It was an absoulutely glorious ride. This was a road I’d not cycled before, a big loop through open moorland, following a river valley and avoiding the worst of the contour lines. Tiny lambs scattered from the road where they had been lying on the warm tarmac, their mothers facing me down and suddenly bigger and rather pointier-horned than any sheep had any right to be. Around another corner I came across a group of cattle with their calves, all standing on the road facing me with a tiny gap between them. I inched through, frightened I’d start a stampede, but they didn’t move, just stared at me the way that cows do, even as I passed close enough between them to feel the heat from their flanks, the calves sheltering and peering out between their mothers’ legs. This is the sort of thing that always happens when I don’t bring my camera. Then it was downhill on crappy patched and crumbling tarmac until I reached the main road and no signpost and the realisation that I was a bit lost. After a bit of headscratching I remembered that my GPS is not just for creating maps, but for displaying them and I was able to follow its pointer to the pub.

And then it was time for a bacon roll – two rashers, and therefore 0.7 of a rasher short according to the Highway Cycling Group bacon calculation algorithm – and a coke and the cycle home.

The title? Was a remark made to me in the car park of the pub as we got on our bicycles ready to go our separate ways. I can’t exactly say I disagreed.