Chasing Sheep ...

... Is Best Left To Shepherds.



It's amazing what the offer of a much better paid job, improved prospects at the bar (and a jolly good row with a bloody awkward customer), a nice walk on the eastern edge of the Lake District last evening and a couple of bottles (one of them hot Sake) can do for one's state of mind. Mine seems to have improved considerably and for no reason I can think of I've suddenly remembered Michael Nyman, the composer of the music that accompanied The Draughtsman's Contract, which is one of my top ten films.

The walk was very satisfying and, like many things, the sort of thing I once did all the time. Living in isolated holes for years has rather dulled my wits but with light at the end of the tunnel and some real prospects in sight I seem to be rousing at last.

Apropos of the walk: The route we followed (number 2 in an AA list of 50 in the Lake District) took us through some meadows in which cows were grazing; all very Wordsworth except for the sounds of dieselised haymaking (how much more picturesque it would have seemed had we seen whole families of the rural poor slaving for eighteen hours each summer day to make less than a subsistence wage). In two fields the cows were wary and happy to run away and leave us in peace as we tramped across their breakfast, lunch, tea and supper, except for one suspicious bullock who stood watchful sentinel, but in a third the cows were rather more organised and to our surprise formed a line across the field and started to walk purposefully towards us. Doubtless the beasts were hungry and thought we were the providers of whatever additive rich supplements they've come to think of as the bovine equivalent of hamburgers and kebabs but the keeper of the Gruff household was not reassured. Although she has assisted at surgical operations in cold barns and held together the throbbing walls of sectioned uteruses (utera?) Mrs Gruff is not at all keen on large animals and it seemed wise to make for the hedge about fifteen or twenty yards off, which we did. However, Mrs Gruff tends to dawdle and a frightened squeal followed by 'I'm going to be trampled' drew my attention. She looked quite comical eyes tightly shut and head pulled down hard into her shoulders, hands out at each side and closely surrounded by a 240 degree arc of rapidly advancing beef weighing perhaps five tons. I shouldn't have laughed as I told her she wasn't going to be trampled, though it did look like it, and the cows stopped short and drew off, but the incident did provide us both with no little merriment for some minutes thereafter.

Walk number 2 is based on the village of Sedgewick, which lies on the now derelict northern section of the Lancaster canal.

Post Script: I'm not at all sure whether it was blackly ironic or eerily coincidental but three weeks after this was written a woman with whom Mrs Gruff once worked (a veterinary surgeon who was heartily disliked by very nearly all who knew her) was trampled by cows while out walking her dogs. She has the posthumous satisfaction, though prehumous might be more appropriate given the speed with which the incident was reported in the national daily papers, of knowing that her name liveth for evermore even though it be besmirched by budgie droppings, which blackly ironic (or eerily coincidental?) fate is certain to amuse those blessed with Mrs Gruff's irreverent sense of humour.

RIP LC and Mrs Gruff bids you less than a fond farewell.