Dying sheep herald onset of lambing

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the guns seem to have temporarily stopped firing.

It is spring and the hill farmer’s fancy is lightly turning to thoughts of lambing.

Of course, not everyone could be described as a cockeyed optimist about this. Jake was speaking to a farmer at the mart recently and asked him when his sheep were due to lamb. “It must be soon”, he replied, “they’ve started dying.”

Our lambing will get started in a few weeks at our newly rented ground, continuing through into May with the main event at home. Planning has commenced – Julia has been instructed to cut her nails.

Happily, the children’s Easter holidays coincide with a big chunk of the lambing season this year and they are both keen to help, or, should I say, earn some pocket money. The idea of an unpaid lambing internship has not really caught on.

We are also planning to go out for a meal before we have to break off all contact with the outside world, the period a friend of ours terms “lambing purdah”.

I can confirm this treat will not take place at a local curry house. Jake suffers from a rather unusual condition – if he eats anything spicy his scalp and his face start to sweat profusely, as if someone had turned on a tap. This would have been great if he had been a jockey or a boxer struggling to make a particular weight. No need for a sauna – he would just chew on a chillies and Bob’s your uncle: immediate weight loss.

However, as it is, Jake finds it embarrassing going into meltdown in public, so we only ever have the occasional curry at home. We had one of these special events this week. Jake dressed up in a black Ramones T-shirt bearing the legend “Hey ho let’s go”. It was a good choice, because he finished the meal looking as if he’d just emerged, dripping, from Rock night at the Mayfair suite (Newcastle) 25 years ago.

On the farm, this week’s issue has been with piles of spent brass bullet casings left all over the road and the verges.

This has been highly unusual, as most of the army activity on our farm comprises soldiers practising shelling into the impact area with big guns or patrolling on foot with vegetation on their helmets. We don’t usually get machine gunning from the back of a Land Rover along our road.

There is clearly an army unit in the camp at the moment which doesn’t follow the country code and doesn’t believe in recycling. A source in the camp tells us “they are Scottish and everyone’s fed up with them”.

In other news, the Olympic torch route has been announced. It will apparently pass within 10 miles of 95% of the population, so naturally it doesn’t come close to us. I note that it isn’t going through Wooler, “Gateway to the Cheviots” (official slogan), so perhaps it is unsurprising that it isn’t going through Otterburn, “Cattlegrid to Kielder” (unofficial slogan) either.

The Olympic torch will, however, pass Jake’s mum’s house and her rather high-spirited terriers, who don’t take too kindly to strangers passing by. Apparently, the plan is that the flame will arrive in a minibus, someone will leap out and run the length of the village, pop back into to minibus and proceed to Berwick. We hope they don’t have two small dogs attached to their legs as they leave.

As racing fans, we were interested to hear recently that Channel 4 has gained the terrestrial TV rights to show the Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot from the BBC. A few years ago I would have been horrified by this, but not any more.

The BBC’s coverage of racing has got worse and worse in recent years, to the extent that, as a fan, I can hardly bear to look at it. It’s as if it has been planned by people who don’t like it and don’t expect anyone else to like it either, so they fill the coverage with other distractions such as fashion and minor celebrities. The Grand National coverage in particular is a case of never mind the quality, feel the overkill.

Worse than that has been some of the BBC news reporting of racing. The 10 O’Clock News report on this year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup (the most prestigious National Hunt race in the calender) was a shocker. Most of it was taken up with interviewing punters on what they thought of horse fatalities which had happened earlier in the week. Then they had a tiny bit which named the winner. Then they interviewed the winning jockey on what he thought about the welfare of another horse in the race which had pulled up.

Why couldn’t they just report what happened rather than on what they thought was going to happen at that morning’s planning meeting?

Anyway, I think Channel 4 Racing deserves its chance. The armchair racing followers of this part of Redesdale wish it good luck.

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