JEREMY
Christmas on the farm. You can picture it,
can’t you? A steaming home-grown goose,
glistening in the candlelight. Piles of spuds
from the garden and buttered vegetables
from the fields. Rosy-faced children playing
happily with the wooden toys you whittled
from trees in the forest and, after a sticky
toffee pudding, some hearty toboggan rides
in the snow until the watery sun’s chilly
demise sends everyone running inside for
some fireside sherry and the shoulder-
punching, yuletide jumper fun of having to
mime The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
in a game of charades. Idyllic. Nearly as
idyllic in fact as having to act out the
trickiest charade of all time, Versailles: The
View from Sweden.
Sadly Christmas on my farm won’t be
like that. It will be like every other day, only
with added mud. When I first became a
horny-handed son of the soil two years ago,
I figured that winter would be an easy
season. The sheeps would be pregnant, the
cows would be in their house, the crops
would be growing on their own, the hens
would be standing around waiting to be
eaten by a fox, the badgers would be spraying
TB around the fields and I’d be in Val d’Isère,
living it large on the fat subsidy cheque.
That’s not how it turned out, though,
partly because the subsidy cheque is now
smaller than a prewar postal order and soon
it’ll be even smaller than that. And also
because winter is actually the season when
you go out into the cold and the rain and
the mud and do all the unpleasant jobs you
should have done in August while you were
waiting for the crops to dry.
Mostly this involves looking at broken
fences and gates, hoping that somehow
they will mend themselves. They can’t, so
I have to do it and, amazingly, this is a skill
I don’t have. While I’ve always said that
hammers can be used to fix everything up
to but not including a child’s poorly eye,
I’ve never really understood how they may
be used to drive a nail into a piece of wood.
On the first blow I always catch the side
of the nailhead, causing the nail itself to
bend. And then I imagine that if I strike the
opposite side of the head with the same
level of ferocity, the kink will straighten out.
It never does though. It gets worse and worse
until eventually I’m forced to hammer it in
sideways before reaching for another nail,
which does the exact same thing.
Soon I will forget to concentrate and bring
the end of the hammer down on my thumb,
but that’s OK because when you are on a
farm in the winter you are so cold you don’t
even notice when you’ve just smashed one
of your own bones. I’ve heard about some
farmers cutting off their right arms and not
noticing until they get in the tractor to go
home and find they can’t engage a gear.
Eventually, though, after you’ve smashed
most of the bones in your hand and bent
two whole bags of nails, you will get one togo through the piece of fencing post and
then you’ll hold up another so that they can
be joined for ever more by the nail. Nope.
What actually happens is the second bit of
wood splits and then someone rural strolls
by and says, helpfully, “That nail’s too big.”
Last year, while attempting to nail a piece
of fence rail to a post that was already there,Christmas will be like every other day, only with added
mud. The birth of the baby Jesus is of no concern
to the cows, who just like knocking fences down
Jeremy and Kaleb waist deep in barley in a Diddly Squat field. Below: a poultry gesture.
Previous pages, from left: a plea to visitors; Lisa and Jeremy in festive mood (briefly)10 • The Sunday Times Magazine