I was so fierce with the hammer, I knocked
the post clean out of the ground. And
honestly I felt like sinking to my knees and
weeping. It’s just so frustrating when you
are hopeless at whatever it is you’ve chosen
to do. It really is.
Of course you would imagine that on
Christmas Day it’s possible to take a day off
fence and gate repair work, but I’m afraid
not. Because the birth of the baby Jesus is of
no concern to the sheep, who want to
escape and die every day of the year, or the
cows, who just like knocking fences down.
Back in November I came back from a
weekend of solid drinking and staying up
late in Scotland, absolutely knackered. I fell
into bed on Sunday evening at around 10.
and was woken up at 2am by an alarm on
my phone, alerting me to the fact that the
automatic hen house doors were opening. It
took an hour to sort that out and I didn’t get
back to sleep till four. Then, two hours later,
I was woken again by a neighbour who said
my cows had pushed over the fence again
and were on the A361 two miles away. And
there’s nothing on God’s green earth I can
do to be certain that the exact same thing
won’t happen again on Christmas Day.
Look at Jurassic Park. To make sure the
dinosaurs stayed in their pens, Dicky
Attenborough built a trillion security
systems into the perimeter fences, all of
which also had important-looking yellow
flashing lights on them. And we all know
what happened next. Martin Ferrero went
to the lavatory and got eaten.
To stop that kind of thing happening at
Diddly Squat, I’ve already bought my cows
lots of distracting presents. There’s an £scratchy thing that looks like an upended
carwash roller, which they can use instead
of fence posts to reduce itchiness, and two
footballs that I fill every morning
with nuts and silage.
Nothing works because
animals don’t understand
presents either. They look at
their new stuff and then walk
through the fence again. And it’ll be the
same story at Christmas, I just know it.
Even if I buy them some new trousers and
the latest Call of Duty video game, they’ll
be off and away into the village to eat all
the local Hamishes’ Brussels sprouts. And even if they don’t escape, they’ll
need hay and the pigs will need potatoes
and the hens will need their grain and the
pheasants will need moving and the new
puppies will need walking and the trouts
will need feeding and the sheeps will
need demaggoting, and when I’ve done all
that, in the cold and the rain, I’ll be so tired
I’ll fall asleep with my face in whatever Lisa
found that morning in the freezer. Mutton
usually, from one of our sheeps. Which
gives me heartburn. Yup, even from beyond
the grave those bastards continue to make
my life miserable.
Still, could be worse — my Christmas
could be like yours. Because you’ll get
back from the pub on Christmas Eve at
quarter to two, and fifteen minutes later
one of the kids will be sick on you
because he has eaten all the sweets Santa
brought, and then after a morning of
arguments during which all the other
presents will be wilfully destroyed in a
series of bitter sibling arguments, you
will open your presents to discover
they’re terrible before cooking half a
hundredweight of food the kids don’t like
and then trying to digest it while watching
a kiddy-friendly film about an otter with
a spade in the back of its head.JEREMY’S CHRISTMAS LIST
Will give Lisa a sculpture. Last year I scored
a hit buying her a Nic Fiddian-Green
horse head piece.
Will give Kaleb I know he
wants a Fendt tractor
so I’m getting him one
— a model one made
by Britains.
Will give Gerald He wants a gas-operated
parsnip thingummy but they don’t have
them at StowAg
Hoping to receive Ken Miles’s Ford GT
P/LISA
I’ve often joked I’ll need a holiday to get
over the festive season but this year I really
will. Somehow I’ve ended up running the
Diddly Squat Farm Shop and it has been
hectic. Throughout December our own
home-grown produce and the things we
sell on behalf of neighbouring farms have
been flying off the shelves. Admittedly
there are not many shelves and they’re
quite small, but as soon as we fill them
they’re empty again. We’re a tiny outfit —
a bit like a car boot sale without the car.
People come expecting Diddly Land,Farm shop gifts, clockwise from top left: “aromatic” candles; gin in a tin; pure honey; locally
made scotch eggs and sausage rolls. Below right: the Ford GT40 Jeremy wants for ChristmasCHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, ANDREW FOX / THE TIMES, NICK RUFFORD
Tyres for the infamous Lamborghini tractor
that Jeremy often crashes around the farmThe Sunday Times Magazine • 11