Mass family reunion (From Gazette & Herald)

Mass family reunion

WORK is nearing completion on the renovations in our middle sitting room. A layer of insulation and then chipboard has gone over the new cement floor, and John has blocked off the chimney in the recently-discovered inglenook, so that there is not a howling draught continually emptying the room of any warm air. I have laid some old rugs over the flooring and, after moving a settee back into the room, it is actually starting to feel quite comfortable and civilised again.

The flooring needed to go down as our granddaughter Jessica was coming with her mum and dad for the weekend. Jess is crawling with purpose these days, creeping up to any object with a grip on it in order to pull herself to her wobbly full height. As all the other rooms are full of furniture tipped out from this middle room, John thought he needed to create an area for her to play and to be safe in.

A reason for the mass family return was the joint birthday of Bryony and Jo-Jo. I booked an Italian restaurant for the celebration as I knew that they would have no qualms about entertaining an eight-month-old baby for the evening. The night was wet. It was raining frogs. First wet night for a month, plus the weather was warming up, and our lanes were heaving with ardour-driven frogs on the lookout for lurve. The toad we found hibernating in the airbrick of the sitting room is probably now far from home. The security of a bricks and mortar existence forgotten. Jessica must have felt sea sick in the back of the car as I swerved all over to try and avoid squashing any of the amorous amphibians. Her baby pod was well strapped in by the seat belt and she had slept through every bit of the birthday celebration, including a mass restaurant version of Happy Birthday. Fortunately, not a murmur arose from the back seat until we got her home and I banged her head lifting her out of the car.

If Bryony and Jo are under the star sign of Pisces, so are most of our new calves. The heifers have all finished calving now. Very successful, and nearly all within the last three weeks. But, John says, much of the joy of farming and new life is taken away by the masses of paper work that attend upon every birth. And death.

The national papers ran a story recently on an elderly farmer, whose even more elderly mother had always completed his paperwork for him. When she fell ill, and whilst he was attempting to care for her and his sheep, he failed to keep up with his paperwork on fallen stock. As a result, he is being penalised to the tune of £30,000, with no hope of an appeal.

What is so frightening now about dealing with this part of government, is that they hold farmers responsible for checking their own - that is DEFRA's - mistakes. The last paperwork we received had 16 mistakes, and prior to that DEFRA actually lost one of the cattle passports. No penalty to them, but missing out three noughts on three herd numbers means that John has £800 worth of subsidy threatened.

He looks ill at times. "I feel frightened to complete the paperwork at times," he said. "I'm worried I'll get it wrong or not spot that they have made a mistake in time."

And then you get all this guff about helping farmers and putting money into agriculture. The Government should start worrying about what weapons of mass destruction they have in this country; mass destruction of agriculture that is.

Updated: 10:16 Wednesday, March 12, 2003