Ey up, it’s time to talk dialect with Adam Collier, who is flushed with show succes.

EY up ow ist tha? Happy new year to you all, if I can still say that, because I saw somewhere last week how many weeks it was until Christmas, so people are obviously thinking about the next one and we haven’t had Easter yet and, yes, I have seen Easter eggs on display, infact I think I saw them the week after Christmas.

I have just returned from a weekend in Harrogate showing the rabbits. It has been a long weekend, Friday Saturday and Sunday, but a good one. Someone asked if I stayed in Harrogate for the weekend and I was quick to reply with, “No it’s ower dear, I can’t afford Harrogate prices”.

Luckily, the price of fuel has dropped, so it’s not too bad. Plus I like my home comforts (I don’t like strange toilets), enough said. Although I would like to stay on the subject of toilets, when I give a talk I like to read my favourite poem call, “Ower double Oler”, which is about an earth closet with two holes, which I think they should bring back because every time women go to the toilet, they like going in twos.

The poem brings back a lot of memories for many people, especially the verse that reads, “it had doubles oles that dilly man com weekly ti clear and we owd neewspaper strung up wi band and it wer best if you rubbed it fost in yer hand”. It continues at the end to say, “mother wont buy ony o that soft tissue paper frev jack iv is van so we ety have slape paper”.

Izzel, I think it was called. We used to have it at primary school and I used it for tracing and it was very good. My grandad once told me that my grandma used to use it to line her spice loaf tins at Christmas and what good spice loafs they were.

That last verse also brings back memories for me about Jack in his van. We used have a bread man who called round twice a week in his van selling everything, how times change.

On the subject of toilets, that is all dad found this week with his metal detector – an old toilet chain, so I have cleaned it up and put it round his neck and made him mayor.

I realise you would like to know how we got on with the rabbits well, put it like this, I told the butcher at our farm shop at Beadlam Grange that if they had done no good I would hang them on the door on Monday morning.

You will be pleased to know they were not there.

They did very well – two firsts, two seconds, two thirds, two fifths and a seventh and there were 1,774 rabbits, so not too bad.

Even if they had not done so well I still couldn’t have sent them to the butcher, because I am too caffy hearted.

I will leave you with this little story, about 18 years ago I went to Malton Show with four rabbits. One of them did very well and won all it could, including the buck class. And a week later it had a litter of babies, so the judge must not of had very good eye sight.