The nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” may not fit appropriately either with my name or my age as I am not called Mary and school is but a distant memory. But the image of a lamb following me everywhere it can, is certainly true enough and my day is now set to a rigid four-hour routine of feeds.

Happily the lamb, a triplet rejected by its mother is thriving. Initially, in between feeds, the lamb lay curled up on an old sheepskin rug I retrieved from a bedroom. My thoughts were to try to comfort the little creature after the pain of isolation from the family unit. I don’t know if it was in the habit of peeing, and worse, on its mum, perhaps that’s why she pushed him out, but it certainly did on the rug. There’s gratitude for you.

Gradually the lamb has grown to trust us and drink all of the milk mixed up for it every four hours. During the day it lives in the back garden and at night in an old dog kennel. Now, as soon as we step out the back door the lamb is there, butting and pushing at the back of our legs.

Once fed, the lamb is reluctant to leave our side and happily follows us round the garden, through the house and into the yard. As Fizz our sheepdog is fascinated by the lamb’s behaviour and apparent lack of fear, she comes too. So, now I frequently have two companions around the yard.

But yesterday we had to leave the lamb alone for a few hours as John had a nostalgic yearning to visit a threshing day run by steam engine enthusiasts.

As we arrived the clear blue sky was dimmed by black smoke gushing out of the chimney of the coal-fired steam engine. We were struck by the number of men required to complete the task. One man was forking sheaves from a trailer to the top of the threshing set. A man on top fed the sheaves into a drum or hopper (I’m not an expert) that leads into a set of blades chopping the straw, then onto racks and shaking screens to separate wheat grains from straw and chaff.

Although most straw was then fed into a ramp with a ram that was baling the straw, another man was forking chaff blown out of the machine back up into the ram, while another man knotted the bales. Yet another man slung the bales onto a trailer to be stacked at the far end. Not forgetting the chap fuelling the steam engine and the man bagging off the corn into 16-stone hessian sacks of wheat and stacking them on a trailer at the back end of the threshing machine. Seven in all.

When you consider that it would already have taken a field full of men to harvest and stook the sheaves last summer, load the sheaves onto the trailer for threshing and that this is now done by one man on a combine, things have certainly changed.