Rocket science it isn't

As I drive up I wave four fingers out the window at him, not two, four, and wait until he gives a jolt of recognition and the thumbs up for me to stop. This is all to save him time.

When drilling, he has to ensure that in every four passes up and down the field, the drilling takes account of creating a tramline on the second and third pass. To do this, one coulter is blocked on the second and third run, so that no seed corn is dropped in that particular row. The new drill automatically counts out the rows, but once the tractor is stopped, the counter goes back to zero, and unless John has remembered which row he is on when he stops the engine, he will have lost where his tramlines are meant to be.

And he invariably does. So to save going back to the start of the field and counting out the number of times he has been up and down, I gesticulate to him in a deranged fashion before the tractor comes to a halt, and until I am sure he has remembered to check his rows. Rocket science it isn't, but effective it is.

Drinkings over, John resumes work. I, on the other hand, set off blackberrying. The dogs love it. They eat all the blackberries off the bottom of the brambles; I take them off the top. We had friends to stay over the weekend and their children had never been blackberrying before. After the initial whines and whinges about prickles and nettles, they started gorging themselves on fruit, and even managed to drop a few berries into their containers to take home.

Despite all the ripening fruit, we have had a lot fewer wasps this autumn than usual. One explanation could stem from the large hole under an apple tree in the garden. A badger has been visiting and dug up the wasp nest presumably to get a taste of grubs and any sweetness stored up for winter. I do not know if wasps make a honey equivalent. Several years ago another badger dug out a dry stone wall in the garden to get at a bees' nest. Then we knew he was after honey, we just did not know that we had a bees' nest until then.

We are seeing a lot more badgers around the farm. Up to two or three years ago the only badger found had been a dead one, knocked over by a car and left at the side of the road. Then Bud, our Jack Russell, came face to claw with a badger among the muck-spreading on a grass field as we were taking the dogs for an evening walk. Bud was ahead and we watched as he followed his nose along the line of muck, determinedly choosing his own path and disregarding where the other dogs were going. Suddenly we saw Bud freeze in front of this large, dark shape in the dusk. When the shape reared up over Bud, John shouted: "Look out, it's a badger" and raced towards Bud to scare the badger back into the nearby wood. Fortunately the tactic worked, otherwise I doubt if little Bud would have come off best, and anyway by that time he had decided that discretion is the better part of valour and was back by our side. Since then we have seen badgers regularly at night in the fields, but visits home are a rarity.

Updated: 12:18 Thursday, September 27, 2001