SIGNS of normality are starting to return to life on the farm after all these months of turning away visitors. We have just seen off three little boys from a unit for pupils with hearing impairment attached to a mainstream school who had come to spend the day observing features on the farm to support their literacy, numeracy, geography, science, and food technology. You name it on the curriculum. We've probably enhanced it today. Even the hissing and squawking of the geese could be recorded as discordant notes and be classed as music.

The lads turned up wearing very appropriate badges - one a sheep, another a cow, the third a pig. All came from the inner city. My friend who is a teacher in a hearing impaired unit attached to a mainstream school, had planned the visit during harvest. Photo after photo of combines, grain trailers and fields of corn. What a difference now it's October. Today the combine is under wraps. The trailers are parked up and empty, many of the fields are still bare earth. But. The sun was shining. The boys could have their lunch outside in the farmyard. Feed the ducks and the geese. Fish. Ride Rupert our old horse. Scrump apples and collect conkers. They thought it was fantastic and want to come back next week.

Unfortunately they could not take any walnuts away with them. In the battle of the walnut tree, the squirrels have won, and John is the walking wounded. Not only has he torn a leg muscle slipping over when trying to catch a squirrel, he has also cut his fingers trying to wrap a sharp plastic coating around the base of the tree. The few walnuts that are left are right at the top of tree. Temptingly out of John's reach, and handily placed for a squirrel snack.

Top of the list of jobs to do, was finding out if the hens had laid any eggs. Here a little trickery came into play, as our own hens are not laying well at the moment. Instead half a dozen came out of an egg box to be surreptiously placed in cunningly created nests of straw. As these nests were all accessible, it did not create a realistic scenario of where our hens normally lay their eggs. Usually on a gravity and death defying ledge of a haystack.

To add more interest to our school children's trip out, I had found malted milk biscuits with cows on, chicken shaped biscuits and chocolate bars with a black and white cow designed wrapper. To add further value I had baked a chocolate cake and swirled the chocolate icing in a familiarly shaped blob, that we see all over the cows field. My friend duly signed the cake to the children as 'Cow Pat Pie'. They ate it with relish and signed back to her that they wanted to bake a Cow Poo (lost something in the signing) Cake the next day at school. In fact from then on the whole day took a prurient turn for the worse. Duck poo, goose poo, dog poo, horse poo, sheep's poo, cats poo (yuck) and hen poo, were all closely studied with an eye to future food technology lesson. I recalled to my friend that in a London store I had seen chocolate covered ants and scorpions for sale, "surely, that must be worse".

"Maybe," she said, "but I have to write in their home/school diary every night and ask them to send in the ingredients for our recipes. I'm going to have a hard time explaining this lot."

Updated: 11:26 Thursday, October 11, 2001