War cabinet in kitchen

The last time was during the Gulf War and, as before, the talk is all of missiles, guns, bombing runs, stealth planes, intelligent strikes.

Suddenly environmental issues seem to be taking a very low priority in the area. No wildlife experts on about the dangers threatened to the existence of mountain goats etc, although whether Mr Bush would take any notice of a concerned authority on the protection of, say, Afghan eagles is dubious, and the impact of Tomahawk missiles on the area's eco-system is possibly about the last thing he is thinking about.

Meanwhile, we watch the explosions on the television screen dominating the news and wonder what ever happened to the foot and mouth crisis. Even the war cabinet had stopped talking about it, that is until we realised that we needed yet another licence to bring the lambs home for worming.

DEFRA has taken advantage of the spotlights moving from foot and mouth on the farm to international negotiations, to bring out new movement licences and autumn movement rules. Only the officials had not told the trading standards officials, or their computers, and then exposed their call centre staff to the wrath of frustrated farmers wanting to get stock away off the farm to slaughter.

Apparently, within the first 24 hours of the new licensing system, 1,728 applications were received at the local trading standards department, and three telephone operators walked out because of the verbal abuse they had received. Obviously the operators did not deserve the abuse, but neither should the farmers be left so much at the mercy of such a confusing system.

To be fair, things are easing. Today John has received an application form for a Sole Movement Licence that will grant us more freedom to move livestock around the farm than we have had previously. We will have to comply with 15 particular legal requirements, and face everything short of the death penalty if we don't. Also we shall be very clean at the end of the application as there are constant entreaties to us to use appropriate cleansing and disinfecting procedures and wash our hands with soap and water. Have these people been in charge of a public toilet before?

New words, too. Just as we had got used to contiguous culling and sentinel sheep (available for guard duty, I presume, outside No 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace) we now have returning cows for parturition (getting served to me and you), premises which are epidemiologically linked (owned by the same person apparently) and we are urged to be geographically discrete. Discrete? I've never been discrete in my life.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they are also starting to use foreign languages to explain reasons behind requests for an emergency movement order, and suggest to an uncomprehending British farmer to determine such movements by 'force majeure'. French? Giving examples in French. Being geographically discrete about the French is not your average British farmer's fort.

Tempers have been short in our house for other reasons than movement licences. There are 30 acres left to drill and no let-up in the rain. Every time John gets to within a sniff of going out with the combination drill, down comes another rainfall. At least all the corn drilled from the end of August has germinated and we are not faced with the problem of a neighbour down the road who has still got two fields of spring beans to combine. "I'm leaving things a bit late," he told me in a definitive example of the British art of understatement. "I had thought of ploughing the whole lot back in, but you never know, things might take up."

A definitive example of a British Optimist.

Updated: 10:09 Thursday, October 18, 2001