A fact-finding mission

So we set off to hold our breath for 20 minutes and drive, via the Chunnel, to Paris for a few days. For anyone who has the slightest trepidation about this mode of travel forget your fears. By the time you have started to worry that you are under a lot of water, you are out on the other side. Tres facile. Very strange though to observe all the precautions that France takes against importing foot and mouth, such as disinfectant dips and no dairy and meat imports, whilst on our return to British soil there are none.

France is due to forsake the franc and take on the euro and, as a consequence, all goods and services have dual prices. As the French are currently getting about 20 pounds more a ton of wheat than we are, on a very simplistic level there seems to be everything going for parity; and as quickly as possible please. We had a superb time. No problems with driving, parking or language, and just a minor hiccup when the museum staff were all on strike and we had to go back in the evening when we wanted, for example, to visit the Louvre. I personally think it was not so much a strike about hours, but more of a wish on the part of the museum staff not to face the hordes of children on their half term school visits. Shame on them. It must have been a huge disappointment to teachers who had planned their visits months in advance. Wonder if they all went to Disneyland instead? Probably the strike was organised in conjunction with Pupil Power plc.

We had left John with carefully labelled meals for each day whilst away on our jaunt. Each morning he had to place his foil wrapped lunch in a roasting dish in the Rayburn at breakfast, and by twelve o'clock, a hot, appetising meal was ready. What actually happened was that he was invited out each night for a meal, and had fish and chips two days, and a steak sandwich at the golf club on another. No imminent starvation worries there.

Where we are all drilled up at home, there seemed to be little sign of any activity in French fields. As they can get on their land in the spring, there will not be the same drive to get finished by autumn as we have. The land on our farm is heavy clay soil, and it can be April before we can take a tractor on the land without expecting it to sink gracefully into the mud. One or two French fields that were drilled up had very untidy wheelings on the land. John would have died from shame to have such wheelings on display by a main motorway. Must be French sangfroid. Or too much red wine during lunch.

Back home our first job was to help John bring all the cattle home. The fields are too wet and the cows and their calves are poaching the land. Military precision and a movement licence are the requirements for any stock moves now. John brought the cows into a corner of the gated field with the temptation of a big bale of silage, whipped an electric fence around the back of the herd to stop them moving back inland, and then the three of us, guided the cows and calves across the road and into the main fold yard. The worry on these moves is always the calves. Some of them have never crossed a road before and they were very anxious about moving out of the field, despite their Mums racing across to the silage yard. Before foot and mouth, if a calf did get past you, although it meant a few hours chase around neighbours fields and up and down lanes, it was at the worst an inconvenience, and often something to laugh about. Now it would be a major, prosecutable offence.

Updated: 11:03 Thursday, November 08, 2001