WE have a poorly goose. She became trapped in some fence netting, I assume yesterday morning, as it wasn’t until I couldn’t find her at night to drive into the pen that I discovered her.

We had been out all day and by the time we came back, she just laid exhausted on the ground by the fence. Why she had stuck her head through the netting I have no idea. The grass on the other side must have looked more tempting than that on offer in her field, is all I can presume. Whatever, she is not herself and so today I have put her into the duck hut and I am administering TLC in large amounts.

I am concerned that if she does not demonstrate a rapid improvement, she may fall victim to the roasting tin rather sooner than I had intended. We always keep our geese until Christmas and prefer roast goose for our festive feasts than turkey. Last year there was one spare in the freezer for a lock down Easter too. Luckily for this goose, though, she seems much improved today and I have managed to persuade John to keep his hands off her.

He is very partial to roast goose, and although Michaelmas has now passed, a traditional time for feasting on goose - it would not have taken much to persuade him that mid-October, was also a time for roast goose. Indeed, my mother was brought up in Nottingham where Goose Fair, nowadays a traditional fairground event with rides and sideshows, was one of the highlights of October.

Dating from the Middle Ages when geese were driven from Lincolnshire and Norfolk to be sold in Nottingham’s Old Market Square, the birds feet were coated with a mixture of tar and sand as many of them , up to 20,000 geese, were walking fifty miles or more , to be sold. How times change.

Apparently this year Nottingham’s Goose Fair has been cancelled. As has Hull Fair, and many other summer country shows and fairs in this strange year. Hull traditionally followed on after Goose Fair, so the knock on effect of the virus into Yorkshire was inevitable.

Our day out when the goose got her neck trapped was to the North Yorkshire coast. I don’t think I had really appreciated how many holiday parks there are on the coast. Every time we drove down a lane to get to a beach, we passed scores of static caravans, neatly lined up in rows, basking in the autumn sunshine. What a wonderful escape they must provide to families living in cities who cannot enjoy the space, we, for example, take for granted when living in the countryside. And how fantastic fish and chips taste when bought in Whitby, with the name of the trawler that caught the fish, displayed on the wall. We must go again, but this time make sure the geese can’t get stuck in the fence wire.