A Rat, A Pea Man and a Bit of A.I.

Five am, the sun rises over the cornfield and the last thing you need to see is a drowned rat in a cattle trough. But hey ho, it happens.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Photo by vicky thorley on Pexels.com

As I fished the rat corpse out of the trough I heard a lorry coming down the lane. Through the mist of the recently woken, I remembered, the Pea Man.

Helping my nephew on the farm, many years ago could be surprising, today it was peas. Yup, he’d decided peas were good for buttermilk and they were cheap. I showed the Pea Man where he needed to tip them and as his trailer raised into the air the smell assaulted my nostrils. If I had thought the rat was bad… Anyway, they seemed less messy than the two-ton of beetroot he had ordered last month.

We arose at 5 am most mornings but this was a special day because it was Driffield Show day and we had seven bullocks and one heifer to wash and load. Of course, this was after we had  ‘fed up’ (feeding animals) and ‘teemed’ (unloaded) a trailer of straw.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

We were parading these beasts at the show. They weighed nearly half a ton and we had spent a lot of time with them. We had wrestled them, haltered them, walked them (oh yes every night for about 3 miles)  and now we washed them, blowed dried them and brushed them.

There was an issue though. The man from the Artificial Insemination unit or the ‘A.I. Man, as we called him was calling around to impregnate one of the cows. But help was at hand, my brother-in-law, a city dweller on a day visit, had offered to ‘see to him’.

We packed our trunk, white coats, white halters, numbers and of course sandwiches and we were ready.

As we were about to leave the A.I. man trundled down the lane. I explained we had to go and introduced him to the aforementioned city dweller/brother-in-law and escorted them to the cowshed. Leaving them to it I began to close the door.

I overheard my brother-in-law say to the A.I. man. “Would you like me to hold your trousers?”

Oh! I bet that’s a story he’s told a few times.

Vaya con dios, amigos xx

 

Memory inspired from a conversation with my dear fellow blogger https://quercuscommunity.com/

All photos from Pexels today I’m afraid