Time slip

All day it has rained, sweeping showers bringing with them the sound of the surf pounding the coast. The view out my window is of trees, wildly, exorbitantly green. The lawn is a meadow. We have sheep in the shed ready for shearing. I want to light the fires, but it’s December for goodness sake. I keep stalling on going for a walk (I have a Sit Spot to write!) but in the end I pull on my raincoat and give in to getting wet. Of course when I’m out, when I gulp great cold drafts of air and the rain pings off my jacket, I wonder why it took me so long to face the weather. The world feels pressed with detail. The hood of my coat serves like blinkers on a horse. A mouse, wet, bedraggled, scuttles across the track. I imagine a tiger snake in the thick grass on the side of the track. Instead I’m startled by the swoop of a kookaburra. I push into curtains of rain. I pass a creek and two wood ducks quietly usher their ducklings out of my sight. I want to haul it all in. I stop on the track and let the beauty swamp me. Let it rise up through my shoes, my sodden socks, cling to my wet leggings until somewhere around my middle, where my coat keeps me dry it moves to a place outside my body and I find myself sweeping the hood of my jacket back.

*

Last week J and I worked in the yards. It was a sunny morning, the last day of spring. In this season of abundance we have been battling foot abscess and we have the rams back in for a follow up jab of antibiotic and to give them another footbath of zinc sulfate¹. They have bounced back from the first shot of antibiotic and even the most lame are now fighting fit. Our job this day is to stand them in the footbath for ten minutes. We fall into a rhythm. Push two rams into the race (easy to write not easy to do). J sets the timer. I fill the syringes with the thick syrupy medicine. J gives them an injection. And then we wait, in the warm spring sunshine, in the birdsong soaked air, for the minutes to tick by.

It takes all morning. It’s simple. Repetitive. Like so much of the work done on farms. Yet there’s a skill in making it all go smoothly. I move up through the crush of rams, behind me the crack of horn on horn as two dominant rams crash into each other. J yells at them to knock it off.

Mostly J and I work well in the yards. It hasn’t always been so. But a decade in and we have ironed out the creases. We don’t use a dog for the rams, though at one point when they are being particularly sticky J threatens to let Geoffrey off. Instead we almost potter. I let my thoughts drift.

*

This week a friend sent me a documentary A World in Pictures on the English photographer James Ravilious. I don’t know what I’m watching when I press play. I hadn’t heard of Ravilious (though a quick google search tells me he’s famous) but from the first photo I understand the collection is extraordinary. His photos span 17 years as he documented life around the Devon village of Beaford. Around 80000 negatives form the Beaford Archive, described as one of the most poignant and detailed archives of a way of life many people had thought extinct. The photos are breathtakingly beautiful and also familiar. They are scenes of farming life. The opening of the film is a sound bite of Ravilious saying I like to think of a photographic negative as a sort of silver water colour. Alan Bennett narrates the documentary. John’s wife Robin, shows us his cameras. The lenses are altered. He covered them in tape, blinkering the view point. The result is distilled composition. Some of the photos so intimate, so revealing it feels voyeuristic to look.

*

All week I’ve been thinking about something J had said as we struggled together to tip over a ram to trim its hooves. He stopped, the sweat prickling his brow, his eyes, blue and piercing. This was the first job I ever did on this place. I came over and helped the manager. I probably used these clippers. It must be nearly 40 years ago. The ram’s head bent back. It’s great strength quiet. Snip. Snip. And time is no longer linear. The job the same, only the ram is different. Oh J’s back and knees, they’re changed too.

mm

Reading

This week’s lunchtime reading slot has been made delightful with the arrival of Wonderground in the letterbox. I love having a book or a journal to eat my sandwich over - rather than diving into rabbit holes on my computer or phone. Graziher’s 30th edition anniversary is out this week and it’s packed with beautiful images and stories perfect for lunchtime reading.

Listening

I have been totally swallowed up in the world of Irish writer Michelle Gallen. I heard her interviewed on Fi and Jane’s new podcast Off Air (the episode is called No Craic) and she sounded so fiesty I searched out her book, Big Girl, Small Town. Sitters, it’s the best audiobook I’ve listened to. It’s read (inhabited) by the comic genius of Nicola Coglan of Derry Girls. The story is set in the fictional northern Irish town of Aghybogy a few years after the ceasefire. The story is Majella’s. She’s autistic (though this is never commented on). She’s just fucking brilliant. I will never forget her. Sitters, this is a book that elevates the art of swearing to a new level - not one to be listened to on the way home from school pick up. Stick it in your ears and be transported. It’s so searingly, painfully real. Can you tell I loved it? I should add a caveat: I also loved Anna Burn's Milkman and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half Formed Thing.

Watching

In what felt like a consolidation of James Ravilious and his way of seeing I watched this beautiful short documentary by Christian Cargill on Welsh farmer Wilf Davies. It’s called Heart Valley: life lessons from a shepherd - I think you’ll love it too.

That’s enough for this week Sitters. I hope there’s something for you to chew over.

1. See last week’s Sit Spot for more detail on this job.