ESCAPE!

Imagine my horror when, as I wandered into the yard at about 4.30 this morning, I was met by the sight of a detachment of our young heifers loitering out on a public highway; their paddock fencing left in a parlous state thanks to their hormonal jumpings.

Of course my first move, rooted as I was to the spot by fear, was to call for back-up. However, my wingman - the tractor driver - was eating first breakfast at home at the time. Thus, grabbing a couple of buckets of calf nuts (the bovine equivalent of picking up a couple of buckets of chocolate bars), I slowly walked up to the heiffered road.

In a scene chillingly similar to the final scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds', the calves did not scatter off to Lamyatt and on to start a new life at Wyke Cheddar but instead stayed very calm as I walked through their ranks without a single one of them paying me any heed. The laden buckets were the Rod Taylor to my psychologically broken and weepy Tippi Hedren, our child represented by the calves….but hang on, the calves were the birds? Okay. Rod Taylor was the buckets, I was Tippi Hedren and we had an invisible child and the calves were the birds. There we are. That analogy now works perfectly.

Once they knew what was up, the greedy little beasts came spilling off the road and onto the side of the hill. Which is the moment captured in this photograph.

In the background of this photograph is the handsomely refurbished farmhouse Anna and I will be imminently moving into, which will be a location affording us better scope for spying on these escape artists. Each evening I shall sit Anna by the window with a bucket of chocolate bars and tell her to wake me if the farm's youth are causing a nuisance. The cowherd must have his rest!