Saturday, February the 6th, 2010

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What I Like About A Farm

“It is the sublime inconsequence of a farm that I like, the confusion of noises, the sense of unreality that is given as a great and heavenly gift to human beings who live among thudding, moaning cattle, and tumbling milk-cans, and hens screeching underfoot and who, no matter how they try, can never coerce their lives into routine, but must always wait on the weather and market prices and the temperamental vagaries of their stock, and at one time spend idle weeks in the rain, and at another toil both day and night, and at yet another time waste precious hours chasing a cow which has got into the wrong field and which, in running away, impales itself eventually on the railings, or in segregating cock chickens of three weeks old who suddenly discover their sex and in one afternoon reduce each other to bleeding wisps of tow. That is what I like about a farm.”

Rayner Heppenstall, The Blaze Of Noon (1939)