Stuart’s Blog

Lambing in Masham, March 2008

As a new found friend of the Smyth family I was very pleased to be asked to contribute to Stuart’s blog. For two weeks during March I worked as a Lambing Assistant on a farm near Masham. I have helped out on this family farm for several years at lambing time, as with 400 ewes it’s all hands to the deck! Luckily, I was under the watchful eye of Adam, the eldest brother in the family who is an experienced Farmer.

I started early (for me) at 7am each day, although Adam and his Dad would have already been up several times during the night to check for new lambs so ‘early’ is only my perspective! The ewes have all been visibly marked so that the farmer can tell exactly when they are due to lamb and after being ultra-sound scanned, the farmer also knows how many lambs are due and can therefore alter the ewe’s feed accordingly. The ewes next due to lamb are herded in to the lambing sheds where they stay in flocks of around 40 per shed. This provides them shelter, warmth from the whipping Yorkshire winds and also allows the farmer to observe and intervene if the ewe needs during the lambing process.

First task of the morning is to wander amongst the 4 lambing pens to see if any lambs have been born since they were last checked. This can result in finding 2 or 3 ewes have lambed, each with potentially 2 or 3 lambs each. As they are all in a pen altogether it can be a feat to work out which lambs belong with which ewe, a talent Adam and his dad have down to a fine art. Each ewe and her lambs are taken out of the pen by pulling the lamb at ground level (so the ewe can see it) whilst the lambing assistant makes the best attempt to impersonate a bleating lamb that they can muster! The navels are sprayed with iodine and the ewe and her lambs are put in a bonding pen for 2 days so that when they are turned out into the fields, mother and lamb will be able to identify each other in the throng of sheep.

Once the lambing sheds are fed, the orphan lambs are bottle fed replacement milk and all lambs in the bonding pens are checked that they are healthy then its time for a proper farmer’s breakfast and all this before 9am! All too soon it’s time to face the spring gales, check the sheds once again and begin going through the bonding sheds, castrating, ringing tails (to ensure they won’t suffer from fly strike) and deciding which lambs are strong enough to be turned out in the fields.

Anybody can feed and water animals but it takes a true stockperson to notice if a ewe is rejecting a lamb and being able to ‘set it on’ another ewe for adoption or being able to identify a lamb still in the womb that is ‘breach’ by touch alone and be able to turn it around before lambing it. Observation, attention to detail and knowing your flock are keys to a successful lambing season and therefore financial year.

The life of a farmer is extremely tough. Long, long hours, the disgustingly low stock prices paid, the increase in fashionable foreign foods and the lack of backing from the government result in a tough financial situation and lifestyle for most. Most are dedicated, passionate and harder working than most people could ever comprehend. If you are still reading, do one thing for me this week; check out where your food comes from and how it is reared. Support YOUR farmers, they are the custodians of our fine land and deserve our support.

 Jude Allen

This is written by my wife Frances:

Stuart and I enjoy going to Northumberland as often as possible. We really enjoy camping and going for walks with our dog Bobby who just loves the sea. Northumberland boasts endless beautiful beaches; Bamburgh, Embleton and Seahouses to mention but a few. There are also many castles and country houses to visit. We enjoy going to AlnwickCastle with its fabulous water garden and to the nearby tree house, the largest in Europe which boasts a restaurant with an open fire! The food is good and even though you have to pay to get into the garden first of all, this does not take away from the magic of the tree house. Alnwick town itself is a wonderful mix of old and new with its many shops, snickets and markets. Barter Books on the outside of town is well worth a visit.

Bamburgh is a seaside town towards the north of the county, is dominated by its huge castle and also boasts the newly refurbished RNLI Museum dedicated to the memory of Grace Darling who was 22 years old when she risked her life in an open boat to help the survivors of the wrecked SS Forfarshire on 7 September 1838.

From Alnwick we like to travel across to the old market town of Rothbury, another lovely trip with magnificent views over the Cheviot Hills. We like to wander round the shops before going to nearby Cragside (the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity). We are members of the National Trust who do a wonderful job in protecting the Northumberland coastline. Our membership entitles us to free entrance to Cragside. Between walking round the stunning woodland, lakes and ornamental gardens and then a tour of the house itself, one can spend most of a day at Cragside.

Apart from camping, when the weather permits, we have also stayed self catering in various locations in some lovely cottages hired through Northumbrian Coast and Country Cottages based at Alnmouth, another quaint little seaside town in the beautiful county of Northumberland.

I love trees!

As a child one of my passions was climbing trees. We had trees at the bottom of the garden when we lived in a suburb of Belfast and when in my early teens we left for a house in the country our new home was called “The Trees” - can you wonder why. I climbed fir trees, oak trees - any old tree was a challenge to my young limbs! I also made an attempt to build a tree house but it was more of an unstable tree platform!

There is a place for trees but I feel that it shouldn’t at the sides of roads where they will present a hazard to any vehicle which should veer from the carriageway for an instant, for any reason. I travel many thousands of miles each year on our motorways and have lost count of the number of times that I have seen lorries and cars move several feet onto the
hard shoulder and out without any problem, either to themselves or to any other road vehicle in the vicinity. It’s a different story on our rural roads both single and double carriageway but even some motorways now have trees growing in that clear zone. In recent years there has been a spate of road accidents where the drivers and in some
cases their passengers have been killed. These vehicles have crashed into trees which have been allowed to grow at the roadside without any apparent control. Saplings which should have been removed have been allowed to grow into major traffic hazards along our roads.

A few months ago a family of 4 was killed on the A1 nearby when their car went out of control, albeit caused by another vehicle but the ultimate cause of death was the presence of not one but several young trees which were in their path. The offending driver was quite rightly jailed for his offence but I feel that the trees shouldn’t have been there in the firstplace. For goodness sake it doesn’t take much of a brain to realise that these are growing things and the time to tackle them is when they are young and small and can be removed with ease.

On the road between Catterick Bridge and Catterick Garrison there are several large trees within a short distance from the road, a single carriageway but road speeds of 60 MPH are still permissible. At 60 mph a vehicle will travel 29 yards in one second, so it shouldn’t take a maths teacher to work out how quickly contact will be made with one of these trees should any vehicle deviate from the road for any reason and possibly an innocent reason as far as the driver is concerned. Some of these trees would stop a tank and if they are to remain I think safety barriers should installed immediately. Where there is a delay I think the trees themselves should be painted in a way to highlight them as potential hazards.

They say every man should have a shed. Whether it’s a fully equipped workshop or a corner of a spare room it good to have a bit of space for a hobby where you can go to and just continue with whatever you were working on and then leave it for the next time. Mine is just a partitioned off part of our garage but it’s dry which is a great help.

When we got engaged 38 years ago Frances bought me a set of carpenter’s tools - a Stanley plane, chisels, hammer and screwdrivers etc. They were great to have as previously I borrowed and very often broke my father’s tools. Looking back I feel a bit guilty as I suppose I took things for granted and just used what was to hand without much thought of who owned them. Anyway it was great to have some tools of my own.

The first house we owned had a damp garage and the tools suffered. But this garage is dry and after partitioning off about a third I lined the walls and roof with thin T&G (tongue and grooved) pine which I later stained. For a work bench I simply put up a length of kitchen laminated shelving supported by the remains of an old workbench. To that I added a joiners vice which I picked up in a car boot sale in nearby Bedale but also an engineer’s vice, a wee bit of a story about that. Many years ago when we lived in Northern Ireland we lived beside the Lagan Navagation Canal in a little place called “Newport” not far from Hillsborough. So called Newport because there was a coalyard there and was where the horse drawn barges delivered their cargos. During the time we lived there the canal was drained and a new motorway (the M1) was constructed on part of the route of the old canal. Before construction the site had to be surveyed and core samples were taken at various sites along the route and a company from England (Cementation) had a crew who I chatted to as a curious schoolboy. One day I was pottering in our garage and wanted to hold something in my father’s vice and used a hammer to persuade the thing to tighten when snap! the casting cracked and the vice fell apart. I told one of the Cementation team and when they had finished their work they gave me an old vice which I was able to give to my Dad as a peace offering. It’s now in my shed here back in England about 50 years later, great it is too but I don’t use a hammer on it. Alastair my son who is a professional musician uses the shed when he’s not travelling and I must say how impressed I am with his soldering, woodwork and metalwork skills. Catherine our daughter potters about too and I must let her use the lathe next time she is at home. It’s great to have somewhere for screws, fuses, tools etc which although I’m not the tidiest of people but I have a fairly good idea of where I have left something. Anyway that’s my shed!

I love gadgets, something fascinates me about a mechanical or electronics gadget that does something special or different. The “Amazon Kindle” recently announced in the USA is one such item. Although I won’t go into too much detail here as it is thoroughly covered in the Amazon website, the link is at the end of this post, let me say briefly that it is an electronic book but with a difference it doesn’t need a computer!… It is lightweight, portable and can receive data enabling a book to be read easily on the new type of screen that replicates print on paper. Brilliant? Yes, but that’s the good news and the bad news is that it is not available in the country, only in the US. However because of demand, it’s not available there at the moment. But look for yourself by clicking here. Please let me know what you think, is there something else out there that we don’t know about?

If you haven’t visited the ‘realage’ website may I recommend it if you would like to see how your way of living may affect your longevity! Through a series of questions on your eating and drinking habits, your fitness regime and some fundimental questions on your weight, height etc you will get a figure of what is reckoned to be your ‘real age’ as a result of your lifestyle. It will make it a bit easier and quicker if you had the following information at hand before you start the questionairre - your resting heart rate, average blood pressure and cholesterol level. At the end there is a comprehensive list of recommendations which if followed will help to reduce the real age figure.

It’s free and to possibly raise some interesting pointers regarding your lifestyle simply click Realage UK on and you may be surprised at the result.

Live life to the youngest!

Durham Cathedral, I am passionate about this place. Since we arrived in England from Northern Ireland about 20 years ago we have come to
Durham City many times, visits including a young friend’s Passing Out Parade after Police training to shopping but the highlight of a visit was always a trip to the Cathedral. Our family has been to a number of services mainly matins and we have always had a warm and friendly greeting. My wife loves to sit in the quoire where we can be close to the organ and see the choir master and hear the choir.

I have read and enjoyed many of Bill Bryson’s books and he described Durham Cathedral as the “best cathedral on planet earth.”

I look forward to going on a guided tour of the cathedral at some stage a tour which includes seeing the tombs of St. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede (in writing this I realise that I don’t really know much about either).

I love the hugh pillars each with its own carved identity and the sheer size of the place is just overwhelming. The building of the cathedral began in 1093 and was apparently completed in 40 years.

After each visit we enjoy going to the little restaurant in one of the Alms Houses for a very welcome cup of coffee and scone with cream and jam just to bring us down to earth again.

I would highly recommend a visit!

Not very skilled I admit but I do enjoy the challenge of putting a fresh piece of wood in my lathe and watching as the object in my minds eye begins to take shape. At the beginning when I started I must admit that the fine wood dust did have an affect on my chest but I splashed out and bought a respirator which includes a face shield and a small motor for delivering filtered air, what a difference that made.

I buy most of my wood from John Boddies in Boroughbridge where that have a large range of hardwoods and many offcuts at reasonable prices.

My efforts so far have produced a number of bowls, a table lamp made from yew and a mortar and pestal made from sycamore. We have an old shaving bowl which belonged to my father in law and I have made a few copies of this including a lid. I enjoy that part - making a lid to see how close fitting I can get it to be.

Good hobby and one that you can pick up at any time and leave to be continues but it helps to have a shed - ah, a shed, that is another subject!

My favourite wood is beech but apart from pine I am happy to use any wood that comes my way.

Bobby is our beloved 7 year old springer spaniel cross from Great Ayton Dog Kennel. He came into our lives about 5 years ago having been abandoned by his previous owners. We had heard that rescue dogs are very affectionate and that is so true with Bobby. He returns our love a thousandfold. He is not perfect, he chases the cat but the staff at Great Ayton did warn us. When they are in the house together there is no problem, the cat (Guinness) will try to rub noses but Bobby won’t have that, he quickly gets off side now, too many memories of the scratched nose he got before by hanging around too long in the company of Guinness.

Bobby loves to walk, or should I say run, he has endless energy and even his daily walk around our local race track won’t tire him out. But his doggy heaven is in the water, sea water preferably, with or without waves, he just ignores them and runs in and out of the water chasing whatever is to hand that we throw in.

Not very keen in being left behind, the tail is tucked in and he has such a mournful look whenever we have to leave him behind - which is not very often. He comes with us on holiday and last year on Rathlin Island he was watched with great suspicion by the seals on Rathlin Island last year as he dashed in and out of the water.

One game he really loves is ‘hide the biscuit’ we leave him in one room and hide a dog biscuit in another, then he’s in nose tuned to the scent and usually within a few seconds he has found it and there is great munching!

Our lives just wouldn’t be the same without our Bobby!

Thank you and welcome to my blog. If your interest is in making money with your computer please stick with me and I will pass on as many ideas, contacts and links as I can. I have spent well over a year looking on the internet for inspiration and in the end I think it is down to yourself and some hard work. I don’t think there is a quick fix answer or I would have found it some time ago.

I envy those who have a good grounding in computers for they must be able to do things so much quicker, however there is an answer - have you heard of “Alison” which offers free ICDL and EDCL coaching and has registered learners in 227 countries worldwide? In simple graphic lessons it can remove the mystic of computer technology. It is funded by advertising but when I did the EDCL course the advertisements did not detract from the teaching. Why not try a quick tutorial - get the details by clicking here. Please let me know what you think.