How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [101]
I thought some sheep would be nice but it turns out Gordon Brown has an opinion on this. He reckons the number of animals I have per acre should be determined by how much nitrogen is in their excrement. I am consequently allowed only 0.6 of a sheep per acre, which means I may have only seventy-five of the damn things.
Standard sheep are good lawnmowers but unless I buy a hitherto undiscovered breed that has blades instead of teeth, I’m going to need a tractor to keep the grass down, and this worries me. I don’t trust tractors. It seems to me that every single component is designed specifically to remove the operator’s left arm.
Then there are the woods. They seem perfectly nice to me, but according to experts, they need thinning. The cost of doing this, I’m told, is around £5 billion and none of the chopped-down trees can be sold because there is no demand for wood at all. I find that hard to believe, but there we are. I also find it hard to believe that a wood needs maintenance. When McDonald’s does that sort of thing in Brazil, it gets into all sorts of trouble, but it seems it’s my duty as the owner to execute the weaker trees so that the stronger ones may survive. I must also keep the woods warm. I have no idea how this might be achieved but I should imagine the cost will be about £2 billion.
One of the things I have accidentally bought is a Neolithic fort. It is, of course, no such thing. It is a slight ripple in an otherwise flat field, useful only as an exciting launch pad for the children’s quad bikes. But I feel fairly sure that if we use it for this purpose, Brown will make me apologize, in public, to the Piltdown man.
Certainly I know he is using satellites to make sure that I plant the right crop in the right field. Also, he is employing men called Colin to come round regularly to make sure I don’t have too many sheep. Can you believe that? That your tax money is being spent to pay a man whose job is to count sheep. How the hell does he stay awake? Then we get on to the thorny question of boundaries. I can see why they matter on a housing estate but trying to determine where they are when they’re in the middle of a blackberry bush and half an acre of nettles seems a bit pointless. And expensive.
And it turns out I’m going to need some buildings in which I can dry my rape, tup my sheep and keep a telephone to use when the tractor has severed my arm. I’m also going to need a topper, and that’s fine, except I don’t know what one is and therefore I have no clue whether to try to get one at the local garage or Toys ’ ’ Us.
Last week I had a long conversation with another local sheep farmer. And I promise you this. While I nodded sagely from time to time and gave the impression I agreed with his countryside ways, I did not understand a single word he said. Apparently, my soil is brashy, my herbage is low and I’ll have to dog and stick my ewes.
What I want to do most of all is plant some game crop so that I can rear a few pheasants. But guess what? It turns out that Brown has an opinion on this as well, and it’s not allowed. He has an opinion on everything, it seems. There’s one field I thought would look nice if I grew some poppies and cornflowers. But that’s not allowed either. Strangely, however, he will give me cash money if I promise to make a trout lake, and even more cash money if I don’t grow anything that could be turned into food. Quite how he squares this in his head when half the world is starving, I have no idea.
And nor do I understand why the forms I have to fill in to get this cash money are longer and more complicated than the instruction manual for a nuclear power station.
I thought that farming would be easy. You plant seeds, weather happens and food grows. But I fear that as the seasons slide by, I will discover that I’m working my nuts off for less return than I got from those useless bastards at AIG.
Perhaps that’s why the people round these parts assume I’m going to turn it into a racetrack. They couldn’t be more wrong.