Listening to Sams.

Mr and Mrs farmer (the ones who keep the sheep up the lane) now have names. Sam and Ange.

I was leaning on the gate this evening, watching the sheep, when Sam drove up behind me. He said he’d just come to see how the grass was greening up. He said that one of the things he most likes about sheep farming is leaning on a gate to see how things are doing – and that includes the state of the grass.

He then went on to tell me all sorts of interesting things about sheep, such as how easily they fall over and die if exposed to stress. And how easily they sometimes fall over and die even when they haven’t apparently been exposed to anything. And how it’s a bad idea to bring them into a barn during the winter because they get bad foot problems from not walking about enough. And how amusing it is to watch the lambs wandering around trying to find their mothers after the ewes have been sheared and become unrecognisable.

So then he turned the subject around to owls. He told me about how the trees in front of his farmhouse play host to many of them at night – how he can shine a torch up into the branches and see as many as twenty pairs of eyes staring back, and how that freaks out the girls his daughters sometimes bring home for sleep overs. The shrieks of the barn owls freak them out even more, apparently.

The young computer technician I spoke to today was also called Sam, and he told me a few things about computers. I won’t bother trying to render the details. Apart from not having a particularly technical mind, I don't find computers quite as interesting as sheep and owls.