Harvest time

The most exciting thing that has happened to me this entire summer is that I learnt to drive a tractor yesterday. A tractor! And we got to ride on the trailer as it was towed through the farm to pick up the next load of straw.

The reason for this was that K and I went wwoofing at Fen End Farm. I had emailed Ken (the farmer) earlier in the week to ask if Saturday would be a good day, his reply was 'we will probably be stacking straw in the barn. Help is always appreciated'. He certainly wasn't joking.

When I close my eyes today, this is more or less what I see.

When I was a child, I used to sometimes play in barns of straw, making wendy houses and dens out of bales. By the end of yesterday we had shifted somewhere in the region of 400 bales of straw and stored them in the barn, scrambling up and down the 'steps' made by stacked bales to haul straw right to the roof. Not a job for anyone with fear of heights or a predisposition to hay fever, or indeed an allergy towards bloody hard work. Ken told us that each bale weighs about 25kg, so that makes a grand total of 10 tonnes of straw that passed through our hands. Even allowing that each person didn't lift every single bale, I still reckon that I personally picked up, carried, stacked and generally flung around 8 tonnes of straw. We were still out working on the fields at 9pm, trying to bear the rain forecast for today. I watched the astonishing beauty that can transform even the most ordinary landscape as the red glow of the set sun faded from the sky and an ethereal dusky mist spread over the fens, and yet must confess that by that point I was thinking only of a cold beer and and a hot shower. Muscles are complaining this morning that I didn't know I had - I don't actually think I've ever worked so much that the muscles in my hands ached. This was with a tractor to carry the bales, one machine to bale them, and another to pick them up from the field and stack them on the trailer. I've said it before and I'll say it again, who needs a gym? Particularly since gyms don't tend to include tractor-driving lessons.

I suppose some people would say that gyms leave you with slightly fewer scratches and bruises, neither do they contain quite such a risk of plummeting from a great height from the top of a great stack of straw while struggling to wedge a bale into position in the eves of a barn. Yet however much money I spent, I don't think I could get any more satisfaction than I did from watching skylarks rise over the field as we were bumped and jostled us over a field of stubble in the late afternoon sun.