This week I'll be mostly covered in cellophane

"When you wake in the morning,
wake and find you're covered in cellophane"
Banks/Collins/Rutherford 1981

On Sunday we woke up to a world of white outside.  However, unlike the rest of the British Isles, it wasn't snow.  In the space of a day the folks who farm the surrounding fields had got out there, planted the Jersey Royals, and got the covers on sharpish.

I've thought on occasion that I'd quite like to get out there and give them a hand planting up those cotils.  Or even just help getting the plastic sheeting all lined up nice and tidy.  But I could never be a farmer.  On the one hand, I'd love a working environment that depends on the predictability of the seasons, rather than on next quarter's IT budget of whatever financial services institution I'm working for this month.  But the unremitting, incessant, inexorable relentlessness of it!  That would just freak me out.


Take sheep farmers for example.  There's that inevitable period of time where they are spending all hours attending to newly born lambs.  There's a 21 week lead-time before lambing kicks off, and then, what if it's a bitterly cold spring day and it's lashing it down with rain?  There's no putting it off for a day or two until the weather brightens up.  And how many times did we see and hear our next-door neighbours in Petrockstow out getting the maize in through the night because nature had given them 24 hours notice that tomorrow would be too late?  And so potato farming is the same.  There comes a point where planting the spuds must happen today.  And just as surely, there will soon come a time where pulling the spuds back out of the ground must happen today.

I'm quite happy to stay inside and watch.  Or put the camera on the tripod, set a 10 minute delay, and come back later and look at the pictures.  But I could never be a farmer.