Scenes From Rural Life

How many feet attached to how many legs

shall I use for my shopping trip today?

Two legs good, three legs even better ?

Hi sheep!

What do you think?

Can you give me some advice?

I suppose having four legs makes the question irrelevant for you?

Baaa!

Protect your lambs against cold and predators.

Young broom or good pasture thy ewes do require

Warm barn and in safety their lambs do desire.

Look often well to them, for foxes and dogs

For pits and for brambles, for vermin and hogs.

Tusser: Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 1573.

Let's buy some eggs first. 

Fresh eggs, laid by genuinely free-rage hens wandering about in the farmyard.

Cow pat and straw still attached.

Money in the bag and on we go.

All week the shoot has been busy in the hills and fields around Valley's End.

The season is about to come to an end, so perhaps

we'll bag a brace or two for the freezer.

There's never any need for a stalking horse, behind whose shoulders the gun

must shelter. Pheasants round here are bred in enclosures, well-fed and fat, and

released for the shoot.

They are almost tame, too lazy to fly up until the beaters stumble over them.

Not much sport in that.

The blackbird in my garden is better off.

Seeds and nuts, fat and apples, supplied on demand, and no guns allowed.

It won't be long before the big males like this one, 

start chasing younger males and females 

to expel the males and impress the females. 

Napoleon has started already.

Laundry service?

Unlikely.

Or Taxi Service?

Quite likely eventually.

In the country, everything is mended and re-used.