Earthy language

Dinner was fish and chips at the Magpie in Whitby, sitting by the window watching the pastel coloured houses climb the cliffs up to the castle. Both Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker ,who stayed in the Royal Hotel on the western side of Whitby while he was writing Dracula ,has made this something of a haven for Goths. Goths and charabangs of pensioners. What a great combination.



I had another great combination - A crab and prawn starter, brown bread and butter, mushy peas on the side and cinder toffee ice cream for pudding, I could hardly move afterwards.



Tim had to be up at 4.30am to pick up the fabled bucket of blood from the abattoir, but I didn’t have to be downstairs until ‘first job’ which was when Peter the shepherd was taking his rams over to the yews.



He came into the kitchen while I was having my tea.



‘Ahm odff weth them toups noo,' he said.



‘Are you ready then Marion?’ When Tim says my name it seems to have even more consonants than it usually does. We jumped into the Range Rover and drove over to West Blandsby Farm where Peter was already standing like a senitel in the field with his little sheepdog Kep at his feet, watching the sheep, exactly like the day before. As though they were going to do something interesting, like a handstand.



Three tups were jossling through a flock of over 100 yews – a Dorset, a Charolet and a Taxil. He had spread some sort of bright red dye on the chest of the tups who when they ‘covered’ the ewes, left some of the residue on their backs. The pink flanked ewes were the lucky ones. Not that they seemed to think they were that privileged, seeming not to think much of the Tups one minute wonder, before tugging themselves away with not even a backward glance, suffering the attentions like a wife with a headache who thinks the ceiling needs decorating, then going back to the much more serious business of eating grass.



I asked about black lambs.



I don’t like ‘em, said Peter. Thee dun’t match. He likes his flocks to look uniform and a black sheep just stands out, spoils the aesthetic.



As sex shows go it was pretty tame. I felt like the sheepdog, and would quite happily have laid my head on my paws and gone to sleep. I mean if you’ve seen one sheep jump on the back of another once, you’ve pretty much seen it all.



We got back in the car and drove up the hill to the pigs. This is where they keep their breeding stock – a mixture of Tamworths (the ginger one) Gloucester Old Spot, Saddlebacks, English Whites and one whose ears fell over it’s eyes like it was playing peek-a-bow with itself so it couldn’t see a damn thing it was doing (those were the muddiest ones)



A big boar was limping round the field, its eyes like slits, looking vaguely sinister, as though it had spent most of its life under a stone and just been turned out.



‘This is the shagging bit here,’ says Tim.



He’s been working for about a week and he’s worn out – probably slipped a disk, made himself lame. They’ve got to be strong these pigs. Whereas a sheep can be on for only about a minute, a pig can standing for an hour. The sow’s got to support him for that time.’



Poor sow.



We wandered round the field. Sows in various stages of pregnancy lived in communal Nissan huts (the shagging pens) and then the ones who are about to give birth get their own green tents, like a scout camp.



‘This is like the delivery room,’ says Kevin the Pig Man.



The pigs stay with their mother until they are about 6 weeks only and then they go off to be fattened. The best are kept as breeding stock. So you fuck or your fry.



The cows are kept at yet another farm, this one near to Scarborough. The herd is aver a hundred strong, The biggest Longhorn herd in Britain. Tim says that all traditional British cows are bred from oxen and you can see It in the shoulders. They are real Desperate Dan type cows with their curled horns, some a bit skew whiff, pointing hither and thither, the more pointed the more dangerous as they stab the other cows in an effort to knock them out of the way, and jab them in the rear.



A big bull – Dynamo - stands in the middle of the herd. He’s the daddy. No, really he's the daddy. All the calves in the field are his. And so are the heifers. ‘You don’t get too close in case he thinks you are after his ladies,’ says Tim. I make sure to keep a Tim or a Sarah between me and the cows at all times.



In a nearby field there are two herds separated only by a slim electric fence. One of the bulls is standing right up beside it glaring at the bull in the other field, bellowing at the top of his voice in a threatening way.



‘Oh he’s singing,’ says Michael the cowman at East Moor Farm . ‘E never shuts up.’



Tim isn’t sure he would have the confidence to put the two of them so close together – bulls love to fight. They both look like football players, American football players with their padded shoulders. I’m quite pleased when we drive out of the field. I mean, it’s all rather charming this macho, hoof stamping, rage but you’re never sure they won’t mistake the big black Range Rover for a rival.



Animal farm - it’s like a weekend in Ibiza on a club 18-30 holiday. Give the cows a soccer shirt and the sheep a short skirt, and you’re only a couple of tequila shots away from a wet t-shirt contest.



‘Oh yes,’ says Tim. ‘It’s all about sex, farming. No room for being squeamish.’



‘By the way Steve, did you get that bull’s dick back from the abattoir?’ He asks.



‘I believe the term is a pizzle,’ says Steve.



‘Aye well. I like to call a dick a dick. Them boys down at the abbatoir. You have to have a strong stomach to go down there of a morning?’ says Tim



‘Why, is it because of all the killing, the gore, the buckets of blood?’ I wonder



‘No it’s their language. Every second word is an f word.’