Lush Places was the hottest place in the country last Sunday. It was 33°C at 2pm. We had had a week of stupidly hot temperatures which resulted in stupidly hot temperaments. Or it would have if it wasn’t too hot to swear and kick things.
It’s so dry that the poplars are already shedding their leaves. Poplars are not silly. Dropping leaves is the tree equivalent of a dog panting. Shedding your leaves cools you down, if you are a tree. If I had leaves to shed, I’d be shedding them, too.
The gravel garden, which planted itself, has never needed watering before. It’s not actually even a garden and was never planned to be. It is self-seeded aquilegia, lychnis, sea holly, love-in-a-mist, euphorbia, golden sedum and creeping thyme. And verbena bonariensis, which is known in these parts as V brontosaurus because it is a beast of a thing and romps about the place with wilful abandon.
You can’t stop it doing what it wants, which is to plant itself wherever it wants, which is everywhere. I don’t mind. I admire its promiscuousness. It is a right tart of a thing. It is not low-maintenance; it is no-maintenance. I have never had to water a V brontosaurus. I do now.
We spent all of winter moaning about mud. What we’d give to see a mud puddle now. A jockey once told me that fasting left him so dehydrated that he’d look at a mud puddle and fantasise about getting down on his hands and knees and lapping it up.
Now it’s so dry that the idea of a mud puddle to lap out of, like a jockey, seems a perfectly reasonable sort of fantasy to entertain.
There are fantasies and then there is madness. Mark Zuckerberg’s latest business venture is cows. It is unknown whether he has plans to set up a new social media platform called Moo-book. He’d have to develop really big keyboards for the cows to use because those hooves aren’t dainty little digits now, are they? It is rumoured that he is installing an underground bunker on the ranch. This might come in handy for confining a billionaire cattle keeper who has gone around the twist and is designing keyboards for cows.
Zuckerberg is feeding his cows a particular and peculiar diet of macadamia nuts and beer. Presumably, the beer is not Budweiser, the US equivalent of DB Brown, but some poncy and pricey craft beer.
Do cows like, or thrive on, fancy nuts and fancy beer? You would have to be nuts to feed your livestock nuts, wouldn’t you? Ahem. I may have been known to feed our pet sheep cashew nuts. Miles the sheep farmer’s wife, Janet, once said: “Why don’t you feed them peanuts?” I got the point. Peanuts are, by some way, cheaper than cashews. But what if the sheep had a peanut allergy? I wasn’t about to risk it. When Elizabeth Jane, my bottle-raised lamb, was very young, I once caught her sipping at the gin and tonic I had taken out to the garden as an encouragement to myself to do some weeding.
We also feed the sheep plums. They love a plum and it is amusing to look at them with plum juice smeared over their faces. They look like drunk ladies who have haphazardly applied red lipstick. When we were running a lamb daycare for Jimmy River, our friend Charlotte the milkmaid’s rescued lamb, we discovered he had a liking for olives.
He would delicately spit out the pips. He was also partial to a drop of rosé. On special occasions, he was allowed a chocolate-covered almond. He was a very sophisticated chap. If he had been a person, he would have been a suave crooner in a bow tie and a white linen suit from the 1940s, like Charlotte’s late dad, Grant Chilcott.
Is it mad to feed sheep cashew nuts and gin and tonics? If anyone is looking for me, I’ll be locked in that underground bunker.
