Before getting married and taking on the farm, he told me, he’d been living on benefits. Becoming a farmer was the best thing he’d ever done.
All their produce was organic, his wife added, with a jolly smile. She must have been a couple of decades younger than him. The only thing that made them sad, she said, was having to slaughter the lambs.
They lived in a small cottage, but the adjacent barn was huge. The farmer and his wife took me inside, where it merged imperceptibly with a wood, so that a good deal of wildlife mingled with the farm animals. A plump black cat was sleeping on a bale of hay.
Oddly, the only place to grab a bite to eat was a new McDonald’s on the other side of the wood. The McDonald’s used the slaughtered lambs, the farmer said, to make their burgers on the spot. This was a new marketing strategy, soon to be rolled out nationwide.
I fancied a double cheeseburger.
The farm cat couldn’t have been very efficient, for when I returned to the barn after my meal, I almost stepped onto some new-born mice nestling in the head of a giant wooden spoon. Their mother fled when I bent down to take a closer look, even though I only wanted to make sure they were all right.
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© Ian Seed, 2020