training day

Today I spent most of my time putting up an electric fence. Although in the morning I did cultivate some land for a friend in the village who has just had an operation. The cultivator he has is similar to mine but gives much more of the feeling of hanging on to the tail; of an enraged kangaroo. I’ve seen horse ploughing in the past and that looks much more fun but I suppose takes a great deal more skill. The locals laugh at me in my steel toe capped boots, it’s much more macho it seems to put your toes at risk. Was it the Pog who was happier without his toes? Anyway I would like to keep mine.
This reminds me of a story years ago in another Hungarian village when someone I knew cut off one of his fingers in a circular saw, (never drink when operating machinery). They took him to the local hospital and the doctors asked if he still had the finger in case they could reattach it. His father said “no, I threw it to a chicken”. When he told me about this a few days later in the pub I made sympathetic noises to which he said, “it doesn’t matter, I got my own back”, what do you mean, I asked? He replied “I ate the chicken”.
The electric fence is to endeavour to keep the dogs from the chickens and goats and the goats and the dogs from the poly tunnel. I bought it from someone I know through another person. This chap lives in what, maybe a hundred years ago, would have been a farm but is now a tumble down farmhouse with a yard and a pocket hankerchief patch of scrubby trees in a forgotten corner of Rochdale. Of course I never got round to testing it and naturally when the fence had gone up it didn’t work, however, when I cleaned up the contacts it started to make a reassuring ticking noise. At this point Bonzo, the smaller of the two dogs who resembles a black pan scrub decided that it would be fun to bite this new toy, it wasn’t!, but at least I know that the unit works. Tomorrow’s goat training, should be fun.