- Location
- Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Like everyone else, I’m so very sad to hear of the passing of both National treasure Terry Wogan, and local icon, Tony Beard. I’d seen the ‘Wag’, as the latter was known, quite recently at a social, where we’d had a good chat. I knew he’d been unwell, but found him chipper, on the ball, and as good a company as ever. Our chat ranged across a smorgasbord of unlikely topics, and I assure you he had a keen eye, and was a more acute observer than his easy ambivalence might imply. His knowledge of the countryside around him, and everything in it, was encyclopaedic, and rightly legendary. Dartmoor is poorer for his leaving us.
And as for Terry Wogan, who seemed to have been whiffling away on the radio all my life, it was only comparatively late in the day that I’d ‘tuned in’ to the fuller extent of his humour. I suppose I just hadn’t been paying attention, as he rabbited away about fighting the fat, and pulling the Eurovision leg. Then one day I happened to hear one of those nonsense stories about ‘Janet and John’……and the penny dropped. And oh my goodness, once you’d picked up the thread, you were left alternatively wandering how on earth he got away with it….and guffawing out loud. To be fair, poor Terry couldn’t always get to the end of those innocent little tales without losing it himself. Bless him.
I shall miss both of them, each for his own special intrinsic value.
Onwards then. I see that twit Donald Trump has suffered a bit of a setback, so there might be hope yet. Mind, I wasn’t overly impressed with the competition either. The whole Trump business does scare me generally, making me begin to wonder if giving everyone the vote is the right thing after all.
And I suppose we’re not much better, given that we’ve got a PM governing us from a position of fabulous privilege, who gives every appearance of handing out the goodies to his Eton and Oxbridge chums, and a leader of the opposition who just got out of a time machine from 1975…. Or possibly 1920. In fairness, I’ll allow that the PM seems to be a pretty smart cookie, and his background shouldn’t matter, and that poor old Jeremy Corvid earnestly believes a tried and tested ideology, his only real flaw being a failure to notice that his ideals were indeed tested extensively in the previous century….and inevitably crashed hideously.
Still, imagine the fun and games in a world where the ‘special relationship’ across the Atlantic had to be fostered by President Trump, and Prime Minister Corbyn!
It’s always refreshing to know I’m occasionally irritating people in this column. And I seem to have last week, explaining why I’m feeling a bit skint. On the one hand, I’m apparently one of those whingy farmers, who shouldn’t be receiving subsidies when all we do is force feed our baby calves with ground up dolphins, and genetically modify wheat plants to grow teeth and legs, and aggressively prowl the countryside looking for vegetarians on which to feast. And we certainly shouldn’t complain when these subsidies look like turning up 6 months late.
And then on the other hand, someone else reckons I can’t be representative, seeing as I’ve got a tax bill to pay, don’t run on an overdraft, and have other income streams….. and presumably because I don’t get up in the morning seeing myself as a victim.
Anyway, now I’ve run out of the space where I was going to admit that I don’t understand the underlying physics behind heat exchange pumps, and whether they’re some kind of sleight of hand. Groundscource-or whatever it’s called- I can get my head around, but using electricity to squidge up the warmth you can take out of the ground…hmmm. The real problem is that there’s so much which interests me, and so little time to explore it all. I’ll look into it when I get a minute and get back to you.
Nor have I got my head round the Zika virus. Why was it first isolated in 1947, but the birth defect problem only just been noticed? And why has it escalated suddenly? The Yanks have got one case, and have announced that it might, for good measure, now be sexually transmitted. Mind you, that brings us back to Donald Trump….I wander what he’ll ban.
And what on earth is the poor old Pope going to do about it? He’s going to be in a corner over Zika, with the Vatican’s accustomed party line looking pretty out of kilter. Given how many countries affected are in his fold, this could be a real test for Catholicism. Hmm.
About the author
Originally published in The Western Morning News, these articles are reproduced for the enjoyment of TFF members World-wide by kind permission of the author Anton Coaker and the WMN
Anton Coaker is a fifth generation farmer keeping suckler cows and flocks of hill sheep high on the Forest of Dartmoor and running a hardwood and mobile sawmill.
A prodigious writer and regular correspondent for The Western Morning News, NFU and The Farming Forum, Anton’s second book “The Complete Bullocks” is available from www.anton-coaker.co.uk
And as for Terry Wogan, who seemed to have been whiffling away on the radio all my life, it was only comparatively late in the day that I’d ‘tuned in’ to the fuller extent of his humour. I suppose I just hadn’t been paying attention, as he rabbited away about fighting the fat, and pulling the Eurovision leg. Then one day I happened to hear one of those nonsense stories about ‘Janet and John’……and the penny dropped. And oh my goodness, once you’d picked up the thread, you were left alternatively wandering how on earth he got away with it….and guffawing out loud. To be fair, poor Terry couldn’t always get to the end of those innocent little tales without losing it himself. Bless him.
I shall miss both of them, each for his own special intrinsic value.
Onwards then. I see that twit Donald Trump has suffered a bit of a setback, so there might be hope yet. Mind, I wasn’t overly impressed with the competition either. The whole Trump business does scare me generally, making me begin to wonder if giving everyone the vote is the right thing after all.
And I suppose we’re not much better, given that we’ve got a PM governing us from a position of fabulous privilege, who gives every appearance of handing out the goodies to his Eton and Oxbridge chums, and a leader of the opposition who just got out of a time machine from 1975…. Or possibly 1920. In fairness, I’ll allow that the PM seems to be a pretty smart cookie, and his background shouldn’t matter, and that poor old Jeremy Corvid earnestly believes a tried and tested ideology, his only real flaw being a failure to notice that his ideals were indeed tested extensively in the previous century….and inevitably crashed hideously.
Still, imagine the fun and games in a world where the ‘special relationship’ across the Atlantic had to be fostered by President Trump, and Prime Minister Corbyn!
It’s always refreshing to know I’m occasionally irritating people in this column. And I seem to have last week, explaining why I’m feeling a bit skint. On the one hand, I’m apparently one of those whingy farmers, who shouldn’t be receiving subsidies when all we do is force feed our baby calves with ground up dolphins, and genetically modify wheat plants to grow teeth and legs, and aggressively prowl the countryside looking for vegetarians on which to feast. And we certainly shouldn’t complain when these subsidies look like turning up 6 months late.
And then on the other hand, someone else reckons I can’t be representative, seeing as I’ve got a tax bill to pay, don’t run on an overdraft, and have other income streams….. and presumably because I don’t get up in the morning seeing myself as a victim.
Anyway, now I’ve run out of the space where I was going to admit that I don’t understand the underlying physics behind heat exchange pumps, and whether they’re some kind of sleight of hand. Groundscource-or whatever it’s called- I can get my head around, but using electricity to squidge up the warmth you can take out of the ground…hmmm. The real problem is that there’s so much which interests me, and so little time to explore it all. I’ll look into it when I get a minute and get back to you.
Nor have I got my head round the Zika virus. Why was it first isolated in 1947, but the birth defect problem only just been noticed? And why has it escalated suddenly? The Yanks have got one case, and have announced that it might, for good measure, now be sexually transmitted. Mind you, that brings us back to Donald Trump….I wander what he’ll ban.
And what on earth is the poor old Pope going to do about it? He’s going to be in a corner over Zika, with the Vatican’s accustomed party line looking pretty out of kilter. Given how many countries affected are in his fold, this could be a real test for Catholicism. Hmm.
About the author
Originally published in The Western Morning News, these articles are reproduced for the enjoyment of TFF members World-wide by kind permission of the author Anton Coaker and the WMN
Anton Coaker is a fifth generation farmer keeping suckler cows and flocks of hill sheep high on the Forest of Dartmoor and running a hardwood and mobile sawmill.
A prodigious writer and regular correspondent for The Western Morning News, NFU and The Farming Forum, Anton’s second book “The Complete Bullocks” is available from www.anton-coaker.co.uk