Mrs Down's Diary July 30 2008

Over the entire week only two salmon and one sea trout were caught by 11 fishermen. All the old excuses. No water. Too hot. No rain. I've heard them all.

The most obvious outcome of my week of being in charge, John says, is the speed with which the ducks and geese zoom into their huts at night.

I had to admit eventually to the bribe of a large bowl of rolled barley in the hut as an incentive for them to go to bed when I wanted them to. This has now been authorised as official policy.

The heifer which was bagging up prior to John going away, waited until the afternoon he came home to give birth to her calf.

As it turned out she needed a pull so it was fortuitous that John was around. The calf is a beautiful soft grey colour, quite unusual and must be a throw back somewhere as the bull is a brown Limousin and she is a black Aberdeen Angus.

The heifer is a most solicitous mum. From the start she licked her calf vigorously and then let it feed with no problem at all. She is extremely gentle with it. In a day or two she will go out with the rest of the herd and her future as a suckler cow is now assured. Lucky girl.

We are currently enjoying a surfeit of field mushrooms. They are delicious.

Many years ago we took some racehorses in for respite care. They grazed over several fields, resting at the end of the racing season.

Nasty bad-tempered things they were too. Any attempts to stroke or get close to them was met with a nasty nip and a pair of flailing back hooves.

They were beautiful creatures but we were both glad to see the back of them as they made walking across the fields a nightmare. But their legacy has been some super crops of mushrooms, kickstarted, aptly, by their manure.

The memory of the racehorses has reminded me of a seaside donkey that we homed for the winter.

This was before we had Jo's horse Rupert, and we thought a donkey might just stave off the evil day that we would have to provide a pony for her.

The donkey arrived in the back of a small lorry. Part of a consignment of seaside donkeys being literally farmed out for the winter.

She trotted docilely behind her owner, saddle still on, ready to go. For approximately two days she let Jo ride her round the paddock at the back of the house.

Submissive and gentle she seemed everything we needed to satisfy a seven-year-old's ambitions to ride. Then the tranquillisers wore off.

Or that's what it seemed like. The donkey suddenly appeared to appreciate that she had the upper hand here and that the day to day routine of trawling up and down a beach had disappeared.

Her main aim in life was then to unseat Jo. She was uncontrollable and her favourite trick was to canter under the low branches of the trees in the paddock and sweep Jo off her back.

Several months later we waited for her owner to collect her for the start of the donkey riding season.

He did not reply to phone calls and the donkey responded to her new life of ease by getting fatter and fatter and producing the most adorable foal. Feelings were very mixed when they were collected.

This feature was first published in the West Sussex Gazette July 30