Lambing leaves a trail of straw to the bedroom

Nothing racy, it's just that it's lambing time again and the midnight and three 'clock wake-up call, demands track suits for John, and fleecy pyjamas for me, as required night time gear in the lambing shed.

The straw trail does stop short of actually the bed's interior, but it gets very close at times.

Our lambing set up is not nearly so well lit as the recent week long programme on lambing that seemed to enthrall, and educate, nearly everyone I know.

Suddenly everyone is an expert. Know much more about the job than we do. Just wish they were there with us in the middle of the night.

There have been the usual mix of tragedies and triumphs. Not getting there fast enough to clear the birth sac from a lambs nose so that you lose them just after they have been born.

A ewe trampling her lamb to death in a frantic effort to guard her triplets from an inquisitive Pip, our young Labrador, who had jumped over the stack bars and got into the lambing area. Our fault and it won't happen again. We hope.

And sorting out which lamb belongs to which Mum when two ewes lamb next to each other in the lambing shed and both want to claim all of the lambs born.

Plus there is usually another ewe close to lambing who thinks she has a say in the matter as well.

Sorting out that problem comes close in complexity to the story told me by a friend whose late father was a jigsaw addict. On the wall of his study hangs a huge jigsaw, of eight thousand pieces, which he completed to celebrate the millennium.

Starting in a bottom corner, historical events are portrayed in pictorial format (well you wouldn't expect an essay would you) until the grand finale of the number two thousand stretching across the centre of the jigsaw.

The piece is mounted in a wooden frame, an exercise of some delicacy given that the completed jigsaw, on it's board, had at one stage to be completely turned over for adhesive to go on the back, and then reversed to stick in the frame. It was done in one go.

But the real test came when, after a month's work on the jigsaw with his close friend and neighbour, Mr Sherburn realised that there were five pieces missing.

My friend Sheila contacted the jigsaw manufacturers in Germany. After some disbelief and querying whether the five pieces were down the back of a sofa, they offered two smaller jigsaws, of four thousand pieces each, as recompense.

No, Sheila insisted, we want the five missing pieces. OK they finally agreed, they'll be in the post.

And so they were. Hidden amongst seven thousand, nine hundred, and ninety five other pieces.

It took another month to find them.