Tempting the flock home with food

John enjoys a traditional approach.

He is not keen to take advantage of technological advances. I'm the one who likes her mobile phone, PC, laptop, satnav, scanner etc. It does drive me mad when he wants to chase up something on the internet and won't learn how to do it himself, but at the same time, knowledge is power.

Plus he can't check on my eBay account.

Where I wish he would edge a little further into the modern world is in possessing a mobile phone. As it is, he can check up and ring me as I always carry mine, but I can't check up and ring him as he won't have one.

And at times it would be very useful to get hold of him.

For example the other morning he decided to go off with his mates for a round of golf. "Just nine holes", he said. "I won't be long."

I knew he had checked up on the sheep before he left, but as we usually look in on them every hour or so during the day, I wandered over to the field opposite the house, where we turn them out first thing in the morning.

Across the field I spotted a gimmer, one of last year's lambs who had been put to a friend's tup, pawing the ground . From her rear end a water sac hung. Lambing was imminent. Being her first lamb the whole experience was very new and she was very skittish when I approached. I decided to leave her be for half an hour.

Back home in the lambing shed a much older ewe, who had not wanted to go out with the rest of the flock at breakfast time, flopped on to the straw and started to strain.

Out in the field the gimmer rejected my shepherdessing skills, so I collected a bag of sheep nuts and decided I would tempt all the flock home and bring the gimmer with them so both of my maternity cases were in the lambing shed.

Except the gimmer wouldn't come.

The rest of the sheep nearly knocked me over to get at the nuts. She wasn't having any and by now I could see the lambs head protruding from her rear. It was all taking too long, the lamb should have slid out at that stage.

To cut a long story short, by the time John cruised back into the yard I was screaming blue murder about the fact he should get a phone so I could get hold of him and the gimmer's lamb seemed to have got it's foot stuck and wouldn't come and the ewe had a breach lamb coming.

"Calm down. We'll soon have them sorted." And he did. Grrrrrrrrr.