1956 Red Goddess - No socks for this birthday!

Lack of use would indicate a hose split? as such an easy (ish) repair?

so what we talking here, a couple sheets of OSB board slid under and some brave pills ? or borrow some of those road plates they stick over holes in the ground at street road works.

You, my dear sir, are prescient. 3 x 15mm sheets of OSB board stacked on top of each other have been accurately calculated to take the load. The meeting of the Purbeck Society of Shade Tree and Bush Mechanics is now in recess until the next problem. We are still go(ish) for MOT.

The tow vehicle is the one being worked on. We tried to get our heads round that problem last night but the beer won

And in Sheep News today, the headlines :

Mad Vegan Woman Banished with Foul Language (we think)
Revered Shearer Suffers Major Heart Attack
Substitute Shearer Drives the Girls Wild
Mad Mary is for the Chop (maybe)

More on this below from our rural correspondent

Sadly Dave, our beloved old-skool, semi-retired shearer had a massive heart attack in the week before shearing. He's OK now but won't be wrestling 130kg Mule rams for a while. Glenda, our neighbour and local queen of sheep, rang round and managed to snag Dave's son on the following Wednesday but I would be at work

Never mind, SWMBO and Glenda and a few helpers rallied together, no doubt helped by the vision of Dave's son in his singlet. He's a proper shearer by trade and our combined 60+ sheep to him would be a light workout as he can do 400 plus in an eight hour stretch. Many local ladies took the opportunity to exercise their rats on strings (I mean small dogs) during the manly singlet-wearing, bicep-flexing tour-de-force. With small numbers it's almost not worth setting up the equipment, especially at £2.50 a sheep but Glenda can call in the favours. Pro shearers can lose 2 kilos of weight a week in the height of the season so have to eat like horses.

Mad Mary and the Vegan Woman are inextricably intertwined (we think). Have a video clip of the shorn sheep with confused lambs as their mums don't look like their mums any more and they've just got to meet their grannies. The grannies are probably telling the lambs 'stranger danger' as they don't recognise their daughters either.



We had to get the four original Shetlands back t'top field so we could spend a leisurely couple of hours vaccinating and flystriking the lambs and arguing over who's stabbed who with the syringe and whether the flystrike treatment will kill us fast or slow. To do this we needed to separate the two groups (easy) and get the Shetlands into the horsebox (not at all easy). Well blow me down as Mad Mary, the most skittish and wild of the Shetlands, just jumped in the the horsebox and we then spent the next 20 minutes coxing the other three in for a non-fatal, non-chops-on-plate road trip. Just as we are closing the door Mary jumped out and then we spent the next 50 minutes coaxing, baiting, chasing, herding and finally failing to get her back. During the denouement I thought I saw Mad Vegan Woman out of the corner of my eye but at this time I was in full John Cleese - Monty Python rant about the sheep, her antecedents, her decendents and various mutton recipes. Not seen Mad Vegan Woman again. RESULT.

Decided to take just three sheep, only to see as I pulled away, Mary moping at the fence because the other sheep were getting a free ride. She is still not caught and I am trying to get a tranquiliser gun off-ticket!

I know two people who have been on proper training courses, passed, got the certificate and decided never to shear a sheep again.

In the late 1950s, my dad was working for a company called Cooper-Stewart that made agricultural machinery. A chap called Godfrey Bowen, from New Zealand, had developed a technique to use modern mechanical clippers to shear sheep in record time. He embarked on a world tour to demonstrate his revolutionary new method and, when he came to the UK he was sponsored by the main machinery suppliers over here, of which my dad was the representative for his firm. Now, Godfrey was notoriously difficult to get on with and so was my dad. Oddly enough, on that first tour in 1958, they both got on very well, and when Godfrey returned in 1959 he refused to work with anyone except my dad. As a result, dad was the British Wool Board’s first registered sheep shearing instructor, and toured the country with Godfrey almost every year until the early 1970s.

Watching a skilled bloke shear a sheep in under a minute is pretty impressive.

Another day, another mode of transport fails on me

My beloved old-skool Timberlands have become flappy soled clown shoes. The are not the modern Timberland fashion boot cr4p but are 22 year-old work boots and were made before the marketing guys and venture capitalists ever got at the company. They would be like an old but trusty pickup that never failed to start and would carry anything if they were automotive. They have been up mountains, down caves, skiing, walking, dirt biking and to 22 countries and it's about time they had some TLC (i'm a really bad owner). Comfiest boots ever.

The problem



The cleaning solution : abrasive block



One boot done and right hand reduced to an arthritic claw but a particularly fine Marlborough Sauv Blanc will cure that or I won't just care about the pain





Onwards with the other boot and then resoling at a specialist and then my old friends will prolly last long enough for me to be buried in them

They can make great expedition vehicles like this. I'm pretty sure one is used in Iceland for glacier tours.