A sideways look at fifty years of farming.
Seen through the cloudy and cracked mirror of retrospection, our lives are more journeying through relationships than places, through happenings not histories, more what took place on the train than the destination.
More poetry than prose.
My journey through late twentieth century farming, from suburban austerity dominated Nottingham, through post-colonial Africa to present day Dartmoor and the French Pyrenees was both eggshell strewn and diamond blessed.
Time widens the cracks and beneath the bravado lies a fear that the giants and dwarfs of my journey might slip away like salt through dry fingers.
To the giants go the first falling snowflakes from a black December sky, the red African sinking Kalahari sun, the husky welcoming bleat of a new-born lamb, the joy filled leap of brown river trout and the smoking winter luxury of wood warmed houses.
To the dwarfs.
mostly we passed unknowingly like boats on a dark sea.
Vanguard Press Under the rope, paperback/clive venables
