A Somerset Lad

I think it was Michael Ramsey, who was Archbishop of Canterbury when that title meant something, who talked about his hopes for eternity and said that he was glad to read in the Bible that there were windows in heaven because he was good at looking out of the window and not very good at praying.

Looking out of the window seems a very profitable way of passing time, although not as good as sitting on a bench overlooking a river or the sea. A lady in her mid-nineties once told me with a sense of perplexity that a friend had told her that they could easily sit on a bench for an hour and watch the time passing. It seemed contrary to the entire Protestant work ethic which had governed her life that anyone would sit willingly and do nothing. I had pondered her comment and admitted that I could probably do so myself, that sitting in thought for an hour would not seem such a bad thing.

Doing nothing seems to have become increasingly difficult for people.  Boredom thresholds have shortened to a few seconds. Watch young people at a bus stop, watch them when them at break times at school, watch them when the bell rings for the end of lessons: immediately they turn to their phones. The addiction to electronic media is such that silent thought has become a rarity.

Perhaps it is not important. I spent countless hours in thought when I was young; hours spent looking out the window towards the Mendip Hills; hours spent staring into an undefined middle distance in the house; hours pondering nothing at all in the garden; and all of those hours produced nothing, except for a capacity for tolerating boredom.

Perhaps, though, there are some people whose loss of a capacity to sit in silent thought is a loss for all of us. People who have the capacity to be original, to be creative, to be incisive, to be subversive, will have thoughts to offer to everyone, yet if they never spend time in developing those thoughts, then it is to the detriment of all of us.

It is astonishing now to consider the universities of medieval times, when books and writing materials were rare and precious commodities, and to think of how much time was spent in listening and in thought. Committing material to memory, examining it in your mind, formulating arguments on the basis of what had been heard and what had been thought, must have been a demanding exercise, one which would be beyond the capacity of most of us today.

Our capacity to think perhaps depends upon our capacity to do nothing. If we can’t sit in silence, how much are we losing?

Vintage tractors assembled for a fair at the foot of Turn Hill yesterday. Passing through before most had arrived was good fortune; later, and there would have been slow moving vehicles to follow for miles. The tractors were familiar: the Massey Fergusons and the Fordsons; the David Browns and the Nuffields; the John Deeres and the Internationals. While the skies were grey, it was a mild day, and the drivers of the tractors journeying to the fair preferred short coats or jackets to anything that might have been waterproof.

It was always a mystery that up until the 1960s, tractors generally had no cab. Motor cars were enclosed from the 1920s onward, but it was not considered necessary to protect tractor drivers against the elements. Sitting behind the steering wheel of a Ferguson  35, or similar, a shower of rain lasting a few minutes would be sufficient to leave you cold, and very wet.

Being wet seemed a frequent experience in farming life. My grandfather’s farmyard didn’t offer much shelter on rainy days; while going through the daily work, if you wanted to stay dry, it was a case of dodging from the cowstalls to the barns to the pigstys. My grandfather was not a man for rushing around and would have gone around the farm with a steady tread. Work was done in a methodical way, no matter how inclement the day, there was work to be finished.

If farming is a vocation, then a preparedness to work in all conditions seems a part of that vocation. At times when many others wil have sought refuge from the rain, or suspended work for the day, there are farmers who work on, regardless of how cold or wet, or even miserable, they may feel.

In memories, much of the farmyard degenerated into mud for much of the winter. It was not a pleasant working environment, but my grandfather seemed unaffected by it. Dressed in combinations, thick woollen socks, corduroy trousers, flannel shirt and v-necked pullover, he would pull an old coat around him, pull his flat cap firmly onto his head, step into his Wellingtons, and head out to face the waiting tasks.

The bright and shiny tractors that appear at vintage fairs often contrast with the appearance of those who drive them – people with weathered faces, large-handed people with sandpaper skin that bears the scars of many days’ work. The fairs tell only a mechanical side of the story.