THE GOOD OLD DAYS
I managed to get the barn patched up and oiled just in time for the start of lambing. As I was sloshing on the black oil, it took me back to when we moved here in the Seventies.
Winter work
Tidying up farm buildings would have been a regular thing on most farms in the area over winter. Back then, all farms around here, and I suppose all over in rural areas, whether large or small, had some all-year-round permanent workers on the books. Most of the year they would have been kept busy with farm work, but in the slack months over winter, they found other work to do around the farm.
When the land work dried up in the “back end” and the wet weather set in, usually the first job would be to carry out any repairs to farm machinery that had cropped over the year and busy harvest time. Then next, do the overdue servicing, oil changes and oil leaks that all tractors get.
This was in the time just before the manufacturers cottoned on that if they computerised everything, their machinery could not be worked on by chaps on the farm. This
