I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.
I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears.
I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.
For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.
If I had been a little dog I’d have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.
I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.
And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.
I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can’t remember what happened a couple of days ago.
There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn’t fall, I started to consider retiring.
If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn’t care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
I will write another book if I feel like it.
They can’t find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.
When all t’world goes one road, I go t’other.
She’s out, Jim! The bugger’s out!” Well this was great. Anybody who has driven a car with a hysterical cat hurtling around the interior will appreciate my situation.
It was to a moribund horse, and Mr. Sidlow, describing the treatment to date, announced that he had been pushing raw onions up the horse’s rectum; he couldn’t understand why it was so uneasy on its legs. Siegfried had pointed out that if he were to insert a raw onion in Mr. Sidlow’s rectum, he, Mr. Sidlow, would undoubtedly be uneasy on his legs.
Why had I entered this profession? I could have gone in for something easier and gentler – like coalmining or lumberjacking.
He devoted a considerable amount of his acute intelligence to the cause of doing as little as possible.
And I could find other excuses to get out and sit on the crisp grass and look out over the airy roof of Yorkshire. It was like taking time out of life. Time to get things into perspective and assess my progress.
You don’t find cows with names any more and there aren’t any farmers like Mr. Dakin, who somehow scratched a living from a herd of six milkers plus a few calves, pigs and hens.
He was polishing the glass with a dead hen.