BBC4 are showing re-runs of Top of the Pops every Friday night and the current episodes are from April 1989.
Music is a fantastic vehicle for bringing back memories, and when they showed Paula Abdul performing her song Straight Up, it immediately took me back to being 11 years old and in the tractor seat of a John Deere 1640.
That was the Easter holidays when I was ‘promoted’ to grubbing and rolling, and with the DJs at Radio 1 blaring out hits from Paula, Guns and Roses and Lisa Stansfield, life was good.
There was nowhere else I would have rather been than on a tractor seat.
I’m glad to say I still get the same excitement at this time of year.
Now, I know we have a long way to go until the grass is green and the stoor is blowing, but as I write this that big shiny ball thingy in the sky has appeared, the birds have started to sing in the mornings and we had our first spring calf yesterday.
March can be a volatile month weather-wise with Mother Nature not knowing if she’s coming or going and conditions can change within days.
It can be a blizzard one day then a week later it’s 14 degrees and then some mate from the Moray coast posts a picture showing them sowing barley on Facebook.
All of a sudden there’s a mad panic with dung, lime and fertiliser to spread, ploughing to finish, repairs to the cultivator to be done and trying to remember where the rollers were left last year.
It’s total chaos but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There is also the small matter of the lambing shed to organise, a situation usually triggered with an early lamb appearing in the field reminding me that the tup escaped for a few hours back in October.
Back in the days when we grew tatties, my mother would love it when the first ewe lambed as it gave her leave from the mundane job of “picking off” at the tattie dresser.
Dad would come and tell her he was needing a hand to catch some demented Cheviot, and you could see the joy in her face.
It was a bit like that scene at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman when Richard Gere walks into the factory to carry Debra Winger away in his arms. Dad didn’t carry Mum out, but he did whisk her away in the tractor towing the livestock trailer en route to rescue the soon mum-to-be sheep.
Who said romance was dead?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the first signs of spring stir something in every farmer – it’s the light at the end of the tunnel.
There is a fantastic episode in the BBC’s This Farming Life where Shetland’s Aimee Budge waxes lyrical about the onset of spring.
In Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel Sunset Song Mearns farmer Ewen Tavendale is shot for desertion after a spring day in the trenches made him walk off the battlefield longing for the smell of the dung in the parks and the cry of the peewit.
So I wish all you fellow fermers a happy and prosperous spring, safe in the knowledge that a few short weeks from now I will be sitting on a tractor seat happy as Larry with only a few seagulls for company.
However, thanks to the magic of Spotify, I will have Paula Abdul too.
Tickets are still available for Jim Smith’s last Back to the Teuchter comedy show in Glasgow on Friday March 27. Details can be found on the Glasgow Comedy Festival website.
