I wonder if you remember the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud’. There’s
certainly a lot of it around here at the moment. There was a slight respite for a while when it was so cold the mud never thawed out, but now we’re back to sloshing and oozing again.
This is one of the differences between the life of a town ‘mouse’ as opposed to that of a country cousin. It makes the point how the weather is more relevant in the country. In London you could travel to work and to shop fairly oblivious of the weather; hermetically sealed in the tube and maybe not take much notice of orange sunsets, rainbows or sun making spider webs sparkle. When the mud stayed frosted the farmers took to muck-spreading the fields, a much less messy job to undertake under those conditions.
For farmers the weather is all important and a vital tool for planning. I always feel that a contractor at harvest time must be a stressful job as everyone wants to book the machinery on the same dry day. But it must be satisfying to plough a field and look back over the shoulder and see a day work set out behind you. That’s a satisfactory sea of mud.
This dog looks as happy as a pig in muck.
