…that the grab arm lorry was coming to collect all the hay. We’d been told they would be coming first thing and so we were up and out at first light, raking, rowing, bagging and transporting as much hay as we could from the second meadow to a big pile that we were formimg at the gate between the fields so that the lorry didn’t have to drive into the second field and potentially compress the ground. When you have started at 6.30am before breakfast, by the time it got to 8am when they were due, I found myself hoping they’d jolly well arrive so that I could stop.

But they didn’t arrive and so we had to go on and on until it felt like we’d been raking up hay our whole lives.

We rang them at ten to learn that, on their way to us, they’d gone under a railway bridge in Sutton and got stuck but had also knocked the bridge and so the trains had had to be stopped. Just thinking about all the disruption to all those people because we wanted our hay shifted was a most uncomfortable thought.

So, they never arrived. And further information on this bridge incident plus more on why it is now alright to compost this stuff even though it almost certainly contains the seeds of ‘injurious weeds’  will have to wait until next week when they are due to come again.