This us the kind of weather I will not miss when we finally leave the rural isolation of Hutton. To day we inhabit real Flanders and Swann country-Mud, Mud, Inglorious Mud, Nothing quite like it for covering the car, the wellies, the visiting cat, the kitchen floor and not a Hippopotamus in sight-not that you could spot one in the driving rain, the dreich and the giraffe deep mud. In all this the farmers are a major contributor to Global Mudding. Tractors from sodden fields take much acreage with them as they join the roads making the whole surface slimy and slippery-they also have fun forcing little ordinary cars (I hesitate to use 'bog standard car' in this context) onto soft verges where they can sink without trace, only to be discovered when they have to prepare the road side for the Jim Clarke Rally drivers who spend as much time on the verges as they do on the carriageway.

Farmers are obliged to clean up their mess-not just put up warning notices which say 'Mud on Road' a statement of the bleeding obvious to say the least-but somehow they never seem to take advantage of dryer spells to clean up and so it is usually April by the time the mud has been returned to where it came from. On top of this the rural roads are badly drained and merely act as a water escape system from neighbouring fields-so small vehicles which manage to avoid the verges end up under water in the massive puddles or rather muddles.

Someone has suggested that those parts of the UK which used to be marshy should be returned to their original state in the fight against Global Warming as Bogs gobble up the carbon. This is the Merse, Merse for Marsh-drained years ago to make it the excellent farming country it now is.With all this rain and the poor drainage we seem to have around here it would not take long to reverse the process. Looking around the soggy fields, the incipient lakes, the cows up to their elbows in mud I reckon we could do it in about

two days.

And we could coin a new description for local agriculture:

Bog Standard


(The image is courtesy of the Hutton Think Tank-games and vision section. It points out that Duns has its Ba' Game. Perhaps we should take advbantage of local conditions and have our own ' Mud Ba'-Rules are simple. Someone drops a new 25p in a field and everyone else looks for it)

Labels: Hutton Mud Ba', Merse, Mud

  ¶ 10:21 AM