It was a hard job, but somebody had to do it! Over the years I’ve been accumulating defunct items in a corner of the Field. The weeds have overgrown the small heap so it was as if there was nothing there. But I knew the day of reckoning would arrive, and yesterday morning it did. I set to with purpose, to clear the corner of the junk.

The old steel Barn, a tiny barn but a barn nonetheless, that the wind had blown apart. A few abandoned coils of chicken netting. Endless seasons of black mulch that had not entered the recycling chain but only mouldered away. Well, two seasons, it seemed. A derelict fertiliser spreader that hadn’t worked as a gritting device for the icy track. They all got shifted out of the field. The piles of woody hedge trimming remain, awaiting a bit of accelerant and a match.

After I recovered from the labour, I was able to brmm my tractor through another section of the field, attacking the tall dock weeds and the thistles in full bloom, and a whole section of land appeared from under their stalks. Clearing job number two sorted. Good things come in threes, I told myself, so what could I do for a final effort?

Ah ha! Perhaps I could summon up the fortitude to take my beloved laptop to a local computer guy, see if he could fix the flickering screen. My work-around, the connecting of a different monitor (well, in my case a nano-projector and a convenient blank wall) has been getting increasingly laborious. We knocked on our target repairer’s door, laptop clenched in my sweating grip. That was the hardest clearance of all, that handover, but perhaps, perhaps, a fix will materialise.

Our neighbour whose fields surround us, iconic upland hay meadows, has been able to harvest, during this hot spell, and everything is wrapped up in big round bales this year. Their fields have the look of clearance too.

It must be the season!