James, Herbie and the Tractor.

Sounds like a children's story.

Another uneventful day's ragworting, again with Herbie providing a respite to the tedium and some entertainment with his tractor. This guy can talk for England (well, the south west, don't know if he'd be understood too far north) and parked his tractor up by us for a chat/moan about the farm. To sum up: he's been working it for 20 years, the land is slipping downhill, his tractor's shit, there's a tramp who lives in the forest at the bottom who smells of piss, and his wife once gave him a sandwich.

We tried to get him to stop talking, but he kept on. Probably nice to have someone to talk to on the farm, looked a bit lonely.

He then proceeded to "cut down" the remaining ragwort, thus rendering the last few days of work we'd done as completely useless. I say "cut down" because the attachment he had on the back of the tractor could only cut about 15cm from the ground, meaning that it missed a load of ragwort and made some of it just bend over. Not too sure if he's helped or hindered, really, though I guess it will stop much of it having the chance to go to seed. At one point he rode over a plastic bag, shredding it into thousands of bits and getting it stuck on the blade, so for the next 5 minutes he drove about sounding like a tank as the plastic shot round and round. It was hard to keep from laughing.

After ragging I had a short nap, then Tom came over to mine to head into town to see a band at the Porter with Charlie and James. Turned out that they were from Galicia, in northern Spain, and with my dutch courage I talked to them in Spanish which was fun. Good music too, but I can't remember or find what they were called...