It must be one of the most-used excuses trotted out by everyone from the excuse-laden executive to the timorous teaboy.
"I got behind a tractor!"
Well, expect more of it in the next few weeks.
You'll have noticed from the straw in the road that farmers have already begun their cereal harvest. A couple of fields have yielded to the combine already and straw bales are now being carted from field to barn. Don't blame the farmer if you get behind one - he's on his way to work, too!
Just a week ago a couple of fields of spuds at Downholland Cross were being picked. Now the field is tilled again, ready for the next crop. In the meanwhile, gulls are enjoying combing the broken soil for whatever they can find.
A field nearby has seen a growing team turning up to take curly lettuce that have rounded up nicely in all this warm and wet weather we have been having.
I'm pleased to have seen a couple of fields of oats roundabout, too. It was once a staple crop in these parts, mainly because it was grown as provender for the draught horses who did all the work on the land before the advent of the tractor. I'm hoping that somewhere someone will be growning a bit of barley as I always think that is a lovely cereal to look at, with its beard weighing it down.
Wheat ears are beginning to droop a little now, too, as they reach maturity. Farmers will be waiting for it to acheive its correct levels for humidity and so on [farming's all hi-tec now, you know, and everything is tested scientifically] before bringing it in.
There has not been much to report on the wildlife front recently. Woodpigeons are still exploding merrily from the hedgerows with no thought for where they're going. Over at Downholland the other night I was watching a crowd of 50 or so swallows really laying into the cornflies over a field of wheat. Their acrobatics re only matched by bats, and I love watching those, too, especially the ones which swoop in, round, over and through my garden in the dusk.
Music On The Moss: there can't be many cowboys born in the city but Rambling Jack Elliott is one. Modelling himself on Woody Guthrie, he learned to pick guitar and search out old songs from old cowboys and toured Europe and America telling tales and making music. Young Brigham is his album I've just been listening to, one which he made when he had been cut free from the constraints of a label which wanted him to do more of the same.
He tackles the Stones' Connection with a vengance, and comes up with what he calls the only night herding song a cowboy would ever sing round cattle - all the others would be likely to spook the longhorns, which panicked at the slightest provocation - as well as the first song he wrote himself, 1912 Greens. It's a spoken blues-type, though it's not sad at all, just a fond looking back at a visit with guitarist Billy Fahr to a house at 1912 Toulouse Street in New Orleans and the events that happened there. His rickety guitar backing adds to the sense of homeliness that RJE engenders.
Speaking of Rambling Jack, isn't the interweb a wonderful thing? Seaching on it just brought up another Rambling Jack, real name Edmond Houlihan. A Fenian, he was blinded in a fight and had to go about earning his living playing the fiddle at fairs and suchlike. According to the article, "The anti-recruiting ballad is one of the great strains of Irish resistance songs. The story is told that in Ferbane, County Offaly, Rambling Jack defied the British Army when he sang an anti-recruiting song as a recruiting meeting was about to begin in the main street. The song was one of the finest, Patrick Sheehan, by Charles Joseph Kickham, the Tipperary Fenian who was the foremost writer on the IRB newspaper The Irish People. Both Kickham, who was partially blind and deaf, and Edmond Houlihan, would have identified with the character in this song, a young Irishman blinded fighting in the British Army in the Crimea." He died aged 92 in 1931, having lost his sight in a battle in 1867. From then on until his death his fiddling playing and Republican ballad-singing was all that kept him going.
There, we've all learnt something. No doubt there are more Rambling Jacks around if we did but know it.

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