Rural ramblings: Spring is almost springing

The sight and smell of narcissi (daffodils) shrieks "spring!" even though I know it's months away. Photo / File

Bruce brought me flowers - it must mean spring is approaching. Him actually buying me flowers is a once-in-a-decade event (all that Scottish blood, he sees no point in paying good money for something that will die in a week or so).

But if he stumbles across blossoms of the free variety, he will pick them and bring them home, as he did with the bunch of narcissi (daffodils) which poked their heads above the grass last week.

The sight and smell of them just shrieks "spring!" even though I know it's months away.

We're still in the depths of winter in fact, with weeks of wet, cold weather ahead. It's hard not to feel deeply envious of those friends who are heading to warmer climates for a break. At one point I had no fewer than seven various friends and relatives soaking up the Italian sun, while still more lounged about on tropical islands, and it was difficult to find nice things to say about their beautiful photos while shivering in the chill and damp. That's when you need a roaring fire and a good glass of red wine, along with the consoling thought that they all have to return to this climate eventually.

The bulls are getting feisty and that's another sign spring can't be far off. Of our Herefords, some are mild-mannered gentlemen, content to stroll along behind the motorbike to their new destination, while others are more argumentative and need to be persuaded that moving to new paddocks is a good thing.

So we regularly see someone on the motorbike, pushing one bull ahead while another ambles behind the bike.

Put another bull with them and it's Jekyll and Hyde, all pretence at civility disappears. They puff themselves up to look bigger, roll their eyes, stamp their hooves and send clumps of grass flying, bellow, roar, push each other through fences and generally carry on like young blokes who have had too much to drink on a Friday night.

Presumably it's to impress cows by displaying what virile sires they would make, but the cows are oblivious to their antics and generally ignore them.

Our eldest daughter is home from university for a few weeks' holiday, so Bruce has been taking - you could possibly describe it more like dragging - her out on the farm to help move bulls and dry cows. She's not a morning person, so that's tough. Often he has to start without her and return when she has surfaced.

He's thoroughly enjoying the dad-daughter time but I'm not sure how much fun it is for her.

She does get to catch up with her old calf club calves, who are still friendly, but it's also an opportunity for Bruce to terrorise her with the electric fence. He's found that now she has had a shock from the electric fence, just shouting "boo!" at her when she is near a wire makes her shriek and fall over.

Learning to drive is an important step for all youngsters, but particularly rural children who rely on parents every time they want to go out until they can operate a car themselves.

We're on to our second learner driver now, and I took her out for her first lesson last week at our local industrial park, which has plenty of roundabouts and give way signs to practise with and very little traffic. But it's also popular with walkers, who are kept on their toes by a regular stream of young drivers bearing down on them.

During an early lesson there, our first learner driver panicked momentarily as an unwary jogger pounded down the road towards us. "What do I do?" she wailed, as the car drifted towards the now-slightly-alarmed looking man. Go around him, I advised.

This time, I hoped for a smooth run for the first lesson but, as we puttered along, I spotted a woman on the footpath on the right, looking nervously across the road.

She was calling her dog and it was about to run across the road right in front of us.

I thought bowling a dog on her very first outing as a driver might be demoralising, but luckily the new driver found the brakes and disaster was averted.