Here a llama, there a llama, and another little llama

Derek and Evie brought us eggs today down from their farm in the Dales.
The eggs are mixed sizes and species. Most of them have poo and feathers stuck to the shells, which are all shades from white to espresso, plain and speckled. They most definitely do not have little red lions and dates stamped on them. They do not conform to each other, never mind DEFRA egg specifications. Derek and Evie’s eggs are not so much free range as positively feral. The yolks, often double, are not the insipid greyish cream of battery eggs, nor are they the self conscious saffron of barn or supermarket ‘free range’ eggs. These are full bodied proud ochre, bright and rich as the sun over a field of bursting wheat ears in an old Soviet propaganda poster.

They are also illegal eggs. The hens and chickens , banties, ducks and geese and whatever else waddles and scratches about Derek and Evie’s yard gobbling up the corn and scraps from Evie’s bucket as they have done for hundreds of years worth of generations of Dereks and Evies, eat the wrong things to be allowed to have the eggs passed as healthy for sale for human consumption and therefore no little lion may be be stamped on them. No little lion, and it is illegal for Derek and Evie to sell them, even though they are the tastiest eggs you could scramble, poach , boil or fry, or indeed throw at Deputy Prime Ministers during Countryside Alliance protest rallies.

Evie’s sponge cakes are orange with them and taste like my generation can just about remember home made cake should taste like; did taste like, before the rules and regulations banned the sale of home made cakes as we knew them, a la Grandma, Jerusalem and WI, church fete and village jamboree. Rather than Grandma knowing what is good for us, Nanny State knows best, and only allows us to buy the kind of factory produced cellophane-wrapped cakes that are marketed with all the clichés that the brainstormers use to try to flog us the mass produced, bland, advertiser’s psychological image triggering so called country- goodness wholegrain free- range hand- made (okay-yah right) have absolutely nothing to do with mother nature as she straddles the motorways and holes herself up in inhospitable rural badlands, naked and fulsome.

So Evie and Derek collect the eggs and give them away to friends. We had sunflower colour mushroom omelettes for tea, and we rejoiced that Derek’s and Evie count us as friends to be trusted not to be poisoned by the eggs.

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Evie's last appointment at York Hospital lasted 20 minutes while they prodded her stomach and pronounced her clear of the cancer. However, when I asked how her eyes were now, (not having seen Derek and Evie since well before Christmas) she calmly replied that she didn't know what he had done in the operation but she had been in some dreadful pain for a week or two, but it was mostly alright now. The worst thing was trying to manage to cross the road in this bright sunlight with only one eye working. I swallowed. I thought it was a routine cataract op. She continued, telling me that Derek had not been so good, he was out of breath before he got to the stall to muck out the alpacas, and she had to go with him to make sure he got there and help with removing the droppings to the midden. They had wanted to breed llama's really, not alpacas but a mistake had been made with the order for the first female and when it had eventually arrived, having cleared extended quarantine because of the outbreak of 'blue tongue' in the UK, it turned out that they had sent an alpaca instead of a lllama. It was a very nice alpaca though, as alpacas went.

Derek chirped in that the windows had been painted with frost patterns for the first time in 25 years. It had been so cold that they had gone round to feed and muck out all the stock first thing, gone in for breakfast and stayed indoors until it was time for evening feeding and bedding down. Evie said Derek had been stir crazy for three days, but his chest was so bad he could hardly breathe the freezing air and several courses of anti- biotics had not helped any, so it would seem he was now incurable and may as well put up with it. It was difficult for them to bottom out the byres, so their sons were coming at Easter to do it, but it was hard work for them. They weren't used to it. Good boys, but not farmers. Right. I almost offered to come and do it myself, but what I know about bottoming out llamas could be written on the sharp end of a needle, and that providing you could locate it in the midden.

'But,' Evie grinned, 'that wasn't the best of it. '

'No,' Derek snickered, 'You know when it was all white, the rime was on every tiny twig and thorn across the valley, and the smoke from the chimneys hung like a fairyland mist. I melted peep holes in the window frost and looked out into the yard. I said to Evie, that alpaca doesn't look too well, what do you think? It was up and down , lying down. I said...'

''Ee said it was colic," Evie chimed in. " I went and had a look at her when I put food out for the cats lunchtime, and I was suspicioned. I didn't say about what I knew to him though,' she touches my arm conspiratorailly, "Sure 'nough, she gave birth to a calf. She must've been expecting when she came. "

"So instead of one llama, you got two alpacas for your money. " I chuckled, thinking flipping typical of a Yorkshire farmer, that, climbing out of the midden stinking of honeysuckle.

Derek's thin face assumed a modest , self deprecating , half embarrassed expression, "well Kevin says he can sell the calf when it is old enough. Evie keeps looking up its arse, but it's difficult at this stage to see how many orifices there are, because of all the hair. But she thinks it is male. We should get a good price for him, offset it all a bit."

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Evie tells of how she was asked to help with the washing up at a village whist drive. She said she would after she had seen to the pigs and had a wash. She had gone down and was very upset that no one had spoken to her. True, although she had lived on the farm for 32 years, she didn't go into the village very much, and never had much time for taking part in things, just washing up and clearing up after them when she had finished working, which was usually very late on. She said that when she had gone on the intensive course- 6 hours a day for 3 weeks - to learn how to use computers (this was last year before she got too ill to do the follow up one) in Tanfield, every one there had been friendly and they all had a laugh and it was interesting and fun. In their village, it seems they are all miserable beggars who can't bring themselves to speak to the volunteer washer upperers , even though they have washed the smell of the piggery off in the shower.

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Derek laughs and the conversation turns to the rag doll cats. They had to let the stud male go because he would not use the litter tray, and when Evie had to clean eleven piles of of catshit , deposited in a neat line along the hearth, enough was enough. He had to be let outside and so his fur got dirty and he cross bred with the moggies , but people loved the half rag dolls. They had another up and coming Rag Doll Tom, so that meant they could maybe afford a laptop computer for Evie in Summer.

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It is a while since I have been to their smallholding in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. Years ago Derek used to hold auction sales in one of his fields, and the farmers from miles around would bring their rusty old bits of obsolete toolery for the incomers to find charming and mount on the walls of their barn conversions. Machinery would change hands, amidst unintellible dealing muttered out of the side of the farmers' mouths, and the most unusual and rare items would often emerge from someone's old cowshed. Like a Bugatti, or an ancient shuddering old Morris van converted to run on gas during the war.
That is how I first met Derek and Evie, when I was in pursuit of a cheap compressor, and someone had told me about the farm auction up Leyburn way. It was a warm , magical summer evening; such a one as you can taste the green and see the fairies flit from meadowsweet to cornflower. This is truly 'God's Own Country' with the yellow and green patchwork fields, bordered by ubiquitous drystone walls wiggling up hill and down dale, the pinkish Yorkshire sandstone cottages, gardens aflame with geranium, begonia and sprawling nasturtiums. Their rambling cottage rambled amidst hollyhocks, honeysuckle and chickens. Geese honked indignantly and a donkey nuzzled around hopefully at anyone who passed near enough to his warped wooden rail fence , teeming with a microcosmic burrowing insect world.

I was breathing in the night-scented stocks, their heady scent intoxicating me even further, dragging me into something resembling a D.H.Lawrence novel, when Evie had started to talk to me about something I remember as being the last thing on earth I expected to have a conversation about out there in the sticks, but can't for the life of me remember the subject. Evie can converse on ever subject under the sun in an informed and intelligent manner. It may well have been the tv film crew that had been there earlier and broken her gladioli . Evie and Derek (as do we) supply various items, animals, implements and backdrops for film and television productions , and sometimes even appear as extras in dramas.

I cannot think of Derek and Evie without an image similar to the Romantic chocolate box painting of William Morris's gaff, Kelmscott Manor (which I once proudly completed in an oil painting by numbers kit) rising tangibly before me, with this old Yorkshire couple meandering down the garden path, hand in hand, to feed the alpacas , just out of frame.

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