Diddly Squat: Pigs Might Fly (Diddly Squat, 3) - Softcover

Clarkson, Jeremy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405961422 ISBN 13: 9781405961424

Verlag: Penguin, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Get tucked in to a third bestselling helping of Clarkson's Farm from our favourite wellie-wearing wannabe farmer, Jeremy Clarkson

'Brilliant . . . laugh-out-loud' Daily Telegraph

'Outrageously funny . . . will have you in stitches' Time Out

---
After three years, Jeremy Clarkson has discovered the golden rule of farming:

whatever you hope will happen, won't.

Enthusiastic schemes to diversify face defeat at the hands of the Council Planning department, or derision from Kaleb. Jeremy's plans for a business empire founded on rewilding and nettle soup are doubted by Lisa. And the stifling thickets of red tape keep only one person smiling – Cheerful Charlie, who charges by the hour.

But the animals couldn’t be happier. A rented bull called Break-Heart Maestro is delighting the cows. The pigs are bringing home the bacon. And the goats are . . . most probably psychopaths.

Yet on the good days it hard not to be optimistic.

Where else do you get to harvest blackberries with a vacuum cleaner?

Maybe it’s not just Break-heart Maestro who gets a happy ending?

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Readers are loving Diddly Squat: Pigs Might Fly

‘Another funny book from Jeremy. This one made me chuckle but, my only complaint it's too short. I wanted more. Hopefully Another book is being written as we speak’ ***** Reader Review

‘I love the show and I love the books. Both make me chuckle but have also given me an insight into farming and how hard farming is’ **** Reader Review

‘I’ve read the previous books and loved those as well.
Witty and funny with depth and a bit of seriousness’ **** Reader Review

‘Loved it, quickest book I've ever read. Can't wait for the next Clarkson instalment’ **** Reader Review

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeremy Clarkson began his writing career on the Rotherham Advertiser. Since then he has written for the Sun, the Sunday Times, the Rochdale Observer, the Wolverhampton Express & Star, all of the Associated Kent Newspapers and Lincolnshire Life. He was, for many years, the tallest person on television. He now lives on Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire where he is learning to become a farmer.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Green-winged testicles

I have always been very suspicious of people who have
hobbies. Because a hobby carves a hole in your soul and
diminishes your humanity. It turns you into a mono-
culture, capable of speaking about and doing only one
thing. Some people live to work and some work to live.
A hobbyist works and lives to collect stamps. It’s a dan-
gerous thing.
I know this because, back in the early Seventies, Esso
launched a marketing scheme where customers could
collect a set of footballing coins. You got a coin with
every four gallons you bought and I became so con-
sumed with this, I used to make my dad drive everywhere
in third so he’d use more petrol.
He was a travelling salesman at the time and had an
account with Blue Star garages, but the only Blue Star
garage that sold Esso petrol was on the Finchley Road in
London. ‘Well, can you ? ll up there?’ I’d say tearfully.
‘Not really, because we live in Doncaster.’
My sister had the notoriously di?cult to ? nd Kilmar-
nock coin and I seriously considered murdering her
for it. I also considered murdering schoolfriends who
wouldn’t do swapsies. This is why I know that hobbies
are dangerous.
Look at golf. One day you slip into a pair of Rupert
Bear trousers and head o? for a game with some friends.
It’ll seem pretty harmless, but sooner or later you’re
going to hit the ball in such a way that it goes in vaguely
the right direction. And that’ll be that. Next thing you
know you’ll be so consumed with the need to improve,
you’ll be spending all your money on better bats and
you’ll practise constantly, in the rain and on your own,
until eventually your wife will leave you. And you won’t
notice for three months.
It’s the same story with light aircraft enthusiasts and
internet onanists. Hobbies become all-consuming. One
minute you’re catching sticklebacks on a lovely summer’s
day in the Test and the next you’re friendless and damp
on the banks of a terrible canal in Birmingham.
We are now starting to see the same problem with
people who collect orchids. It starts harmlessly, when
someone buys you a pretty example as a house-warming
present and it ends with you on the dark web, at three in
the morning, trying to ? nd a man who’ll go into the
? elds at night and steal you a variety that’s on the edge
of extinction.
I wish I was joking, but in recent months gardeners
and landowners in Kent and Sussex have been reporting
a spate of thefts from their wild? ower meadows. They
go to bed at night, happy that a rare lady’s slipper orchid,
worth about £2,000,to the hobbyists, is growing on their
land, and they wake in the morning to ? nd nothing but
a hole in the ground.
It’s not only a pro? table crime but easy too. Unlike
Range Rovers, orchids don’t have steering locks and
alarms. Furthermore, if you’re caught, and that is highly
unlikely, the penalties are likely to be less severe. Yes,
section  of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 
provides for a ?ne of £5000,and six months in jail, but
that’s never going to happen because, at the end of the
day, all you were actually doing, m’lud, is picking wild-
?owers. And people have been doing that for years.
Back in  someone dug up an orchid called summer
lady’s tresses from a site in the New Forest, and as a result
it’s now extinct. Thieves stole what was thought at the
time to be the last lady’s slipper orchid in 1917. And
collectors damn nearly wiped out the lizard orchid. They
must have known, because even I know it, that you can’t
dig up an orchid and expect it to thrive in your garden or
on your hall table. Because it won’t. It’ll die.
I suppose it’s the hobbyist egg collector mentality that
was all the rage in Victorian times. Bo?ns would announce
that there was only one great crusted lesser-spotted

dodo left in the world and there’d be a stampede of
hunting fanatics, each one desperate to kill it. ‘Yes! I
single-handedly wiped out an entire species. I ended it.
And then I cooked its egg and ate that.’
And it’s still going on today. There are orchid collec-
tors who are so determined to have the equivalent of
that Kilmarnock football coin that they’ll stop at noth-
ing to get it. That’s why, in Yorkshire, there’s one very
rare orchid that is housed in a metal cage and monitored
round the clock by CCTV. If someone could nick that,
it’d probably make a Hollywood movie. Except Adapta-
tion, a critically acclaimed film starring Nicolas Cage and
Meryl Streep, of course got there first.
There are orchids on my farm. And some are very
rare. I know this because when they were found by
members of a local horticulturalist society they all ran
around clutching their tinkles. It worries me that some-
one will steal them.
And it’s not just orchids that are being pinched.
Thieves are also targeting bluebells and, back in 2019,
30,000 snowdrops worth £1,500 were nicked from
woodland in Norfolk. They’re even going after ferns for
God’s sake. And now I’m wondering, how long will it be
before thieves start to come after my wheat? Because
thanks to the cost of fertiliser, one ear alone is now
more valuable than a Rwandan water lily.
My big worry, though, is that topsoil could well
become the next big thing for Johnny Burglar. Because it
was recently described by the author Claire Ratinon as a
‘divine entity’.
I was in Hampshire recently and as I drove along I
became consumed with envy at the lushness of every-
thing. Plainly the Meon Valley has much better soil than
the stony brash I have up here in the Cotswold Hills. So
why don’t I just nick some? Is it even illegal, I wonder.
Certainly the money’s good. It would take a skilled
operator no more than 15 minutes to fill a truck, and
that load would be worth maybe £2,000. So in a single
night I could earn 50 grand.
There’s only one thing stopping me really. My JCB
telehandler. The first time I used it three years ago, I
thought, ‘Hang on. This is fun.’ And the next step on that
road is that it becomes a hobby. Already my relationship
with it is worrying because I’m forever thinking of jobs
that don’t really need doing, just so I can play with it. If
I thought it could earn me £50,000 a night, you’d never
get me out of it.
Only the other day I was sating the needs of my inner
nine-year-old by making an unnecessary bund out of
some subsoil when a neighbour walked by and said I was
operating perilously close to a clump of green-winged
orchids.
I got out for a closer look and, I must say, they were
very unimpressive. But then it was pointed out to me
that orchid is derived from the Greek word orchis. Which
means testicle. Yes. I have green-winged testicles on my
farm. And I’m going to make it my life’s work to look
after them.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1405961422
• ISBN 13: 9781405961424
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Penguin Random House Ireland Limited; productsafety@penguin.co.uk; ; Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street; Dublin; D02 YH68; Irland