BFW blog - how it all began...

Now that we’re coming to the end of the second week of the BFW blog, I feel I should come clean about where the original idea for the ‘Bad Farmer’s Wife’ came from.

Farms are dangerous places, especially if you’re a teensy bit accident prone, like the farmer.

For the past 3 years, almost to the day, the farmer has had a series of accidents. The first, and most serious, was when a vet student, here on work experience, stabbed him with a pitch fork while mucking out the byre (she hadn’t realised the farmer was behind her), the prong lodging itself 2mm shy of his eye, piercing his nose. The second year his thumb was ripped open as he tried, belatedly, to attach a kick-bar to the cubicle when milking a moody cow – she kicked, slamming his thumb between two pieces of metal. And last year, he fractured his ankle when jumping down from his tractor, landing awkwardly in a stubble field.

So really, it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise when he limped into the kitchen after work a few weeks ago, peeling off his sock to reveal 5 purple toes on which a section of crash barrier (yes, the central reservation stuff) had been dropped. Fortunately, the unique design of the farmer’s feet (‘Wake up and smell the coffee...’) meant that he wasn’t really feeling much pain.

Not being very medically minded, I told him to call his mum, a former nurse, for advice. Meanwhile, I plated up a rather nice dinner of pan fried rump steak with baked potatoes, roasted vine tomatoes and a mixed green salad from my local vegetable box. Of course, the advice was to go straight to A+E...but dinner was on the table, so we sat down and ate, although I could hardly expect the farmer to do the dishes afterwards, as per our usual routine.

Pulling on his jacket and grabbing the car keys, he said he was off. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, ‘I’ll take you’. He said he’d take my car, an automatic, so he wouldn’t have to use his injured (left) foot. ‘Really?’ I swithered. He would take his new book, he assured me; there was no point in us both hanging around, that I would only be bored. True, I thought. So off he hobbled as I curled up on the sofa with Millie and Molly to watch Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers.

Two hours later, he hobbled back in: swollen little piggies all strapped up with tape and gauze, clutching a paper bag of pills and bandages. The front of his foot was fractured! He was to stay off his feet for a fortnight. I felt terrible...I was going to have to the cooking and the dishes for two weeks??