girlyswot

After ankaret's recommendation I made a point of watching Victorian Farm last night. As soon as the narrator mentioned that they were in Shropshire I thought, 'I wonder if that's Acton Scott,' and lo, it was! So that was a pleasing moment of smugness for me.

I did like it a lot. My absolute favourite moment was when they explained that they were going to put the mangold-wurzels into a tump for the winter and, just as I was thinking, 'Never heard of a tump. Don't you have clamps of mangold-wurzels?', the narrator continued to explain that tumps are also called clamps. So now we all know what Rowan was doing while the others were off having fun at school in End of Term.

I could have done without the narrator constantly telling us that 'Ruth is doing the laundry using a Victorian technique'; 'Peter is ploughing the fields using a Victorian method'; 'Alex is tiling the roof using a...' pause for dramatic tension '...Victorian technique.' Yes, thank you. The programme is called Victorian farm. We are not stupid. We do not have to be told that Henry Stephen's 'The Book of the Farm' is the Victorian farming bible every sodding time it is mentioned.

But it was very nice to see them just rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it, whether it was Ruth spending four days out of every week doing the laundry, or cooking and serving a cow's tongue, and then spending an hour in a cold, dark room every night stitching a pair of braces for a Christmas present, or the boys raddling the ram or building the pigsty or feeding the animals while it was snowing. And that Christmas dinner did look delicious. I will be watching again.