the muddy mum 💙

@karina_kk24 I had to, my garage couldn’t read the code to find out what the issue was! Only Skoda could read the code.

@muddymuddymum You paid already only for that information?? Lovely...

My visit to the Skoda garage left me £156 lighter this week just to find out what the error codes were, and with a quote for an additional £1757 for updates/door locking system and bushes. 😬 I'm going to have it checked elsewhere.

@KatpEvans Thank you, I've got someone looking at it tomorrow, at least two people have said they're trying it on.

@muddymuddymum I can recommend a guy who might come down to you, (based in West Devon) he also does a lot of farm vehicle work too And very Honest on his pricing

It's hard to know what to do, with tupping time just around the corner and the possibility that it may become difficult to get the vaccine as demand increases. Why is there always something else to worry about? 2

Stavros, the Suffolk ram has had his blood tests and a ram MOT with the vet today. He's a very sweet, quiet boy and she thinks he's lovely. While she was here, she mentioned there are a lot of suspected cases of bluetongue in Cornwall atm, and a few confirmed cases 1

The obvious answer to losing our foreign shearers is to simply train our own. Britain already does. Training was never the problem, and here is what actually is. The country has fourteen million breeding ewes and about three months to shear them, because the fleece has to come off in a short warm window or the animal suffers. A mountain of work crammed into one season, then nothing for nine months. So think like someone weighing up the trade. You spend years mastering one of the hardest physical skills in farming, shearing hundreds a day with calm hands and no harm to the animal, and the reward is twelve brutal weeks in summer and three quarters of a year with no work and no money. Nobody builds a life on that. So they don't, and who could blame them. The shearers who fly in have solved the one problem Britain cannot. A top shearer works four countries a year, New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, three months in each, chasing the season round the planet until twelve weeks becomes fifty. That is what makes it a career instead of a summer job, and no single country can recreate it, because no single country has more than one season. There used to be British gangs on this circuit. Contractors who travelled, who trained the next lot, who knew every shed in the dale. That world thinned as the wool stopped paying and the young went to jobs that ran all year, and the gap was filled by the shearers who fly in, who now teach the British newcomers coming up, because the knowledge had nowhere else to live. Cut them off and you do not force Britain to train its own. You remove the last people still doing the teaching. And this is what makes it so hard to stomach. Seventy-five people, in for twelve weeks, gone the day the job is done, costing the taxpayer nothing and leaving the flock shorn. If any arrival on earth is the useful kind, it is this one. A government serious about who comes and goes would fling the door open to exactly these people and spend its energy on the arrivals it genuinely cannot account for. It has done the precise reverse. A hard No for the seventy-five it could see, needed and time-limit, while the numbers it cannot explain carry on untouched. They looked at a skills chain held together by seasonal workers and decided the workers were the problem. They were the only reason it still existed.

@IainSankey I've met some humans where AI seems more adaptable...

@muddymuddymum The main problem with AI, apps, auto phone options and computer 'help' is that there's no room for nuance. Quite often, none of the fields or options fit. Despite all the hype, they are simply not as adaptable or intuitive as human brains. Yet, anyway...

This is a long thread (sorry) I’m a technically savvy person. I’m early 40s, have a smart phone, smart tv, lightbulbs that I can yell to turn off. But you know what? I’m getting tired of tech. I’m tired that everything is an app. 1

@Sarahcoxon8 😂😂😂 Thst actually makes a good title. No one would know what to expect!

@muddymuddymum Dirty hussey ewes 🐑🐑thug life and stavros. 🤣🤣🤣 love it. Not the quiet evening you wanted. Have you thought about writing book. 📕 Book title as above 🤣

It’s always a Sunday with our sheep…. The new ram has been in the paddock, with sheep in the next field. Not ideal to be on his own, but we need to quarantine him. Me: we really need to give him company. How about Bradley (teaser ram who is on the way out) 1

@CookO2 I think we all learnt a lesson from this!

@muddymuddymum And Farmer in field without a phone. That’s good thinking. 🙄

So now Stavros is contained in another field with company, my lambs are back in their field, the ewes are happy in the field we were planning to cut for hay. And it’s 10pm on a Sunday night and time for bed! Even the newbies are naughty on our farm! Night all! 9

We get Stavros and the lambs in. Luckily he’s pretty chill and easy to get out of the group first. But who to put with him? There’s two ewes in the group, one with a late lamb and one that needed fleshing up. We figure the ladies might keep him entertained. 8

@MinxGenie @peterwells79 I had one of these - the issue on mine was the lint collector wasn’t fitted properly, so it would come off in use, meaning all sorts went down and could catch fire. Sent it back before it went up in flames, they didn’t think it had an issue, recalled the lot a month or so later!

@peterwells79 @muddymuddymum So many horror stories about tumble dryers. Beko went through a Zafira phase where they just seemed to self combust. Horrible thing to come home to though. Hope your mum was OK.

@peterwells79 @MinxGenie I had this and then it wouldn't work - spoke to customer support and they couldn't help, told me to take it back to shop as it was a connection error!

@MinxGenie @muddymuddymum I’ve a (cheap!) printer, it needed an app to set it up. What happened to plug’n’play? That app got deleted the minute it was working…