My heroes

Yesterday was a pretty normal day on the "farm". Animals were fed, a bit of work clearing a space for all the roof slates was done, tea was cooked. Usual stuff.

As a result I completely forgot Armistice Day. The world didn't stop, gentle winds blew occasional showers across Westray, the tide rose and fell.

And I forgot my grandads.

Hubert Cinnamond and Harry Winters, being Irishmen, didn't have to join up, but they did. They fought for Britain in the First World War almost from the start, right to the finish in 1918.

The pair of them could hardly have been more different. Hubert was 6ft 4in, 17 stone of bone and muscle and straight out of a storybook. Born and bred in County Antrim from hardline Loyalist stock, he lied about his age to escape the boredom of a clerk's job in his father's bank.

With a lieutenant's pips on his shoulders he revelled in the mayhem of the trenches, twice earning the Military Cross for ludicrous heroism and finishing the war with a captaincy and a backful of shrapnel.

He then took on the IRA in the War of Independence as a member of the Auxiliary Cadets, later joined the colonial service in East Africa, organised "native" troops at the outbreak of World War II to fight the Italians before accepting a commission in the Indian Army, hoping for a chance to have a "crack at the Japs".

He died in 1970 at his retirement home in Madeira, having met his only grandson once. There's a picture of a huge man with a military moustache holding a small baby - and that's it. Me and Grandad Cinnamond.

Harry was a country boy from Mullingar in County Westmeath. War broke out not long after he had moved to Birmingham, eager to make a fresh new life for himself. He'd deliberately avoided living in Brum's Irish ghettos, doing his best to fit in. And fitting in included signing his name on the recruitment sheet.

His ability with and love of horses helped find him a place in the Royal Engineers where Private Winters did his best to survive, mending telephone lines and ferrying equipment while he watched his friends smashed to pieces or simply disappear out of the saddle without trace.

He emerged from the war a quiet, serious man, but he had met May Bews and they made a home in Dublin, had one daughter who became one of only a handful of women to earn a place at Trinity College. She graduated and left for England with her Ulsterman husband, coming back a couple of years later with Harry's little grandson.

Harry spoiled me rotten. He took me anywhere a Dublin Corporation bus went. Howth Head, Killiney beach, Phoenix Park Zoo. We fed peanuts to the elephants, walked up the Big Sugar Loaf, stood on the pavement in O'Connell Street to see George Best go by.

He visited us at our home in Ely, Cambridgeshire, one November and I recall nearly bursting with pride when my grandad marched in the front rank of the Remembrance Day parade. He died when I was nine and he never knew how much I loved him.

I never wear a poppy, although I always buy one, and I fervently support any anti-war campaign, but that doesn't mean I don't fully appreciate what soldiers are forced to do in the name of politicians' ambitions. The parade of hearses through Wootton Bassett this week was one of the saddest things I've seen in a long time.

And it made me grateful that my grandads - the swashbuckling hero of a hundred family stories and the steady, quiet, loving man with the bushy eyebrows - lived through it all.

POSTSCRIPT: Before anyone points it out, I'm aware of the role of the Auxiliary Cadets during the War of Independence. They were murdering bastards who made the Black and Tans look like an under-11 netball team. My views are completely different to my grandfather's so I feel no need to excuse or apologise.

The wheels on the bin don't go round and round

When is a wheelie bin not a wheelie bin?

Orkney Islands Council's development and environment services department obviously had a lot of our cash to spare so they've given everyone on the island a big green wheelie bin.

With the bin came a set of instructions, telling us in seven fairly detailed steps how to secure it. Obviously, given that it's November and it gets a little breezy here at this time of year, it would be madness to leave a plastic bin just hanging around.

So everyone, old folks included I assume, has been given a wooden fence post and a length of blue rope and told to hammer the post into the ground to a depth of 2ft. No small task for a pig "farmer" who happens to be the owner of a large sledge hammer - can't imagine what a peedie Westray wifey will do.

The bin is then lashed to the post using a clove hitch (don't ask me) - no doubt while whistling a sea shanty. A bungee cord to prevent the lid heading off towards Norway is the finishing touch.

Which brings me to the big question. What the bloody hell are the wheels for?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of a wheelie bin is that it's mobile. You can wheel it around the place - the clue's in the name.

When we lived in England we had a wheelie bin. We kept it by the back door and wheeled out to the front of the house on bin day. The bin men hooked it onto the back of the cart, the rubbish was tipped in, the bin parked outside the house to be returned round the back.

Up to now in Westray, we have been given a year's supply of black bags, leaving the filled bags at the end of the lane to be collected and thrown onto the back of Geordie's wheezing wreck of a lorry.

The new system involves leaving the bags at the end of the lane where they'll be collected and thrown onto the back of Geordie's wheezing wreck of a lorry, although we now have the choice of leaving the bags in the bin if that's where we've left it.

I much prefer living in Orkney to England and I firmly believe Scotland is a far superior country (only one Tory MP for a start), but I have to admit that England is way ahead when it comes to the 'understanding what a wheelie bin does' department.

What the council seems to have done is (out of the goodness of our own council tax payments) handed out a few hundred bins - the type we used to go to the hardware shop and buy ourselves - with no discernable improvement in the service.

On the upside, the Westray wheelie bin racing season gets underway next week. Entries to the usual address.

It's a gas

Rain was dripping off the roof and down the back of Pat's neck as he manhandled the big orange gas bottle into position.

The pig "farmer" was on torch duty as his knee had inflated like a Montgolfier brothers invention after too much driving the previous week followed by a piglet-related incident. He wasn't about to risk the "I told you so" of Mrs P"F".

Next job was to take the attachment off the empty bottle and put it on the new one. "Have you got a spanner?"

Search through tool box followed, revealing any number of spanners. Guess what. Not one of them would fit. Resisting the temptation to have a rant along the lines of "why the hell does nobody, including me, put anything away?" I searched the workshop and found a monkey wrench. Couldn't get that to work either. Presumably it's great for monkeys, but not so good for gas bottles.

With the rain trickling down our backs, we skipped straight through to plan Z - ring Electric Eric and borrow spanner. The "farmer" took a few minutes to get his unbendable knee into the car and drove very carefully (it was taking several seconds to switch foot from throttle to brake, making any kind of emergency stop impossible) down to pick up the spanner.

On return, the job was done in seconds, tea was back on the stove, leaving only the question: "Why the bloody hell does the gas never run out in daylight?"

Fitbaaa

The referee raised the red card and the sheep behind the goal went mental. Four of them left their seats and rushed to the front where they grappled with the stewards in an attempt to invade the pitch.

The rest roared their indignation and at least one missile landed on the pitch. The appearance of Lothian and Borders Constabulary's finest calmed things and Hibernian were able to get on with proving they were a little less hopeless than an Aberdeen side reduced to nine men by disciplinary issues.

A hundred yards or so away, in the back of the West Stand, a pig "farmer" from Orkney was commenting to his son along the lines of "there's something you don't see every day", "I think pitch invasions by farm animals can only improve the game" and "why do you suppose a dozen grown men would dress as sheep and travel from Aberdeen for football?"

This was the first time I'd been to a football game for about three years. The last ground I visited has now been demolished. I've always had a sneaking regard for Scottish football (quality issues notwithstanding) in general and Hibs in particular.

We had pints, went to the game, had pints again and mixed with the locals before calling it a night with a Chinese at around nine - a happy evening.

The same can't be said for the sheep. A man was taken to hospital in Kirkcaldy with burns after someone set his sheep costume on fire on the Edinburgh-Aberdeen train.

Camping out

Little Kim was having a lie-down. Nothing unusual in that, except she was outside, behind her hut in a force seven south-easterly with intermittent, heavy rain.

Strong winds have swept the length of Westray for most of the week and, despite the temperature hovering around eight or nine degrees, you get the feeling winter is upon us. The sea has changed from blue to grey, the grass from bright green to dull grey/green/brown and the ground from dirt to mud.

All our pigs are indoors now except for Molly and Little Kim who have moved to new quarters in the top field after spending the summer over the road.

Marcus brought his tractor to move the pig arc to the top field and I positioned it facing the direction from which we get the fewest winds - south east.

This morning Little Kim emerged from her hut soaked down one side where the rain had blown in through the door all night. She wasn't happy at all, but was cheered by the arrival of breakfast and chowed down while I found an old mat which I attached to the arc as a sort of flap to keep out the worst of the rain.

It was later I saw her lying outside. She wandered over to me, gave me a welcoming shove and, as I gave her the obligatory back-rub, I worked out the problem. Little Kim is a lovely pig, a real sweetheart, but clearly she's not the sharpest chisel in the woodwork set. She hadn't worked out that she could push the flap aside to get in her hut.

I lobbed a few spuds inside the hut and held the flap open while the penny finally dropped, just in time for another wave of heavy rain.

Just before dark, I nipped out for a quick look and she was snuggled up in some new bedding - nice and dry.

Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em

I was in the workshop, cutting wood for the fire, when I heard a commotion from the barn.

When I say 'commotion', I mean a bloody great snorting, banging and general kerfuffle - a bit more than the average duck or chicken would create. A bit more than the average herd of wildebeest would create.

I patiently laid down the axe, wandered through and there was Molly the sow. Having fought her way past the straw, she was doing her best to overturn my concrete mixer en route to the bulging feed bins. That'll teach me to leave the barn door open.

Molly, who has 'previous' in the escapology department, had grown tired of her paddock and walked through the electric fence and over/under/around another fence before working out exactly where the next two weeks' dinners were.

As she engaged in hand-to-hand (trotter-to-trotter?) combat with the mixer, I got hold of a bucket, put a scoop of feed in it, got her attention and led her back to her paddock.

I shut the door and tidied up, then set about improving security with the help of an old gate, two sheep hurdles, an extending ladder and a damp fence post which I managed to split while banging it in. (Tip: use another piece of wood, lay it across the top and hit that with the hammer).

Did I mention it was blowing a gale?

And it was raining.

Ten minutes later Molly had broken through the electric fence again and, denied access to the barn by my makeshift barrier, was eyeing up my leeks.

The bucket-feed-back-in-the-paddock routine followed. I had a look at the fence and thought: "I really must get one of those tester thingys that check if there's any charge in the wire."

There was nothing for it but to resort to a quick tap with the back of my hand.

Nothing. No wonder she was getting out.

I reached up to the energiser to check the connection.

SNAP! "Ow! Bollocks!"

Forgot to disconnect the battery first. Still at least I knew where the problem was and a couple of minutes later a new piece of copper wire was transferring lots of lovely current into the fence and I was walking back towards a fresh jug of nice hot coffee.

SNAP! "Squeal! Bollocks!*" The fence was working.

An hour later, it was time to get the horses in. Dotty - pregnant with "a future Badminton** winner" (so I keep being told) - came over and allowed me to clip on the lead rope. She took two steps and stopped dead, deciding there was no way she'd go past Little Kim's paddock.

I pulled and Dotty pulled back, pulled harder, wrenched the rope out of my hand span round and kicked out at me, contact being avoided by a dive that would have won a round of applause from any Premiership football squad.

I gave her ten minutes to calm down, then managed to grab the rope and, with a lot of very gentle persuasion, got her as far as the gate where she decided progress wasn't fast enough, wrenched herself free again and charged off, skidding to a halt just outside the stable door. By the time I caught up with her she was inside and tucking into Teddy's tea.

Women, eh?

* She didn't say "bollocks". Pigs can't talk.

** I wasn't previously aware that horses played badminton, but I'd pay good money to see it.

Size doesn't matter

You see, the thing is, the camera on my trusty Samsung phone doesn't work any more. The phone hasn't been at all well since I sat on it heavily while climbing over a wall in the pigshed, the phone dropping out of my pocket in two pieces where it was given a bit of a chew and a slurp by Kim the sow.

If the camera was working I could bring you pics of the whacking great spuds that are appearing from the ground (I'm lifting them, they aren't miraculously rising from the earth and dumping themselves in bags - I bleeding wish!).

You'd also see Colin the carrot, so big it just had to have a name. I'd say it was as big as a babbie's arm, but actually it was as big as a pig "farmer's" forearm. And don't believe that guff about big veg not tasting good - it was terrific.