Lucy and Beaatie happily joined the Jacob sheep in the home paddock and we were sitting drinking tea and eating jam tarts with the Creaseys who had sold and delivered the cows to us.  They seemed so happy in the small field and we were having a lovely chat when all of a sudden our neighbours appeared and said that a black cow was running down the road.  All hell broke loose!  Jeremy,Paul, Sharon and Lizzie took off in pursuit of a cow and Kate and I inspected the fencing and discovered a hole in the hedge big enough for a naughty heifer to push through and onto the road.  I fetched the sheep hurdles and we tried to fill the gap meanwhile deciding to get all the remaining stock into the “big field” where, we hope there are no more places for sheep and cows to escape.  But where was Beattie the black cow?  Lucy was lowing, calling for her lost soulmate and Rosemary, a stock woman and cow breeder for forty years said to me ” I have never had this happen before in all my years of selling cows!”

Paul and co set off in his car to scour the road and fields for a black runaway cow and then all of a sudden Beattie ambled in through a side gate into our garden pursued by neighbour Sharon, who was soaked from top to bottom from running through the fields in pursuit of the renegade.  We chased her around the front garden and into the courtyard in front of the barns and shut the gate but she managed to push her way through to the unfinished chicken run and ran down the vegetable garden to the pond where she promptly dived in to cool off.  Meanwhile the others had arrived with cow nuts and halter at the ready.  We made a line to push her along the fence towards the field gate and, miraculously, we got her into the big field to join Lucy and the sheep.

We walked back to the kitchen, opened some beers and downed some whiskey, examined our muddy boots and sodden clothes and concluded that Jeremy and I may be the “black sheep” or even the “black cows” of Roothams Green.