Hay

For the connoisseur, pushing your nose into a bale of new-season hay is one of life’s small but glorious pleasures. As the peasant poet John Clare wrote in 1835, the ‘breath of flowers and grass and happy cow/ Fling o’er one’s senses streams of fragrance now’. Green and gold and sweet-smelling, first-cut hay is headier than marijuana, more complex than a Meursault. When the last bale was stored in the barn, you’d inhale deeply one last time, then close the doors with the quiet satisfaction that your horses were taken care of for the winter. Horses and livestock used to eat grass in the summer, with hay kept for the dead months.

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a week. When the sun shines relentlessly and it never rains, keeping horses gets awfully expensive. The poor gee-gees themselves are bored stiff. We heave mountains of hay into the fields but they miss the ability to mooch about foraging and munching the greenery. There is no greenery. Everything is brown and white. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing the fields white before. When the grass first burned off, the paddocks went a taupe colour. But after weeks and weeks of relentless sun and no more than the odd spot of rain, the ground became quite bleached. The builder boyfriend’s cobs loaf about or snooze under trees. They like being lazy.

‘We’re closed for lunch,’ said the farmer, sitting behind the counter of his farm shop with a scowl on his face, not eating anything. ‘Well then,’ said the builder boyfriend, ‘I’ll come back.’ And the BB went off to have a bite to eat at a nearby caff, where he texted me the news that he had yet to score, but was going to try again later. There is no hay, or at least there is not enough hay in any given place to make farmers want to sell it. While the human food supply managed to recover from last year’s panic-buying, animal forage was different, because there really is a limited supply of that, not just an imagined shortage. Farmers only got one cut of hay last summer because of dry weather, which would have been bad enough.