When I last wrote, it was just after storm Éowyn had left a trail of destruction in its wake, not to mention a large portion of the country without power.

Never did I expect we’d be 15 long days without electricity, heating and water. If it wasn’t for the ESB crews out working until all hours, we’d probably still be in darkness.

The men who reconnected us were from Finland, and even though my own nephew is half Finnish, my language skills are sorely lacking except for a plethora of curse words and dog training commands, neither of which seemed remotely suitable.

By the time our power was restored my fridge was growing things which wouldn’t look out of place in a science lab and I had gained a newfound respect for the older generation who lived and worked the farm before us.

As electricity only came into our townland in the 1950s, they would have known no other way of life. Indeed by the second week without heating I was dreaming of a big open hearth fire roaring away in place of my trusty solid fuel cooker in which I could only burn a small fire due to the circulation pump being out of action.

To add insult to injury, one-off housing is now being criticised on the back of the power outages. Not only do we pay a higher standing charge than urban areas, many people applying for planning permission have more hoops to jump through than an acrobat, along with the cost of connection fees or the expense of drilling a well.

And yet, for a time last week, there was a suggestion that we would be left to foot the bill with higher charges for the incompetence of ESB management to carry out sufficient maintenance around power lines. It’s all well and good to tell farmers to cut trees close to power lines, but what about those in private gardens (one of these is what caused our outage) or around forestry owned by State companies?

We all know Leitrim has pretty poor-quality soil in many areas, but we seem to have become the scapegoat for companies looking to offset emissions by planting trees, purely because our land is cheaper than the rest of the country.

With most of these plantations being of non-native trees, it might be in their better interest to keep the pasture in place and look at farming practices which are better for biodiversity and the community at large. As I’ve said before to a few people, I’ll be planted in the ground before any of our fields will be.

Calving

Meanwhile, for the most part, everything ran smoothly in the shed, though time, tide and labouring cows wait for no-one and on the 10th day without power, our first calf of the year decided to make an appearance.

The same cow needed assistance last year and while we have a plethora of head torches around, they’re not too useful when you’re working a calving jack. We decided to use the tractor lights to brighten up the calving pen in case help was needed.

Thankfully she fired out a beautiful little heifer calf by Sliabh Felim Sterling (LM8929) who was up and sucking within an hour. It’s our first time using that bull but certainly won’t be the last as she already looks to have a bit of style about her. Though I hope she doesn’t look to the other Limousin calf in the shed for guidance in ‘calf behaviour 101’.

When she was little, I wondered if she could be trained to jump on command. The answer was a resolute yes, and now she’s more like a giant puppy following me around than a nice sensible calf learning from the cow.

I’m hoping she’ll forget about jumping on people before she gets much bigger as I could find myself ‘planted’ sooner rather than later.