One of the best things when I was a kid was the summer holidays, well, summer full stop. Days that were so long and offered so much opportunity to get up to so much, no need for cumbersome coats and 5p Mr Freeze ice pops from the sweet shop a few doors down. Or perhaps that's just the pink flower hued spectacles I'm squinting through. There also came the interminable boredom of weeks at home and only two of those away on 'proper' holiday, and they were never the same two weeks that your friends went away, so there were plenty times that watching the grass grow was about as entertaining as it got. Maybe that's how sheep feel.

Summer. Now it's a time I time I associate with the drinking of cider (there is ONE Cumbrian producer now, give that man a medal!), T-shirt tan lines from when I'm digging on a site instead of being stuck in the office and BLESSED BE, weekends off work! Summer has also nurtured my love of sheep. Yes, sheep, little woolly buggers whose only aim in life is to find a new and inventive way to die. Grass look good on that sharp road bend verge? Give it a nibble with your arse in the road, see how long you last. Never seen a fast flowing body of water before? Step a bit closer on small hooves with no grasping toes and ALL THAT HEAVY WOOL and find out if your kind can swim. That kind of thing. But I love 'em. Since leaving the town and moving here I can name about twenty breeds, foreign ones too, which is why I love going to the village country shows that run most weekends from June to September every year.

The shows attract all sorts, the farming fellows that never get down from the fell for ten months of the year line up sweating, desperate to prove that their 'Daisy', the pedigree Holstein-Freisan heifer, is better than that one from the next hill over. Kids run riot, tanked up on fast-food and coke bouncing between climbing on the 1930's vintage tractors and taking frighteningly good shots in the rifle alley. Children of an age in single figures surely should not be able to shoot that good and with that kind of concentration'¦There is always the tent (feeling like a Greek sauna) that contains the female quota of the countryside hovering like hawks over the cake competition layout and flower arranging displays to see who gets first prize. No wonder the judges kick them all out while the judging takes place, I'd feel more than a bit nervous if I had to explain to Mrs. Bellas why her amateur display had to be disqualified because of the discovery of the price tag on the bottom. The small animal section is always good for those kids who are going to be a vet/animal rescue worker/breeder/knacker's van driver (!) and the local food section is the perfect accompaniment to the most popular area, the beer tent.

The sheep though, vegetarian ruminants that are not as small as you might think, would, in my mind, make great pets. They don't make too much noise, would be relatively cheap to feed and the fleece deals with itself until you get it sheared off once a year. The downside really would have to be the suicidal tendencies that these animals carry. No fence can be secured enough, no patch of ground can be, to the naked human eye, free enough from trip or fall hazards and as for drinking troughs, don't bother, give them liquids through a drip so they don't drown.

Why sheep despair of life so much is a mystery. When I see the lambs appearing in the fields at the end of February their apparent joie de vivre is infectious, spring must be in the air!! How they turn into limping, jaded, lice ridden, walking lumps of mutton, is known only to themselves. From the stub nosed Texel to the floppy-eared Suffolk and the shaggy Rough-Fell a complete lack of interest in the world around them increases with age. No wonder most of them go off to the supermarkets at six months old..

So, despite my liking for the curious (only when it comes to potential death traps), lanolin covered beasts, perhaps this little exercise has convinced me to get a Labrador instead. It would look a bit more Country Set on its lead than Country Bumpkin and would come in more useful for dispatching errant rabbits than an animal that chews with only a bottom set of teeth, wondering just how soon it can end its day.

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