I’ve followed Anne’s blog for a while now. She writes witty, evocative and often moving posts about her experiences as a Cork city girl who’d never met a cow until she married a North Kerry dairy farmer.
I had a job picking a favourite to share with you here, so do go and read more of Anne’s posts over at Girl in Wellies. In the meantime here’s a taster …
It’s a date
We should check this one out, he writes, on a restaurant review in last Saturday’s paper. ‘It’s a date’ I write and ‘look at this’, I go on, circling a home exchange advertorial that suggests that we could up sticks for a couple of weeks and swap our farm house for a Manhattan penthouse. We get cocktails, you get milkshakes and oh so much more besides. And here, Mr and Mrs New Yorker, if you could milk the cows; that would be great.
I leave a sandwich, he eats it.
He leaves a pile of washing; guess what, I wash it.
‘Don’t forget’, I write on a post-it, ‘to ring your man about the concrete’. ‘I won’t forget’ he writes back. ‘Good’ says I.
He records our favourite programme, I watch it.
He texts at bedtime to see how the kids have settled to sleep. They miss Dad I write and then think again and erase it, text instead ‘good, they’re all sound’.
And then the rains stops and the cows go out. They can, at long last, spend time outdoors during the day. And as he fences around the house to leave the cows out, we arrive, en famille, to ‘help him’ fence, we fill in the gaps between the scraps of newspaper, texts and sandwiches. The Spring or the intense calving period is coming to an end. We’ll be there to walk the cows out with Dad. To bring them in for milking, to let them out. In our wellies, chatting to fill in the Springtime gaps. Spring takes him away, the cows out in the fields brings him back. That most certainly is a date.
You can find Anne on Twitter and Facebook if you’d like to follow her there.
Neil farms in Cheshire, rearing dairy heifers, and returned to the industry after a break from farming (you can read more about that on his blog – 
How do I know this?
My body didn’t know whether to stay in the gateway, run after the “wrong one” that had got through or try to skulk off.
I’m romanticising, of course, because that’s what I do when I’m not on a tractor or up to my elbows in nutrient-rich soil (read mud). I write rustic romance. I’m a rural authoress.
I’m no longer youthful, but when my cheeks are wind-stung and the feet are numb, I’ve still got a romantic world to escape to. It might be winter in Draymere too, there may be mud or even snow, but the characters warm the story (and me) with a wealth of diverting antics. My mind can romp alongside them for hours. Be it out in the fields, on a dog walk or while I’m cooking the dinner, you’ll probably find me at Draymere. I’m seldom present in everyday life.
Be it town, village or farm, we all fall in love, and we’ve all experienced passion, heartbreak and unwise attraction. The emotions play out no matter where in the world you live. But I write it rural, earthy and rustic.
Sam Russell 