I visited The Great Yorkshire Show this week for the first time, this is an annual agricultural show where the regions farmers gather to compete their livestock and drink lots of Black Sheep Bitter. The place was also crawling with landed gentry who walked around wearing Bertie Wooster style tweed clothes and posh hair.
A walk around the livestock pens was an eye opener, I've seen plenty of cows and sheep in my time but these have all been average, run of the mill animals. The ones in the pens were the super models of the livestock world, enormous sheep with gold coloured fleeces, bulls as big as vans and and a huge variety of pigs. Everywhere I looked there were stud animals, bulls, rams and boars and all of them with gigantic testicles.
Young farmhands sat between the stalls talking and drinking beer, every so often getting up to wipe a cows backside and squirt it with water after it had a crap to keep it's anus in show-standard condition.
We watched a falconry display where the falconer flew an enormous African Griffin Vulture with a seven and a half foot wingspan. Before it took off he warned that if it should land in the crowd then no-one should attempt to stroke it as it would have their fingers off.
Off it flew, flapping it's massive wings to gain height. It reached a decent altitude then banked with the turning circle of an aircraft carrier and headed straight at me.
Now I've never seen a vulture up close before, let alone have come hurtling towards me and this one looked as big as a small family car with wings. I ducked my head a little too late and got a slap in the face from the end of it's wing. It landed right behind me.
It was the height of a small child and was looking balefully at me in the eye and nobody in their right mind would try and stroke something that looked as hard as that.
A little later we saw a large crowd gathered near the sheep-shearing competition pens and lots of coppers helmets poking above the crowds heads.
Prince Charles and Camilla had turned up to have a nosey around. Now as well as never seeing a vulture in the flesh I've never seen a real live royal before and I tend to think that people who wait for hours to get a glimpse of a royal are a bit mental.
It turns out that I am in fact one of these people and ran over to get a look at them as they examined some fleeces, talked to some men wearing bowler hats, had a bit of a chat with some of the crowd then got in some well armoured 4x4's and left.
So there we are, The Great Yorkshire Show. I saw my first Royal, lots and lots of of animal bollocks and got a slap off a vulture. Not bad for twenty quid.
