of place in a Spanish bullring. His horns were fiercesome; he weighed just short of a ton. He spent his entire life outdoors on the uncompromising Lakeland Fells. He was part Cumberland White, part Aberdeen Angus, what we called Cumberland Angus, more properly called Blue-Grey Angus, although his coat was black.
The bull was brought to Ayres abattoir, near Newby Bridge, at dawn. The journey from the farm was less than an hour. The travelling time is important because a long journey will lead to stress and stress releases a hormone which toughens the meat. Some commercial breeds will spend 18 hours on their final journey in a lorry crowded with other frightened animals. We are fortunate having Ayres so close to hand so that the stress is kept to a minimum
The bull was released into the building immediately on arrival and five minutes later it was dead- but not before it had exchanged a tender kiss with a cow awaiting a similar fate- as this video shows. The sides of beef weighed 214 and 216 kilos respectively- a total of 420 kilos, which is a formidable weight for a traditional beast.  They will be hung for 26 days and the sirloins have been set aside for the Slow Food “Burns Night” dinner at the Damson Dene on January 25th.

On average rare breed sows such as ours produce fewer piglets than the ‘factory-bred’ commercial varieties such as the Large White. The average is about 10, which is fine, not least because a pig has only 12 teats and might struggle with a larger brood.
But on December 22nd, this beauty of ours produced 16, and they all survived. She started to farrow during the night and finished at about 2am, attended throughout by Jean. Jean’s careful husbandry ensured that they all survived. She knew that if sows are allowed to pig on their own some will inevitably be lost.
The only problem is- there are now too many piglets for the number of teats, so the piglets have to queue, as this video shows.
An enterprising pig farmer in Yorkshire, after reading that the Chinese produce 40 million tons of pork a year, to our 800,000 tons, went to investigate and he found a variety of Chinese pig with 16 teats. He has now crossed this with an English pig to produce the first breed here with 16 teats and the subsequent increase in productivity has enabled him to expand so fast that he now has the largest pig farm in the country. Good luck to him, but I think we’ll stick to our mammary-challenged British breeds.

Jean has three young children, including one born this year, so you would have thought she would have enough to do, preparing for Santa on Christmas Eve. Yet she spent the early hours of Christmas morning acting as midwife to one of our Saddleback sows. The farrowing bays are in the old stable, so she had the perfect venue for a Christmas birth. Eight piglets were born, all in perfect health, the last at 3am, just in time for Santa if not for the Three Wise Men.

The Slow Life perfect Christmas would include the Christmas Eve service at Cartmel Priory, which can be enjoyed even by a gnarled old non-believer like me. You have to get there early to secure a place, a situation summed up perfectly by Wendy Cope in her lovely new poem:

CATHEDRAL CAROL SERVICE

Those of us who are not important enough
To have places reserved for us
And who turned up too late to get a seat at all,
Stand in the nave aisles, or perch on stone ledges.

We shiver in the draught from the west door.
We cannot see the choir, the altar or the candles.
We can barely see the words on our service sheets.

But we can hear the music. And we can sing
For the baby whose parents were not important enough
To have a place reserved for them,
And who turned up too late to get a room at all.