At Your Service: A grand day for t'job

THERE may never be a more God's-in-his-heaven afternoon than last Sunday's nor - come to that - a more glorious place than David Amsden's top pasture on which to hold an open air harvest thanksgiving.

"A grand day for t'job," says the old lad on the next chair and in those rural parts, it should be explained, "t'job" is a general term for just about everything from birth to death, endeavour to unemployment.

It would be mistaken, however, to suppose that everything in the country garden - or hayloft, or sheepfold - is suddenly rosy again. Foot-and-mouth disease may have gone, but its bitter legacy remains.

David Amsden, who farms at Carperby in Wensleydale, had spent months without leaving his land, for fear of bringing the plague back in on his boots. "The hardship was indescribable," he says. "Our telephone was on the go all the time because it was the only contact we had to help keep us sane.

"We get blamed for being a lot of whingers but in a way I was hoping we would get the disease, because that way we wouldn't have been in business. After so long, you just gave up."

Farmland beyond bounds, last autumn's united harvest service had been in the village hall at West Burton, a few miles away. For what on earth had the people been thankful?

"Well we were still in the most beautiful part of the country, though behind the pretty pictures there was havoc," says Martin James, Methodist minister for the upper dale. "We weren't exactly starving either, and that's quite important, too."

Carperby's a lovely village with a pub at which James Herriot spent his honeymoon, a village hall with an honesty box car park and at least three houses which appear once to have been chapels - a multiple division, even in Methodism's serried past.

Pen Hill rises from the heat haze to the south, Castle Bolton majestically to the east.

The service is led by Mr James and by Sue Whitehouse, vicar of the surrounding Anglican parishes. Around 200 are present. Chairs arrive by the wheelbarrow load; some of the more unsteady perhaps better similarly to have been transported across West Bolton Farm.

There's not a flat cap in sight, not on weathered heads, anyway. For those who'd only go through the church door in a box, it's a chance still to acknowledge the good things on the land.

Hawes Silver Band accompanies familiar harvest hymns, the second time in a month we've encountered them. "We'll be in the top ten next," says one of the bandsmen, cheerfully.

Farm dogs bark along discordantly, sheep seem curiously captivated. The line "The wind and waves obey him" has been unilaterally changed to "He fills the earth with beauty."

The vicar, soon to be Canon Whitehouse, talks of taking stock. "There's still pain and there are still rules and regulations, but there's also a resilience and a determination to move forward with new hope."

Mind, she in turn adds, there were still farmers who'd tell you that the future wasn't what it used to be.

Tom Stephenson, another trapped for months on his farm, reads one of the lessons. "Can you hear me at the back?" he asks and is told, inevitably, that they can't. "Well, you'll just have to sit at the front then," says Tom.

Martin James's address incorporates weddings, Blankety Blank ("I'm sure you're all far too sophisticated ever to have watched it") and, for reasons forgotten, the Argos catalogue.

"For some people harvest is one of the favourite services of the year. For others, dare I say, it's the only service of the year," he adds.

Overhead, an errant hang glider pilot prepares to come down in the next field, as if the poor sheep haven't had enough on their plates of late.

Whatever other distractions have presented themselves during Mr James's preaching ministry, it may be the first time that he's been upstaged by a hang glider.

There are also prayers of thanksgiving for the "joy and exhilaration of country living", though David Amsden, a very nice man, has had enough of it. Already he's had a quadruple heart bypass - "the pressure of farming didn't help" - and now plans to sell the farm and join his family in Canada. It's a long way to babysit otherwise, he says.

"I want to sell up while I still have a choice, and while there's still a life in front of me. We've had relatively realistic prices, not the daft ones like last year, but we worked for nothing at all last year and the strain was terrible.

"It's been a grand life as a farmer, but it isn't so grand as a paper pusher, which is what the Ministry has made us into. I'm not selling a farm, I'm selling a view, with the farm thrown in for luck."

For those distant days in Canada, he has made a video of the harvest home service at West Bolton. At the end the band plays Onward Christian Soldiers, though no one's in a hurry to march off anywhere whatever.

They just sit out in the autumn sunshine, enjoy the "bring and share" tea, offer quiet thanks for all that they still have. A grand day for t'job, undoubtedly.