ALlarm Bells

There is a first time for everything.

Little did I know as I made my way across the grassy paddock that I would experience the strangest of sights and sensations.

I am a town dweller through and through, I make no excuses for that, but my workload does inevitably mean that I deal with rural folk and rural properties and landed areas. I make a few jokes about my urban origins to the country dwellers which seems to make them more at ease on a first meeting. This is usually on the theme of pretending to be scared about the wide open spaces, the possibility of falling into a ditch or worse, on trespassing and being confronted by a landowner with a weapon or making a comment about nasty smells that often accompany an idyllic country scene.

The job today was to measure up a parcel of land which was to be sold to a developer who had just bought a redundant public house in a hamlet and was converting it into a pair of houses. The land in question had been leased by my client to successive pub tenant landlords for use as a beer garden but would be a desirable thing to own outright if the pair of dwellings were to be rented out or eventually sold.

I had pulled up on the road frontage having arranged to meet the client outside the former Inn .Such was the collection of builders vans, labourers cars and the impending offloading of a JCB excavator from a low loader on the narrow lane that there was perhaps the first ever traffic jam ever in that location. This would make our intended liaison impossible.

On the far side of the crowd of overall clad operatives I noticed a countryfied lady, wearing a rugby shirt, jodhpurs and with sunglasses sat atop her dishevelled blond hair. Her appearance was so alien to the surroundings that she could only be the client.

She strode purposefully over and her handshake, strengthened by endless hours holding the reins of a horse, caused me to wince effiminately. I made a mental note to work on my own handshake in such situations as rural folk do value a first impression.

The mesh fencing around the construction site and an officious Foreman in high viz vest and hard hat prevented access to measure the land from the road side and so I climbed up into a dusty and hay strewn 4 x 4 with the horsey lady and we drove around a maze of lanes and through the grand gates of The Hall.

It was an impressive manor house with a gentrified Victorian facade but with thin facing bricks to the other elevations indicating 18th Century origins. I was a bit disorientated by the tour of the hamlet and it took a few minutes for me to get my bearings. This was only by sighting the back of the old pub beyond the fencing of a paddock.

I was watching where I was placing my feet, in my city shoes, although I did have the option of my steel toe capped wellies (inherited from my late Father in Law who had worked in Construction). Ground conditions were dry and so I stayed in my somewhat unsuitable worn leather soled footwear for the duration.

There was some undulation to the patchy grass and clumpy foliage and concentrating on my negotiation through such alien territory I did not fully hear what the client was saying.

I did catch the words in the latter part of a full sentence "they are quite harmless but may make a charge at you", and "spitting is quite normal and not aggressive".

I glanced around nervously for a herd of heifers (who can be quite excitable), a gaggle of geese, an errant donkey, ramblers perhaps, holidaying circus creatures or convalescing zoo residents.

The paddock looked empty and a bit forlorn but then I saw its occupants.

Quite close up, Llamas are pretty intimidating and not the scattey but affable pack-animals that we have been educated to accept.

The appearance of two of the beasts moving swiftly towards me was striking. Their long snaking necks, heads held upright and with an inscrutable and aloof expression on long muzzles. Stocky and muscly legs supported bulky torso's with  thick matted mop top type fur.

I moved with purpose towards the lady of the Manor hoping that she would not be seen as a stranger or threat by the Llama's or at least with the possibility of using her as a human shield.

There followed a bit of a Peruvian stand-off in that paddock before they lost interest and galloped away through the daisies.

I remarked that I had not expected to see such animals to the east of Hull and my client commented that they had been a recent, impulse purchase. Whoever had sold them had marketed them on unique selling points of being able to scare off foxes intent on decimating the chicken population and with an appetite to consume huge amounts of dock leaves and other intrusive vegetation.

There was no surviving poultry to be seen and I stumbled over and cursed a little about the abundant broad leaved vegetation under foot.

On both counts the Llama's had failed spectacularly but they were just not bothered.