The alarm shrieked.
I jolted out of bed.
4:30am on the 26th December.
Bloody hell.
My breath condensed in the air as I raced to pull on some warm clothes.
Chinos, jumper, Barbour jacket, leather gloves, woolly hat.
Ready to go.
The floors of our Irish country house creaked as I snuck out in the darkness.
“I’m looking forward to this.” I forced myself to think as got into the car and turned the key in the ignition.
The engine sprung to life, betraying my true feelings, and I sat there. Shivering my tits off. Waiting for the windscreen to slowly defrost.
After five freezing minutes, I started the journey through the fog to my uncle’s raw milk farm.
I arrived at around 5am and was loudly greeted by Martin & his beloved Yorkshire terrier, Bentley.
“Good morning wee man!” Martin bellowed at me.
Apparently unaware of the fact that he’s 5 ft 4″.
“Beautiful morning for it.” I said, shaking his hand and gesticulating satirically towards the pitch black, drizzling, windy sky.
Martin nodded and said: “Aye. Nothing makes a man gayer than regular sunshine.”
Bentley barked in agreement.
After exchanging these pleasantly homophobic pleasantries, we headed into the barn where Martin has milked his cows for over 40 years.
He pointed to giant, rusty, metal gate and said: “Crack that open will ye? And we can say good mornin’ to the girls.”
The gate was frozen shut.
I pulled, pushed, and kicked the thing, but it wasn’t budging.
It was fixed and immovable, just like the biblically accurate Earth.
“I can’t get it open.” I reluctantly conceded.
“Aye, that’s because you have lesbian fingers.” He said.
“All Englishmen do.”
He jogged over and gave the gate a hard tug.
It didn’t move an inch.
Then he pulled it as hard as he could. His face contorted into a Rubik’s cube of excruciating anguish.
But it didn’t move an inch.
Martin sighed knowingly.
Then, he hit the fuck-it button.
Without hesitation or warning, he took five quick steps back, inhaled deeply into his lungs, then sprinted forwards and body-slammed the frozen gate.
The impromptu shoulder charge took me, and presumably the gate, by surprise.
And with a massive THUD, it became dislodged.
Martin stood there for a second, then slowly opened the gate whilst smirking at me.
Then he held up his hands victoriously and said, “Look at these!”
So I did.
And bloody hell, I’ve never seen anything like them.
His hands were covered in dried blood, grease and scars.
He was missing at least two nails, and his fingers were wider than they were long.
His fingertips had been broken so many times that they all pointed in different directions.
His hands looked like something that belonged to a creature you’d pull out of a poisoned lake.
Where on Earth was he born… Chernobyl?
He interrupted this thought process and said proudly: “Look at ’em, these are the hands of a man!”
“Who was holding a grenade when it exploded?” I enquired.
He laughed and we got to work whilst he rubbed his painful shoulder.
As we moved some of the cows into position, Martin explained that for four decades, he provided raw milk for the local community by hand.
Apparently, it used to take him thirty minutes to milk a cow, but with new machinery, it now takes him less than five.
This means as a solitary farmer, he can now milk between one hundred and two hundred cows per day.
Martin described how you can get four gallons of milk in the morning and four gallons in the evening from every healthy cow.
But, you have to milk them every single day, or they stop producing milk.
So that meant, it was his daily duty, come hell or high water, to extract one thousand gallons of milk from his heard.
And he hadn’t missed a day for forty years.
He showed up to work fifteen-thousand days in a row.
Millennials could never.
As he told me the plan for the morning, I thought about letting him know that work from home wage slaves at ZogCorp get 5 days of mental health leave every year.
But I refrained from doing so because I realised that information could actually give him a heart attack.
The strategy was simple.
Our aim was to calmly manoeuvre the cows into position, gently place the suction cups onto their udders and then use the vacuum pump to fill up a giant glass vase with steaming hot milk.
He told me that he refuses to pasteurise his milk because he’s “not a practising faggot”.
I appreciated this sentiment greatly and got to work.
I’ll never forget the first time I milked a cow.
It changed my mindset forever.
I realised that one of the healthiest foods in the world, is basically free.
All you have to do is put a cow in a field with some water and some hay, and in return, she will provide you with an infinite supply of perfectly nutritious food.
As we worked, Martin and I discussed one of my more outrageous theories:
“I think that white people like stealing just as much as black people. But they like stealing bikes from us, and we like stealing milk from cows, eggs from chickens, and wool from sheep.”
“Aye, farming is just legalised robbery wee man. We’d be fooked if the cattle were more litigious.”
Four hours flew by with no distractions.
No news, no checking the crypto portfolio, no posting hate crimes on Twitter with the boys.
Martin and I were just completely focused on the task at hand.
The dude’s in his sixties and is one of the strongest men I’ve ever met.
He doesn’t have that gym-bro strength.
He‘s got that old man strength.
He’s got that “survived the potato famine’ kind of strength.
Real strength.
After we finished milking one hundred and twenty five cows, we headed back inside for a well earned breakfast.
“That was very meditative” I said.
“Aye, thanks for your help Buddha.” Martin replied as he put the kettle on.
The average Irish Catholic farmer is funnier than any Netflix comedian.
And crime… is for black people!”
Cows need to be milked twice a day, so we had a few hours off before we had to do it all again.
We settled down for a cuppa and were enjoying a few minutes of peace and quiet, when, out of nowhere, there was a massive CRASH.
We both jumped up and headed to the window.
And we were greeted by…
Absolute chaos.
The howling wind had blown off a chunk of the barn’s roof.
Martin took a quick sip of his tea, smiled to himself, and then slipped on his jacket.
“The simple life.” He whispered as he walked out the door.
I stood there in shock.
This man hasn’t had a break in four decades.
He gets sneered down on by the champagne socialists in London.
He gets undermined by the parasites in parliament.
He gets betrayed by the bankers in the city.
And what does he get in return for his work?
Fame? Wealth? Status?
Nope.
There’s only one thing Martin has to show for his lifetime of hard manual labour.
And that’s faith.
The only thing in this world that money can’t buy.
