Big White Eyes On The Mud Monster.

I was riding on the back of a turf-cutting machine, slowly throbbing its way down a field, when I fell flat on my face and rolled off the back into two inches of mud. It was my first day and I was trying to impress the redneck in the driving seat. I wanted to look strong and virile, a man of the fields, unafraid of nature and hard work. Not like the haiku writing, pansy-assed, drunken, city boy I had always been. I turned up on the farm in jeans and trainers, so I started off on the wrong foot. Its like going to Clapham in welly-boots and animal dung flavoured overalls.

The redneck was driving and so sometimes his concentration was taken up with looking forwards. The rest of the time he was staring at me to see if I was worthy of riding his glorious beast. I had to take the rolled cut turf out of the machine and stack it onto pallets on the back. I had stacked the pallet up to knee height. I was resting my knees on the lowest turf to get to the back when I lost grip with my trainers. My feet moved back, my upper body forwards, fast, and my knees acted like the centre of a seesaw, increasing my speed. My hands were occupied with rolled turf and my face, unguarded, met with the stacked turf on the pallet with a sickening, muddy, thud. I then rolled off the back of the tractor with the grace of a walrus easing himself into the water, into the Somme of the field. Like a whippet I jumped up on impact with the ground. Have you ever thrown a cat into the bath? That’s how I moved. Bang, straight back into position on the back of the machine.

            I do not know what the odds were but all of this had happened in one of the moments that the redneck chose to look forward. So to his eyes I had been there the whole time. He stared at my mud-covered face, which only five seconds before was clean. I had big white eyes where I had closed them to the impact. Madness was afoot. I could see the puzzlement in his eyes as he tried to figure out how, in such a short time I had become so caked in mud. To him he had just looked away for a second and turned back to see a mud monster replacing the idiot before.