Children grow from little lambs to teenage terrors

THERE is a line, invisible as electricity but just as shocking, that your kids will one day step over, when they move from being children to something far, far worse. Teenagers. It can happen in an instant, when a single sentence crystallises the transition, a lone throwaway remark telescopes the whole of childhood from the present to the past in the blink of an eye. Or in this case, the shake of a lamb’s tail. And that single, electrocuting sentence? “Lambs are crap.”

Let me repeat that: Lambs. Are. Crap. Have you ever heard such a monstrous statement? And yet this is what you are being told, repeatedly, as you stand surrounded by newborn lambs baaaaing and wobbling to their feet, so adorable that you feel like you may dissolve on the farmyard floor in a pool of warm goo. This is how you, the adult, feels when you are in the presence of all these newborn lambs, with their melty eyes and knobbly knees.

Yes, it’s lambing season. At a sheep farm, for a fiver, you can hand feed the mummy sheep bags of sheep treats – hopefully not made of ground-up fellow sheep – and cuddle the lambs, who lick your hands and make baaaa noises. You go every spring, and every spring leave all misty-eyed and covered in lanolin.