THE AGRICULTURALISTS

On a cloudy, murky May morning, I caught the 07:30 to Inverurie from Edinburgh Waverley. It was full; backpackers with ear-rings and hair like oil-slicks, lecturers in open-necked rugby shirts and sandals, young businessmen with netbooks and Sekonda watches and determined women tourists with glum faces and capacious handbags. I was bound for Bonnie Dundee after an absence of several weeks. At the table diagonally in front of me sat a quartet of middle-aged men. From their conversation, they appeared to be active in the agricultural industry. One, who looked not unlike Richard Dreyfuss, the actor, was holding forth about ‘Johnny, farming 6,000 hectares.’ Another, a grey-haired chap with a hairstyle redolent of American tumbleweed, had the slow, drawling delivery of Worzel Gummidge. His voice was loud, and reverberated from the four corners of the carriage, as if through quadraphonic speakers. At the table directly in front of me, two young oil-exploration consultants, one male, one female, from London, sat in front of a laptop discussing a presentation they were going to make in Aberdeen. The young man, who spent much of the journey beaming, was competing with Worzel to see who could speak the loudest. The oil man generally lost, because Worzel hung onto every word for as long as half a minute, so the effect was far more penetrating. The oil-woman said little, but she did not have to. She was breathtakingly gorgeous. In fact, she was the most beautiful thing on the train. She was exquisite; a golden-haired maiden with a freckled face and a pencil-slim body. Imagine a young Susannah York but with Jane Asher’s colouring and a finely chiselled, aquiline hooter that would have made Mark Antony splutter with envy, and you can begin to understand how radiant she was. She wore a simple beige dress and her spun silk hair was clipped back and encouraged to tumble down onto her magnificent pre-Raphaelite bosom.

My attention was deflected from this golden vision by Worzel, Gummidging into his mobile phone: ‘So maybe we have to get my dribble-bars and drive them up and down to level them up. He must know if he’s left the limiter on. I’ll have to discuss this with Dougie. It’s nothing to do with the wind – I would suggest the limiter’s been left in, or it’s the wrong type We need a strategy to level it up. We need to know if it was the second application, or the third, or the first.’ It took him from Burntisland almost to Kircaldy to get this message across.

A determined-looking woman in a floral blouse sat next to me at Kircaldy. She was en route to a conference on marine renewables in Aberdeen. She read avidly from a conference brochure. A huge advertisement across one page suggested that ‘Skykon was the Solution’ but to what I was unable to ascertain. The sun broke through as we approached Cupar, and my mood began to pick up. The carriage warmed up considerably, aided by the hot air from Worzel and the Oil Man. The former was discussing ‘stratification’ with great earnestness and the quartet were examining the impact on soils of using sprays or fertilizers.

In a field just outside of Leuchars, an abandoned trailer doing business as a feed store for livestock bore the legend ‘Nack Bar’, the ‘S’ having disappeared without trace. This seemed a more apt description of some of the establishments I have visited on my travels. As the train pulled into Dundee, Worzel was telling a long and unnecessarily involved story about an Austrian woodsman who rotated his hazel crop every sixty years. To my reckoning, that meant he could only do it once before he died, unless he had the secret of eternal youth. I stepped down onto the platform with the feeling that Agriculturalists inhabited a strange world which they could jolly well keep to themselves.