I don’t listen to the Archers religiously, but with four of my five radios (bedroom, dining room, wind-up radio for bath times and the one in the truck) permanently set to Radio 4 (so much so that the wind-up now can’t pick up anything else) I do get to hear quite a few episodes. In case you are wondering - the fifth one in the tractor swings wildly between Pirate Radio and Classic FM depending on whether it was Mitchell or me who last fed the cows!

Sad to say, that from time to time as the story of the good folk of Ambridge unfolds over the airways, I sometimes find life imitating art – or visa versa – and I hear exact conversations between the characters that we ourselves have at home.

Just before Christmas there was a story line about Ruth and David Archer replanting a hedge that his father had removed during the good old subsidy driven days of the seventies. As it happened, I had also just ordered 250 metres of native hedge to plant as a new field boundary.

Unlike the Archers, we were not reinstating a hedge, if fact our moorland holding doesn’t have any hedgerows at all – just miles of granite walls. However one particularly large field had been split by a former owner with a simple wire fence, which was now about twenty years old and showing its age. To build a new stone wall to replace the 250m of tatty sheep netting would cost well in excess of £30,000 and so I hit upon the idea of planting a new wildlife-friendly hedge.

First of all, we borrowed a tractor-mounted rotovator and ‘ploughed’ a line next to the old fence. Next, in came Chris with his huge monster-truck post thumper and put a new wire fence the other side of the rotovated strip. Then the trees arrived.

With over 1200 assorted thorns and beech this was going to be no mean job for Cathy and I (despite the fact it only seemed to take the Archer family one leisurely afternoon), and so it was with considerable relief that I learnt that the local college was looking for planting jobs for the students on their NVQ land management course.

This was a true win-win situation, with the college delighted to have such a large planting job to train the youngsters on and with me having to do nothing more strenuous than stroll up and down twice a week and survey the progress.

So now the hedge has been neatly planted (with about 5 tonne of shredded garden wasted as a mulch to keep the grass down for a bit), leaving me to return to restoring old tractors and running the village cricket team while Cathy runs off for a fling with the herdsman - damn those Archers!