Work xmas lunch today was delicious, especially the spiced pear cake for dessert (albeit with the tiniest slice of pear I’ve ever seen).

Company was good, and highlighted how socially inept I am without a couple of pints inside me.

Service was excellent apart from the ridiculous length of time it took to pay the bill. They seemed to need to input each individual course into the till, but couldn’t work out why the total didn’t equal 13 x £16.95 - one of us didn’t order dessert.

Another one of our gathering is likely soon to be deported, which I felt uncomfortably aware of throughout.

Immigration case I’ve been working on since almost exactly a year ago has finally gone kaput with devastating and life changing consequences for the person involved.

They’ve lived here since they were eighteen. They volunteer to run a wellbeing cafe in a local church. They applied for grant funding to keep the cafe open over winter. We wanted to employ them as a community development worker.

They now have to leave the UK by the day of our office xmas lunch or face deportation.

The recent farmers’ protests in the UK and a comment on micro.blog about old style rectangular straw bales reminded me (again) of my own farming history.

[@Miraz](https://micro.blog/Miraz) It has taken me many years to get used to this way of packing hay. I grew up with the old rectangular bales that we had to fill the loft with for the horses' winter. What do they call this big rolls of hay? Also "bales"?

Now, obviously, without farmers we don’t eat. All those fields left to grow wild kindly paid for by the European Union… oh, wait, that freebie blew away in the Farage wind and now costs us £2.4 billion of our own money every year.

Talking of wind, apparently the new inheritance tax farmers are protesting will incentivise them to use or sell their farmland for use as wind or solar farms. Presumably to keep the lights and the air conditioning on for the rich when it all goes tits up, while the rest of us scrabble around blaming immigrants and woke lefties.

Farmers are notoriously tight-fisted, as I related in my own story about having my farm labouring wages deducted by the farmer after he gave me a lift home. Tight as a duck’s arse as we used to say. Steve, the farmer’s foreman, walked like a duck. Probably because he spent all day sitting on a tractor shovelling straw bales on to trailers for us to stack.

My first day on the bales ended in disaster. Steve could have lifted me down on his tractor shovel thing, as he he did many times thereafter, but instead allowed newbie me to slide down the ropes we’d just tightened.

My fingertips took several days to regrow. I had fifty pence deducted from my wages for the cost of replenishing the first aid kit, and received a straight knockout for bleeding on the ropes.

Baling was actually decent fun when you got used to the physical aspect of the work. I worked with my mate who lived on the same road, and it was a challenge to stack the bales in the right way and learn particular tricks for making them fit into impossibly small spaces. The lorry drivers often helped and, being Northumbrians, they were usually a good crack. They wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible and to make sure their load wasn’t going to topple over on the long road back to Cockermouth.

The days were often hot and long, and I would spend a lot of time visualising my first pint of the evening when we were done. But invariably, by the time I’d got home, soaked in the bath, eaten and gone out, the last thing I wanted was beer. I usually drank a shandy instead and went home for an early night.