Here's looking at ewe, kid

Tasked with shearing his neighbour's sheep late on a warm June night, the clickety-click of John Lewis-Stempel's metal hand-shears is accompanied by a vociferous twilight chorus of crickets, birds and bats

- John Lewis-Stempel

Illustration by Michael Frith

I STOPPED by the copse, where the track enters the trees, on the lightest evening of the year. Even at 10 pm, I could see clear across the quiet valley, the breeze stirring the creamy barley and the thirsty brown cattle drinking from the trough in the meadow. The hay had just been cut, the bales stacked in towers, and the mown ground glowed as if lit from underneath. Getting out of the car, the pale sky was gentle and warm and it seemed to me then that winter never had been and never would be again.

In the perpetual twilight of midsummer, the shadows of the four black sheep shifted restlessly in their pen under the verge side oak. Disturbed by my arrival, a tawny owl flew out of the tree and looked at me quizzically with its heart-shaped face. I was late, but I had a commitment to keep. My neighbour, who is of a certain vintage, had asked if I could shear her four sheep. They had been troubled by the heat and the professional shearer she had booked had postponed.

From the boot of the car, I took a plywood board, a yard square. And a pair of metal hand-shears. It had not seemed worth the trouble of lugging up a generator for the Lister electric shears. Not for four sheep.