'When I was a farmer I occasionally used to write a page in a journal... if something happened that I thought was interesting enough... and I wrote them in a kind of rough verse and I eventually collected them together in a book called Moortown Diaries... the name of the farm was Moortown... you look across from the higher part of it straight on to the northern edge of Dartmoor.

'This poem is about a tractor I had, an old blue Fordson... it was a good enough tractor, but on this occasion there had been a tremendous cold night... very hard wind and snow blowing horizontally across the fields and I had to get this tractor going... and the thing wouldn't start!’