ONE of my favourite times of year before retirement as a reporter was the agricultural show season.

My “patch” encompassed the North Tyne, Redewater and beyond, so every year for decades, I got to sample the delights of Falstone, Bellingham, Kirkwhelpington and Rochester shows – usually with a couple of others thrown in too.

There was a special reason for going to this year’s 175th Bellingham Show as a paying customer, and it was worth every penny to hear my 13-year-old granddaughter Abbey bring the showfield to a standstill by singing Redesdale poet Billy Bell’s evocative words about the 1904 Bellingham Show to officially open the event.

My eyes were not the only ones to be glistening with tears!

As a toonie by birth, it was a struggle at first to get used to some of the arcane and esoteric terminology of the show ring, which saw hinds showing gimmers from their own hirsels and heifers displaying stirk teeth, I seem to remember.

I was also a little startled to discover that hoggs were not in fact pigs, but young sheep, that ewes were not ewes but yows and leeks had something called a fast button, which I had always associated with our ancient video recorder.

But I soon acquired a sketchy knowledge of sheep, although I still struggle to differentiate between a Hexham Blackface and a Scotch type, and have yet to detect anything azure about the haughty head of a Roman-nosed Bluefaced Leicester.

Then there was the Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, where large men parodied Superman by wearing their velveteen drawers outside their vests and long johns.

As a fan of Les Kellett and Billy Two Rivers, I expected lots of action, so was a little startled in my first bout when the combatants merely hugged each other like old friends and seemed to lean against each other for a gentle snooze for many minutes.

Then they both fell over and one was declared the winner. I know now it is a highly-skilled and technical contest of strength, but its widespread appeal among farming folk continues to elude me.

At one bout, I heard a well lubricated farmer declare: “Awd Harrington’s felt him! ”. I was expecting a disqualification for ungentlemanly conduct until I deciphered the Cumbrian dialect for felled.

I also learned that a sure way to turn the cheeks of a ruddy- faced master of foxhounds even more rubicund was to ask how many dogs he had, rather than hounds, and that hounds were counted in couples, rather than individually. At some of the posher shows, they were not even hounds, but rather hinds.

My favourites were the lean and shaven trail hounds which came boiling through the bracken like banshees, urged on by their owners whooping and hollering and rattling buckets.

Showgrounds were also my first introduction to horses, other than the one that used to pull an ice cream cart around our childhood estate, followed by hordes of children and almost as many eager gardeners, armed with buckets and shovels to give their rhubarb the benefit of copious amounts of free fertiliser.

The showfield was full of prancing and snorting specimens of equine excellence, usually with a tiny toddler or an inadequately jodhpurred beefy farmer’s wife in the saddle, berating everyone who had the temerity to get in their way.

The industrial tent was always worth a visit to marvel at the rows of tiny matinee jackets, perfect cakes and unlikely representations of animals fashioned by children from marrows, aubergines and a large tomato. Thank goodness I was never asked to judge them!

The secretary’s hut or tent was always on the visiting list, as the only way for some harassed officials to get through the long and turbulent day was to do full justice to the bottles of whisky nestling below the judges’ comments.

Once I had got the knack of it myself, I had to pass on my knowledge to trainee reporters and fellow townies like myself. At one show, I ordered a cub reporter from the back streets of Toxteth to tackle the goat classes while I did the sheep.

He was back 10 minutes later to ask: “Er, which are the sheep and which are the goats? They all have horns…”

Another reporter excelled herself by insisting that the champion of champions among the sheep was a gimmer tup.