Going, going, gone...

It is a measure of how closely interwoven country folk are that a farm equipment auction can draw a huge crowd from many miles around. Retirement sales are rare and it is often everyone's last chance to say a proper goodbye before the retiring farmer pulls down his sheds and moves to sheltered accommodation within easy reach of the A30.

The retirement of a farmer always feels like the loss of a respected comrade, or a particularly well-loved shire horse. To begin with it is rare. Usually, you die on the job in some hideous accident, or you spend your twilight years interfering with how your son/nephew/grandson wants to run the farm, spending all your time letting them know how it was done in your day. I have always found it difficult to imagine that retirement existed for farmers as a group - my own grandfather was buying and selling bullocks almost to his dying day and had to a have a hip replacement at 82 years old after being trampled over by a frightened heifer. The option of a long and happy retirement is, therefore, a relatively new phenomenon in the countryside thanks to the near-doubling of land values in the past 10 years that has allowed retiring farmers the real option of the good life on a foreign beach.

Brushing sentiment aside, a farm sale can occasionally be a fantastic source of bargains if you want to mend/fix/renovate/restore your tractor/quad/water pipes/galvanised sheds, so I fired up the Isuzu, put on my best tweed and went to look for bargains in Tedburn St Mary.

The experience was both invigorating and rather surreal. Builders scavenged for cheap timber, while hobbyists paid way over the odds for knackered out old calf feeders and sheep races. The lots included some antique chamber pots (sold as a job lot, the auctioneer told us) and some fine cider jars and demi-johns, which I snapped up for £40, alongside an eclectic collection of chainsaws, tools, sinks and tractors. The detritus of an entre career on the land illustrated that it is impossible to throw anything away on a farm as it might just come in handy one day. No doubt other sales will come up and much of the same stuff will end up back on the market, which also proves the point of the Yorkshire saying: "Buy cheap, buy two..." A good friend of mine from Bradford had to explain to me that this meant that quality told in the end. I explained that a similar saying doesn't exist in German as quality is taken as a given in the Fatherland. In the end, you'll get what you pay for, but it was a nice day out, nonetheless, and the cider jars look nice on the mantelpiece.