Cows Investigating Tent

Cows are quite curious. If you lie in a field they amble over cautiously, lower their heads and have a hearty sniff of you. The most confident one pushes its nose into your body then starts lashing its grey tongue across your face. You should try it (but not when calves are around.) They do more heavy breathing than female porn stars.

Over the years I’ve seen them investigating objects in fields - troughs, hay bales, footballs, deflated Chinese lanterns and dying sheep. While trekking along a former packhorse path in Todmorden I remember seeing a farmer digging a deep hole in one of his fields. Beside him was a deflated tent with something big under it. I thought he might be burying a dead horse but he said he'd ordered a wind propeller and preparing its foundations. I saw the shape of the thing under the tent was too box-like to be a carcass and the man said it was some equipment for planting in the hole. The previous night he’d left it inside the tent but one of his cows had gotten too curious and forced her way into it. On his mobile phone he showed me a photograph of the cow with a tent half way across its back. He didn’t find it as amusing as I did.

I thought this subject would make a jolly good painting and here it is. One afternoon I drew out the general shape of an old-fashioned type of tent and the back half of a cow poking out. The canvas looked to be lacking something so I put added another cow. The tent took about twenty minutes to paint and the cows much longer. I added a random black patches (these have evolved over thousands of years to deter flies) and lots of thick grass. Some birds are curious too so I added one perplexed by the cow's adventure.

This could be yours for £32,024. It was £24 but I put a £32,000 bet on "The Pyramids" being under snow on Christmas Day. I thought I'd won a fortune when I witnessed snow falling on The Pyramids Snooker Club. Unfortunately the bet was on the pyramids in Egypt and I lost all the money. I need the recover the £32,000. I can mail the canvas off tomorrow after I've finished at Shrink-Your-Prostrate-In-A-Week night class.