Picture this: I'm sitting in a McDonalds near Galashiels, in order to write about Great British Farming (an organic one in particular - CB).

I'm wearing my fleece and tracksuit bottoms (from the farm, unchanged). Opposite me, a woman in a very short denim skirt, high-heeled boots and a serious amount of make-up, is feeding chips to a small child. I am aware of the irony of the situation, but whilst McDonalds' BT internet hotspots enable me to get my laptop (thus website) online, I am glad that the King of fast food chains exists and that there's one near Coldbrook Farm (imagine, I could choose my farms by their proximity to McDonalds'!).

At Coldbrook, my (and Chris') first job of the morning has been to collect hen eggs. It's altogether a different story to going round the croft (Isle of Eigg) with a bucket and bringing a dozen back. Here, there are two hen houses, each with well over a thousand hens. In the mornings, Chris and I go down to the first in the Woollers' landrover and stand in a little room at the back of the shed. It is cold. We wind up the radio, run a conveyor belt, and wait with icy cold wet cloths, dipped in water which we have sometimes had to break. Suddenly, from under a black plastic flap, eggs start appearing. Depending on what mood I'm in when I collect them, it's either quite extraordinary / wonderful, or overwhelming / sickening, to be confronted by these funnily-shaped, jiggling objects, in their hundreds, thousands.

The range of colours, textures, shapes, is startling.

Truffles

We seperate them into three orders: good eggs; seconds; and the rubbish. The good ones are those you'd buy in the supermarket, and can be brown, shiny, speckled or white, but most importantly the shell is intact, strong, and there's nothing 'odd' about the egg. The seconds are those which are okay, but sold to friends, passers-by and used in the house; the might have rough tops, be funny colours (you get stripey eggs), wrinkled or just 'odd' looking. There's something about the rough ones which reminds me of Thornton's chocolates, or truffles (when you look at them for so long, they stop being eggs). The third sort of egg, put aside in blue trays, are cracked or barely recognisable as eggs. You put your fingers down over a warm, squishy, sack-like thing, and if too quickly, the whole thing bursts. Euuughhhh! Anyway, there's still nothing edibly wrong with these eggs (I don't think), but they're not very transportable, and don't look very appealing. But even they have a use; Sam uses some of the yokes in her ice-cream, and they do even get sold, at a very low price, to the egg distributer. Who knows what he does with them? Oh, the mysteries.