I was pleased to see that on December 1 Her Majesty’s government came up trumps for the first time ever and our Single Payment was credited to my bank account along with the upland hill farming organic allowance, writes Clive Langford Mycock

I don’t mind admitting, as we hadn’t yet sold any lambs, the old bank account was beginning to look quite shaky but with the single farm payment and a load of fat lambs into Bakewell market in the world of finance things are looking up.

I can’t help pondering over how marketing lambs has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. If you sold a lamb 10 years ago approaching 40 kilos it was over fat, overweight and no-one wanted it yet the lorry load of lambs we sent to Bakewell just before Christmas averaged 48 kilos worth an average of 210 pence per kilo with the top priced pen of lambs coming to £115.

Apparently, according to my mates in the sheep business, there is an enormous demand now for what we call overweight lambs for the catering trade. I suppose, if you think about it, the costs are almost the same for cutting up a 36 kilo lamb as it is to cut up a 46 kilo one.

There is an old saying in life; it’s better to be born lucky than rich. One of my close relatives who was a very successful farmer and businessman reckoned that wasn’t necessarily the case as most successful people made their luck.

The reason I am starting off this month’s article talking about luck is because December certainly proved to be somewhat of an interesting month at Back oth Brook farm.

Way back in October a letter had come through the post from the National Health Service inviting a man of my years to do a bowel screening test for cancer. As a fighting fit person who had never visited the quacks more than a handful of times in his life, a carnivore consuming an enormous amount of red meat, I suppose I’d formed the view in life that I was pretty impregnable and it was always someone else who picked a bad hand when it comes to ill health.

It was several days before the letter inviting me, free of charge, to put a bit of poo on the back of a card, seal it down and send it back came to the notice of the boss of the household.

Talking about luck, thank goodness, for once in life I’ve got a missus who doesn’t know the meaning of the word NO. Almost with a shotgun in her hand she oversaw the return of the poo card. Within a few days it turned out that I was one of a small minority of people who needed a second test as there was a possibility that cancer was lurking around the old bones.

Well, I have to say what a damn lucky man I am because almost before I could say Jack Robinson I’d met a team of unbelievable people down the road at Derby, had the plumbing rearranged, the nasty bits thrown away and am left with a fighting chance of making a full recovery.

No one must ever moan to me about the health care that we have in Britain.

I have been fortunate to be associated with what I consider to be some of the best specialists, surgeons and nursing staff that you could find anywhere in the world. In little more than two weeks since I lay on the surgeon’s table I am up and running and looking forward to life for the next 20 years.

I make no apologies for writing about my ordeal with cancer and, to put it in a nutshell, had I not had a wife who insisted on me doing the sensible thing by the time I was ill, which would have been in several months time, I would probably not be writing about the future but more in anticipation of an obituary.

So please, please folk when you are given the opportunity to do a few simple tests, grab it with both hands because I am living proof that without the screening tests I wouldn’t have the fighting chance to resume a normal life that I have today. Never has the old wives proverb ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ been so appropriate.

Whilst I am recuperating I have little else to do other than listen to the radio in the mornings. The other day my old mate and former sparring partner Peter Kendal gave his new years speech as NFU president .

He gave a rallying cry to both the government and UK farmers that we, the good yeoman of Britain, given the opportunity to get rid of all the bureaucracy and shackles that are holding this great industry back, can go a long way to digging Britain out of the financial hole we seem to be finding impossible to climb out of.

This positive approach is what the whole country needs. There is too much rhubarb talked about how bad things are at a time when we should all be moving up a gear.

Finally, I would like to thank the hundreds of friends and relatives, my team of doctors and nursing staff who have been so kind to me over the last few weeks. I’d especially like to thank all the good folk who took the trouble to pray for me.

I am a Christian, although maybe not as good as I could be, but knowing folk have taken the time to think so deeply about you is like having an extra team on your side pushing you to the finishing post.