Amanda Sheridan's Reviews > Diddly Squat: A Year on the Farm

Diddly Squat – A Year on the Farm is the companion book to the first series of Clarkson’s Farm, and like the series, it follows Jeremy Clarkson as he stumbles through learning how to actually be a farmer in his famous, bumbling ‘I’m a complete idiot,’ style.
His sheep are trying to kill him. His pigs are re-enacting The Great Escape. He wants a chainsaw but he’s afraid of them, and he constantly worries that he’ll walk home some day with his severed arm in a bag.
And, just like the series, the book is brilliant. There are laugh out loud moments, and then there’s the serious part.
Clarkson finds himself, like all farmers, up against the vagaries of the British weather. It’s too hot, it’s too cold. It’s too dry, it’s too wet. He battles red tape, new regulations, and the devastating damage Brexit has caused to farming. The Government, and the exhausting, continuous hard work just to try and make a living from the soil.
In one short comedic series, and book, Clarkson has done more to highlight the plight of farming in Britain today, and, as he says, he does this to earn 40p a day. He speaks of the high injury/death rate due to farm accidents and the terribly high rate of suicides in farming. And he speaks from the heart because, despite all the hardship—he knows that without his other income from TV shows he would have gone under a long time ago—he loves what he is doing.
And “on that bombshell” I’m giving this book five stars.