I know some farmers are praying for rain, but for those of us on heavy ground this spell of dry weather is the best and longest we’ve had in years. All around me plenty of good, first-cut silage has been saved.

This week you can even smell the aroma of hay crisping up in the heat. I can’t remember when I saw so much hay down and no one fretting about saving it. Meadows are being cut where just seven weeks ago you couldn’t let livestock into them for fear of serious poaching. The turnaround is amazing.

Here in the yard and garden the long evenings mean we are making serious inroads into work we haven’t been able to tackle for years. One of these jobs is white-washing a bunch of old houses and the concrete posts and piers down the avenue.

This is a job that Seán and I have managed to avoid for the best part of 20 years. Avoidance was easy, as we always had children who needed to be kept busy and what better way than having to white-wash 70 posts and piers or a length of wall to keep them out of mischief. It’s my belief the two words you should never hear from a child growing up on a farm are “I’m bored”.

Alas the days of free child labour are over. Now those jobs are down to us. I volunteered so long as Seán made the whitewash mix. What he presented me with had the consistency of water. All I managed to do with it was splash everything in sight including myself.

My memory of making whitewash was that it had the consistency of clotted cream. So we upped the amount of hydrated lime in the mix. I could see what I had covered and there was little or no waste. Seán still says there’s no difference between the watery mix he made versus my thicker mix. All I’ve done is use up a lot more lime.

So what I’d like readers to do is send me their recipe for perfect whitewash. What are the proportions of water to lime? Do you add any other ingredients to make the whitewash sparkle? Given that the fine weather looks set to last into next week, there’s still plenty of time to put a shine on the place.

Turning to another topic, I fully agree with Damien O’Reilly and what he says about dropping history as a compulsory subject for the Junior Cert. I cannot understand the logic of it.

A well thought out history curriculum with proper source materials can lay the foundation for how young people perceive the world. It could give them perspective on great world events, the people who made a difference and whose actions still impact on us today. It could explain how we got to where we are today. Give context to wars, civil unrest and popular movements, be it fascism in 1930s Europe or the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s.

Where else will young people learn about Stalin, Ghandi, Roosevelt, Bismarck, Hitler, Thatcher or Gorbachev if not at school?

Dropping history is a bad decision, one that will leave young people all the poorer as they try to make sense of a rapidly changing and potentially more dangerous world. CL