I have always, it seems, woken up at two or three o'clock in the morning. There is a very good reason why I wake up at that time these days, the details of which would be inappropriate to set down here.

Thirty years ago it would have been for a very different reason altogether but the details of that would be even more inappropriate.

This morning I was woken by a throbbing noise. As I lay in a semi-conscious state I, very feebly, tried to identify what it was.

I ran a sort of roll call of my body parts to see if all was well and decided that the only bit that was in any difficulty was my left arm. I was lying on it.

The arm felt sort of dead and it was full of pins and needles so I decided that it was empty of blood and the throbbing noise was in fact the blood trying to get back in.

I turned over on to the other side and went back to sleep, pleased that I had solved the problem without having to wake up properly.

The noise woke me a second time but I drifted off again.

The third time I woke I turned over on to my back and I did another body check. After a few minutes, half awake, half dozing, I decided that the noise wasn't coming from me. I also decided to try to locate it.

First I checked my mobile phone. I use it as an alarm clock because I hate the noise it makes so it always does a good job of waking me up. I put my hand out in the dark and located the phone – it was fast asleep, just like I should have been.

I sat up in bed and realised the noise was quite clearly coming through the window. And there lay the answer – it was a rave.

They have one on a farm about three miles away several times a year and the drum beat always wakes me up and invades my subconscious.

I always wonder how loud it is if you are actually at the rave if I can hear it such a long way away.

I know the lad whose farm it was on; he's a grand lad, even if he is a bit unconventional for a farmer.

I've asked him if I could go to one of his raves and he said I'd be very welcome.

I went back to sleep content and satisfied. For a few minutes there, I'd thought I was having one of my turns.

I've mentioned deer here before. I've never seen one on my land but there are woods everywhere you look around here, some are even called forests, and there are plenty of stories of deer being there.

Ten or 12 miles away there is a forest with hundreds in, so I suppose it's inevitable that they will spread about.

Driving along the back lanes to where my daughter lives, only four miles away, I saw one on their land. I stopped and watched it grazing and eventually drove on, pleased to have seen it.

Deer in this sort of mixed farming environment have quite a good life because conventional farm fences are no barrier to them – I've seen them hop over a standard netting and two-barb wire fence from a standing start and clear it by some distance. This ability to roam at will gives them access to the best of everything in their diet, especially in winter when they can graze at night on swedes, turnips and winter wheat crops or help themselves to hay or silage where it is put out for out-lying sheep and cattle.

I told my son-in-law that I'd seen the deer on his land and he said it had been about for a couple of weeks. He went on to name three local farmers who are determined to shoot it and put it in the deep freeze and that it has become quite a competition as to who will bag the prize.

I thought that was a shame, as it was nice to see that deer about. It would be nicer still to see a group of them about – then you could start thinking about one for the freezer.

■ Our cows spend two or three months of their calving cycle in what we call a dry period. This is a time when, as the word dry suggests, they are not producing milk.

It is a time of relative rest, when they can rebuild body resources and grow the calf that is inside them.

In the winter, our dry cows go into a nice warm shed with plenty of clean straw and in summer they go out to graze, but away from where we live, on land we rent a couple of miles away.

A month or so ago our brown Swiss cow, she of the Alpine bell around her neck, was about to undergo this journey and I had intended to remove the bell lest she should lose it but I was too late, she had already been boarded, so cow and bell were away to their summer grazing.

It so happens that there is a row of cottages adjoining the fields where she roams and complaints have been trickling back to me about the noise.

It's quite a pleasant, melodious bell, and this group of cattle have the run of 40 acres, so I don't suppose she goes up and down the row every night like the grim reaper out and about.

There are two solutions to this: get her in and remove the bell, or get some more. My inclination is the latter.

Are there any kind West Country Life readers out there with cow bells they don't use? If I had enough, I could make a herd of cows sound like an ice cream van – this has an attraction I find difficult to resist.