It was 31st October – Halloween! Trick or Treat and fancy dress, and of course games like bobbing for apples. And that gave Andrea an idea… She’d recently walked down the side of one of the fields at the farm, looking for brambles trailing in the water of the ditch because they snag sticks and other flotsam and cause surprising amounts of flooding. Whilst doing this she’d noticed hundreds and hundreds of crab apples floating in the water. Many of the trees edging this field are crab apples and the ripe fruit just drops into the water and gets washed downstream. So, she reasoned, here was an opportunity to celebrate Halloween with some apple bobbing, and also to cut back any brambles that were in danger of causing flooding! A win-win situation – perfect! All she needed was a pair of waterproof jodhpurs (which she was already wearing), some neoprene socks (which she was also already wearing) a Rooster AquaFleece smock (which had just finished drying on the Aga) and a pair of the tallest Bullseye-Hood rubber waders that she could find. Oh, and a pair of sturdy leather gloves and some secateurs of course, because the brambles are very prickly… Suitably attired she walked along the edge of the stream, her wader boots squelching in the muddy grass of the field; she watched the apples floating along in the beck whilst noting the brambles that she needed to remove. At the far end of the field she lowered herself thigh-deep into the flow and proceeded to work her way slowly downstream, snipping brambles and freeing snagged apples as she went. The Bullseye-Hood waders were sized as Extra Tall and for the first 200 meters of the stream they did their job admirably. Being Andrea, however, meant that she had to keep pushing them – deeper and deeper – until she got that little ingress of cold water through the crotch-seam of her waterproof jodhpurs. This was followed by trickles down the inside legs of both waders and then that squelching sensation between her neoprene socks and the insides of the wader boots. At this point she threw caution to the wind and enjoyed getting completely soaked, albeit pleasantly slowly...