IT is, perhaps, the saddest piece of paper I have ever seen, a small orange pamphlet with a picture of a farmer on the front page. It is not the normal picture one associates with bucolic goings on amongst the rustics.

This agricultural type is walking away from the camera, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his Barbour jacket, his head bowed towards the earth. It was the headline that caught my eye: "Don't suffer alone ... Please Phone".

For this is a plea from a group of rural organisations including the Samaritans. And its aim is to throw a lifeline to battered, bewildered and sometimes bitter farmers contemplating that most awful of acts, suicide.

I had gone to Mar'ton Mart with Owd Tom for a bit of a day out, some shopping, whilst Tom sold half a dozen lambs in the show ring.

Whilst he was going about his business, I sorted idly through some of the brochures and pamphlets lying on a table in the pay office.

And there it was, amongst the ads for animals feed and farm machinery, the bumph explaining (or at least, trying to explain) the latest twist in the European Union red-tape maze: a scrap of orange paper that could literally mean the difference between life and death.

Now here in Beggarsdale, despite the slump in livestock prices, we have as far as I know no farmers likely to commit suicide, largely because they are a stolid, careful bunch who did not go running to the banks to take out huge loans for so-called farm improvements.

But there are many who did in other Dales - indeed, throughout the whole country - and now they can no longer afford the repayments.

There are, no doubt, many thousands of townies who have lost their cars, perhaps even their houses, because of debt arrears and I am not underestimating the disaster that this must have meant to them.

But I wonder if any urban folk can really understand the agony of a young farmer who is faced with losing the land he and his family have worked for years, perhaps for generations?

This is more than just bankruptcy, which some city whizz-kids seem to accept as a normal hazard of commercial life, a mere hiccup on the way to their first million milked from the trusting public in some other dodgy scheme.

For the farmer, this is a disgrace sometimes too much to bear, a blow to his standing not just as a farmer but as a man (or, often these days, a woman).

And in small communities, where bad news travels fast, it is not possible to hide the shame from family, friends and neighbours.

So more and more farmers are taking their own lives. The job now has one of the highest suicide rates of any profession, which is why the Samaritans, the Citizens' Advice Bureaux and other members of the Yorkshire Rural Initiative Group have issued their sad orange pamphlet listing the phone numbers desperate people can ring for help.

Do the politicians in Westminster and Brussels and Strasbourg know what is going on the the countryside? Frankly, I doubt it. But if they do, do they care?

The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.