YOU can take the girl out of the city, but you can't make her pat a cow. I'm sorry, I know some of you might harbour misguided notions about cows being harmless, lovable old milkers with eyelashes like Naomi Campbell and serene temperaments (unlike the aforementioned little madam) that mean they wouldn't say moo to a goose, but I simply don't like them.

I used to have a bit of a phobia about them, refusing to walk through fields that contained even the merest hint of cow - you know what I'm talking about - and shuddering to a halt in my car whenever a cattle-grid appeared on the horizon.

I blame reading a horror novel (I think it was a James Herbert gore-fest) at an early age. It contained a scene in which a farmer was surrounded by a herd of mad cows who proceeded to bite off his fingers one at a time with a gut-wrenching series of snaps and crunches before knocking him to the ground and finishing him off.

For the life of me I can't remember why on earth the cows committed this heinous crime. Maybe the farmer hadn't warmed his hands sufficiently before milking them, or perhaps they had spotted the Pies R Us van approaching across the fields. I just remember that they slowly and quietly surrounded him, probably batting their stupid eyelashes for all they were worth, and then pounced.

Only cows can't pounce, can they? They can lumber and they can lurk, but they can't pounce even if their long life milk depends on it. Unfortunately, this is a fact that took me an embarrassingly long time to come to terms with. Almost as long as it took me to realise that Henry Cooper wasn't Barry Sheen's dad (I saw them in those Brut commercials together in the Seventies and drew my own mentally-challenged conclusions).

But after long, tortuous hours of contemplation and even more hours of my supposed friends pointing, laughing and mooing at me as I cowered in the backseat of the car on countryside drives with my head wrapped in a travel blanket, I have finally rid myself of my phobia.

I still don't like cows. Which is why I didn't exactly kick up my heels with joy when I was asked to go to Malton Show last week. But there will be animals there, I said, animals bigger than my sofa with horns and hooves and weird purple tongues.

Fortunately, however, my fears were soon appeased by some softly spoken words of reassurance... and a handful of crisp fivers. So off I went with my notebook in my bag and my heart in my mouth. Of course, it wasn't as bad as I had imagined. There weren't hordes of cows wandering about, cornering lone farmers and biting off their digits, and there weren't gigantic bulls thundering through the tea tent, knocking over tables of scones and goring members of the WI.

There was a stray hound which made its way into the press tent and had to be literally dragged out from under the table by the scruff of its neck by a small but deceptively strong boy. And as I trudged across the field to the portable toilets (aren't they fun?) I did have to manoeuvre my way gingerly through a braying throng of young showjumpers on horses which were each about the size of a bungalow.

Oh, and did I mention the weather? Let's just say that on the few occasions I stuck my head out of the tent to catch a glimpse of the lovely old vintage tractors or the incredible birds of prey, my hair was whipped into a frenzy by the wildest winds this side of Chicago and my face was immediately drenched by the first Malton monsoon of the season.

But at least I wasn't attacked by a herd of cows.

Updated: 10:54 Monday, June 28, 2004