In 1999 climbers found George Mallory's body high on Everest, 75 years after he vanished, and the clothes he died in were still on him. They were wool, silk and cotton. In 2006 somebody put on an exact copy and climbed the mountain in it. For decades the story had been that Mallory and Irvine were doomed by their kit. Tweed jackets and woolly jumpers at 28,000 feet. Brave amateurs, dressed for a grouse moor. The body told a different story. Mallory was wearing 8 thin layers. Silk next to the skin, then fine wool, then more silk, more wool, a flannel shirt, and a windproof cotton outer woven so tightly it turned the snow. Four British universities took fragments from the body and rebuilt the whole outfit, thread for thread. A mountaineer called Graham Hoyland wore it on Everest. He reported that it was warm. It was also lighter than the modern down suit his companions were wearing. The silk layers slid over the wool, so he could move his arms freely, which a man in a padded plastic suit cannot. The wool held its warmth when damp with sweat. He said he would have been comfortable going for the summit in it. The researchers concluded the clothing was fully up to the job. So the gear of 1924 was not the weak point. A sheep and a silkworm had solved the problem of the coldest place on earth, at less weight, before anyone had invented nylon. Then we spent a century replacing it with petroleum and told ourselves the men who came before were underdressed.

Eduardo went to the vet on Tuesday for the first time in his life, for a tooth, and the lamb held the field for 7 hours. Nobody asked it to. It is 6 months old, it was orphaned on its first day and handed to an alpaca, and it has spent the whole of its life since copying him, badly, with complete conviction. It grazes head up. It spits. It walks the ewes in the evening in a manner the ewes have never once acknowledged. The trailer took Eduardo at 8. The lamb ran the fence line after it until the lane turned, and then it stopped, and stood, and the farmer watched it do a thing he has only ever seen the alpaca do. It turned round. It walked, at a steady pace, to the geometric centre of the field. And it stood there, at an angle to the hedge, head up, scanning, a 30-kilo Welsh Mountain lamb doing continuous arithmetic on 40 ewes who outweigh it 3 to 1 and have never taken it seriously for a second. The ewes went on grazing. At 11 the buzzard came over, low, the way it has come over that field twice a week all summer and been seen off by 5 feet of camelid each time. The lamb went up on its toes. It did not run. It did the thing Eduardo does, the long stare and the step forward, and the farmer, at the gate, said out loud that this was going to go badly. The ewes bunched. Every one of them. They came in behind the lamb in a block, the way they come in behind the alpaca, because a flock does not look at what is standing in the middle of the field, it looks at where the middle of the field is pointing, and the middle of the field was pointing at the buzzard. The buzzard, finding 41 animals facing it instead of 1, went and sat on a post. The lamb held the centre until the trailer came back at 3. It had not eaten. When Eduardo walked down the ramp, with a tooth fewer and a sore mouth, it ran to him, and the ewes went back to being 40 sheep in a field, and the farmer said nothing to anybody about any of it until his wife asked why the lamb was asleep against the alpaca at 4 in the afternoon. He said it had done a shift.