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Mugging up for my task, I watched a clip on YouTube of an Australian farmer shearing a sheep in less than a minute. Looks pretty straightforward, I thought.

Never has my confidence been so misplaced. Arriving at Ludley Farm, near Rye in East Sussex, I noticed that sheep were much bigger than they appeared online. Each Romney ewe weighed 14 stone (90kg) and stood at waist height. They were huge.

Their wool was not white and fluffy either, but coarse, sticky and yellow (up to 20 per cent of the weight comes from lanolin, a grease excreted by the animals’ pores). It was also covered in streaks of greenish faeces. The idea of even touching a sheep, let alone shaving off its coat, was becoming less appealing.

“The first thing to do is to grab one,” said Frank Langrishe, a semi-retired shearer and my tutor. He told me to creep up on the sheep from behind, put a hand underneath its chin and haul it backwards so that it sat against my legs with its feet in the air. This would make it docile, Frank said.

My first attempt went well. I grabbed one and managed to force it on to its backside. Then the sheep’s hind leg touched the side of the pen. It went ballistic and kicked me hard on the shin. “Don’t let its feet touch anything,” said Frank, belatedly.

He showed me the shears, which are like industrial versions of those used in the barbers. With its many blades, the comb is affectionately known as the 17-tooth dog. It is connected to an electric motor and spins at 2,500rpm. Frank held up a finger with the end missing after it was bitten off by the “dog”. I wanted to go home.

To shear a sheep you start on its belly. With slow, fluid motions of his right hand, Frank stroked the shears in parallel lines down towards the teats and used his left hand to pull the skin taut. Then it was my turn. I started on the flank and worked round, digging my feet beneath the sheep and gripping it between my legs to keep my hands free.

With Frank’s help, I managed to extract at least some wool from five sheep without killing either them or myself. One sheep, entirely shorn except for a spot on its back, kicked its way out of my grasp and ran towards the door, dragging its coat behind it like a bridal train. Still, Frank thought that I had done “remarkably well for a first go”. I felt proud, despite being covered in wool and faeces.

Shearing is exhausting work. I was sweating after only two and a half sheep. The top guys from New Zealand can do 500 in a day. “You get used to it,” said Frank, whose record is 350. “It takes about three weeks and a thousand sheep to get the pattern right. You only get quick after you’ve done 10,000. The top guys go into a trance. They say it’s like yoga.”

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