The village hall was cold, the calendar was for the air ambulance, and I had been recruited on the firm understanding that I would be pouring tea, not appearing in it. Mrs. Prydderch of the committee had other ideas, and Mrs. Prydderch has never once lost an argument in this valley.
So I stood where I was told, in my own coat, in front of a borrowed backdrop, feeling every one of my sixty-one years - and the photographer, a young woman down from Cardiff, kept lowering her camera and laughing. Not at me, she insisted. At how little I seemed to care. Thirty-eight years of shearing gangs and market days will do that; there is no self-consciousness left in me to find.
Three weeks later her agency wrote to ask if I had representation. I read the letter twice, put it behind the clock, and got on with worming the ewes. My daughter found it there in August and made the phone call herself, standing in my kitchen, watching me the whole time like I might bolt for the hill.
I tell this story to every woman my age who says she couldn't. I couldn't either. That's rather the point. The work found me because I stopped performing for the camera and simply stood still in front of it - and standing still, it turns out, is a thing you get better at with age, not worse.
The calendar raised four thousand pounds, by the way. I was March.