Fair Game Reloaded

The pheasant was not my first attempt at harvesting road kill this last year. My first was a stag.

It was lying invitingly by the roadside, a whole truckload of venison on the hoof. All I needed was a truck.

So I called up various truck-owning friends. None of them, to my disgust, were prepared to sully their vehicles with a dead stag whose innards were in not as innard as one might wish. So much for getting down and dirty in countryside. Designer smallholders, to a man.

So I gave up, decided I could just about squeeze the corpse into my hatchback, and returned to its side.

I hadn’t realised how heavy deer actually are. They look so lightweight, flitting about on those spindly legs. I could barely lift the head of this one. I might possibly have been able to haul him into the car in stages if my back held out, but I was fairly sure what I was doing was illegal (it isn’t) so didn’t want to hang about for too long, and those bulging entrails did look rather green and viscous. So I chickened out. And when I passed the spot a few hours later, the deer had flown. Some lucky stiff had nabbed it.

My parents killed a deer once, in the middle of Guildford.

They hit it head-on and it flew right over their car, crashing lifeless onto the tarmac behind them. My parents walked up the road to phone the police and confess all. By they time they returned, the deer had vanished. The emergency services arrived speedily and in force, sirens blazing, under the misapprehension that the reported death was a human one. My poor parents didn’t even have the corpse to show them.

Venison is tricky stuff.

Fair game

He lay on the verge – young, handsome, flawless but immobile, eyes closed and neck at an improbable angle. I dared not stop on such a busy stretch of road, but I knew I could reach him on foot if I parked around the corner. I was right – the side path from the woods came out onto the roadside almost alongside him. I had taken the precaution of bringing along a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. It was the work of a moment to pick him up by the feet, pop him into it and melt back into the forest like a happy shopper, leaving behind only a perplexed motorist or two. Roast pheasant for Easter!

Back home, Number One Son was less than enthusiastic about my bag. ‘Is it okay?’ he asked, peering at the bird like the eagle-eyed physician he’s hoping to become.

‘Nope!’ I said happily.

‘What did he die of?’ the forensic scientist moved to the fore.

‘I would guess a road accident’ I said ‘Though I don’t think he was actually driving. Just an innocent pedestrian, in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

‘You’re not going to make us eat road-kill? That’s so rank!’

‘He’s not road kill, he’s game’ I said gamely ‘ I’m now going to draw his entrails, then hang him for a week till Easter’

‘I think you hang them first’ said Number One Son ‘Then draw and quarter them. We did it in History.’

Number One Son is currently revising for GCSEs.

In fact, I was also turning to History. My undergraduate studies are hardly ever useful, but medieval writers were obsessed with hunting, and with the courtly art, as they regarded it, of dismembering dead stuff. So I knew the techniques.

My idea was to cut around the back passage of the bird, and then draw out the insides in a single flowing movement.

Scrabbling amongst the still warm feathers for the anus felt disturbingly intimate and presumptuous, a feeling which increased massively when what I found looked remarkably familiar and pinkly vulnerable. Cutting around it proved harder than expected, but I managed eventually, and was rewarded, after unspeakable oozings, with a blue-grey bulge of bowel, which came away in my hands. Groping inside for more, the warmth of the interior gave me the horrors (could something that warm really be dead?), until I found a spare surgical glove (spare from what?) and with its protection fought on.

Actually, it was fascinating. The liver surprisingly large, the heart surprisingly small and heart-shaped, the bile duct slimey green and the stomach enormous. I never did find the lungs – maybe pheasants have residual gills.

The pheasant is hanging in the shed, waiting to be plucked and roasted. Now he’s cold, stiff and hollow as an Easter egg, I feel a lot better about him. Though I’m still not sure I can force myself to eat him.

Selling out

Well, we have a future, but it’s not in the countryside.

We are moving to the local market town. It’s perfect in so many ways – close to the children’s school and easy access to the rail network if I need to commute – which I may well do in order to pay for our pretty new home. It does have a garden – a house-width streak of looking green with a substantial shed at the bottom (I do love a good shed!). Not chook country, alas, though I could attempt the odd potato, I suppose. At the moment the grounds are mainly laid to Early Learning Centre plastic play equipment, and drying lines of midget pastel clothing – the present incumbents have small children.

I’ve been using the impending move as an excuse to get rid of thing the children have outgrown. Number One Son’s cast offs naturally leach down into Number Two Son’s overcrowded bedroom, so last weekend we were able to exercise Number Two Son’s passion for car boot sales with car-full of books, toys and prepubescent clutter harvested from his floor.

Not sharing Number Two Son’s passion, I had to be emotionally blackmailed into participation, particularly when I discovered it meant getting up at 5.00 am on a Sunday morning. But, came the dawn (and even before that) I found I didn’t mind nearly as much as I thought I would.

It was fun driving the empty roads under an eggshell blue sky that boded well. It was fun laying out our humble stall amongst the other car-booters, who proved a jolly, charming, helpful bunch. As not a lot happened, I lounged in the spring sunshine happily reading a book from our stock. And when the pace eventually hotted up, I had the pleasure and surprise of watching my normally quiet, thoughtful child transform himself into a red hot salesman and patter-merchant.

We ended the day £50 up and half a carful lighter. The highlight for me was the box of Pokamon cards. At 2p per card these were never going to make a hefty profit, but they proved an outstanding crowd-pleaser. Small heads were bent and grubby fingers scrabbled all morning, as eight year old Pokamon aficionados shared expertise (‘No, that’s Charmian, it evolves into Charmander’), and no doubt nits, before relinquishing their stickily warm 10 pences.

His father has been worrying lately that our second-born may not grow to be financially astute. But I detect a definite entrepreneurial streak. I’m keeping quiet, though , about his plan to supplement his future zoo-keeper’s salary by writing science fiction novels. At least he's not selling out.

The Coming of Carloth

We’ve been threatened with the coming of Carlos (or Carloth, as I can’t help calling him, having spent years learning to say ‘Barthelona’ with appropriate aplomb) ever since Number One Son’s exchange trip to Seville.

Carloth is coming to stay with us next week to brush up his excellent English, Number One Son having spent his Spanish trip also brushing up Carloth’s excellent English. Number One Son’s Spanish remains stubbornly negligible, unlike my own, which is non-existent. I can say Ola! (without the upside down exclamation mark, which I can’t pronounce) because it’s the name of a magazine, and Grazie and Prego, which alas turn out to be Italian.

So we are all depending entirely and pathetically on Carloth’s Excellent English.

Number One Son asked me to fetch down his air gun to ‘give them something to do’ during Carloth’s stay. What exactly? They could practice shooting the bird table, which has already almost disintegrated under the strain, or the apple trees, though this risks winging Dolly, Mollie or possibly Polly in the field beyond. They could shoot each other, of course, but only by taking turns.

We both know why Number One Son wants the gun around; to make him look impressive. Like the sword.

I bought him the sword for Christmas. I was tired of investing in memory sticks that got lost and PS3 games I didn’t want them to play. I wanted to buy actual stuff for Christmas, not electronics. And what my total pacificist son turned out to want was a real antique sword.

Easier said than done. I soon discovered that telling a dealer ‘I want a sword for my 15 year old son’ meant he couldn’t then sell me one: it’s illegal. Daft really, as the sword I ended up with (by lying, alas) is so blunt no drug-crazed adolescent could possibly do harm with it, except perhaps by bashing someone over the head with the scabbard.

But Number One Son was enraptured, and has mounted it, Damocles-like, above his bedroom door, where it lives when he isn’t polishing it lovingly. It’s a nineteenth century infantryman’s sword apparently: hopefully Carloth will be impressed.

Armed with this and my red tray-cloth, they could always go and play matadors with ‘bull in park.’ – that should make Carloth feel more at home.

Ole! And all that. I do wish I spoke Spanish

Ragging on

I would have liked to show you a photo of the childen of the village school learning to rag a rug. Pictures were taken. But I cannot publish them here, for the children’s safety (or, rather, mine – the headmistress is quite scarey). Blanking out their faces would not apparently be sufficient to guarantee anonymity.

I do, anyway, dislike TV footage with all the children’s faces blurred into fingerprints or pixilated into Mondrians. It makes them look like little criminals, denying the very innocence of childhood.

But I do see the problem. I too would hate the idea of the sexual deviants who follow this blog becoming erotically enflamed at the sight of Years Five and Six with a progging hook. On top of that, I would be drawing attention to the fact that the village school does in fact contain many children, of both sexes. Local paedophile gangs, having wasted years hanging hopefully around the Masonic Lodge and the WI Hall, would soon realise their strategic error and turn up in droves,

So all you get to see is the rug. And if you’re a hessian-fetishist – you’re welcome to it. I can do no more

In which we rag a rug

I’ve just been showing a captive audience of primary school children how to make a rag rug. I managed to keep them (slightly) amused for a whole 20 minutes – a good 19 more than it actually takes to explain the technique.

I can’t imagine how my parents came to possess a rag rug, but they did. It was large and smelly, like a friendly old dog, and as a small child I would roll myself up in it whilst watching Crackerjack.

The Black Country Living History Museum capitalises on its location in an unemployment blackspot by forcing locals to dress as Victorians and Demonstrate things. When I visited, one unfortunate victim was demonstrating rag rug making. I immediately cornered her (Victorian Black Country cottages being ideal for this sort of thing) and bombarded her with technical questions, which she fended off bravely. Inspired by this encounter, I bought a rug-progger online, and set about learning the trade.

These rugs, I explained to the children (most of whom stayed politely awake throughout) are based on old hessian sacks, readily available throughout Victorian rural England.

I did not add that modern agriculture is, however, founded on bailer twine and paper sacks. I couldn’t find hessian anywhere.

I’d been wanting a hessian sack for some time. I’d heard that if you fill one with chicken pooh and keep it in a water butt, the result is a superb liquid manure (it isn’t: the sack rots and the result is indescribable).

My search eventually took me to Hen and Hammock, a stunning online shop for the Boden-clad weekend Cotswold cottager. Here, browsing deliciously around the unacceptable face of pastel-coloured Yummy-Mummy-hood, amongst designer hedgehog houses and alpaca wrist warmers, I found genuine hessian sacks.

A pair (‘for sack races…ideal for party games’) came to a price including postage which would reduce any self-respecting farmer, Victorian or otherwise, to tears of mirth. Well worth it, however, as the foundation of a successful rug-making career.

I’ve progged half a rug so far, and it looks wonderful. I don’t know what I’ll do with the finished item. My own children are far too old to roll up in it, and you can’t play Assassin’s Creed II from inside a rag rug.

I could always unpick it and enter a sack race.

The Silence of the Blog

Just a quick apology for the blog-silence over the past couple of weeks. I've got stuff to tell you but no way to upload it - for the last week and more I have been internetless.

The reason apparently, and you'll like this, is that someone has broken into the BT cabinet in the village and stolen a lot of the copper wire, presumably to sell. My immediate neighbours' copper wire was apparently resistable, so they're still in communication with the outside world. Mine, however, was just too desirable.

BT has established a base camp next to the cabinet; a small rather unimpressive tent accompanied by a large support lorry parked outside the pub. So we have hopes.

Questions remain. How much copper wire does a cabinet contain, and what's the current price? I'm impressed it's actually worth the effort. Maybe, like gold, it's gone up in the recession, and subject to dodgy daytime television ads ( 'I stripped all the lead off the church roof and posted it to 'Moneyformetal', and they sent me back £234!)

The other question - so how am I getting this online? Answer, serruptitiously from deep in a government office at risk of a well-paid contract. Spies are everywhere, I can say no more....