In The Bleak Midwinter

'Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone'

We skimmed stones across frozen ponds yesterday. They make a strange, alien, thrumming noise as they bounce over the ice. In another era, we would have strapped on our skates and cut a fine dash amongst the petrified willows. As it was, we contented ourselves with crunching through a little stream, leaving a wake of shattered panes and stirring mud. I have a brand new pair of aubergine Hunters, which makes me feel like a Christopher Robin poem. After a season of leaky wellies, there is a special pleasure now in being ankle-deep in water.

With everything frozen solid for days, paths which were impassibly muddy are now solid, if perilously rocky. Frosted grass crunches deliciously under foot. But my toes, tiddly pom, are frozen.

‘It’s not so much the toes, as the ears’ says Piglet to Pooh.

And like piglet’s, mine do seem to catch the wind a bit as Frosty Wind Makes Moan. So one way and another, I’m retreating indoors for Christmas.

The countryside has closed down for the winter. Next door’s sheep are barricaded inside their designer barn. We have to break the ice each morning to open the chooks’ coop, and defrost their drinking water. Robins are everywhere in the bare-branched trees, fluffed up against the cold like feathery round tree decorations. They are ridiculously tame, suddenly, and their pathetic ‘peeping’ cries plead with you to do something about all this, please. But I’m not sure what.

I do believe we are all designed to hibernate. Emerging from the duvet before the watery winter sun has hauled itself high into the sky each morning is an unnatural act. I want my burrow, my lair, my nice dark earthy hideaway to doze in snugly till spring comes knocking.

We have, thanks to our wood-elf, enough fuel to see us well into the New Year. We have a freezer full of food squirreled away against the Christmas period. We have crystal decanters glowing with sloe gin and raspberry vodka to keep out the cold, and dozens of Devil’s Wee to uncork. And we have our friends and neighbours, crunching up the path to deliver Christmas cards and invitations, stopping for a glass and a gossip.

I’ve done my bit. I’ve Harked at Herald Angels Singing and Come and Adored Him in the candle-lit depths of our village church, welcoming in the Light of the World as we squash into old oak pews in a welter of knitted scarves, gloves and dropped carol sheets. Now, in the Bleak Midwinter, I am battening down the hatches and staying firmly put. The world can get along without me for a few days.

With best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Joyful New Year from all at Garden Cottage.

Of Headless Kings and Broken Haloes

It was meant to be, if not quite an heirloom, a tradition to be passed on to my grandchildren. Grannie’s nativity – created in a bygone era when people had the leisure, ingenuity and sheer bad taste to do such things.

The nativity came out of a rather sad period of my life (for recipients, not for me – I was loving it) when I made everything out of papier mache. My nativity represented a creative peak – after which I was able to move on, calm down and return to the tamer shores of jam-making.

The size of the nativity was dictated by the polystyrene balls obtainable from my local art shop, and the amount of plasticine I could summon up from about the house. Each figure was modelled, headless, in plasticine, and coated and Vaseline, then papier mache. Once hardened, I split and removed the papier mache shell, reassembled it with a coin inside for stability, attached the polystyrene head with a matchstick….oh, you get the idea. The result, painted and varnished, looked pretty good, particularly when I thought of lining the rather nasty cardboard ‘stable’ with foil, and lighting candles inside.

Every Twelfth Night my papier mache cast returns to a bin-liner in the attic, and every Christmas it re-emerges slightly the worse for wear. First, the donkey’s ears got bent. Then the clear varnish began yellowing, giving the angel of the Lord a streaky, nicotine-stained look. The stout shepherd (adolescent puppy-fat, I had decided, having somehow overdone the plasticine at an early stage) lost his ability to stand unaided and now has to lean drunkenly each year against the crooked-eared donkey. But worst of all, my best king’s head fell off. Last year, I made it a whole new papier mache neck. But this year, as I unpacked, out it rolled, like a French aristocrat after a bad day at the tumbrels. I have glued it back, but he will never be the same.

And now Jesus’s halo is bent.

Every year I think I’ve lost Baby Jesus, a tiny cigar-end shaped slug of yellowing papier mache; and that, or course, will be the end of that. But every year he turns up, caught in a corner of the stable, or bowling along the carpet with the disembodied king, ready to be reinstated in his cardboard manger. So every year Mary kneels totteringly before him, and Joseph, tall and thin and slightly disapproving, balances behind.

What do you do with a dying nativity? I can hardly put the Holy Family and all their friends on the fire, or out in the wheelie bin with the wrapping paper.

What has happened is what I wanted to happen. My nativity has become more than just wallpaper paste and poster paint. It has become, if not quite a tradition, greater than the sum of its various tatty parts. In a very modest way, it has become a Sacred Thing.

So that’s that. I am obliged to join the fat shepherd and the headless king and make my obeisance before the bent halo of the Infant Christ. They have brought Him a papier mache sheep that looks more like a small bear, and a tiny gold box of frankinscence. I have brought Superglue and a sense of resignation, only slightly tinged with pride.

Dark Doings at the Victorian Farm

Bliss. The Victorian Farm is back on television – this time as a three part Christmas Special.

I just adored The Victorian Farm. I love the production values. The clothes for a start – how wonderful to see someone farming in a bowler hat, or homely, spikily intelligent Ruth bustling about dressed in a hideous, lumpen jacket and skirt of her own manufacture. Then there’s the farming – not just the ploughshares and shire horses, but the outlandish bygone agricultural machinery that so often works.

Most of all, there’s the personal chemistry. Identifying as I do with Ruth, I was deeply put out when Part One of the Christmas Edition introduced her real-life daughter as Assistant Butter-Churner. I don’t want Ruth to have a real, twenty-first century private life. I want to believe that she and the two handsome younger men live together in a scandalous Dickensian rural ménage-a-trois, complete with candlesticks, billowing white nightshirts and plump, all-embracing goose-down quilts, whilst their landlords the Actons turn a blind eye.

Christmas starts early in Shropshire – with hay-making, apparently. This task was designated by Mr Acton himself – an adorable old gent who has clearly not had to adapt his normal get-up much to appear Victorian. He plays along gamely as the cast tug their forelocks to him, though you can see he’s just itching to get back to Countdown on the telly.

There were early Christmas presents for everyone on their return the series - Ruth had a new copper which excited her a good deal, and Peter and Alex had a Heath-Robinson-ish automatic bailer which sprayed everything impressively with hay.

The cottage had fallen victim to various improvements since last season, including the destruction of Ruth’s kitchen garden and the establishment of an entirely new one on the other side of the building.

Ruth looked genuinely put out, and I don’t blame her. ‘All that work!’ she wailed.

But why?

Alas, all is not as it seems down at the Victorian Farm. The Actons have a dark family secret, much worse than a bit of discreet bed-swapping. The Victorian Farm is actually (I quote):

‘…one of Britain's leading working farm museums.’

Old Mr Acton is not a throw-back. He’s an entrepreneur.

‘We specialise in practical demonstrations of historic farming using traditional skills and period horse-drawn machines.’ Says the blurb.

‘You can see farm life unfold on the land, around the farm yard and in the cottage [Ruth’s cottage! How could they?] with each day being rounded off with milking by hand.’

What a blow. Next thing, you’ll be telling me that Ruth’s a professional Historical Consultant, and Alex and Peter aren’t really Victorians at all.

Image borrowed without permission from BBC and Ruth Goodman websites

In Which We Fail to Sew a Fine Seam

I've just spent an utterly humiliating morning, completely failing at a project I’ve been putting off for weeks.

I'm beginning to notice that if I keep delaying an activity, it’s because my subconscious is well ahead of me. It's already calculated the whole thing is going to screw up big-time, sensibly ignoring my conscious brain’s assurances that I’ve thought it all through, and it’s Absolutely Fool-Proof.

‘Oh yeah?’ says my subconscious.

And when it comes to sewing projects, it speaks from bitter experience.

All my life, I’ve been defeated by needlework. My schooldays were blighted by blanket stitch and bias binding. Stunningly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, my teachers seemed more interested in neat handwriting and invisible hemming than mere academic achievement. I think the problem was the sheer scope and magnitude of my failures – it must have been hard to believe I wasn’t doing it on purpose.

First, there were the knitted gloves, which then became mittens, which were finally, after a year of hard labour had produced a single grubby, lopsided square, declared a Useful Kettle-Holder.

Then there was the little girl’s dress: a disaster waiting to happen.

‘The poor child will have out grown it long before it’s finished’ sighed my exasperated needlework-mistress, unpicking yet another seam.

It was eventually completed. Whether it got worn I don’t know. The recipient was recently appointed a Professor of Art History, so is almost certainly too big for it now.

I never stood a chance. My mother couldn’t sew, and neither could her mother. They didn’t need to. I grew up in a welter of adoring great-aunts, some of them professional needlewomen. Amazing gauze and velvet party frocks streamed continuously from their skilled, arthritic fingers. Then another aunt married a textile designer, and the circle was complete – all I had to do was model the results.

We did eventually own a sewing machine. My father purchased it from the elderly admirer of one of the great-aunts, in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. It was a pre-war treadle machine which, if you didn’t peddle continuously with Le-Mans-style tenacity, would leap suddenly and unnervingly into reverse.

When we moved house, it was replaced by an equally decrepit table-top model. And with this I still try, and fail, to sew. I read the other day that the needle on a sewing machine should be replaced after each project: mine's still using the needle that saw it through the Blitz.

But it’s a bad workman who blames his tools. I blame my own incompetence and poor observation skills.

I copied a simple top, which has always fitted surprisingly well, using a chintz off-cut I’d bought years ago for a potential nativity shepherd. I tacked it carefully together using the original top as a guide, so there could be no possibility of error.

I tried on the results, and the seams split. It was far too tight. I tried on the original white top. It fitted perfectly. I laid the white top against the chintz one. They were identical.

I pondered this bizarre conundrum for a while.

Then I grabbed the sides of the original top and pulled. It flexed. It was bias cut, giving the linen weave an elastic quality. My chintz top, of course, was not.

So that’s the end of that. What a waste of fabric. I shall just have to make it into kettle-holders.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

I’ve just enjoyed my annual treat of buying the Christmas tree. A bit early for me, but apparently only just in time.

Every year I go to the same place, and unpromising-looking modern bungalow in the middle of nowhere, with a hand-painted hardboard ‘Xmas trees and wreaths’ sign out the front. Beside the bungalow is a yard full of newly cut trees. You can tell they’re newly cut because, if none of them appeals, a handsome young man in overalls leads you into the adjoining field where (disappointingly) he simply invites you to select a growing one to be chopped down specially. It’s a bit like choosing your lobster from a tank in a seafood restaurant – the same sense of absolute power over life and death, but less gruesome and you don’t need claw crackers.

This year, however, they’re talking about closing down well before Christmas. They’ve run out of trees.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, pointing to a field simply stuffed with Christmas trees.

But these, apparently, are next year’s trees, not yet ready for harvesting. It takes around 6 years to grow a 5’ to 7’ tree – the size people want. 3 years ago there was a run of dry summers, which are just beginning to hit this season’s yield.

‘See those trees there?’ the farmer indicated a sad-looking row of hefty sawn-off pines ‘We’re having cut the tops off and use them, just to have something to sell’

I got lucky and found a prime specimen – a bit too prime, to be honest, being a good 8’ tall with skirts so wide that, once installed in our substantial hall, it may well no longer be possible to use the stairs. But it’s Christmas, and you have to be ready to make sacrifices.

The farmer pushed my tree through a wonderful gadget which enveloped it tightly in plastic mesh. He inserted it, thus tamed, into my hatchback, where it nuzzled my ear and blocked my left-side view for the journey home.

Soon, I will be draping festive silver and gold ktinsel all over it to the sound of Carols from Kings College Cambridge on the CD player, whilst the children huddle Scrooge -like before the PS3, complaining about the racket.

Incidentally, the debate about whether real or artificial trees are most environmentally –friendly seems to have been settled – so my tree is also guilt-free.

‘…the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree’

Oh, I do still love Christmas!

Thanks to the excellent Owl-light blog for sharing T S Eliot's poem 'The Cultivation of Christmas Trees'

Of wreaths and rosehips

My Christmas Wreath is looking better and better as I find more stuff to poke into it.

This has been a great year for berries, with the holly looking wonderful (some years the berries disappear before Christmas, which is so frustrating) and the hedgerows full of bird fodder.

Today I added some hawthorn berries (I think) and a handful of late rosehips to my wreath for added colour. It’s been a while since I last handled a rosehip, traumatised as I still am by the past.

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I’d always felt there ought to be something you can do with rosehips, and once I acquired my life-changing copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for Free, I realised what it was.

In the Second World War, when everyone was eating their potato peel and generally exploiting resources to the max, some sadistic soul dreamed up Rose Hip Syrup. Mabey provides much detail on this, as well as the original Ministry of Food recipe.

People seem to have been obsessed with vitamin C during wartime. Why, when the UK produces so much excellent soft fruit? Don’t tell me all the blackberries were all off serving their country on the Western Front. My great aunts used to speak of pips made out of wood chips to make turnip jam look more like raspberry. Why not use raspberries? There was even extra sugar ration available for jam-making. But no, the masochistic British housewife had to go and make turnip jam and Rose Hip Syrup.

I can just remember Rose Hip Syrup, which must have continued well into the 1960s. I also remember Cod Liver Oil and Malt – a fabulous, fat, slurpy, toffee-covered spoonful with the merest hint of fishiness. Rose Hip Syrup, despite the promising colour, was a comparative let-down.

Nevertheless, with Mabey behind me, I decided to create a few bottles for my fellow mothers and their infants to enjoy.

‘The pricky seed…can be a dangerous internal irritant’ warns Mabey

And not just internal, believe me.

I did have the sense to wear rubber gloves, but the seeds somehow migrated around and above these, and my arms were a mass of agonising itchy red. A myriad minute yellow spines worked their way under my skin, making life a total misery for days.

I completed the syrup somehow, and strained and strained it, each straining producing another skim of evil yellow specks. I decanted the result, which was very pretty indeed. But I couldn’t bring myself to feed it to a child. The idea of one of those spiteful yellow filaments burrowing into some innocent little pink epiglottis...

So I threw the lot away, and haven’t touched a rosehip since.

The sacrifice and suffering of the wartime housewife is rarely emphasised. I think wreathes should be laid at the cenotaph for veteran housewives as well as servicemen. Instead of poppies, these wreathes would be made from rosehips.

Not by me, though.

Of Scarey Sheep and Holy Goats

I’m not bad with sheep.

When they’re feeling fond of me, my sons like to recite tales of my ovine derring-do – ‘The time Mum rescued the sheep stuck a bramble bush’; ‘The time Mum rescued the sheep stuck in a feeding trough’. But their favourite of all is ‘The time Mum got bitten by a sheep. Twice’

This last is the least heroic, but easily the most interesting. Anyone can rescue sheep – being savaged by one is harder.

Our village had a tiny pretty pocket-handkerchief sized paddock right next to the church. The late Squire used this to keep small numbers of sheep under his eye in special cases: pregnant ewes, for example or, in this instance, intact rams.

My mother, who was with us at the time, is not a countrywoman.

‘Look at that poor animal’ she whispered to me, in some distress. ‘It’s got some sort of enormous growth hanging, you know, under its tummy. Don’t you think we should tell someone?’

‘Bollocks, Mother’ I said.

You can wait years for an opening like that.

I stopped to rest my foot on the paddock fence and tie a shoelace. A ram ambled over and, quite deliberately, bit my fingers through the fence. I jumped, laughed sportingly, and went back to tying my shoelace. It did it again: really painfully this time. I was obliged to withdraw sheepishly, leaving my shoe-lace untied.

On balance, sheep are incredibly stupid animals. The parable of the Good Shepherd is not a flattering one from humanity’s perspective, Although Middle Eastern sheep 2,000 years ago may have been rather more goat-y. Look into the cunning, slitty eye of a nubian goat and you can see why the devil has hooves. Look into the eye of a modern sheep and you can see all the way to the back of its daft woolly skull…

Which reminds me. I've just found in a Cathedral shop the perfect Christmas present - a pair of Holy Socks.

They are packaged with a verse from the Gospel of St Matthew:

‘He will put the sheep on his right, and the goats on his left.’

One sock has sheep on it. The other has goats.

I laughed so much I had to be led out out of the shop.

Of Pears and Horses

‘I know two things about a horse’

my grandmother used to recite:

‘And one of them is rather coarse’

From which you may gather that she was rather coarse herself.

My grandfather used to run into the street with a shovel whenever a horse passed, to collect the dung for his roses.

City dwellers, they weren’t otherwise much interested in horses. Unfortunately, I seem to have inherited this quality.

I have just delivered another wheelbarrowful of fat green pears to my neighbour M. M is a village schoolmistress and passionate horsewoman. Her small cottage is attached to a very large field containing a brook, some wonderful old oaks, and a big stable block, home to her own two mounts and various paying guests (‘in livery’ is the correct term, but conjours up in me disturbing images of M mucking out in a footman’s powdered wig and blue satin breeches).

I’m not interested in horses, but I do like M, and I’m happy to have found a use for the pears, at last.

They are beautiful pears, the size of cricket balls and of a similar consistency. No-one has yet succeeded in rendering them edible to man.

‘Try poaching them in red wine’ people suggest: (the sort of people who ask chronic insomniacs if they’ve Tried Hot Milk).

I’ve poached the wretched things for hours and hours. They do eventually develop a pinkish hue which penetrates about a millimetre into the fruit. The rest stays white and rock-hard. I’ve even tried poaching them in Devil’s Wee, which dissolves pretty much anything. No success.

M suggested her horses might care for them. I don’t like horses, but not enough to poison them deliberately, and I couldn’t help feeling this was a bad idea. But M knows much more about horses than I do, and hers seem to thrive on these pears. Either they have remarkably corrosive digestive juices, or the pears simply cannon-ball straight through, in which case they will turn up back in my garden in a couple of years’ time.

For M’s horses perform one important service to the community. Their dung is piled into a field where our mutual neighbours, Rupe and Jo, keep three remarkably spoilt pet sheep. The resulting mound has grown a couple of metres high – the sheep use it as a lookout station – and one end is beautifully matured. Rupe and Jo allow free access to all comers interested in manure, so all my beds are deep in rich, well-rotted pooh from M’s horses.

My grandparents would, I think, understand my satisfaction.

Country Wit and Donald Two

I have just this minute received, from my lifelong friend N, a delightful little book entitled 'Country Wit.' , which will sit beautifully alongside 'extraordinary chickens' on my cloakroom bookshelf.

N, who reads these pages (so with a bit of luck I won't have to write a separate Thank You letter), Directs a Very Well Known TV Soap Indeed. When not creating scenes from raw contemporary urban life for your delight, she lives in a cosy countryside barn conversion, drives a 4x4, and makes her own extremely clever Christmas Cards.

Hopefully the publishers of 'Country Wit' won't sue me for copyright if I quote a couple of excerpts:

I'm not the type who wants to go back to the land.
I'm the type who wants to go back to the hotel.
Fran Lebowitz

They told me it takes three sheep to make a cardigan.
I didn't even know they could knit.
Sue Gingold

Thank you, N! And just last week, when I was attending the smart preview of her latest exhibition, J presented me with a replacement for Donald.

How generous my followers are. If any of you out there feels it might be amusing to send me a nice shiny new Range Rover, I do hope you won't hesitate.

I never had a Joseph

We’ll be giving Christingle a miss this year – the jelly-tots speared onto the orange being deemed no longer worth the candle (forgive the pun).

So that’s another bit of Christmas in the countryside grown out of.

Again this year, the Crib Service will not see me squatting in the shadows of the church font, prodding my Shepherd forward at the appropriate moment or beaming encouragement at the King reluctant to part with his Frankincense.

I will not be wedged on a half-sized seat in the village school hall watching The Grumpy Sheep or The Bad Tempered Angel turn over a festive new leaf when confronted with a precariously swaddled baby Jesus, wielded like a club by the Virgin Mary.

I never had a Joseph, and now I never will. Never again will I congratulate the mother of this year’s Joseph over coffee and mince pies afterwards (‘Isn’t Alex talented? And what a clever costume!’) whilst secretly seething with envy.

We’ve never really made it past Shepherd. I do a competent shepherd costume with a tea towel, a fake-fur waistcoat and, the ‘piece de resistance’, my late father’s walking stick.

Kings bring out the best in me, but you only get three per Nativity so the odds on landing one are that much slimmer.

When we first arrived, Number 1 Son, then a tiny, perky three year old (what went wrong – where did he go?) landed a toddle-on part as a King. Keen to impress, and with clearly too much time on my hands, my King’s outfit was a triumph of crimson and gold, with curly-toed Arabian Nights shoes and an embroidered satin waistcoat sacrificed from my own wardrobe. The result was complete overkill for a tiny village church, and no doubt resulted in a lot of discreet merriment from the locals. But the costume itself hung around for years, passed down from King to King like an emblem of state, joining a set of papier-mache camel heads as Corporate Village Nativity Resources. Until the cardboard ends fell of the shoes and the waistcoat got lost.

I had hopes after that, particularly when Number 1 Son scored a speaking role at playgroup as The Innkeeper. My interpretation of this role involved adding a money bag and a pewter tankard to the shepherd’s tea-towel costume, and Number 1 Son was pleased as punch with himself. As he distinguished himself by being the only member of the company to remember any lines at all (the staff shunting the cast about the stage like croupiers with roulette tokens, whispering lines and wiping noses en route) I was pleased as punch too.

A family friend asked Number 1 Son what the nativity story was all about.

‘It’s about this Innkeeper…’ he said. That’s professional ego for you.

But it was a flash in the pan. After that, we were back to shepherds.

At least, as a Mother of Sons, I never suffered Mary-envy. Now that must really hurt.

How to Make A Christmas Wreath

I have fir trees, holly and ivy all growing around me – no excuse not to make my own Christmas wreath this year.

Except ignorance. So I turned to the internet.

The advice on all sides is to start with a bought wreath base and then stick things on it. But I don’t want a fake pine base: I want the real thing. So I’ve started from scratch, all on my own.

How to Make a Christmas Wreath

1) First, take an above-ground swimming pool – I used a 12 foot diameter, but a smaller pool would do. Assemble on the lawn, fill with water and leave until the end of the summer. Then take down and store in garage. You will find that all the grass under the pool has died, and been replaced by a sinister brown, fibrous moss. This moss is ideal for the construction of a Christmas Wreath.

2) Next, take a 150 cm x 25 cm strip of chicken wire formerly used to protect the sunflowers from the chooks. Spread this on the ground, fill the centre with a fat line of moss like meat in a sausage roll, (or rice in a sushi roll if you’re from the Home Counties) and roll into a sausage, twisting the wire sides together together to form a secure tube. Then join the two ends of the tube to form a circle – viola!

3) You will find that the result sags horribly when lifted, so stretch a coat hanger into a circle (retaining the hook) and attach your moss-and-wire base onto this with plant ties. Test by hanging the result up by the coat-hanger hook, and if the whole thing threatens to come apart, add more plant ties.

4) Now comes the exciting part. Poke bits of fir tree into the moss and attach them to the wire frame with plant ties. Go on, keeping the foliage pointing in one direction so that each piece covers the previous tie, until you’ve gone all the way round. Bung in some bits of holly with the berries still on. Admire results.

Cost – nothing, bar a little suffering from the chicken wire.

Time taken – one hour.

Result – pretty good I think, considering. More Green Man that Gentle Jesus, but definitely not shop-bought and all the better for it. And I can keep poking more bits of holly in as I pass, which will keep me amused until Christmas.

Based on long experience, I don’t really expect anything I make to actually work. There must be a catch…

The Bare Truth

Looks like it’s Winter Moulting time around here.

Have you ever heard of anything so daft, just when it’s bitterly cold? Arctic foxes and stoats must moult in Autumn to acquire their warm white winter camouflage. But sheep, and Attila the hen, the two practicing groups around here, are both white already. Beats me.

Attila has lost all her tail feathers, giving her a sawn-off look. She also developed large, indecently balding areas around the parson’s nose. This explains why I still can’t find any eggs (birds don’t lay whilst moulting; all their energies go into new feather growth) and also why Attila abandoned the coop – lacking enough pinion-power to flutter up to her perch.

Re-growing what she has lost, Attila currently has a rattling plumage full of stiff, stubby, lightly-feathered quills, as though she’s deciding whether to keep on being a hen or work on becoming a porcupine.

Meanwhile Utensil, having moulted just a handful of glossy red breast-feathers, has alsoquit laying in sympathy.

The sheep are equally baffling. The hedges and brambles are flecked everywhere with dirty wool scraps, the sheep trailing swags of fleece behind them. Like Attila, they seem to be moulting mainly from the rear. The result is quite obscene, their naked exposed flanks looking as neatly done as if they’ve been Brazilian waxed.

There are, I know, new strains of sheep bred to moult, wool being of so little value now that it’s not worth the cost of shearing. Easier, I suppose, than breeding acrylic sheep – the only real market these days being the carpet trade. A nearby farmer with a flock of these moulting sheep has notices on his gate explaining about them – defence against well-meaning locals who keep reporting the sorry state of his apparently disintegrating animals to the RSPCA.

But those sheep moulted each spring, and these are suddenly doing it in winter.

I feel I ought to collect the wool and do something with it, but the idea of all that carding, spinning, weaving, and all the equipment I’d need just to make a pair of itchy mittens tires me out just thinking about it.

Like the sheep, I’d rather be cold.

The Wenceslas Effect

I know shouldn’t care, but I’ve never yet found a method of gathering kindling with dignity and/or style.

Why do I feel self-conscious about picking up sticks? I don't have these hang-ups about picking blackberries or mushrooms. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m collecting nature's cast-offs rather than her bounty – scavenging rather than harvesting. Or maybe it’s the Wenceslas effect.

The Good King, you will remember, spots ‘a poor man gathering winter fuel’ and heads off after him, his page in tow. That’s about it, really. Whether they make it, and what the peasant thinks about it all, goes unrecorded.

‘Nobody has ever understood why Neale [who wrote the carol in 1853] makes Wenceslas feel impelled to take pine logs to a peasant who already lives next to a forest’ says Telegraph columnist Rupert Christiansen.

I’ll tell you why – for the same reason that my smart neighbours feel impelled to draw their pristine Range Rovers up alongside when I’m wrestling an awkwardly shaped twig into an outsize Sainsbury’s carrier, and ask if I’m okay. Because, like the peasant, I look pathetic grubbing about in the undergrowth, and, like King W, they can’t help interfering.

But, again like the peasant, I would rather be left to my own humble devices. Why do you think he chose to live ‘A good league hence – underneath the mountain’? To avoid being patronised by smug do-gooders like Good King W and his entourage, that’s why.

The idle rich and decadent can buy kindling in elegant little bundles form petrol stations - a bit Marie Antoinette-ish for me. You can also make your own by splitting logs, provided you have a handy hatchet and a strong right arm. I have two hatchets, neither of which are handy for me as my right arm is weak and my aim is dreadful. I’m safer by far grubbing about in the woods for sticks.

Hauling around something larger would be more dignified, of course, and more profitable. The woods round here are full of fallen branches, just perfect for a poor man’s winter fuel. But they’re always miles from the car and too hefty to carry. There’s also the question of legality. Stick-gathering counts as foraging: dragging whole chunks of tree about looks rather too much like theft.

So I stick to kindling. But I always end up tired, dirty, self-pitying and with comparatively little to show for it. I haul my haul back to my dwelling, and if I’m lucky there’s no Good King on the doorstep with a Boxing Day picnic and a dinky sledge full of hand-split pine logs to belittle all my efforts.

I can settle down, kindle a fire in the woodburner, and enjoy St Stephens Day in peace, knowing that I’m probably going to have to go through the whole business all over again before New Year.

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St Stephen's Day is Boxing Day, 26th December. St Stephen is the Patron Saint of Hungary, stone-masons, left-over turkey and hangovers.

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In Which We Twitch

It being lovely weather for ducks, I thought we should go and look at some.

Number 2 Son is a bit of a twitcher. So from time to time we go birding at Brandon Marsh. I enjoy the stroll, the cafe, and the virtuous sense of being a good mother and wildlife patron (at £2.50 to get in, patronage comes pleasantly cheap)

Hiding in hides is magical. I love raising the worn wooden flaps, made apparently from old school desks, to open the viewing slits which line the walls. We spy out of these, sitting on hard, high wooden benches, like voyeurs at a peepshow.

Courtesy demands that the flaps are closed once you’ve finished ogling the waterfowl, so you enter in darkness, unless the hide is occupied. If it is, the odds are that your companion is armed with both binoculars and a camera the size and shape of a bazooka. With this terrifying piece of armoury, he takes very, very close-up pictures of small and, to me, deeply undistinguished birds.

We too come badged with binoculars (you can borrow cast-off pairs free from reception; no-one can tell the difference and they generally work if you close one eye and concentrate).

I can’t really tell one bird from another. A duck is a duck in my book. We see Pochards, and Teal, and search vainly for Goldeneye, but only because Number 2 Son points them out to me. I squint through my dodgy binoculars in the wrong direction, and pretend I can see them too. What I really see is out-of-focus ducks.

The bazooka wielders assume that, as an adult, I am the twitcher. They point out to me a Dunlin that’s just gone behind that patch of scrub.

‘Actually, it’s a Redshank’ murmers Number 2 Son, and they realise they’ve addressed the monkey, not the organ grinder.

We want to see a kingfisher. Even I quite want to see a kingfisher. Whenever we arrive at the Carlton Hide, where they hang out, some kind soul tells us we’ve just missed one. Today, before we get even that far, a passing fisherman tells us how he sees them constantly, they even perch on the end of his rod; in fact (guess what) there was one right here only half an hour ago.

We hang around the East Marsh Hide for a while with a bazooka wielder and a nice elderly couple eating sandwiches, and watch cormorants. I can recognise cormorants, being much bigger than ducks. Huffed up in the sleeting rain, they remind me of Japanese woodcuts, fishermen and sanpans, and I fantasise that I’m somewhere else, drier and warmer. I bet they do, too.

Number 2 Son sets off for the Carlton and the wretched kingfisher (which we both know has just this minute left) while I wait back at the East Marsh, contemplating a damp shag (or possibly cormorant), when something terrible happens. Bazooka says casually ‘Ah, there’s a Water Rail. See, by those rushes’

Just as I’m obligingly swivelling my binoculars in the wrong direction, a small brown wader breaks cover and sprints right across the front of the hide. The Water Rail. Even I can’t miss it.

But Number 2 Son has. And, for him, it would have been the best thing that’s happened to him, ever.

He returns from not seeing the kingfisher, and of course Bazooka immediately tells him all about it. My son’s small face stiffens with suppressed anguish and disappointment. I pray for the rail to make return dash, right now. It doesn’t, of course.

We trudge back to the café for hot chocolate and toasted tea-cakes, both lost in contemplation. Eventually, he lets out a sigh.

‘I’ve thought about it’ he says ‘And, after all, I did see a Red Kite, once’

His bravery overwhelms me with love.

Complete Bullocks

Well blow me down. Here I am writing what’s meant to be mindless ramble of a blog, the online equivalent muttering to yourself in private, and I seem accidentally to have hit a nerve. And now, thanks to all your comments, I’ve also discovered that my mutterings are being overheard by you, and feel rather embarrassed

I’m stunned by your scare stories. I always tell myself as I walk that nobody really gets attacked by cattle. In fact, taking your comments as a statistical sample, 50% of us do.

We are reaching the end of the season for being chased by bullocks. I’ve just walked through a field which, last week, was full of stocky young animals, and now it’s empty. And I bet you anything the farmer hasn’t packed them off for a nice holiday by the seaside.

My heart goes out (a bit) to David Dimbleby, knocked out whilst loading a bullock into a trailer (thanks for this WalkTalk!). But from the bullock’s point of view, this may well have been a life and death struggle. Which it lost. So whose side are you on? The elderly presenter of Any Answers (itself as good an argument for mass-euthanasia as I’ve ever come across) or a shaggy, bewildered young bullock with liquid black eyes and a big soft warm nose? The answer, I guess, lies on the Meat Counter at Sainsburys.

The whole business has made me think about the difference between beef and dairy cattle. I hadn’t fully realised there was one. I’d not appreciated that the thickset, broad-faced, butch-looking brown jobs I meet on my walks are actually quite different to, and less dangerous than (thanks, Whitefeather!) the spray-painted black-and-white version, with their hollow haunches and pendulous, bulging, blue-veined udders.

And I know which I’d rather be.

Beef cattle (the butch brown type) get to keep their offspring with them. As you walk past, bravura calves try to stare you out, then lose their nerve and skitter back to maternal protection until you are safely past. There's such poignancy in that gawky, grudging, adolescent trust.

Eventually, the bullocks get packed off to play separately with their mates, and most will meet a sticky end at somewhere between 6 and 15 months. But at least their short lives have been pretty good.

Dairy cattle (the black and white paint jobs) have a less attractive lifestyle. A by-product of milk production, calves are removed from their mothers within 24 hours and males slaughtered at around 2 weeks old. 2 years on, the heifers have become milk-machines in their own right.

I’m not a vegetarian, mainly due to greed, but also because if we didn’t eat animals, there wouldn’t be so many around.

And you have to wonder if the massacre of dairy innocents for the milk they would have drunk is any more acceptable than the slaughter of beef bullocks for MacDonalds.

Sorry – all a bit serious. Your own fault for taking me seriously. In future, I'll just keep maundering away to myself like a sad old bag-lady, pretending you’re not there.

But thanks for being it. There, I mean.

Never Mind the Bullocks...

Here’s a tricky ethical dilemma. You are crossing a farmer’s private field by the public footpath, in full compliance with the Country Code. Suddenly your way is barred by a substantial herd of cows. Or possibly bulls.

Do you

a) Proceed calmly but firmly forward, on the assumption that they will part like the Red Sea to let you through?

b) Take an extended route around the group, trespassing off the footpath in the process?

c) Pretend a suddenly remembered appointment and retrace your steps?

I'm not afraid of cows, of course. Ha! Except possibly those big shaggy Highland cattle who stare belligerently at you through their fringes like drunk Glaswegian laddettes wondering if you’re looking at them funny, hen?

But cows are big. Suppose they all decided to lean on you? Or just give you a friendly nudge?

And how can you tell which are cows? Answer, of course, is to look for the udders, or that bit of damp dangly hair in the middle. But it’s not easy when they’re confronting you full-on, eyeballing you as if to say ‘Well, punk - cow or bull? Do you feel lucky?’

According to the Wildlife and Countryside Act it’s ‘an offence for the occupier of land crossed by a public right of way to allow a bull over 10 months old and on its own and/or any bull of a recognised dairy breed (even if accompanied by cows/heifers) to be at large on the land.’

So that settles that. They must be cows. Either that, or I get to sue someone after I’ve been gored to death. Goodee.

Hold on though. This doesn’t apply to bulls of ‘of a recognised beef breed and at large with cows/heifers.’

So some sorts of bull are okay (How can I tell if I’m being chased by the right sort? And does the bull know?) but only if they’re with their families, who presumably exercise a restraining influence (‘Come on now, Father, live and let live. Calm down and have some nice grass’).

Then there’s the age bit. Why 10 months? 10 month old heifers can be pretty big, and if human adolescents are anything to go by, are probably scarier than the grown-ups.

Well, today I discovered today a way to handle all comers. Take their pictures.

When you actually want cattle to stay still, stare at you and be photographed, they scatter instantly – cows, bulls, the lot. Even these huggable young heifers, who look so much more like furry pandas than Lunch on the Hoof that it makes you want to turn vegan.

Give me the SLR over the red rag any time.

The End of Attila

Our chooks are called Utensil and Attila the Hen Two. Utensil, a big, fierce Rhode Island Red, derives her name from sources too obscure to go into here. Attila Two is named after Attila One.

We bought the original Attila as one of four Light Sussexes – neighbours wanting the other three. The lad superintending our purchase grabbed each hen unceremoniously by the legs and shoved them into a cardboard box, throwing Utensil into the deal almost literally. The chooks took all this philosophically.

Back home, we handed over the three other Sussexes, and left Utensil and Attila boxed in the garage. W’d read that if you wait till they’re asleep, you can rehouse hens by simply lifting them onto their new perches. Staggeringly, it worked. Next morning, Utensil woke in a terrible temper, stomped up and down her new run squawking furiously, laid a double-yolker and promptly settled down. Attila just behaved as if she’d always lived there.

Attila emerged as bottom hen in a two-hen pecking order, but didn’t seem to care. She was a quiet chook, and we thought not very bright (like most middle-class parents, we were concerned over our progeny’s intellectual abilities. Utensil, based on the temper and the double-yolker, was we felt obvious Oxbridge material).

Both chooks were sold as ‘point-of-lay’, but as Attila showed no signs of laying, we assumed she was younger than Utensil. She certainly looked smaller. Meanwhile, the other three Sussexes were laying like mad, which depressed us.

Then we noticed that Attila kept falling asleep, often in the middle of the lawn, standing up and in mid-sentence, like an elderly Don at a garden party. She started having long lie-ins, and her adolescent wattles faded from healthy red to pallid pink.

We consulted Martin Gurdon’s superb ‘Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance’. Though not a reference book (it’s far too funny) there are helpful chapters on nursing sick chickens; sweetcorn plays a big part. We also read the pull-out guide to chicken diseases in the Smallholder http://www.smallholder.co.uk/poultry/, and, hypochondriacs that we are, decided she had most of them.

Nothing helped. As she got weaker, I moved her into the utility room on a towel; I felt Martin Gurdon would approve. Should we take her to a vet? Do vets treat chickens? If we were manly farming types with egg-quotas to worry about, perhaps we would simply wring her neck and call it a day. But I’m not a manly type and don’t know a thing about killing chickens, so I bundled her up and took her to the surgery.

By now Attila couldn’t raise her head. The vet confirmed that she was hours away from death and it would be kinder to her to end things. I said goodbye to Attila, who was visibly slipping away, and left.

Back in the vet’s waiting room, I explained to the receptionist that sadly my chicken was now defunct, and asked for the bill.

Even as I was writing out a cheque, a volley of very loud, indignant squawks issued from the surgery behind us, followed by protracted and blood-curdling strangulated gurgles. Clearly, the vet didn’t know much about killing chickens either.

We all pretended we couldn’t hear anything, and I handed over my cheque.

So we bought another Attila, and Utensil couldn’t tell the difference. After a while, neither could we. And I’ve never, until this day, told anyone the truth about the death of the first Attila, and how I Chickened Out.

Tale of a Wood-Elf

‘Now in winter, fires are lit
And huddled round them we all sit.’

This exquisite couplet is from ‘Winter’, one of a quartet of poems in celebration of the seasons penned by me aged ten. The rest of this master-work is, mercifully, lost to posterity. I do remember that ‘Mother Nature’ turned up, suitably ‘be-gowned’ (to rhyme with ‘ground’), so many times that my own mother asked nervously whether I realised it was not actually a Real Person.

So much for art. Now, in Winter, Fires are Lit in the inglenook using an unending supply of plywood off-cuts from our Wood-Elf.

I’m not sure how we acquired a Wood-Elf. I know the pub comes into it somewhere. He arrives unannounced in a small red Citroen. This, like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, disgorges impossibly large quantities of sawn-off timber, randomly studded with long, savage nails, which he stacks on our woodpile. He doesn’t wait to be thanked, and no money changes hands. He just flits off, to reappear magically whenever stocks runs low.

I have asked, of course. And here I have to be very, very careful. Like Tinkerbell, the existance of our Wood-Elf could be threatened by people who don’t believe in fairies. And who do believe in the Official Secrets Act.

Let’s just say that there are Very Large Things which are apparently imported into this country Very Discreetly by Government Bodies. These, being on the dangerous side, are packed for shipping in waste plywood (goodness knows why, in view of its flammability, but that’s not my problem). This plywood, being full of nails and so unrecyclable, is thrown into a skip. From whence it is promptly rescued by Wood-Elves like ours.

Our wood comes from all over the world – from Brazil to Kazakhstan, and other more controversial sources. But it all looks the same, ply off-cuts clearly being a standard global commodity.

As we sit toasting our toes in the warmth, and probable radioactivity, of our winter fire, we think of the Wood-Elf, and give sincere thanks.

It almost makes you believe in Mother Nature, doesn't it?

Coops de Grace

Having decided on chickens, our first move was to purchase a large, cheap, ugly but very serviceable chicken coop on ebay. The next logical step was to fill it with something, and so we headed off to the Domestic Fowl Trust in Honeybourne http://www.domesticfowltrust.co.uk/

I’m not sure what constitutes a Trust, but they definitely have domestic fowl – lots of them. To reach these, however, you to run the gamut of a display of bijou chicken coops.

Chook-keeping is now the province of the chattering classes - I should know; I’m a member of it. And when Chatterers have finished accessorising their Chihuahuas, their thoughts turn to livestock.

At Honeybourne, you can buy hexagonal chicken mansions with separate duplex apartments for each resident or tiled and gabled multi-storey chalets for winter sports chooks. Low-slung wheeled affairs, like avian Ferraris, are designed for moving about the landscape when you or your hens fancy a change of vista. Suddenly, our purchase of a chicken coop simply because it was cheap, solid and suitable for keeping chickens in seems so prosaic.

Of course there’s J’s chicken coop, which is in a whole other league. J’s coop has attics, neat little house-that-jack-built windows and a shingled roof. It cost her precisely nothing, being her daughter’s former wendy house, a present in turn from a posh patron whose children had out-grown it. J’s chooks, good honest battery rescues unlike my effete pure-breds, nest happily at different levels, peering out of the windows like eager Cranford spinsters.

Our coop is virtually indestructible, so there’s no hope of replacing it. But whenever we return to Honeybourne to stock up on red mite powder or laying pellets, I stare with hopeless longing at these pleasure palaces, wishing I was chicken-sized and rich.

We did buy our chooks themselves from Honeybourne. But that just means they’ve been bred for better things. No wonder they’ve taken to hanging around our neighbours’ gardens and laying in out-of-the-way places.

They’re probably house-hunting.

The Blind Ploughman

'Set my hands upon the plough' the song goes

‘My feet upon the Sod’
(homophobia must have been rife in Victorian England)

‘Turn my eyes toward the East,
And praise be to God!’

And so the ploughman carves his lonely furrow, eyes blind but faith unwavering.

I used to sing this, accompanied by my father on piano.

My father was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, and one of the worst pianists. Self-taught on the church organ, he never quite grasped the concept of ‘touch’. He didn’t do graduated volume – when he struck a key, you really knew about it. Meanwhile, to vent his frustration at the piano's lack of organ pedals, he kept one foot jammed firmly on the loud one.

We only had one copy of the score, so I sang craning over his shoulder, directly in the line of fire. As a result, my voice possesses a volume which could fill the Albert Hall. Though not, alas, with anything nice.

‘God who took-away-my-sight……That my S-O-U-L. Might. SEEEEE!'

We end on a magnificant crescendo, me tremulous with effort, the tendons on my neck bulging, my father red-faced but triumphant as he throws his body at the final notes. My mother, for whose pleasure these peformances are theoretically given, sits poised with a sock on an orange in one hand and a darning needle in the other, waiting with a strained expression for the noise to abate and the ornaments to settle back into their places.

Happy days. I think of them now whenever I see the rich brown corduroy patchwork of a ploughed field amongst the green and gold. Or as I struggle manfully across one, forging a stumbling right-of-way over a sea of sticky mud.

It’s suprising how much soil weighs. A few steps in, and I feel like a concrete-booted Mafia victim. There’s nothing to scrape the mud off your boot with, except more mud, though there seems to be an optimum volume after which no more mud can adhere. Having reached this, one boot occasionally becomes overweighted and stays embedded in the earth, causing me to step out of it unexpectedly, and fall over.

Did the Blind Ploughman man actually plough a straight furrow? His horse was presumably sighted, unless God had decided to give its soul a lucky break as well. Maybe it was a guide-horse, trained specially to tow unsighted agricultural workers in straight lines.

I can’t help preferring the alternative. The happy old codger weaves all over the show, oblivious, an expression of holy bliss on his blind face, his lips parted in song. Meanwhile, friends and neighbours hang around the edge of the field, tactfully waiting to step in and do the job properly after he’s finished, and to rescue the horse before it takes them both straight through a hedge.

There’s a lovely recording of Paul Robeson singing ‘The Blind Ploughman’ at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t_XfcB0ZVg . He lacks my pleasing soprano but makes a fair job of it, considering.

Last of the Mohicans

Mine’s a ladybird, or it will be one day. At the moment, it’s more of a lump.

Jonathan has a thing about trees. His official job title at The Manor House is Gardener, but he’s not that grabbed by flowers and vegetables. His speciality is topiary, on which he has his own unique take.

He’s self-trained, inspired initially by French ice sculptures. Once, long ago, the Manor House grounds did feature topiary, but by Jonathan’s time the ancient trees had more or less reverted to nature.

Nature, however, had reckoned without Jonathan.

It took him five years to carve his first yew sapling into a passable egg-shape. Another five years, and the sapling is now a two metre high head, complete with eyebrows, lips and a rather startling Mohican hairstyle. Much to the bemusement of the Manor House’s owner.

There’s an elephant at the Manor House too, a pair of peacocks and a number of geometric constructions like giant chess pieces – more conventional than the Mohican, but less alarming to stumble into on a moonlit night.

And now, of course, we all want one. At a house up the road, another Mohican rubs shoulders with a row of feeding chickens. Further on, three rabbits are in the offing. Jonathan works to his own agenda, pruning and coaxing foliage, year after year, into the shapes of his imagination. Customers don’t have a say - you get what you’re given.

He works with a chainsaw, and I doubt if he’s even heard of Edward Scissorhands. Young, good-looking, severely dyslexic and shy, he’s quietly building his own magical Looking Glass World in other people’s gardens.

I think Jonathan’s outgrowing his Mohican phase – hence my ladybird, and the dolphin-jumping-over-a-ball under construction over at the Dower House.

I can’t wait to see the owner's face: he thinks he's getting a nice box pyramid.

In Which We Are Eggless

I haven’t had an egg in three days. This is ridiculous.

I know egg production eases off when the days get shorter. I know that as chooks get older they lay less. But they’re under two years old, for goodness sakes, and there was only one day last year when neither hen laid.

No - they’re up to something. I just can’t work out what.

For a year and a half, the chooks laid eggs in the nice warm nesting box provided. There was a certain amount of bickering about taking too long – one hen hopping up and down outside with its legs crossed whilst the other hogged the facilities. But by and large, the system worked well.

Then, a couple of months back, the eggs stopped. It didn’t take me long to find out why – the chooks had relocated their operation to the base of the wisteria on the side terrace. No problem, I just collected eggs from there.

But this was only the beginning. The wisteria nest was soon abandoned in favour of a site under a rose bush near the back door.

So whilst the chooks dotted their eggs about the landscape like a couple of demented Easter Bunnies, I followed patiently. Bad weather would, I thought, drive them back to their snug dry nest box once Winter set in.

Then things got really weird. A couple of weeks ago, Attila, our Light Sussex (Attila the Hen – geddit?) got locked out overnight. I always call into the coop before shutting it up each evening – reassured by the soft sleepy clucks in response. The chooks are generally inseparable – it never occurred to me that one would bed down without the other. But Attila must have gone AWOL and slept out all night - daybreak saw her standing alone outside the back door, waiting for breakfast.

Whether as a result of her ordeal, or a cause of it, she’s now started sleeping on the mesh roof of the chicken run. I have absolutely no idea why. It can’t be red mite, as the other chook is perfectly happy indoors as usual. They are still otherwise best friends, and as I write are enjoying adjoining dust baths in my dahlia bed as though nothing were amiss.

But I can’t find any eggs, and have to lift Attila onto her perch each night. Has she gone senile? Has she become secretly airborne now she roosts on roofs; is she laying eggs in a tree somewhere? And why is the other chook joining in the egg-hunt game, but not the bedswapping?

Questions questions. It’s not easy trying to second-guess the logical processes of animals with brains the size of peanuts.

But I need those eggs and, one way or another, I’m going to get them

Pushing up Mushrooms (2)

Number Two Son was home from school today with Executive Stress, and I had obtained a Hard Copy of Roger Phillips’ ‘Mushrooms’ (Macmillan, £18.99 and a bargain), so I took him foraging amidst the woodland graves.

Over 1,250 species of fungi are fully illustrated in Phillips’ book, so it seems improbable that most of the specimens we came across genuinely weren’t in it. But it’s really difficult identifying mushrooms, however good the descriptions and pictures. And it matters so much if you get it wrong. Phillips himself doesn’t help by being cautious about edibility, with phrases like ‘unknown, avoid’. And mushrooming in a burial ground does promote morbid thoughts.

I could see that our failure to identify anything safely edible from the wealth of specimens around us was tarnishing my hunter-gatherer image in my son’s eyes. So I bagged a couple of large Bolete, assuring him that they were Boletus Edulis or Cep (‘excellent’) rather than the Blushing Bolete (‘Edible but not worthwhile’) they obviously were. I could see they were edible anyway, as something had been eating them, but it had left some.

We were returning to the car, bickering idly about Psathyrellae, when Number Two Son suddenly quivered with excitement and Pointed like an Irish Setter. Twenty yards away, squatting on a verge, were a number of large, white shapes.

Blythely ignoring the fact that we were now outside a crematorium, surrounded by mourners, we hurried to the spot and consulted Phillips. Definitely Agaricus, and if not actually Agaricus Campestris (‘Field Mushroom’. Habitat: Sainsburys), definitely Agaricus something, and therefore probably edible.

At that moment, an elderly Funeral Director, complete with black gloves and a Remembrance Day poppy, came bustling over. I braced myself for unpleasantness.

‘Are they what I think they are?’ he asked as he reached us, breaking into a largely toothless grin.

‘We think so.’ I replied solemnly.

And they were, more or less. The Funeral Director, who politely refused my offer of a handful for fear of soiling his gloves, explained the country view that if you could peel the skin off a mushroom, it was edible. The skin peeled. These were Horse Mushrooms (‘Excellent’) – splendid specimens.

Honour is satisfied. We have foraged and triumphed. Number Two Son has been Blooded. I’m now off to eat horse-mushrooms.

Photographs include chook’s egg, and son, for scale comparison.

Pigeons on the Grass, Alas

I’ve just noticed that the pigeons have stopped.

All summer, at what felt to me like the crack of dawn but was probably around eight a.m., I would wake to the regular call of wood pigeons.

‘Duh duh duuurh duuurh duh’

Always the same five notes– two short, fat, comfortable ‘duh’s, followed by long, jaded ‘duuurh’s – exactly the sound teenagers make to indicate that you have just stated the blindingly obvious. How nice to face each morning to the sarcastic comments of birds who’ve been up for, like, hours, and are already pissed off with the day.

But they’ve stopped whinging outside my window lately. Maybe now they’re Empty Nesters their expectations have lowered – they’re content with an early night and the odd Saga weekend.

They’re still around – wedged into the bird table or pottering on the back lawn, waiting for scraps left by the chooks. Fat, handsome specimens with soft pale grey plumage and elegant clean white necklets; a far cry from their shabby urban counterparts clad in shiny synthetic feathers, hobbling on deformed red feet like bag-ladies with chilblains.

There seem to be three wood pigeons; a nice pie-sized group.

‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?’ asks the Gospels. Not at discount supermarket Lidl, where, in festive pre-Christmas spirit, four tiny, pathetic frozen quails in a foil tin are currently retailing at £6. So my plump lawn-fed pigeons are worth a bit, and could come in handy for Boxing Day.

But you can’t shoot a sitting bird, even with your son’s airgun when nobody’s looking, and these three are far too fat and lazy to fly away.

I guess it’ll be turkey again this year.

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‘Pigeons on the grass alas. Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass. Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass’

Gertude Stein (in one of her more lucid moments)