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.

---------------

‘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)

In which we meet The Jolly Farmer

‘Did you just photograph that house?’ The farmer called to me.

‘No’ I said. Then, as an afterthought: ‘Why?’

Farmers are like sheepdogs. They growl a good deal to start with, but once you talk to them gently and let them sniff your hand, they’re all over you.

I had nearly photographed a sheep. It was eyeing me sardonically, like Jeremy Paxman faced with a Durham undergraduate who couldn't identify the components of Riboflavin. I whipped out my camera, but the Paxman look faded suddenly and it was just another sheep. So I didn’t bother.

If a photoof the farmhouse appeared in the papers, the farmer explained, thieves might come and nick things from it. He’d had machinery nicked that way, even millstones from the garden. They’d nicked the generator, too, from the electric fence.

It's the same with livestock, apparently.

‘They’ll see the picture in the papers, so then they know you’ve got sheep out in that field. So then they come and nick 'em.’

Particularly, of course, if they’re partial to sheep ressembling Paxman.

Farmers have such a jaded view of humanity. They divide it into Trespassers, Thieves, Perverts and, on the plus side, Other Farmers.

This farmer had found the local headmaster having sex with a junior science teacher in his wheatfield in broad daylight (Perverts), was infuriated by stray lycra-clad joggers from the local management college (Trespassers) and had most recently driven over a youth he found trying to siphon fuel out of his Range Rover (Thieves).

Many of his tales ended with him and his neighbours (Other Farmers) meting out rough justice in this satisfactory spirit. Fortunately I was camouflaged (apart from the camera) as Another Farmer so cast as appreciative audience to all this, rather than a potential enemy.





We parted on the best of terms. Once out of sight, I took this picture – a favourite vista from one of my favourite walks. It contains, you will observe, no buildings, sheep or farm implements worth nicking.

Though I suppose now someone will come and nick the gate.

Pushing up Mushrooms

I’ve always fancied the idea of something growing out of my corpse when I’m dead; a rose bush, a pot of basil or, more probably, a nice silver birch. So I checked out our local woodland burial ground.

The difficulty is, of course, that you can’t physically plant people beneath existing trees; you can only practically access the spaces in between them. In a clearing amongst slender beeches, I found a dozen or so fresh-ish coffin-sized humps, close-packed side by side in a neat row like sleeping babes in an orphanage, or bread dough waiting in tins to rise. This was the only sign of life (if you know what I mean) and all disappointingly prosaic.

The place was carpeted with clover, and I was looking idly for 4-leaved stems, wondering if these counted as lucky despite the location, when I noticed the fungi.

I counted half a dozen varieties at least. My favourites where tiny grey ghost-like Mycenae with long spindly stems and almost transparent pale caps, held together by fragile gills so that they fell apart at a touch – real Tim Burton Nightmare-Before-Christmas fungi, perfect for a burial ground. But there were masses of fairy-ring mushrooms too, almost carpeting the floor, tiny white porcelain caps, some baby puffballs growing on a log and even one tiny, distinctive inkcap.

I shall return, complete with field guide and a couple of paper bags, for a good forage. Morbid I know, but finding an unplundered mushroom site is not easy these days, and I don’t intend to let a few cadavers put me off.

Incidentally, there was a clear, broad man-made path running through the burial wood. Then, abruptly, and for no apparent reason, it suddenly came to a dead end.

Symbolic?

http://www.rogersmushrooms.com/ is a very handsome, fully illustrated mushroom identification site.

Sloe, sloe, quick, quick....

It is now the beginning of November (and I should know, having just hefted a s*dding great Halloween pumpkin, complete with candle stubs, into a wheelie-bin) so where’s the frost?

Not that I’m complaining. Or am I? I am still, amazingly, picking raspberries. At the end of a dry August, the bushes were producing sad little nodular objects which I assumed where their autumnal death throws. Then the drought broke, and we have been back to big plump luscious summer fruits ever since. Except, of course, that it isn’t summer.

The tomatoes, too, are still ripening in my ancient, unheated greenhouse. In fact, I almost thought I might finally get an aubergine this year, but that was obviously going too far. Yet again the fine, fleshy, promising-looking mauve flowers were followed by – nothing.

So if I’m complaining, It’s about the suspense, and the agonising question – what about sloes then?

The rule with sloes, the only rule really, is not to pick until after the first frosts. They confuse you by looking like damsons, only smaller; so you feel that once they’ve been sitting around blooming black and enticing for a bit, you ought to harvest them. But you must hold out.

What is a ripe sloe? Difficult to tell, as sloes, ripe or not, don’t make for good eating. Bite into one, and you can feel the enamel being ripped from your teeth as your cheeks suck inward. There ought to be a clever medical use for something this viciously acerbic, like leeches and those vacuum things in dentists, but I don’t know of one. There’s only one thing they’re good for – Sloe Gin.

And then again, should you make sloe gin at all?

The maxim ‘Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’ applies not only to macramé and decoupage. Should you dilute perfectly good gin with inedible sloes? Because the fact is, you’re not actually doing anything worthwhile here, like manufacturing alcohol; you’re just tarting up existing spirit.

Oh, but it looks so lovely. Those warm rich ruby depths are what rural winters should be all about – glowing log fires, snug, toasty armchairs, cosy corners and a comforting glass or two of something strong, dark and almondy.

Remember, you don’t have to waste the Bombay Sapphire; any old gin will gain in nobility from a few months cosseted in a Kilner jar with equal quantities sugar and fully-ripened, frost-split sloes.

Which is where we came in….