Fair Game Reloaded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venison is tricky stuff.

Fair game

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

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

‘Nope!’ I said happily.

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

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

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

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

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

Number One Son is currently revising for GCSEs.

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

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

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

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

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

Selling out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Coming of Carloth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ragging on

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

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

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

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

In which we rag a rug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could always unpick it and enter a sack race.

The Silence of the Blog

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

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

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

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

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

Fleeced

‘We’re off to breed alpacas!’ said the farewell note left by the previous owners of Garden Cottage.

It was the exclamation mark, I think, that really annoyed me. Like those fay hand-written notes on the doors of craft shops reading ‘Back in 20 minutes!’ As though the owners' lives are so much more frenetic and spontaneous than mine, with people constantly whisking them off unexpectedly. Whilst I, by contrast, have nothing better to do than lurk around their shop fronts, waiting for them to come back and sell me something.

‘Off to breed alpacas!’. There’s a lot of it about. A few years ago, domestic alpacas were a rural novelty (‘Did you see those llamas? Weird!’). Now they're pretty much the norm. I can think of half a dozen serious breeders within bola-hurling distance of the village.

Except they’re mainly not quite serious enough (!). Animal husbandry is hard work, and no matter how cute the animal, making it pay takes actual skill.

There are around 16,000 alpacas in the UK and around 3 million, give or take a few, in South America. Barbour-clad ex-bankers with 3 acre smallholdinsg and loads of bubbly enthusiasm are competing with Bolivian peasants in a flappy hats one whose livelihood they are trying to muscle inand who, their families having been doing this for centuries, know a thing or two. An economy whose other key exports are pan pipes, worry dolls and marching powder will always undercut the burgeoning UK alpaca market, especially if that market is being operating is a spirit of Enid-Blyton-esque gung-ho and '!'

A 2006 paper published by the University of California concluded that in the US ‘the [alpaca wool] industry represents the latest in the rich history of speculative bubbles in agriculture’. We’re talking tulip bulbs here, in other words, if not actual South Seas.

If there is money to be made, it’s in not in alpacas present, but in alpaca futures. A pregnant femailealpaca covered by a prize-winning male (these males must be massive – it would take a tarpaulin to cover a whole alpaca) can fetch up to £25,000. this is interesting, when you consider that a pregnant human Marketing Manager is actually considered less, not more, desirable by most UK employers. No added value is actually attached to the putative extra Marketing Professional nestling within the Managerial womb. Alpaca babies, unlike human babies, have investment potential

Alpacas are pretty creatures, if you like the ‘wide-eyed baby’s head on improbably long neck’ look as recently pioneered by Alex Wek and Lily Cole.

That may be a good enough reason to breed them. Trying to foist alpaca wool leg-warmers on the innocent public at £40 a pair is, alas, not.

Don't drink the water...

I’ve just been asked a wonderful question – whether increased oestrogen levels in the water supply is attributable to the feeding of oestrogen to hens and dairy cattle, in order to increase yield.

Interesting, both for me and for the questioner – as Mothers of Sons, we have no wish to find ourselves unexpectedly Mothers of Daughters instead.

My first, and I think correct, instinct is that as far as egg production goes, it would be cheaper and easier to start with a fresh hen than to feed oestrogen to a menopausal one. There is, after all, an optimum outcome of one egg per day per chook, max.

Cows I felt less certain about. In a website chatroom, I recently came across a group of people scandalised to discover that cows’ milk is a by-product of birth: one cannot be instigated without the other. However oestrogen, whilst great for bovine hot flushes, has never to my knowledge been used in milk production.

According to a paper in The Internet Journal of Urology 2004 (I’m sure you have your own copy about the place somewhere) oestrogen does enter the milk supply, purely because (interesting fact) cows, unlike people, continue to lactate whilst pregnant. So the milk from pregnant cows enters the food chain, as it has always done. The only difference in recent years is that this milk is used to make baby formula. The jury is however still out (as far as I know) on whether oestrogen could survive the production process.

No. I’m afraid we have to come back to the obvious cause of rising oestrogen levels in drinking water; pollution from the contraceptive pill. All over the world, salmon are poppimg Viagra in a vain attempt to get it up for long enough to spawn. Our sons, meanwhile, already unmanned by tight jeans and girl-power, are fending off man-boobs with bottles of Highland Spring.

The Sisterhood has a lot to answer for.

Much More Bull

A message had been painted on the top rail of the gate in neat white capitals

‘Bull in Park’

Assuming this was not referring to the animal’s automotive state (‘Heifer in Neutral’, ‘Sheep in Reverse’), this looked serious.

As a walker, I had the right to climb over the gate, cross the land by the public footpath, and be gored to death. As a coward, however, I didn’t feel keen.

It was possible, of course, that the notice was intended to advertise the bull as an attraction - a petting- or photo-opportunity perhaps. But somehow I doubted it. There was, I felt, a clear implication that the bull in question was the wrong sort of bull, possibly in the wrong sort of mood, and if it took against me, that was my lookout. All that was missing was a sentence in italics pointing out that this would not affect my statutory rights. Perhaps it was painted on the other side of the gate.

Only one way to find out. I scaled the gate and, reader, I crossed that field. Not without trepidation, and some searching questions (Can bulls climb trees? Can I climb trees? Not when their lowest branches are 3 metres from the ground I can't).

But nothing happened. Half a dozen sheep - possibly the animal’s lunch - watched me idly, and somewhere in shadows of a deep barn, something may or may not have stirred.

I had survived – no Bull. They must have left it in Park, after all.

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Later today I am casseroling the ox-heart – it’s been in the freezer, taking up a whole shelf more or less, whilst I searched out a recipe. This collosal object will only serve four, because most of the outside is fat (we must have got a very sedentary animal – too much on-line gaming and not enough brisk walks).

I shall render the fat (‘render’ - wonderful word, redolent of cauldrons, stoked fires and sweaty arms in rolled-up sleeves) to lard for future cooking. The fact that I’ve got through the last decade without ever feeling a need for lard makes me hesitate only slightly.

I have meanwhile learnt that ox-heart is in fact just cow- or bull-heart re-packaged to make it sound better. Oxen don’t actually come into it. On the same principal, ‘crispy seaweed’ sounds so much more appetising than ‘fried spring greens’, and ‘sweetbreads’ - well, never mind that; just eat up and I’ll tell you later.

I shall stew the meaty bits (if I can find them) of my heart for about a week, serve them with celeriac mash, glazed carrots and peas, deal with the resultant protests as best I can, then scrape the largely-untouched plates into the recycling bin.

Home cooking is such a joy.

Slum Duck Millionaires

I’ve been to visit Utensil the hen in her new home, where she is self-appointed boss of 3 Light Sussexes and a flock of 20 Indian Runner Ducks. She didn’t recognise me, but then I probably couldn’t pick her out in a crowd either.

Always the way. You lavish your time and money on them, three square meals a day and an expensive education. Then, once they’ve flown the nest, they just don’t want to know you.

She did, however, lay me an egg.

There’s not a lot of point to Indian Runner Ducks. Too bony to eat, they’re bred largely for sheepdog herding at Agricultural Shows. Rupert keeps them, he says, because they make him laugh.

And they are comical. At rest, legs splayed like tripods, their lower abdomens drooping and bulging almost to the ground, they look like elderly dropsical aristocrats, hands behind backs, balancing on shooting sticks.

But there is a less funny side. Ducks reproduce by rape: females are mugged and half-drowned in the process. With as many drakes as ducks, romance at Utensil’s new home is a particularly aggressive business. Last year, one duck lost an eye to Love.

The obvious answer is to cull a few males, but this is not Rupert and Jo’s style. The Indian Runners, like the sheep, are effectively pets. Wealthy enough to do pretty well whatever they please, Rupert and Jo have developed a lifestyle that’s half Darling Buds of May and half Duchy of Cornwall, happily enslaved to their land and their pampered animals.

Utensil’s fallen on her feet again – a millionaire avian lifestyle in a Fowls’ Paradise.

A Yomp Among the Yurts

I’ve just spent the weekend cottaging. Half a dozen of us holed up in Gloucestershire, partly to escape husbands, children etc and partly to slob around in dressing gowns eating, drinking, gossiping and reading dreadful women’s magazines.

We also walk a bit, and this year made our first visit to the yurts our host Julian Usborne, ever a trend-spotter, has just had erected on the estate.

Yurts are not, in fact, native to the Cotswolds. Though if the early Mongolians had deliberately set out to capture the sub-Glastonbury UK tourist trade, they could hardly have done better. The countryside around Stroud is absolutely stiff with well-heeled new-age eco-baby-boomers (or, as we used to call them, sad old hippies). After a hard day teaching ceramics or making Channel 4 documentaries about one another, there’s nothing they like better than to curl up on a yak skin in front of the stove with a glass of nettle wine and The Guardian.

The Luxury Yurt Break – or ‘posh camping’ - is big business. The circular tents with their upholstered interiors and wood-burners are cosy and stunningly romantic. The romance stems not least from intimacy – with just one undivided space there’s not a lot of privacy. Then there’s the smell.

Yurts don’t smell of anything in particular, but campers do. When nomadic Mongolians pitched camp, they didn’t worry about sanitary or catering facilities. Yurts don’t have bathrooms.

To me, the words 'luxury' and 'communal shower block' can never sit well together.

Julian has compensated with delightful little sheds perched high in the hillside, complete with pretty china ewers, ingenious homespun toilet-roll holders and chemical loos. Here you can meditate for hours gazing over a delightful leafy valley, whilst fellow-yurters, cross-legged with urgency, bang on the door.

We were thinking of renting the triumvirate for a group holiday, until we saw the prices. One 3-person yurt, complete with chemical loo and shared kitchen facilities, costs not that much less than our 3 bedroom stone cottage complete with central heating, proper bathroom and DVD player.

Call me a philistine and a pervert – I’d rather go cottaging than yurting any day.

The Country Mouse and Me

I’ve caught a mouse!

This puts me one up on Misty, the neighbouring cat who spends most of her spare time in my place, hogging the sofa but failing to lift a finger when it comes to the wildlife.

We know we have mice in the kitchen. And the attics. And number two son’s bedroom. Well, most places really. We tried putting down humane traps, which are basically tubes with a little bit of food at the end. Trouble is, in our house there’s very little incentive to climb down a tube for a mouthful of peanut butter when you can just as easily raid the larder or the fruit-bowl.

Now, just when we’d stopped worrying, as we’re about to move anyway, I’ve actually caught one.

I’m glad, as this particular mouse was getting me down. Just lately, I’ve come across him several times of an evening, hanging around the kitchen bin. He retreats under the fridge-freezer, where he clearly has a pied-a-terre, when he sees me. But he’s been getting more and more casual about this, positively slouching off like a reluctant teenager caught behind the bike shed during Games.

It was this casual approach that caused his downfall. He climbed into the recycling bin, then couldn’t get out.

I slammed down the lid, calling the children to come and admire my cunning. We couldn’t kill him: with Number One Son a pacifist and Number Two a Buddhist, it’s a pretty safe house to be a mouse in. So we carried him outside, and, very discreetly, set him down in front of a neighbour’s house.

He hopped up their steps and under the front gate, just as though he had an appointment.

I worried initially that ‘he’may be a ‘she’ with a nest of babies starving away behind the skirting board. But I expect the rest of the colony will take care of them.

Whose Pooh?

In honour of two extremely special young VIP readers in Australia, I have created a special Rural Blog Quiz. I wanted to do this for Christmas, but had a problem with access to raw materials.

I have now, after extensive field work, got everything I need, so here goes.

Your task, gentle readers both, is to identify the owners of the various poohs shown below, into which I commonly step by mistake in the English Countryside. I only need species - not individual names and telephone numbers, of course.







Please submit your best 6 guesses in the comments box below (or by email if you'd rather) and then I'll give you the answers. There will be a prize for the best entry if I can think of one.

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'Muck on the Wall' by Hu Flung Dungh

Ancient Chinese Book Title and Even More Ancient Joke.

DEFRAyed Sums

A smallholder friend was decribing his dealings with DEFRA.

His holding is really very Small indeed – he rents a little strip of field, not that much bigger than an allotment, on which he grazes a couple of goats.

Because of this, he is legally obliged to register with DEFRA, in exchange for which they send him annually a wad of glossy colour brochures, guides and forms; enough, laid end to end with the pages separated, to paper over the plot in question. Except the goats would eat the paper.

In his first year of registration, DEFRA sent him a cheque for £3.24. Not, apparently, in recognition of any good work done by the goats, or by him. They didn’t even know about the goats, or ask what he was using the land for.

After a period of silent contemplation, DEFRA then announced that he had been underpaid for whatever they were paying him for, and forwarded a cheque for a further17 pence.

Last year, DEFRA sent him £103.44. He still has no idea why.

This means that either:
a) Whatever he was doing in the first year that so pleased DEFRA, he is now accidentally doing a great deal more of.
Or:
b) This increase represents some form of standard practice on the part of DEFRA.

If (b), then the British Smallholder has never had it so good.

Just look at the sums:
Year 1
1 x tiny strip of land = £3.41
Year 2
Same tiny strip of land = £103.44
This, if I’ve got my figures right, represents an annual increase of over 3000%
Therefore:
Year 3
Same tiny strip of land = £103.44 x 3000% average annual increase = £3,090
Year 4
Same tiny strip of land = £92,700

And so forth, until in around Year 8 he can buy his own Caribbean Island.

All this, of course, is not allowing for the profits on goats’ milk sales.

Anybody got a 30 acre field I could rent?

Affairs of the Heart - the Offal Truth

Number One Son has just asked for £6 to buy an ox heart. It’s for Art. GCSE that is, not St Martins Diploma, so he’s not going to staple it to a wall or marinate it in formaldehyde. Just paint its portrait.

Two points struck me. ‘What are you going to do with it afterwards?’

I was worried about decomposition: his art projects tend to go on for weeks.

‘ I suppose you want me to bring it home so you can cook it’ he said sardonically.

Which brings me to the other point. £6 for an ox heart? I can get a whole chicken for that, or a nice piece of sirloin.

‘Ox hearts are pretty big’ he pointed out.

‘And you only get one per ox’ I agreed.

When you think about it, the heart and tail are the only bits of an ox anyone eats. What a terrible waste of an animal.

I don’t like waste. Part of not being a vegetarian is not wasting the body of something killed for food. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall taught a group of initiates how to make three meals from one chicken, including soup.

‘Amazing’ said one ‘We usually just eat the breast and throw the rest away.’

Amazing.

The other day a TV presenter persuaded passersby to eat budget beefburgers, then told them the burgers were made from heart. His victims promptly spat them out, gagging.

The presenter then demanded the manufacturer come clean about the real content of these ‘so called 100% beef burgers’.

Hold on. A cow is 100% beef, and that includes the heart. What wrong with eating it? And what on earth do people think burgers are made of? Prime fillet?

The fillet of a cow is a pretty small strip along the spine – try feeling your own for meatiness and you’ll see what I mean. Rump, ribs, silverside and all the rest still account for only a modest percentage of a very big animal. The rest needs eating too.

My grandmother used to serve cow heel pie (it was appalling). My parents ate tripe (not bad, but cruel to apprentice butchers, who have to wash it). My father loved a stuffed sheep’s heart.

What would you stuff an ox heart with? A sheep’s heart, perhaps. Like those roasts at Tudor banquets, you could keep stuffing one heart inside another, from sheep to hare to partridge, right down to a teensy-weensy little wren heart right in the middle.

Ah, but who would eat the rest of the wren? Maybe wrenburgers could catch on.

Be Very Afraid....

The power of detention without charge is not exclusive to the Prevention of Terrorism Act. British Waterways are getting in on the act, with a draconian approach to improper mooring.

Counting Sheep

In the beginning there was Dolly.

The original Dolly the sheep was, you’ll remember, cloned. This Dolly’s genesis is even more impressive – she was immaculately conceived.

The field behind Garden Cottage was rented to a keeper of rare-breed sheep. This spinster population, with its dark brown fleeces, white blazes, and long fluffy white-tipped bottle-brush tails, were virgin ewes. One, however, was later found to be mysteriously pregnant - father unknown. The resulting lamb was adopted, and christened, by Rupert and Jo.

In due course, and by more conventional means, Dolly begat Molly and Dolly and Molly between them begat Polly and Holly. All very Jolly, but then Holly (or possibly Polly) succumbed to a virus. Being a pampered pet rather than livestock, she received the finest medical attention, but perished.

Jo asked the vet how best to dispose of the remains of her Loved One, and he recommended a specialist. The specialist, having mistaken Holly for just another dead sheep, flung the carcase into a skip, causing Jo to go into hysterics. The corpse was duly rescued and given a decent Christian burial at home.

So now there are three: Dolly, Molly and (I think) Polly. Rupert has built a beautiful timber and brick barn, one half of which he uses as a Summer workshop and party venue; the other half as a sheepfold. A couple of hurdles divide the two activities, and man and sheep make a charming group as straw, wood-shavings, droppings and cigar smoke intermingle.

When they find time for a bit of outdoor living, the sheep stand together on the ridge of a strip of field acquired specially for them, simpering like Three Little Mikado Maids in a row, or in times of stress (sheep have a lot of these), taking turns to stand meerkat-like on sentry duty, eyeing me malevolently.

Having moved from quartet to trio, Rupert and Jo have decided three is enough. So, barring another immaculate conception, there will never be a flock.

This is a shame. I was looking forward to Folly the daft sheep, Solly the Jewish sheep, Bolly the classy sheep, Collie, the sheep that thinks it’s a sheepdog, and so forth. What a sad waste of names.

And, of course, of cutlets.

Elergy in a Country Churchyard

My friend C tells me she wants to be buried (once she's dead, of course) in a particular country churchyard. I was surprised, as her church of choice had seemed to me rather a monster - an ancient, barn-like structure servicing a tiny hamlet, the few parishoners huddling together round an oil heater in the apse of a Sunday.

But the countryside is spectacular, and C's words made me revisit the place.

She's right. The churchyard is special, a complete history of local families over 200 years and more - the names of local farms and farmers echoing through generations. Ancient snaggle-toothed memorials watch over more recent sadnesses. Like the shiny granite slab engraved with a drumkit: propped against it, the framed photograph of a grinning young man.

There's a fabulous walk from the church, down a long avenue of slanting young birches past a beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse (whose earlier owners are back in the churchyard: even in death I envy them their former home). I've been here before, but one thing is new. A cluster of bouquets by the roadside, and with them another copy of that same photograph.

How did he die in such an empty, solitary place? There's nothing to crash into, no buildings, never any traffic. Such a short distance, with a wide world of possibilities still in view, to travel from death to eternity.

C will travel a longer journey, hopefully a long time hence, but perhaps she'll join the young drummer here one day. She's very pretty and sweet: they should hit it off well together.

Walking By The Book

Why do I do it? Why do I buy books of guided walks when they always get me lost?

This walk featured a village famous for its water buffalo herd. I hoped to stumble across this (not literally, though these are apparently the gentler, oriental, ikebana-arranging variety, not the larger African ‘Big-5’ type than hangs out with lions and rhinos) en route.

The first herd I came upon was a mixed one: designer sheep, alpacas, ducks and, I kid you not, emus. I was clearly in silly farming territory, just the place to breed bonsai water buffalo. The Book then sent me through a barbed wire fence (‘Here you will find a stile’), down several wrong turns and into a farmyard. Here I found a notice saying the farm was closed for ‘Saturday Sabbath’ but that, otherwise, hikers and cyclists were welcome to come and look around – the equivalent, to most Warwickshire farmers, of inviting paedophiles to tour a primary school. Alongside, shaggy highland cattle were enjoying their Sabbatical before a magnificent red brick windmill. Perfect.

And the village, when I finally found it, was glorious – tumbling down the steep hillside in a confusion of gable ends, jutting bays and terraces. At its base, as instructed by The Book, I set off down a cart track.

The next bit was my fault. ‘You come to a gate’ The Book said. I came to a nice gate, on the left, and went through it. ‘You come to another gate’ it continued. I came to a stile, but decided that counted. Next came a pool ‘where cup and saucer lilies can be seen’ said The Book, forgetting it was January. Then I found another, then another, then some anglers and a great many brambles and was clearly in the wrong place entirely

The village loomed reassuringly above me throughout, and I now found myself, Alice-like, heading inexorably back towards it. Resigned, I started again the cart track.

This time I found the correct gate. And the second gate. And another pool. And was utterly lost: the countryside had clearly undergone some sort of tectonic shift since the author of The Book last visited.

I abandoned The Book and relied on instinct, stumbling through field after field of cattled-churned mud, wading through brooks and straddling fences. I must have trespassed through every field in the area, without coming across a single water-buffalo herd. Though by then I was well past caring.

Eventually, plunging through a hedge, I reached a lane – civilisation at last. There, parked by a solitary house, was a white van with ‘-ton Buffalo Herd’ painted on its side.

I hadn’t seen the Buffalo, but I know now where their road crew hangs out.

Back home, exhausted, I replaced The Book on its shelf. We’d had our differences, but we’d had fun. Next time, I’ll try a different walk. I never do learn.

Of wheels and water

Thos. Beeching and James Brindley - the lazy cyclist’s friends. Beeching created nice flat disused railway cuttings: Brindley constructed nice flat canals. Thanks to them, I can travel goodish distances through beautiful countryside with hardly a gear change.

Which is as well, because my handlebars become clammy with fear once I hit the towpath. I’m frightened of falling in the canal. Again.

I’d got the idea from somewhere than anyone falling into a canal is immediately sucked under lock gates, and drowns. It doesn’t help that bridges over canals are so very low. They have to be, of course; bargees would lie on their backs and ‘walk’ their craft through the tunnels. So for me, there’s always the debate – get off and push, or cycle under the bridge, horribly close to the water’s edge, wobbling with nerves. When alone, I push. When anyone’s watching, I cycle. That’s how I fell in.

The bike, remarkably, managed to pitch me head first into the water whilst itself remaining safe and dry on the path, sniggering. The stranger whose presence had caused me to brave the tunnel in the first place was not young, but strong-ish. He had to be, as, whilst I wasn’t sucked anywhere (I wasn’t even out of my depth) I couldn’t climb out - canal walls are wedge-shaped, narrowing at the top, and unscaleable. The poor man had to haul me out and land me like a salmon. So undignified.

I had no option but to remount and cycle, my white shirt and jeans dripping blood and slime, several miles home. It says much for the British character that not a soul, on that busy, sunny day, raised an eyebrow as, filthy, wet and bleeding, I pedalled past.

So the other week I faced my fears. It was an icy day and the canal was frozen, which felt safer, until an icebreaking barge ground slowly through, exposing its wintry depths. I cycled the frozen, rutted towpath, my rear wheel slewing beneath me occasionally, terrifying but never quite jettisoning me. At each tunnel, I dismounted, remounting shakily on the other side.

I made it to the railway cutting, and home, without falling off once. I think I have beaten my fears; the canal system is my oyster once more.

And still it snows....

Day 5. Still snowing. This morning we ate the last of the huskies. Sent a dove out for emergency supplies, but it came back with an olive branch. Must have mis-read the shopping list.

No good, I’m going stir-crazy. Have to get out. With nothing left to pull the car, I head off by bike.

The woods are perfect, a glittering white crust coating each filigree twig, like Narnia under White Witch’s spell. The big evergreens are shaped into the pointy triangles of a child’s drawing, branches dragged downward under the weight of snow.

Out of the woods, only a single set of footprints crosses the biggest field as a stretches over the horizon in a waste of white. So now at last I know for certain where the footpath runs. I follow the prints, Wenceslas-like.

‘Aha, a Dunlop Acifort Ribbed Size 11, if I am not mistaken, Watson. You will remember my monograph on the subject. A large man, no longer young, unused to exercise, right-handed, whose wife has very recently been murdered’

‘Remarkable, Holmes. You deduce his size and health from the depth and spacing of the footprints, of course. But right-handed?’

‘You will observe a pattern of dashes and dots to the right of the footprints, Watson. They do not appear initially, but as he tires he lowers his walking stick and uses it for support. Either that, or he has suddenly been joined by a friend on a pogo stick.’

‘And the murdered wife?’

‘Simplicity itself, Watson. We’ve just observed him murdering her’

There are other prints. Foxes and rabbits, playing life-and-death tag across the landscape. And less readily identifiable spoor.

‘My God Holmes, but surely these are the tracks some gigantic sheep!’

‘More probably a Woozle and two, as it were, Wizzles, walking in close formation, Watson. Calm yourself - the Ram of the Baskervilles remains the stuff of legend.’

There’s no sign of the animals who normally graze here. Perhaps they've been taken into the adjoining Hall, now a management college. That should up the overall IQ a bit.

Later, I find them. The sheep have been herded into a single field, where they are picking over a heap of mangle-wurzels and complaining about the catering. The cattle are penned behind a barn which is stacked solid to the high roof, Rachel Whiteread style, with rich golden hay. Must feel like living next to a sweet shop or a gingerbread house.

This reminds me. I’ve forgotten to buy supplies. But I have a tin of anchovies and a freezerful of raspberries at home still. I too shall feast tonight.

The Giant Plastic Robin Strikes

Nemesis. Atilla II is dead. Utensil, who we don't feel is suited to extended widowhood, will be rehomed up the road tonight. Three Light Sussexes are going to get the fright of their lives when she wakes amongst them in a fury tomorrow.

In Rupert and Jo's courtyard this morning we saw a large and handsome fox, red-gold against the snow and looking straight through the kitchen window at us, bold as brass. Rupe grabbed his gun without much hope, and we hurried outside.

The fox had gone into the walled garden, and not to the back where Jo tends the National Herd of Indian Running Ducks (Jo's ducks breed like rabbits - except of course they have ducklings, not bunnies - making her largest breeder in England, by default). I hurried back through the field to Garden Cottage and ran about our gardens making anti-fox noises ('Oy, fox, go away!' and similar - all very embarrassing) whilst the chooks regarded me balefully from under their usual hedge.

Then I went indoors. An hour later, we noticed that Utensil was alone. A couple feathers, white against the white snow, were the only sign of anything amiss. It had been soundless and, apparently bloodless. Atilla was fox-food. And Ute could not have looked less bothered. So much for the sisterhood

So that's it. We are no longer chicken owners. The giant plastic robin of fate as struck. We have skiied right off the cake and are in free-fall.

U

The More It Snows, Tiddly Pom

Laugh and the world laughs with you: cry, and something or other interrupts you just when you want to wallow alone your grief.

How can I mourn the loss of Garden Cottage when we are suddenly snowed into it, sons and all (the schools having meanly evicted them at the first snowflake). True, our landlord could still technically wade across the lawn and, twirling his moustaches in true Victorian melodrama style, cast us out into the icy storm, but as we’re on six months notice it’s not really likely.

So here we huddle, snowbound.

Outside, my elderly car is hunched like a leveret in its form, wing mirrors flat against its head, under a tarpaulin weighed down with snow. In an ideal world the poor old dear would be indoors in this weather,, but the garges are needed to store detritus including our award-winning collection of power saws, two broken wardrobes and a dead Range Rover. Clearly these valuable objects take precedence over my cold but faithful Citroen.

So I set off for a walk, mainly because with so very much snow you feel you ought to do something about it. Number 2 Son had already shown enterprise by sliding down the front slope on a black plastic bin liner. Number 1 Son had gone to earth with a pot of tea and Jeremy Clarkson – his response to most situations, climatic and otherwise. So it was up to me.

I got as far as the village, where I found several neighbours, rarely seen outside their natural habitats, wandering dazedly about like lost souls in Parkas, clutching plastic bags. Strange how the knowledge that you really are genuinely snowed in creates an immediate urge to acquire provisions, regardless of need. Owners of freezers full of lamb and arders stuffed with homegrown vegetables are suddenly filled with a primitive urge to venture out like Scott of the Antarctic, foraging for frozen peas and tinned ham.

Having admired the ham, I broke to my neighbours the sad news of our not-very-immenent departure. They immediately suggested clubbing together and purchase Garden Cottage; not, as would have been appropriately touching, to present it to me, but to stop the previous occupants from moving back in.

These occupants, christened (not by their mothers, I’m guessing) ‘The Witch and the Warlock,’ were of unspecified but frightful awfulness.

‘They went off to live opposite Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’ One neighbour added ‘Next we heard, he’d sold River Cottage and moved. We knew just how he felt.’

For a micro-community (two dozen at most) we manage an impressive level of hostilities. The current blood-feud, a complex matter centring on a potential balcony overlooking a hot tub, threatens run through generations.

On into the innocent fields I stomped, the crisp new snow crunching underfoot, burying the ploughed earth and plopping in lumps off branches.

There is a mouth-watering quality in the tart crunch of deep, virgin snow. It reminds me of childhood Christmas cakes, with their scenes of Father Christmas skiing downhill through thickly ruffled white royal icing.

The skiing Father Christmas figure took advantage of the natural gradient of my mother’s homemade cakes At the bottom of the icing sugar hill, his arrival would traditionally be keenly awaited by a red plaster pillar box with a yellowing snow roof and a crusty base of last year’s icing, and a brown plastic robin the comparative size of an Alsatian.

Crunching back to the warm glow my soon-to-be-someone-else’s home, I reflected that, for me, as for skiing Father Christmas, life is full of unpredictable developments. Even in our most carefree moments, the brown plastic robin on Nemesis awaits us all.

At the Turning of the Year

Twelfth Night, and its snowing again. This is the most beautiful winter I can remember. Cycling along the frozen rutted ground. I watch the low slung sun turn the silvery frost-spiked world all fierce bronze and dusky pink, a scene as improbably vulgar as a Christmas card painting, but magical. In the garden Jonathan, his face two red cheeks sandwiched between a startling turquoise bobble hat and many layers of leather and knitted collars, his glasses glinting with snowflakes, attacks the snow-capped evergreens flourishing amongst gaunt, bare fruit trees.

Twelfth night, and I am disentangling withered ivy and dusty holly from light fittings and picture frames. The Christmas tree, still as fresh and festive as ever, will nevertheless make its way to the bonfire tonight. And as I strip it of lights and tinsel, I am crying.

Because it’s over. Not Christmas, or the year, but everything.

We have to leave. The landlord is selling our cottage. He wants the money, and the land, to extend his own land which marches with, and is now muscling in on, our own.

We’ll find somewhere to go. The children must live somewhere and so, I suppose, must I. But not like this.

And the tears just don't seem able to stop. I had thought I was braver than this.

It was to be A Year, you see – the diary of one annual cycle of the Warwickshire countryside. I was looking forward to blogging about spring bulbs, apple blossom, the Horticultural Show, the Summer Fete and, eventually, the glorious climax of the Harvest Festival, where churches round here as stuffed fuller than at Christmas. I’d even got my name down for a half-allotment (a sort of ‘starter-allotment’ for the nervous amateur) and together we could have planted leeks and broccoli and sat in potting sheds amongst broken flowerpots watching them fail to flourish and contemplating other, more successful patches.

But I cheated. I didn't tell you that this place was not really mine, that I was just a tenant, living in a dream world, pretending this could be forever.

I have lived too long.

But at least I have lived. I used to wonder what paradise could be like, and whether I’d actually enjoy it much anyway. Now I know. Paradise is a garden, the garden of Garden Cottage. And I have enjoyed it very much indeed.