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.