Country Blog of an English Gentlewoman

Fair Game Reloaded

2010-03-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-27T10:13:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-27T10:01:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-26T01:36:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

‘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...

2010-02-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-05T02:02:00.000-08:00

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.

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

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

2010-02-05T01:46:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-04T06:14:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-04T06:12:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-02-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

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.

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

'Muck on the Wall' by Hu Flung Dungh

Ancient Chinese Book Title and Even More Ancient Joke.

DEFRAyed Sums

2010-01-28T14:53:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-27T01:07:00.001-08:00

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....

2010-01-19T08:07:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T07:27:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T07:18:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T06:46:00.000-08:00

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....

2010-01-10T08:22:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T07:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-05T04:17:00.000-08:00

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.

In The Bleak Midwinter

2009-12-23T02:36:00.000-08:00

'Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Headless Kings and Broken Haloes

2009-12-23T02:25:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

And now Jesus’s halo is bent.

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

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

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

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

Dark Doings at the Victorian Farm

2009-12-14T11:50:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image borrowed without permission from BBC and Ruth Goodman websites

In Which We Fail to Sew a Fine Seam

2009-12-14T05:06:00.000-08:00

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

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

‘Oh yeah?’ says my subconscious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I pondered this bizarre conundrum for a while.

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

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

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

2009-12-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I do still love Christmas!

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

Of wreaths and rosehips

2009-12-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And not just internal, believe me.

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

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

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

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

Not by me, though.

Of Scarey Sheep and Holy Goats

2009-12-11T04:10:00.000-08:00

I’m not bad with sheep.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Bollocks, Mother’ I said.

You can wait years for an opening like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Pears and Horses

2009-12-11T03:18:00.000-08:00

‘I know two things about a horse’

my grandmother used to recite:

‘And one of them is rather coarse’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My grandparents would, I think, understand my satisfaction.

Country Wit and Donald Two

2009-12-11T02:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never had a Joseph

2009-12-08T05:33:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Make A Christmas Wreath

2009-12-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

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

Except ignorance. So I turned to the internet.

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

How to Make a Christmas Wreath

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

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

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

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

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

Time taken – one hour.

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

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

The Bare Truth

2009-12-05T12:27:00.000-08:00

Looks like it’s Winter Moulting time around here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the sheep, I’d rather be cold.

The Wenceslas Effect

2009-12-03T07:23:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Which We Twitch

2009-11-26T05:15:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-23T04:52:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-11-12T08:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-11T04:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-11T02:21:00.000-08:00

‘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

2009-11-11T01:27:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T04:26:00.000-08:00

'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

2009-11-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-05T04:18:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-11-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T13:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

‘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

2009-11-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

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....

2009-11-02T05:15:00.000-08:00

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….

Supping with the Devil's Wee

2009-10-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to let the matter of Blackberry Wine die quietly away, but dear friend J, who reads this blog, came to lunch the other day and enquired after it. As a matter of fact I had just finished labelling the final bottle.

The labelling was fun, but putting on the foil caps even better. You just plunge them into boiling water for a second and they shrink-wrap on, looking most impressive.

The wine has been christened ‘Devil’s Wee’ after the country tradition http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/brim_ble.htm that the Devil urinates on blackberries after a certain date, rendering them inedible. It’s also coincidentally no bad description of the contents; the labels are rather better than the actual wine.

I poured J a glass. Devil’s Wee has a pleasant, blackberry bouquet and an interestingly cloudy appearance. I detected faint hints of strawberry: J detected hints of methyl alcohol.

Methyl alcohol, J explained, is ‘bad’ alcohol as opposed to ‘good’ ethyl alcohol. Methyl or ‘wood’ alcohol is the stuff that makes you go blind.

J, who is a real countrywoman as well as a talented artist, knows a lot about home made wine. I sipped manfully at my glass of Devil’s Wee as she described the wines her sister makes, a marvellous delicate elderflower and a rich port-like elderberry. Her mother, apparently, also made a whole range of the most exquisite wines.

Ah, but blackberry wine is notoriously tricky, I pointed out weakly.

But no - J’s mother made excellent blackberry wine. In fact, virtually everyone J has ever come across seems to be an accomplished winemaker. Except, obviously, me.

J cautiously left her glass of methyl alcohol alone, sticking firmly to mineral water throughout lunch.

After she left, I checked up on methyl alcohol from a number of sites including the excellent http://www.drinksplanet.com/ (which I wish I’d found earlier) and I think I’m safe. The unanimous view is that you can’t get methyl alcohol poisoning from home-made wine. Some say it can’t be produced by grain or grape fermentation, others that all wines (and even jams) contain insignificant traces.

So that’s okay. I shall go on drinking Devil’s Wee.

Better stop blogging now; the room is going strangely dark and hazy…

The Propulsion of Mangel-Wurzels.

2009-10-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

I didn’t quite realise that mangel-wurzels actually exist – I thought they were the stuff of rural legend and comic song, like cordwanglers. But I found this root lying on a farm track and pocketed it (I have large pockets) for further identification.

I’d assumed this rather sorry specimen of a beet had fallen off the back of a lorry, but having check out the superb and highly informative http://www.mangoldhurling.co.uk/index.html I think I must have stumbled into the aftermath of a sporting event. Whoever chucked this one at the Norman clearly missed the mark.

Do please check out this website – the Rules alone are an absolute must-read for any vegetable-throwing enthusiast.

The First Turkey of Winter

2009-10-22T11:22:00.001-07:00

I've just seen the first turkey of winter. Bathed in early Autumn sunlight, he was poking his head through a farm gate, looking hopeful.

Christmas lights are already up (though not lit) in Stratford upon Avon. Sainsbury's has been selling Xmas Puddings for a month or more.

Fella, your days are definitely numbered...

Donald - The Last Potato

2009-10-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

In which we meet, greet and eat Donald

Well, the potato crop is not seeing us as far through the winter as I’d hoped – here we are in October and scrapping the bottom of the bag.

I got nearly half a sack (okay - a quarter) of potatoes from my initial investment of 11 tubers. There were additional costs, of course. I had to bribe Number 1 Son with £10 to dig over the potato patch, after I’d wrecked my shoulder trying. Then, when I caught him trying to subcontract the work to Number 2 Son for 50p, I spent another £2 employing Number 2 Son to shovel manure.

All the same, I feel I got a decent return.

Potatoes are funny things. They have to be ‘earthed up’ – the earth piled higher and higher around the plants as they grow - so that the tubers are not exposed to air. Otherwise, they turn green and are apparently toxic. This figures, as they are actually part of the nightshade family.

Which of course invites the question – Why did people persist in cultivating such obviously poisonous plants? And how many people died eating green potatoes before someone invented ‘earthing up’? It’s like the fact that rhubarb stalks are edible, but rhubarb leaves very definitely aren’t. How many hungry souls succumbed to rhubarb poisoning working that one out?

I earthed up like mad, and all my potatoes were snowy white. And (I might have mentioned this before – it’s had a big impact on my life) I won 3rd Prize for Whites at the local Horticultural Show (don’t ask how many entries there were… lets just say Under Four).

I found Donald whilst selecting my entries. Show potatoes have to be identical in size and shape. Donald was a clear one-off: an exact and perfect replica of a bathduck.

So we’ve kept him till the very last. And now he’s had his chips. Or rather we have. Ha ha.

Incidental: Ever-Decreasing Crop Circles

2009-10-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

So what actually happens to all the crop-circle makers once the crops have been harvested and there’s nothing left to flatten? Do they hibernate, like hedgehogs, or do they take up their planks and ropes and globe-trot like surfers, chasing the endless summer and that perfect rolling wave of wheat?

Or maybe they have a second trade, like sweeping chimneys. I’ve thought of several suitable rural trades they could turn their hands to this winter, all of which are seriously undersubscribed. I’m sure you can think of plenty more – please let me know your thoughts.

Guerrilla Funerals

These days, more and more people want to be buried in remote, romantic eco-friendly locations. Crack teams of guerrilla crop-circle makers moving at dead of night could surreptitiously bury YOU in the rural setting of your choice – from arable land to National Trust gardens or scenic cliff-top paths. There’s no red tape, no funeral directors to pay, and by the time you’re discovered you’re already decomposing.

Communicating with the Dead

Rural Churches are suffering funding crises, but they possess many valuable assets which remain under-exploited. Why not follow the lead of farmers with land adjoining motorways, and help sell the backs of tombstones as local advertising space?

Graffiti in Motion

Follow in the footsteps of Banksy – graffiti a cow. Cows are large, slow moving and grow a thicker pelt in winter. Using sheep shearing equipment or even a powerful electric shaver, it should be simple enough to carve elaborate crop circle designs into the rumps of cattle. A book of the results, artistically photographed would make an excellent Christmas stocking filler. You may also be eligible for Arts Council funding.

Cleaning up at the Mop

2009-10-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

Now is the season of the Mop Fair. Labourers, the harvest brought home, would traditionally assemble for hire in the town square, each holding the implement of his or her trade (mopping being a popular one, clearly). No doubt a certain amount of morris dancing and accordion playing was laid on to make the whole thing go with a swing.

Nowadays, the Mop is an occasion for the youth of the local community to a ride on neon-lit mechanical monsters covered in garish portraits of Kylie and Elvis and churning out electro-pop at £2 – £10 a shot, or to compete for outsize pink plush teddy bears clutching red satin hearts by throwing balls at soldered stacks of tins.

The traditional Mop Fair treated labourers like commodities to be exploited. The modern Mop Fair treats young people like commodities to be ripped off. Plus ca change and all that…..

In Which We Fancy Poultry

2009-10-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

Shottery Memorial Hall sounded a surprisingly modest venue for The National Poultry Show, and the signage was similarly low key. It comprised a home-made A4 poster on the gatepost, and an open fire exit door. The only signs of life were a handful of cars and a lady smoking a cigarette outside the fire exit.

I walked once round the building in search of an entrance, them gave up and consulted the lady at the fire exit.

‘You just go in’ she said nodding at the passageway behind her.

At the end of the passageway was a largish hall, its entrance more or less guarded by a seedy looking character with a book of raffle tickets. He seemed faintly surprised when I asked the entrance fee, and we settled on a modest 50p. He didn’t try to sell me a raffle ticket, and I helped myself to a photocopied list of exhibits.

The hall was stuffed with small square metal cages, stacked 3 high back to back in rows, all full of chickens. There must have been a good 400 of them, and as at any moment in time around 10 per cent were actively squawking or crowing, the noise was impressive.

Most of the serious business had clearly already taken place. Prize certificates were threaded into the fronts of many cages, and on the stage in the end of the hall sat a sad looking man behind a bottle of sherry and some gift-wrapped parcels (presumably the prizes) and five much larger cages containing the overall winners, the big-name stars of the show.

You know, I don’t think this could have been the actual National Poultry Show. I think it must have been a regional, or even local, offshoot of the main event. Apart from anything else, Prince Charles is the patron of the Poultry Club of Great Britain, and there was no sign of him at all.

And I would have spotted him easily – there were only a couple of dozen people in the hall, out of all proportion to the number of chickens, even allowing for multiple ownership. Presumably the vast majority had sneaked off to the nearby town for a spot of lunch and sightseeing, leaving their poultry to fend for itself. There was a ruddy cheeked man in a white coat and flat cap and a clipboard walking about, presumably the invigilator. Flat caps, ruddy cheeks, knobbly walking sticks and loden green jackets were indeed much in evidence, reflecting the healthy outdoor life of the chicken breeder. Also straining paunches, reflecting its comparatively sedentary nature and proximity to the local pub, and a curious range of frayed shorts and track suit bottoms, reflecting a sad want of fashion sense all round. The women were generally better dressed, and most had the air of being there out of necessity rather than passion, perhaps to help with the teas.

I had been hoping for something a little more commercial and upbeat, I must admit. I had been looking forward to stall selling poultry shampoo and grooming kits for show birds, and other things I could snigger at. But, in all fairness, there was no shortage of chickens.

In fact I was dazzled and confused, hardly knowing where to turn. For a happy hour I stalked the corridors of cages, consulting my exhibitor list and getting my eye in. I tried to convince myself that I could tell the difference between the first prize winner and the unplaced. I couldn’t. They were all beautiful. My favorites were the Wyandottes with their wonderful black or gold deckle-edged feathers, like Huguenot lace, and the Sussex. As a light Light Sussex farmer myself (well I own one) I felt more in my depth here; the striking difference in the award winners and my own specimen was they were sparking white and clean (tip – never get a white hen – unlike cats, they’re not into washing) and the ruffs around their necks were very deep and black, each feather delineated as though with Indian ink. There were a handful of fascinating rare breeds too, including this wonderful character, a split comb Cruella De Ville with black and white spotted feathers and a deep white collar.

The Bantams, which I had imagined merely toy birds for dilettantes, also fascinated me. The Modern Game bantams (category Hard Feather – don’t ask me why), tiny wiry brown creatures like pumped up starlings on steroids, with spindly legs and disproportionally broad pectorals, were deliciously feisty – just like their boxing namesakes. There was also a bantam category risquély named ‘A cock and two hens’ comprising a small huffy-looking family unit trying to get on with it’s life and ignore the audience.

Bantam fanciers seemed to be a class on their own. Clusters of shaven headed youths bigged up their birds to one another, a procedure which seemed to involve turning the birds upside down and peering up their rear ends. A pretty unhealthy activity, I felt, for young men who could be spending their Saturdays in the healthy outdoors, swigging cider in the doorway of Primark.

There was also an exhibition of eggs, chiefly of interest because almost all the ‘single bantam eggs’, already judged, had been removed, leaving only an indentation in the sawdust on each paper plate. What sort of person, I wondered, takes his bantam egg home early before it gets over-tired, but not his birds?

My bet for Best in Show was a massive, opulently feathered Sussex Cock with lusty red wattles and a rich baritone crow of toe-curling sexiness – I would have loved to have taken him home to my two. He came second, however, to an undistinguished-looking (to me) little brown bantam with a chest almost as wide as she was tall. Maybe you have to look up her fundament to appreciate her winning qualities.

If you can’t wait a whole year to attend the next National Poulty Show yourself, check out Stephen Armytage’s superb and amazing ‘Extraordinary Chickens’ – no guest cloakroom should be without it.

Fungal Feeding

2009-10-16T03:45:00.000-07:00

You know, I simply can’t keep up with the harvest just at this point. No sooner have I brought home the nut crop, than the mushroom season is upon me. Imagine how busy I would be if I’d actually grown anything on purpose. I can’t think the larger-scale food producers cope.

I harvested the first crop of mushrooms this morning, when I was hanging out the washing It’s the first time I’d noticed them, though judging from the size of some, they must have been there for a while. It has been very dry lately, but finally rained few days back (I was so relieved, the drought was playing havoc with the late radishes) and that must have brought them out in a rush.

When I first saw these mushrooms, two years ago, I turned for advice to my trusty copy of Richard Mabey’s ‘Food for Free’. Richard Mabey is my guru and this little book is largely responsible for converting me from a callous city slicker to the dedicated daughter of the soil I have now become. You really must get yourself a copy.

‘There are 3000 species of large-bodied fungi growing in the British Isles, yet only twenty-odd of these are seriously poisonous’ says Mabey. That’s odds of 150:1, even if you ate fungi at random with your eyes bandaged.

One of the twenty-odd turned up in my first proper garden, in Kent. It wasn’t really a garden, more of a landslide – eighty or so feet of mud, trees and brambles rising up behind the house at around 60 degrees from the horizontal. I didn’t walk to end of the garden: I mountaineered.

I was very busy earning a semi-honest crust in one of those lucrative but dubious industries you don’t admit to at dinner parties (not estate agency, obviously, or I wouldn’t have bought such a daft house) and so I didn’t take much interest in the garden. But as the months passed, I noticed from my window a spot of colour amongst the damp vegetation. Grabbing a handful of crampons, I clambered up, to find two of the most perfect scarlet toadstools. They were absolute beauties, big enough to shelter a fair sized gnome, let alone seat a toad, and I was pleased as punch with them. Thanks to Richard Mabey, I now think they must have been Fly Agaric ‘very common in birch and pine woods’. They are of course toxic, but you’d have to be insane or suicidal to try eating anything that evil-looking.

Richard Mabey set me off on the mushroom trail.

Having first moved to the country, I found in the local woods in winter a quantity of Velvet Shank, also known (not by Mabey, I hasten to add) by the revoltingly anti-semitic name of ‘Jew’s Ears’. They don’t actually taste a great deal, and are fairly tough, but they are definitely edible. Mabey suggests you add them towards the end of stews where ‘….they will float on the surface like fungal water lilies’. I prefer to add them, chopped, at the beginning; well disguised from guests nervous of eating of fungi that don’t come from Tesco.

A year or two later I was walking on a wet autumn day around the grounds of a National Trust property, killing time before a meeting. Suddenly before me was a really magnificent giant puffball. I didn’t need Richard Mabey in my briefcase for this one. I’d read the Fay Weldon story, and I’d been hoping to find a decent puffball for ages. But the whole point about them seems to be that they pop up quite unpredictably. As this one had.

I checked around, but there was no-one in sight. Swiftly, I detached the puffball, opened my briefcase, and squeezed it in amongst the paperwork. Back home, only slightly bruised (the puffball, not me), sliced, fried in butter and olive oil, sprinkled lavishly with sea salt and black pepper and eaten all on its own, it made a truly sumptuous meal.

I first spotted my very own garden mushrooms two years ago and, working on the principal that they were probably Ceps, I ate them. Not all at once, though. Following tried and tested methodology, I ate a small piece on day 1, half a mushroom on day 2, a whole one on day 3, and, when I still wasn’t dead on day 4, a large plate of them, fried, on toast.

Looking again this year, I can see that they are clearly not members of the boletus family, as they don’t have the distinctive spongy gills. So I’ve no idea what they are, but I shall keep eating them anyway. If you can identify these mushrooms from the photos, please let me know. And if they are one of the poisonous varieties, please do so as swiftly as possible. Thanks!

In which we go gathering nuts in October

2009-10-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

Why would anyone gather nuts in May? It’s entirely the wrong time of year. The reference may of course be to may trees, but then they don’t have nuts. More probably ‘gathering nuts in May’ is a quaint old country term for being off one’s rocker, a bit nuts in fact, and the nursery rhyme is, like so many, rather less dainty and more sinister than at first appears.

I started trying to gather nuts in August, to win a head start over the squirrels. I had looked up cobnut harvesting online, and read somewhere the jokey little sentence ‘but you have to be quick, before the squirrels get there first!’

It was the ‘!’ that really got to me, I think. Slugs eat my lettuces, caterpillars eat my tomato plants and everything eats my raspberries. Now even the bl**dy squirrels were getting in on the act.

I had read that nuts could be harvested from August to September. I was going away at the end of August, which would give the squirrels a clear window of opportunity. So I had to get in first. I mounted my campaign, Operation Nut, in mid-August.

I should explain that my hazel grove is not extensive. It comprises a single tree by the front lawn, stretching spindly branches a good fifteen feet upward. The central trunk is not really a trunk at all, but a cluster of them, all fairly slender and unclimbable (unless you are a squirrel, of course) after the first couple of feet.

So how to get the nuts down from the tree? For I could see that there were nuts, unlike last year when there there seemed to be nothing at all, for which I blamed the squirrels. Looking carefully, I could make out a number pale green clusters amongst the foliage of the upper branches. But how to get at them?

Shaking didn’t get me far – the branches, though too slender to climb, proved far too sturdy to shake. So I tried dislodging the nuts by throwing things at them. Unfortunately, I’m a pretty bad thrower, and 15 foot vertically is a surprisingly long way to throw anything heavy enough to dislodge a nut. Stones were too small, a half-brick too heavy, and a chunk of wood to cumbersome. Most of my throws fell short, and I nearly brained myself with the half-brick.

Then I remembered the catapult. Not one of those wimpy jock-strap resembling wash-leather slingshots as wielded by David against Goliath, but a serious piece of kit with a metal wrist guard and a thick rubber sling. It takes quite a lot of muscle tooperate, but shoots a long way. And probably, when used by an expert, it is pretty accurate. Not, alas, when used by me. Trying to hit a nut at 15 yards is not easy. I succeeded once, and the r*ddy thing must have been welded to the tree; it didn’t budge.

I was getting exasperated. Suppose I was on a desert island with only this tree for sustenance. Would I starve to death just because I lacked the skill, stamina and ingenuity to detach a nut? It seemed ridiculous to be defeated by such a simple challenge.

Then I had A Good Idea. I slung some string over one of the main branches (this in itself took twenty minutes and involved clambering about, getting poked in the eye with twigs). I tied the string into a loop, with a circumference of around 20 feet, and by pulling hard on it, made the branch sway and dance about like a sapling in a hurricane.

The nuts, however, stayed put.

So I gave up, and left the squirrels to it.

But by late September the nuts were still on the tree (as was my string – I tugged at it from time to time, to no effect) and the squirrels were clearly taking their time. Then one day I noticed a solitary nut lying on the driveway. Poking about the lawn, I found half a dozen more.

And so it went on, day after day, for a month and more. Every day half a dozen nuts appeared on the ground, and my only task was to spot them (not easy, they are well camouflaged against leaf litter) and rescue those on the driveway before they got run over.

I now have a large bowl of home bred cobnuts which we are keeping for Christmas.

I also have another, smaller bowl of some very beautiful nuts indeed.

These handsome fellows were gleaned, or scrounged, not from the rural hedgerows but from the Shifley Park housing development.

The development, and hence the saplings that the council no doubt forced the developers to plant along the pedestrian walkways, is about 10 years old. Planting includes a number of hazel trees, I did a spot-check on these in passing.

They are scrubby little bushes compared to my towering specimen, but they have catkins on them already (mine doesn’t) and one of them, mysteriously, seems to produce a very different and vastly superior looking nut. The inhabitants of Shifley Park, not being of a rural turn of mind, have clearly failed to spot the potential of this plantation as anything other than a handy dog toilet. So by picking my way amongst the furry grey decaying turds, I managed to collect a whole carrier bag full of these little beauties.

As you can see in the photo, the suburban nut on the right is massively larger and rounder than its rural counterpart. However, both kernels are about the same size. I think this must be because the larger nuts are older (I collected them from the ground, and don’t know how long they had been there) so the kernels may have had time to dry out and become wizened, like so many of us.

But the home-grown cobnut kernel definitely wins hands down on flavour. To be fair, I’ll have do to a taste test at Christmas when both have matured but, for now, I reckon the Cottage variety wins hands down. Thank goodness for that – I don’t think I could have borne the shame.

I believe there are many varieties of cobnut, and would love to hear from you if you know which variety either of these is. Or perhaps we should both just get a life.

In which we give a little wine....

2009-10-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

It’s worked! I don’t believe it – I think it’s actually worked! Ladies and Gentlemen, I think I may actually be making home made blackberry wine. Well b*gg*r me.

On Wednesday, Dermot the Techie came to the house to remove all the lovely kit that the company had installed here almost three years ago when I started working for them. My hunky PC (two screens, massive RAM, goes like a Lambourghini when I’m on a roll) my business phones complete with fancy headsets, my printer (he’s welcome to that one – bloody thing drives me insane maundering on about its cartridges when I’m trying to get on with something) and even my lovely spare hard drive. But first of all he wanted to see the chooks. He knew about my pair, and was thinking of getting a few himself.

Smarting from his mission to strip me of my professional assets and reduce me to a single laptop and broadband that I actually have to pay for, I marched him out the back for a quick teach-in on Chickens and Why Not to Have Them.

He caught on as soon as he stepped out of the kitchen door, of course. Whilst he was scraping the excrement off his loafer, I explained that what comes out of the end of a chicken per diem, or out of ours, anyway, is one egg max and an absolutely astonishing quantity of guano, out of all proportion to the egg, the chicken, or indeed in my case the back terrace. The chooks spend a sizable portion of their day hanging around outside the kitchen door, pecking at the window in the hope of stimulating me into providing food, and crapping for England. As a result, step outside and you walk straight into a midden.

So it only took a brief inspection of the lawn, the vegetable patches and other devastated areas for Dermot to decide against chickens. But somehow the subject got around to wine-making, and here he turned out to be an old hand.

Dermot spent years, apparently, churning out gallons of Chateau Dermot from a second floor flat in Banbury. It had, he explained, a south facing balcony with sliding glass doors. The demi-johns ranged in the sunlit warmth behind the glass, where they bubbled away merrily like something out of Harry Potter. The results were, he said, spectacular. He also made rum out of marrows. You fill the marrows with brown sugar then hang them in the window to drip. That’s it, no yeast sachets or Campden tablets, just a marrow, some sugar and the sun – how idyllic. Sounds improbable to me,but there we go, and he said it was absolutely delicious. I wonder why he stopped doing it? Maybe his wife objected to window decorations of decomposing marrow. Women can be funny like that. We both realised, incidentally, that we had no idea what Jamaican, as opposed to Banbury, Rum is actually made of (apart from sugar, or course). So I have looked it up for you.

Anyway, a bloke who can make rum by dangling a marrow clearly knows a bit about homemade hooch, so I took him to visit the my own distillery, comprising around 25 pints of purple liquid in a plastic bottle.

I’m not committing myself, you see to the nature of the liquid. At that point, I was fairly confident it wasn’t wine, or even prospective wine. I reckoned it was sugared blackberry juice. And Dermot’s talk of ‘bubbling away merrily’ seemed to confirm my very worst fears. The recipe I had been following (about which much more below) described the pleasure of listening to the happy plops and gurgles as the fermentation gases make their way out of the airlock My airlock was totally bloody silent. I’d checked the seal, checked that I’d got the water level right, tried sneaking up on it and listening when it didn’t know I was there, like an anxious mother with a sleeping babe, but…nothing. Things were not looking good.

I blamed the equipment (when in doubt, blame the equipment). Thanks to the wonders of eBay and my lousy knowledge of geography, I had driven about 50 miles to acquire a garage full of second hand wine making kit, including 52 wine bottles (alas, empty) some big plastic buckets and a large cardboard box full of an astonishing range of unidentified ‘stuff’. There were several rubber bungs with airlocks poking out of them, but my eye was caught by one spectacularly high-tech version which had what looked like a tiny emersion heater wired into it. Just dangle the heater in the liquid, bung in the bung, plug the whole lot in and … bingo!

I hesitated at first. There was no thermostat on the thing, so how would I set it to the right temperature? Then it dawned on me that (a) if it was designed for winemaking, it would be preset to the right temperature and (b) its not as though I knew what the right temperature was anyway. A more pressing problem was that there is no electrical socket in the airing cupboard, selected, as I do not have a south facing balcony, as the warmest place in the house for my wine to live

Ah, but with the emersion heater working, it would not need to sit in the warmest place in the house, I could carry it down to the utility room, where the 52 bottles and the cardboard box were already sitting, and plug it in there.

So I hauled my 25 pints of blackberry juice downstairs. This saddened me, as I had been rather proud of the practicality with which I had made up the bottle upstairs, so that I would not have to carry up a heavy container and risk it collapsing on the stairs and wrecking the carpets. The questionable hygiene involved in perching the thing on the bathroom toilet whilst working, hardly in the spirit of the great Premier Crus, seemed a small price to pay. Now I had to drag the wretched object all the way through the house.

But I got there, lowered and plugged in the emersion heater, taped down the socket switch so that nobody could interfere with it, and waited for the Miracle at Cana to do a rerun.

So here Dermot and I were, eight days later, standing in a chilly utility room staring down onto the passive, opaque surface of was pretty certainly a whole lot of cold, stagnant blackberry juice. The tiny emersion heater glowed hopefully as we raised it from the depths, but it had evidently been inadequate to the task.

‘No, that’s had it’ said Dermot smugly. And I was not surprised.

However, as a mother will cling pitifully to the tiny corpse of her dead baby, I could not bear to acknowledge the death of my hopes and the waste of all those blackberries. Against any logic, I dragged the dead weight back up the stairs and into the reviving warmth of the airing cupboard. Tenderly I swaddled the demijohn in fleecy towels and old blankets. The warmth it lacked in life, I would give it in death. I decided to allow it 24 hours to revive spontaneously, after which I would creep out at dead of night and pour it down the drain. No-one need ever know.

The next morning showed no signs of life. I adjusted its swaddling clothes and decided to see if there was any winemaking advice online that could help me.

In the study, my decimated desk yawned back at me. I had forgotten the reason why Dermot came in the first place. There was no online.

Undaunted, I set off for my nearest public library. I would return to the technologies of the ancients. I would look it up in a book.

There were books on how to drink wine in the library (apparently there are those who can’t do it uninstructed) and books on how to mix cocktails. But nothing on how to make wine. A check on in the online catalogue showed that all the books were on loan, presumably to people like me with an airing cupboard full of blackberry juice. However, this in itself brought a relevation – you can go surf for free in libraries, for a whole half-hour. It had already crossed my mind that I could seek out an internet café, but I’ve always muddled them up with Cannibis cafes in Amsterdam and anyway I get baffled by the complexities of ordering in Starbucks, so the whole thing seemed pretty scary. But this is easy – you just need your library card. You don’t even have to buy a coffee.

In five minutes I had keyed in ‘stuck fermentation’ and got all the advice I needed. Depending upon where you are stuck, at any point between 1000 and 1080, you can either add more yeast, add a special re-start yeast, or creep out at dead of night etc etc.

Victorious, I returned home to the cardboard box to find something to measure my blackberry juice with. There was a very small box labelled, curiously, ‘vino-o-meter’. Perfect. It was a fragile glass object wrapped tenderly in tissue paper and, sadly, it only wenjt up to 25. If only I had bothered to find what I should have 1080 of.

Instead, I made a pragmatic decision to add more yeast and give it yet another 24 hours.

I made up the yeast, took it up to the airing cupboard, opened the door and … ‘plop…(gurgle)…’

Had my ears deceived me? Had the stress of it all finally got to me? Or were there actually signs of life in that thur demijohn? I closed the door, lurked outside for a bit, opened it again and …surely that was another faint ‘plop’?

I swaddled the demijohn yet closer, closed the door tenderly, crept down stairs and emptied the yeast down the sink.

From time to time during the day I stood listening at the airing cupboard for further signs of life. Not a sound. I had hope now, but it was again fading fast. And I had no more yeast.

That was yesterday. This morning I woke and immediately checked on the demijohn. Nothing. I had an idea. I fetched a breakfast cup, turned the little tap at the base of the demijohn, and poured myself a dribble of cloudy dark pink liquid. And sipped

Reader, it nearly blew my head off. It certainly wasn’t blackberry juice, and it wasn’t exactly paintstripper either. It was, in fact, rather thin, very sour but almost definitely wine.

I dug out the vino-o-meter and after a couple of false starts worked out how to get a reading. Yes, I had proof – and Proof. I was back in the winemaking business.

I have just returned from the bathroom where, after much siphoning (during which accidentally swallowed a certain amount of the stuff – hopefully it will grow on me) and a third round of sugar, I snuggled my precious demi-john back into its airing cupboard. It promptly rewarded me with a couple of loud, satisfied belches. I couldn’t be prouder.

One last thing. I said I had proof. In fact, according to the vino-o-meter, I have a whopping 17 per cent Proof. And it’s still fermenting….

Gentle reader, could it be that I am now making blackberry liqueur?

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I have been following, and more recently deviating (probably disastrously) from, the blackberry wine recipe appearing at http://www.familyherbalremedies.com/blackberry_wine_recipe

Stephen Buhner's recipe is beautifully and reassuringly written, and any shortcoming in my own efforts at wine production is entirely due to operator error and failure to follow instructions
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Postscript:
What did the grape say when it was crushed? Nothing, it just gave a little wine....