Posh luggage

Up first thing in old trackie bottoms, thick socks, heavenly neoprene wellies and fleece, all covering nightie which is too cosy to take off, for early morning lamb check. Weather glorious but ominous rainbow and grey clouds with streaks joining the sky to the land on the next hill. Shove on battered leather hat that sheds rain beyond the back of my neck unless I bend forward, and feed the animal troupes. An hour later I'm done and hoik out luggage for packing my gear for London. The contrast between my smelly farming clobber and the smartness of my year-old trolley bag stops me in my tracks. The contrary lifestyles are now inches apart and clashing madly in colour and content. High heeled boots and clothes without barbed wire tears that rarely get worn here go into the bag. I'm off to my parallel existence.

The phenomenon of the to do list

My life is ruled by to-do lists; for work, for the domestic stuff of life, and the mother of all lists (in fact a list of lists) for the farm. I am intimately acquainted with the pleasure of crossing off an item that has been completed. I write lists for myself and eagerly (and undoubtedly irritatingly) for other people. Everyone knows my life is a list of to dos and I am content to be the butt of their jokes. So it was with real pleasure that I complied with the request to produce a list of crucial info for when I leave for London. And just in case that paper copy gets lost.....

• Please check incubator temperature daily (37.4 - 37.6 degrees) and fill one side with water on Saturday if needed
• If piglet with runny bum is off feed/poorly, inject with Engemycin (in vet cupboard) subcutaneously. For a piglet of 25kg it’s 2ml for a 24 hour dose or 5ml for 72 hours
• If preggers sheep need antibiotics they want 4ml for 24 hour dose or 10ml for 72 hours. Also subcut injection.
• If you get any bubbly/poorly lambs they have an Oxytet tablet (1 daily up to 3 days) – on shelf in lambing shed
• Before you turn ewes out they need 12mls of wormer
• Check/empty mouse traps in polytunnel
• Water vegetable seeds and seedlings
  
• Walk dogs
• Count sheep
• Eat
• Sleep

Bugs and gruesome tales

Last night off to the local farmer's group held monthly at the pub. Set up during foot and mouth by the local vicar to cheer things up, there is a speaker and Q+A followed by a carb blowout of ferociously hot chips, sarnies and potato croquettes. The speaker was a hospital microbiologist, a farmer's daughter with a knowledge and love of all things bug. You want ringworm? We saw the pictures. You prefer Listeriosis or MRSA? We had the lowdown. You like swollen digits and pots of sample poo? We had those too. You want to hear that farmers only go to hospital when they are really ill? She flattered us. The beer glasses didn't move, the pool table was empty, the darts board unused. We were riveted. We went home and threw away old dishcloths, got in the antibacterial soap and stuffed grimy towels in the washing machine. It didn't stop me from having very vivid dreams of pus and worse. All this for £1. Bargain? You betcha.

Reasons to be cheerful - part 2

Reasons to be cheerful - part 1

Day in the life

7.15 am feed cats and dogs. Let out ducks and sort their feed and water. Pipes frozen. Feed piglets. Hear a woodpecker. Feed the geese and let them into the orchard. Feed the pregnant ewes and the llama. Carry 20kg sacks of feed up the hill to fill sheep and llama feed bins. Jack and Jill nowhere in sight. Extract nine goose eggs from their nest and set up incubator. Clean out duck house. 9am head into village for the papers with the dogs. Back for breakfast. Fill up wild bird feeders outside kitchen window. Muck out goose hut. Cut a dozen tree stakes from some rough sawn 2x2. Admire fancy new draught-proofing in lambing pen. Put bare-rooted trees (hazel and field maple) , stakes, ties, tree guards, sledgehammer, graft and stuff into back of ancient Landrover and drive round planting up some of the remaining tree gaps in the hedges. 3pm late lunch. Check temperature in incubator. Walk dogs and sort out a gate latch the sheep have worked out how to undo. 5pm notice one of the ewes has a water bag hanging out - she's two days early. Leave her to get on with it for half an hour and move feed troughs and hay rack into the orchard. Bring the ewe and her very new twin ram lambs into the lambing shed, iodine their navels and give the ewe water and sheep nuts - although she's a first-timer she seems to know what to do and the lambs look fine. Move the rest of the sheep into the orchard so they are closer to the house for lambing - they aren't keen to change fields. 6.30pm Ducks and geese to bed, check the new mother. 7pm feed cats and dogs and put supper in the oven. Shower, eat and fall in knackered heap. Lambing has started and the clocks go back tonight. Have to go to London this week - I won't be popular.

Ramblings, Mutterings and Meanderings

She takes a bow, she smacks her lips at the prospect of champagne and truffles, and then gets real as she sucks on her glass of water and looks longingly at the heap of dogs wanting to be walked and the smaller heap of second hand paperbacks bought from Oxfam this morning - they'll just have to wait. The lovely M&M has awarded her Thoggers (Thinking Blogger Awards) and I must show grace. And now my obligation is to award five Thoggers of my own. And then their obligation is to award etc etc and so on and on and on. I will try not to be too incestuous in my choices and bring a bit of fresh blood into the process, but don't count on that. So, with greatest respect, my nominations are:

1. Peter D Cox
2. Random Acts of Reality
3. mamajules
4. Grumpy Old Bookman
5. Strife in the North ( I know, I know, but perhaps incest is allowable on occasion?)

I doubt it'll change your life or even your afternoon, but it's always nice to be appreciated. Hugs to all. Keep making us think.

Lambing prep

So you sort through the household veterinary supplies, and look for castration rings (check), soft rope (check), iodine (check), syringes and needles (check), lube (check), armpit length gloves (nope), and make a short list of goodies to buy before the off. Only trouble is the checklist on the kitchen table looks like a shopping list for a sex-shop spree rather than the more mundane agricultural store and you wonder if you should put it somewhere a little less prominent to avoid shocking the visitors. Then you get to the farm shop and start to chortle at the drawings on the side of the insemination gloves - accompanied by wording normally restricted to other latex products, reminding you that they are for single use. And then it adds (they can't be serious) that if the product proves defective you should return it to the retailer..... do they mean the used ones or those left in the packet??

Blair - the art lover in hiding

I know I'm a little late on this one, but sometimes you need to let things fester a while, just like Tony Blair. Ten years and no significant speech about the arts from the Prime Minister (I think we can ignore that Cool Britannia shenanigans early on in the premiership for the self-congratulatory spin it was). Just months away from his departure he claims the past decade as a golden era for culture. Media pundits all over the place are remarking on Blair's legacy speeches. There is, it is true, something potentially rather pathetic about an ex-leader of a country and it must be all but impossible to discuss your future plans whilst still in the hot seat, with commentators ready to accuse you of taking your eye off the ball. So why has the speech at the Tate had as much impact on the arts sector as cold porridge slapped onto a cold plate? It's true that courtesy of the Lottery and increased allocations to the Arts Council, the arts has had a genuinely significant financial boost since 1997, but whether it is government prudence at work or the huge Olympics deficit, the Arts Council is having to satisfy a Treasury looking for 5% year on year cuts over the next three years. Even looking at the arts from a purely fiscal point of view, considering the huge payback it makes into the economy (£13 billion in 2004 according to Blair), the £420 million subsidy it receives would win five gold stars simply in value for money terms. Perhaps this speech might turn this unfortunate tide, but then again, Brown wasn't the speaker....

Scent of a pig

Okay, okay. It's not everyone's idea of a heavenly scent, but when you don't have pigs around all the time you really do miss that pungent sweet smell. Pigs are only on the farm during the spring and summer to fatten for pork and bacon, so during the winter months you miss their presence and their unique pong. Last night six beautiful 8-week old Berkshire weaners were trundled back from South Hams (yup, you couldn't make it up). When they are this small you carry them in your arms like a baby, holding one front leg and the opposite back leg. Held firmly, they lay happily and quietly. As soon as you loosen your grip or they feel less than secure, the squealing is dramatic. When I picked up the first one to move it into the trailer, the smell hit me - I had temporarily forgotten the particular perfume of a porker - it was lovely; warm, porcine, healthy. Not Apres L'Ondee perhaps, but joyous all the same. Now the six wiglets are chomping fresh grass and burying themselves in deep straw, none the worse for their journey. Undoubtedly, there will be updates on their progress.

Spring is in the air?

There's no denying it. The lanes are full of primroses, the goose has started laying, there is blossom on one brave plum tree, there should be six Berkshire weaners (eight week old piglets) in the pig ark by tonight, and the lambing pens are awaiting occupancy. All this fecundity calls for calm, warm days to nurture the animal and vegetable growth, but instead the blossom is about to get hail-stormed into oblivion, straw bales are insulating the lambing area, further great works need to be undertaken to improve the draught-proofing, and it's lucky that the pig ark is protected by a Devon bank.

You lie in bed at night listening to the wind and hail battering the ruined barns and hide your head under the duvet using the same trick as you did as a child - if I can't see it, it isn't really there. Only in this case it's "if I can't hear it, the roof isn't really falling in". Looking out of the window in the morning requires you to collect your courage after a windy night. If the roof and walls would only stay put until all the planning and preparation can be put in place, perhaps there may be more than just a heap of cobby rubble, rotten timbers and slate to work with.

Masterchef final - on tenterhooks

Like most folks I have my television passions. This year the Beeb's Masterchef has had me downing work tools and heading for the box for my 6.30pm half hour fix. When the credits roll it's time to get up and feed the dogs and make supper for the humans. But for those thirty minutes I am transfixed, and as we entered the semi-finals and now the finals, I have been hiding my head inside my t-shirt. T-shirt head-hiding moments included: faffing around as if there was all the time in the world to feed hordes of over-exercised squaddies; food delivered late to Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern; hoping that Hannah could produce chocolate wonders for some of the best chefs in the world (she did - it was amazing); gasping at the pompousness of Ben (it's all me, me, me and nothing for the person doing the eating, even if they are those afore-mentioned chefs); and shouting at Steven to think about TIMING!!! If Ben-I-know-techniques-but-can't-do-flavours wins it tonight I will throw pots and pans at the telly. Go Steven, and go, go, go Hannah!

Stop Press! Brilliant, Steven - congrats. The TV is safe from flying kitchen equipment.

Persephone books - almost as good as finding a decent bookshop in Devon

'Oh, the bliss of Persephone Books!' says India Knight in her own treat of a book, The Shops. I picked up Knight's book in my local Oxfam shop and although it's not universally admired, I roared my way through it, and "pants of steel", "ooh, dirt!" and other choice phrases have stuck with me. I won't bore you with my shopping habits and peccadilloes (ones inspired by Knight or otherwise) but her recommendation of Persephone Books' collection of forgotten twentieth century classics is something I truly thank her for. Because they arrive so fast (next day), if you are up to pointing feebly at the catalogue, it's worth asking a friend to order something for you on-line if you are in bed with a dose of flu, as the books will arrive by the time you are feeling up to reading but can't yet face pottering about. And these are very much recovering-from-flu books - a certain surface sweetness containing considerable depth. But I also want to read them any evening wrapped in my fleece rug with the dogs at my feet - learning from the masters (mainly female) how to avoid cliché if nothing else (too late for that). The only problem is that you might find yourself galloping through them and they are not the cheapest of paperbacks, and there are 70 of them. That might sound like plenty, but if you get through two or three a month, it won't take more than a couple of years (and a wodge of dosh) to devour the lot. I have just finished Dorothy Whipple's They Were Sisters. Utterly compelling with more bite than Eastenders on a VERY good day, with rogues, a truly evil villain, sweet souls, despair, studies of fecklessness and empty vanities. Unfortunately, the last few pages fell out of the covers as I reached the end; I emailed Persephone and they have promised me a replacement - amazing service.
If anyone can recommend any decent bookshops in Devon that have piles of good fiction, I'd be eternally grateful. Waterstones in Exeter and elsewhere have managed to turn what were idiosyncratic spaces to spend hours choosing and discarding into antiseptic lines of bestseller fodder. I yearn for the fab but tiny bookshop in Ashbourne in Derbyshire where the owner would ask you what you had last enjoyed and then heap you up with recommendations for further delight. Having hunted for it on-line it seems to have disappeared! I only visited once a year but came away with 10 or 20 books at a time.

The drive to blog

In March 2005 the BBC said there were 14.2 million blogs. By July 2005 the Blog Herald estimated 70 million blogs worldwide; that's 1% of the world population blogging away. I suspect the statistics - and why can't I find any current data? - are pretty poor; can blogs have increased by nearly 500% in just 4 months? But the message still stands - there are millions of folks blogging and I suspect far more are written than are read. Does this matter? What drives people to blog in the first place?
Do we talk less often face to face than we used to? Yes. Do we spend too much time by our computers and mobile phones (YES!) and still yearn for discussion, debate and thought even if there is no-one around or if people are there, they are also engaged with a flat screen and keyboard?
But there is also something very pleasing about the blog as a writing form. It forces you to shape your thoughts into some semblance of cogency. It makes you question your ideas before you commit them to screen. It makes you realise that some days demand whimsy and others require more serious cogitation. It has to be brief, which is a useful discipline. It also releases some of those juices for those who think they want to write but will never commit themselves to the full monty experience of a novel or other lengthy text. And its a fabulous way of sharing real stuff with friends that avoids those horrendous round robin Christmas letters.

The elephant in the room

I loved that one - "the elephant in the room". It was so expressive, so daft, so visually pleasing as a concept, so completely full of trunks, tusks, hairy-ended tails and flapping wrinkly ears. Why do folks have to demean a perfectly good metaphor and turn it into cliché so that you then feel like a mug or a ham for using it? I can't count the number of times I have sat in a room with others and visualised the elephant rolling its eyes as everyone manages to avoid noticing its presence.

Agatha Christie needs charity?

I hugely admire the National Trust. Most of the time. The audacity of taking on properties and places in perpetuity for the benefit of us all. Who else would do it? Who could even face the budgeting for supplying dusters to a stately home for ten years let alone for ministering to its every need forever? It puts the concept of long term planning into perspective. This whole 'til the end of time thing does mean you have to make your decisions on what to take on and what to put aside very carefully indeed. As an ex National Trust regional committee member (an interesting but strange experience that made me feel very odd-one-out) I have appreciated what making these decisions mean and how rigorously endowments need to be considered before taking on new holdings of land or property.
Last month I received a letter from the Trust asking for a contribution towards the major restoration of Greenway, the only surviving home of Agatha Christie. Given to the Trust by Christie's family in 2000 its gardens have been open to the public for the last 6 years and now Christie's daughter and son-in-law have died, the house also belongs to the Trust. The repairs are estimated at £3.5million, with cataloguing and conserving adding a further £600,000.
If you were to ask me for a bit of dosh to save a piece of coast, or for an ancient forest I would cough up and be glad that the Trust can be counted on to do a job that no-one else will. But Agatha Christie's house? When Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are household icons and murder mysteries are everyone's favourite bank holiday fare? Perhaps a commercial company such as Tussauds, owners of Warwick Castle, Alton Towers and the London Eye to name a few attractions, would be better placed to take on a project like this. But as it sits with the Trust, I would suggest that the commercial exploitation potential for the property must be huge; shouldn't the Trust be generating funding for this from the private sector and creating a surplus to contribute to other less immediately attractive projects? Humphh.

Farm subsidy - and all that jazz

From time to time Farmers Weekly has skulked on the kitchen table, with headlines like "the cloud behind the silver lining" telling you all you need to know about this pessimistic publication. To suggest it is a chronicle of whingeing, carping and hand-wringing would do most editions justice. I may, however, have gained an insight that might temper my view a little. These days, farm subsidy (now the Single Farm Payment or SFP) is no longer for production. The days of supporting, indeed encouraging, butter mountains and milk lakes are long gone, and to qualify for subsidy you need to be farming in an environmentally friendly way that conserves the countryside for all. Not popular with all farmers, it will contribute in a small way to improving the environment for flora, fauna and traditional landscape features on our farm. At least it would, if the process of communicating with the body that handles the SFP left me enough energy to get on with the farming. The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has got to be one of the most infuriatingly bloodpressure raising organisations I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. When they get your reference number, address and all other details apart from your name wrong, you write and expect it to be sorted. When, nearly two years and countless email, telephone and snail-mail communications later you are still trying to get all of this most basic of information corrected, patience wears desperately thin. When you get letters (to your ex-address) containing profuse apologies and helpful souls on the phone saying it's all been sorted, you dance about the place like a loon thanking your lucky stars (in that cloudless sky) that you might have finally secured a few hours back in your week. When you find yourself swearing at the poor messenger on the end of the phone because you just can't believe the incompetence of the system has ballsed up yet again, you know that something has got to give - now it's your sanity versus theirs .
As contributors to Farmers Weekly are highly likely to be dealing with the RPA regularly, it's not surprising that the tone of the magazine can leave you checking every gift horses mouth and poking at the silver linings for grey, claggy misfortune.

Oops.....

There is a forbidden word. It became forbidden when the 6 tonne digger arrived. When the person most likely to use it was a novice. When there was lots of opportunity for mistaken demolition. And where the excitement of a full size Tonka toy could overcome spatial awareness. It was agreed that "oops" was entirely disallowed, binned, banned and canned. As in "Oops, I've just knocked down the side of the barn", or "Oops, do you remember where that wall used to be?", and "Oops, I was just using the digger when.....". So wary are we of the previously beloved "oops" that it has vanished from normal conversation as if the saying of it might result in rubble, ruin and wrecking.

Tomato and Chilli Relish and the wonder of Google archives

Last week we opened the first jar of tomato and chilli relish that I'd made last September from the polytunnel-grown glut of beefsteak tomatoes, and that first small pot has all been snaffled (mostly by me) before the week was out. It was utterly fantastic - sweet, warming, no vinegary sourness at all. I hunted around the cookery books for the recipe to mark it up for repeating this year, and then remembered that it has been an on-line find. Googling to find it again didnt work at first - none of the recipes that popped up sounded familiar - and then I started to look at my Google desktop history for "tomato relish" and there it was, posted by Libby on the Delia on-line messageboard, secured from a distant New Zealander. So here is the posting, and here is the recipe:

6 lbs ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped
4 oz salt
4 apples, peeled and chopped
8 large onions, chopped
3 lbs sugar
4 small tablespoons mustard powder
1 pint cider vinegar
5 small fresh chillies
2 tablespoons cornflour and a little vinegar to mix it

Mix the mustard powder with a little of the cold vinegar. Add to other ingredients in a large pot and boil for at least an hour. Thicken with 2 tablespoons of cornflour in a little vinegar and bottle in sterilized jars.

Chopped liver

4 chicken livers
2 hard-boiled eggs
1 medium onion
chicken schmaltz (or duck/goose fat)

When I was a child, more than thirty years ago, my mother usually did a chicken for Sunday lunch. If it was a boiling fowl we had the neck skin stuffed with dumpling ingredients, stitched at both ends into a large sausage shape and boiled alongside the fowl to eat greedily in slices with the chicken soup first course.

More usually my mother roasted the chicken and would save every scrap of chicken fat (schmaltz) from the roasting pan to make chopped liver for supper. The butcher was always happy to throw in a few extra chicken livers; most of his customers didn’t seem to want the giblets.

Once lunch things were put away I had the job of chopping the onion and boiling the eggs. My mother fried the onion in plenty of schmaltz until it softened and then added the livers. When the livers were cooked they were left to cool a little in the pan. She then tipped the pan on to a board and chopped the mix with the hard-boiled eggs until she had a coarse pate–like texture. Every little bit was scraped carefully into a bowl, including any fat still lingering in the pan.

Eaten slightly warm with toast turned Sunday evenings into something more than the lull before Monday morning school. I still make chopped liver occasionally and each time I wonder why I don’t make it every week; it tastes of childhood and is simply delicious.

Squirrel for tea

The workshop looked like something out of a game cookbook photoshoot; 2 brace of pheasant, 4 partridge, a solitary wild duck and a couple of pigeons swung by their feet, tied to the beam with baler twine awaiting an orgy of plucking. The feathers flew, the innards, heads and feet went in the rubbish and the freezer contents swelled. Something of this sort happens nearly every other weekend in the autumn and winter as the local farmer's Saturday shoot surplus finds its way to our door. Fantastically tasty and free meat - what more could you ask? Our stalwart providers said they took their hats off to us - that we were seemingly prepared to eat anything. Some distant memory of Hugh Fearnley-Wotsit eating squirrel resurrected itself - we've not tried squirrel yet we said. Two weeks later a very smiley face appeared carrying a very fat example of the breed; I suspect it had been their particular challenge that week to find us something new to tackle. A chubby grey squirrel that looked more like a stuffed toy than a food source sat on the chopping board and soon looked like a small skinned rabbit. We casseroled it in the luscious apple and calvados gravy left over from the previous night's pheasant. It smelled nice. It tasted fine. But it had the texture of an unreconstructed rubber tyre/wellie boot. The fact that the shotgun pellets had all collected under the skin and not penetrated into the muscle should have been more than a hint; the wee beastie was not so much fat as mature, I suspect.

Ethics, morals and confusion

I rarely read any newspaper article with a man in a dog-collar featured at its head, but something about John Sentamu's piece, "Ethics must shape our global economy" made me press on. The Archbishop of York describes how feeble is the typical guess as to the meaning of ethics: a feeling of what is right or wrong; linking ethics to one's religious beliefs; thinking that being consistent with the law of the land will make your actions ethical. We can all think of examples when taking those as our ethical standards would have meant condoning or carrying out terrifyingly unjust actions.

The Archbishop describes ethics as referring to "well-based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, justice, or specific virtues - such as decency... ethical standards also include ... honesty, compassion, and loyalty... rights to life, freedom from injury, and privacy. Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's standards... it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics...means...studying our moral beliefs and conduct, and striving to ensure we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to reasonable, solidly based standards. We must always allow our standards to be open to question and judgement."

And that's when I moved from agreement to confusion. For me, the term morality or moral beliefs means something that someone somewhere is going to get het up about in order to restrict my or someone elses personal freedom and probably our personal rights. Rather than feel comfortable with the idea of morals, I get very nervous that some dubious moral code is being used to justify entirely unethical actions, or at the very least make it difficult for individuals to assert their rights.

I suspect many of my concerns are linked to what others would call sexual "moralities". That a religion can dictate that couples refrain from using contraception because it deems it intrinsically evil; that condoms are the work of the devil and are useless anyway; that couples should either refrain from sex altogether or keep pushing out a child every year and compromise the woman's health, their sanity and their family, seems to me utterly unethical. That anyone other than the woman involved can ultimately decide whether or not she can or cannot have an abortion is likewise unacceptable in my ethical terms. Just as untenable to me are: denying young people sex education and easy access to contraception; that those with a "moral code" are refusing women the morning after pill; that gay couples should be treated differently in law from heterosexual married couples etc etc etc.....

The prurience of the tabloids when dealing with sexual affairs also sickens; they trawl unendingly for what they see as "dirt", splash it happily all over the front pages to sell their papers (and we buy them!) and condemn those targetted as if we were in the middle ages and stoning and the stocks had just been banned so public ridicule must be ensured in other ways. It's just sex, folks; stop getting so worked up about it.

But away from personal life, what about those business ethics issues? Green or ecological policies seems to be a confusion with ethical policies; if we are ecologically sound, surely we cannot be unethical at the same time? I don't know the answer; I only pose the question, but I guess that it's a matter of perception, knowledge and understanding the longest of long term effects of the actions we take today and tomorrow.

Playing with apples

For the first time ever, in October 2006 there were enough apples to make it a genuine crime not to use them properly. Hiring an apple crusher and press from the local commercial makers was simple, and the apple picking was a joy - filling barrels in the tractor link box making sure that each different variety was kept separate and labelled on a cold but sunny autumn day was a novelty. They got a quick bobbing in clean water and then were put through the electric crusher before putting the pulp into the press. The smell of the crushed apples was heavenly. The pulp is put into a kind of stocking (very high denier!) bag, wooden blocks hold down the lid and then you turn the press until the juice flows. It comes surprisingly quickly and clean food-safe buckets have to be at the ready. We made over 100 litres of apple juice and 4 barrels of cider. The cider was a mix of bittersweet and sweet cider apples with some Bramleys for extra flavour. The juice was a combination of blends and single juices and now, some months on you can determine which ones should be incorporated into blends when juicing next years load and which are best kept as single varieties. The orchard has a lot of Blenheim Orange apples - very sweet, in fact too sweet as a single variety juice - but just fantastic when blended with Egremont Russet and Bramley (ratio of 1:2:1). The best single varieties were Allington Pippin and Ellisons Orange. I didnt want to pasteurise so had to freeze the juice - in new 1 litre plastic milk bottles that a goat-keeper in Milton Abbot had surplus to requirements. The cider has been racked once and now needs to be bottled, ready for tasting in the summer. Cider making and apple juicing has been happening in and around Dartmoor for hundreds of years - it's nice to know that you are part of a tradition and that there is a lot of advice around for novices.

Beenleigh Blue

I'm still mid-lunch but this is just so yummy I have to share! I have blogged on cheeses before but I'm increasingly knocked over by the quality of Devon cheeses. The fab cheese shop in Hatherleigh Market, only open on market day (Tuesdays) has a small but perfectly formed collection in a space that can accommodate 3 shoppers, tops, and two if they have bags of market veg with them. Having a particular love of ewe's milk cheese I went for a slice of the Roquefort-looking Beenleigh Blue, made by Ticklemore Cheese in Totnes. It is crumbly, perfectly salty, and mouth-fillingly delicious as the tiny taster I was offered, proved. The taste lingers and although it is distinctively eweish in nature, not so pungent as to put off the more conservative cheese eater. You can buy it on-line from the Teddington Cheese Company or from their own Ticklemore Cheese Shop in Totnes. Even Nigel Slater and Gordon Ramsay sing its praises. This is a real find; perhaps cheesemaking can be my last career change.

Pork brings pleasure

"We have started on the pork- it's better than any I've had before! ". When you get comments like that you know you are doing something right. Those 6 Berkshire pigs are being feted in kitchens from Cardiff to Bristol and Devon to Warwickshire. The grass in the pig paddock is making a swift return, following the fabulous ploughing that six unringed noses made throughout the summer. They unearthed mounds of sizeable stone which I am slowly picking up and chucking in the link box, carting it off to use as much needed hard core in gateways. The absence of the pigs is quite tangible - they made plenty of affable noises, pungent smells and being so many of them, spent most of their time playing in a sizeable space, learning how to hoist themselves into the water trough and create wallows to cool themselves off on hot days. Sentimentality bows out though, when the freezer needs filling and it is months since you were offered a decent bit of pork.

The Olympic bandwagon

Absolutely NOT a sports fan (if you hadn't already guessed), my prime unpatriotic groans about the 2012 olympics are that they are: a) going to create havoc in London and jealousy in every other city in the UK; b) that huge amounts of public money is being chucked at a pipe dream; c) that sport will play an increased role on a world stage already saturated with the tedious stuff; d) that hosts of private finance initiatives and their top brass will retire to the Bahamas on the proceeds, having hugely over-charged a government apparently unable to get value for money from the private sector; and e) that funds will be diverted from real good causes and the arts. In the last year, the London Olympics has become a sexy hook for the widest possible variety of projects, schemes and organisations in the private, public and not for profit sectors. If they can just make a link, no matter how tentative, they might just cream off some of that lovely sloshing-about lolly. You can just hear the Chair or CEO coming in on a Monday morning, rubbing their hands together and shouting "olympics!", just like they shouted "Y2K" back in 1999; it makes them seem up to the minute, hot to trot, thinking outside the envelope or any other daft cliche you care to think of. Today however, I open my regular Involve newletter from the Sector Skills Development Agency to read that "The 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games in London represent a real and significant opportunity to drive up skills not only in London, but nationally". Apparently, "The Department for Education and Skills is responsible for maximising the benefits of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the field of education and skills, so that 2012 has a long-term impact on the lives of learners, particularly young people of the 2012 Olympic generation." Is it uncharitable of me to say that this is a load of old guff, and if it takes the Olympics to get government to do its core work, then we truly have our priorities completely twisted? The Olympics is not a once in a lifetime opportunity - what is once in a lifetime is every individual's opportunity to develop and thrive. It makes me incandescent that this is linked to something so peripheral (yet so high profile) as sport in the noughties. Olympic and paralympic sport is elitist by definition - the best competing with the best. It is not about access, or that old saw about taking part, but about winning. To dangle this vision in front of Jo and Joe public and suggesting it will specifically enhance their skills in any way is bonkers. Jo and Joe need great schooling and education, great skills development opportunities and a real, interesting life, not lived vicariously through feted sports celebs viewed on the box.
(Sept 2006)

Little grey rabbit time

It's harvest time and as it's been throwing it down and the outdoor tasks put on hold, the preserving pan has been gurgling away all day. The two small plum trees were stripped of their bounty and the fruit turned into goodies for immediate and long term pleasures. Plum tart will go into the oven for a late supper, but for the months ahead 2 different sorts of plum jam - same recipe, different plums (fruit, sugar, nothing else) - are now on the shelves. A tray of halved and stoned plums have been frozen and bagged up to make a couple of winter crumbles. Kate's chutney gets made every 2 or 3 years as it gets better with age so I make enough to last that long, and this year is the first time it's been made in Devon. The recipe comes from a great grandmother from Norfolk (I think) and has been adapted this year as there weren't enough dates, so dried apricots and figs made up the lack. The apples and plums for the chutney came from the orchard, the tomatoes from the polytunnel, and the carrots were blagged from next door from the sack used to feed their breeding water voles. Tomorrow it's time for tomato relish and if the rain holds off, there are heaps of sloes and blackberries to pick for cheese and conserve. The shelves are starting to fill again, my hands are discoloured from stoning the fruit and socks are being worn for the first time in months. It must be heading for autumn.

Ornithology made easy

A casual conversation about bird feeders, £5.95 on a peanut feeder and £4 on one for suet balls spent in the local agricultural store, a length of ash cut from the firewood heap, feeders dangling in the breeze, and there was years worth of education and entertainment all set up less than a yard from the kitchen window. That was in March. Since then there have been: nuthatches (look, look, there's one that prefers to eat upside down...); a wren or two - a personal favourite; blue tits and great tits; house and tree sparrows; chaffinch, goldfinch, bullfinch; and a pair of great spotted woodpeckers. The woodpeckers were spectacular: large, dominant and shy with brilliant red patches under their tails and on the back of the (male) head, they successfully reared two young that later learned to feed themselves as juveniles after sitting on the iron railings getting their parents to loosen peanut after peanut from the feeder and pass them on like a parent doling out smarties to toddlers. Apparently woodpeckers also feed their young on baby blue tits and there are no shortage of those.
Fledglings of all kinds have hovered about looking fresh and fluffy and unsure, and the type and age of birds visiting have changed as the months have passed. The time of day also dictates who eats when. Early morning, before anyone is up, magpies take advantage. I really don't like these birds as they eat the duck eggs and have a raucous and insistent call. They have gone further down in my estimation by not only nicking the peanuts put out for the smaller birds, but tapping loudly on the windows hours before any sane person would consider setting their alarm clock. The vigour of their tapping initially made me rush out of bed wondering what someone could possibly want at that hour - sheep out on the road perhaps - but no, it's just the magpies having their fun. Their brothers, the rooks, are equally irritating as they build nests in the chimney pots causing great clumps of twigs and mummified birds to fall into the chimneys and woodburners, so I light small fires during the summer to dissuade them.
Some of the birds haven't eaten directly from the feeders but pecked instead at the suet and nut crumbs that dusted the grass below like hundreds and thousands. These crumbs also attracted mice, and inevitably, the cats, although surprisingly few birds have been caught. Until yesterday that is. At breakfast there was a whoosh of feathers as a cloud of sparrows dived under the broom bush for cover. A few seconds later a sparrowhawk emerged, sparrow secured in its yellow claws with black talons. He stood for a few moments, just 4 feet away, whilst I had a really good look, and then took off, leaving the remaining sparrows distinctly and understandably nervous for the rest of the day.
The yard has also seen a lot of other birds not attracted to the feeders. Wagtails bounce their way along the ground, or at least the constantly wagging tails make it look like that. House martins have built several of their muddy nests under the eaves around the house, stealing bits of cob from the crumbling barns and swooping in flocks of twenty or so in circles across the yard in the late afternoon. Some are more successful nest builders than others, having watched one make a feeble attempt whilst others were finishing their elaborate structures just inches away. Swallows and swifts are also frequent visitors, sitting on power cables and joining the house martins in their circular exercises. In the evenings you can hear and sometimes see the barn owl, a truly gorgeous creature, and the tawny owl too with its hooting call which if you mimic will get you a response. Then there are the robins which appear from late summer; the cuckoo, although you hear it close by I've never seen it; many buzzards who are incredibly bold round here and can land fairly close to you; the pheasants that shared the pig paddock, eating any rare leftovers; the grey partridge that hatched and reared its young in the middle of Mopsa's Meadow; the snipe that paddle about in the wet drainage ditches with their young. The list goes on, and on.

Bedtime

OK. This is going to be a paeon to retail possibilities; I apologise, but only a little. Having a comfortable bed is one of those things that's pretty baseline on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Pocket sprung has always seemed to me to be a euphemism for lumpy, poky, uneven and unrestful, so something smooth and supportive does it for me. Horribly allergic to goose feathers (that particular fab and pricey duvet is now luxuriating on the guest bed), I hunt out the squashiest non-allergenic quilts and greedily steal as much of it for my side of the bed as possible. I thought I had it sorted until I spent the night at friends; it's Jane and Richard that have got it sorted. I got into a great big bed kindly vacated by one of their children to discover a kind of duvet-under-the-sheet deliciousness. I was the filling in a duvet sandwich. I spent an age scrunching it in glee with my toes and wriggling my shoulders deeper in a state of disbelieving comfort. What was this thing? Why hadn't anyone told me about it? Why wasn't Annalisa Barbieri writing about it every Saturday? Does everybody else know about it? WHY HADN'T SOMEONE TOLD ME? My world didn't include mattress toppers, enhancers or pads. I'd never heard about, seen or slept on one before. Once you start hunting on the web they are everywhere, costing from a few pounds up to £400 and no doubt even more. Being out in the sticks I can't just pop into my local M&S for instant bedtime gratification, and after some entirely useless email correspondence with that famous store trying to replicate the Jane and Richard experience but getting precisely nowhere, I waited till a looming meeting in Bristol would get me in spitting distance of shops. There, in John Lewis, hiding nonchalantly and without ceremony among the duvets was the holy grail. £55 for nightly bliss is a small price to pay.

A letter to all the people who used to live on the farm

When you move into a new house, if you are lucky and the vendors thoughtful, there might be a list of where you turn off the water, a description of the careful handling required for the loft hatch, and a note of when the bin men collect. Moving into our previous house we received reams of instructions, a list of all the plants and trees, and notes and jottings hidden behind skirting boards, under floors, on corrugated tin roofs and in the hen house giving dates for when things had been attended to, plus a commentary on that day’s entertainment – the success of the Christmas panto at the Belgrade Theatre was one example. But when you move into a farm that hasn’t been lived in by farmers for the best part of a decade, you have a million questions, and only local lore to supply just a fistful of answers. There are so many things that I want to ask you all.
That stone-faced banking at the far end of the farm, just running for a matter of yards, so carefully made and where only the sheep can see it; was it something your parents got you to do as penance for some minor misdeed? That enormous well in Little Stone Horse Field; did it ever feed water to anywhere or was it a white elephant, an unfinished project that ran out of cash? Did you use donkeys or horses in the now derelict roundhouse for the threshing barn? That room at the side of the house that you can only access from an external staircase - was it where transient farm labourers slept, away from the temptation of the daughters of the house? Where do all the drains run and why are there at the last count four separate water supplies? Which of you took out and flogged the slate flagstone floors in the house and put in concrete? Who put in the Aga in such a way that you can't use the bread oven anymore? Why is the old cider room floor creased in the middle; was there an mini-earthquake? Who screwed down the floorboards so that they cracked as they shrank? And why are there one inch gaps between the boards so that coins, earrings, pens and other small items both cheap and expensive are lost?
Do you mind that we gave new names to three of the fields when neighbours couldn’t quite remember all of the old ones; the naming of fields felt like an exercise not to be undertaken lightly. How exactly did you make and manage your hedgerows and banks in the 17th century and how long did they last? And this century, that low fencing wire you put along the top of the banks – what was the point of that – even our small sheep breed can hop over it without a second thought. Did you allow your livestock to drink all along the mill leat or only where it wouldn’t interfere with the flow to the neighbouring mill?
Didn’t you mind the smell of the pigs in sties so close to the house? Where did you salt and store the bacon? Did you make your own sausages and have as much fun as we did? It was much, much easier to do than we had expected, even more hilarious, with fabulously tasty results.
Did you ever get to see the dormice that we know live in Langan Meadow only by the evidence of precisely nibbled cobnuts? It’s even illegal to photograph them now. And why is Langan Meadow that strange rounded shape? Were the buzzards, bats and barn owls even more plentiful? Was there ever any wild boar here? When was that veteran oak by the river blasted by lightening and lose its top? It has a rowan growing out of its crown now. Which of the ditches have disappeared and need to be re-dug to get the ground less “drought-resistant” as the estate agent described the more sodden fields? Where on the farm did you dig up the clay to make the cob walls for the barns that are melting away now the roofs have gone? What types of apple grew in the orchards and was the cider any good? We heard that when one farmer here told a son to fetch a jug of cider, that he be sure to keep whistling the whole time – but did you ever manage a secret slurp? Did you ever think that the farm is shaped along the lines of a mini South America?
Did you ever run out of things to do and did you ever get enough sleep? Did you ever write a to-do list? Did it look like ours? What have we forgotten?
We feel the weight of your absence as we move across the farm, mending this, patching that, planning the next ten years of work. By the time the hundred oaks we want to plant come to maturity, someone else might be writing a similar letter to us, but before then perhaps one of you could tell us the whereabouts of the socket for the radio aerial?

Organic veg delivery boxes rool

Is it a truism that as you get older the more you feel the need to complain? Me, I expect decent and friendly service and have been known to carp when it doesn't come as standard. I've mentioned Riverford before and whilst waiting for the new veg garden to become a reality, the weekly boxes have been a fab addition, bringing new varieties and mostly seasonal goodies at their best. The Guardian praised them last week with the acknowledgement that the soil on the carrots could be collected to create your very own London based smallholding; in my case, when I'm too lazy to scrape the soil into the compost bucket, it just clogs the sink and the less than organic Mr Muscle sink unblocker (the things that have websites!) has had to work overtime. But then we got the tomatoes. In January, February and March. Horrid, quickly turning rotten, tasteless. What else would they be in winter, and why were they in my box? My query was very swiftly answered; my local Riverford distributors obviously felt the same way although they were tactful. Then Adrian, Riverford's Customer Services Manager got in touch and apologised for the poor quality of the product: "Whilst our own tomatoes will not be ready for some months, we do feel that having tomatoes in the boxes brings a positive addition for this time of the year. We are therefore currently importing tomatoes but we are aware however, that the quality of some of them has not been up to the standard that we would expect. The taste of the product has actually been good but there have been issues with their physical quality including blemished skins and mould appearing very quickly." That made me have an immediate munch on one of the unappetising examples to test out the tastiness: My conclusions, shared with Adrian were that they don't even feel right in the hand - if I was selecting produce from a market stall, I would not be purchasing them - if I was picking them off a homegrown plant I wouldn't buy that seed variety again. The stalk end was showing signs of incipient mould and had been in the fridge ever since delivery (I rarely need or want to put summer tomatoes in the fridge - far tastier at room temperature or warm off the plant). The flesh texture was both hard and weirdly pappy - like a tomato out of season - although the pulp and seeds were quite flavoursome. As nice as the idea of tomatoes is, I just cannot square organic principles with this unseasonable (and importing) approach - although if the produce was fabulous I am as apt to drop a principle as anyone else. As they are so very far from fabulous, what is the point? I love tomatoes, but they need good hot sun for good ripening and taste. I appreciate that they feel the need to jazz up the veg boxes in the winter months, but the tomato thing just isn't working - the odd lettuce they have been putting in have, on the other hand, been fine. Adrian kindly said the feedback was useful and much appreciated, and in this week's box is a stop press note that they have been disappointed with the standard of their tomatoes, that they have tried to persevere with the grower on the promise of improvement of quality, but as this has not happened they have removed them from the boxes. I am sure I have not been the only one having a carp, but isn't is refreshing that the customer's views are truly taken into consideration to improve the quality of the service. Full marks Riverford.

First lambing in Devon (2006)

"It's warmer in Devon - let's lamb a bit earlier this year" has turned out to be somewhat wishful thinking. It snows, it hails, it's as windy as hell, but the lambs have started to arrive all the same. A quarter of the way through and we have had all ewe lambs - how weird is that? Never one for probability theory, I guess that each lamb has a 50/50 chance of being one sex or the other, so I presume that there is no greater probability that the remaining lambs will turn out to be rams. Perhaps the new ram, Toy-boy, has an intriguing chromosomal make-up. The old ram, Thoom (or Tomb? was never given the spelling) was put in with the ewes at the same time as Toy-boy and there is no proof of who did what and to whom. Raddles and all that malarkey seem too much trouble for our small flock. Reading Hardy's Return of the Native can put you off red raddle for life, but it's just a crayon or powder - originally red ochre or iron oxide - that is put on the ram's chest so you can see which ewe has been served and by which ram, using different colours for each ram. Some use a harness to attach a crayon block to the ram, but it all seems rather too S&M to me.
The new mothers are doing their thing admirably, seeing off dogs Mopsa and Fenn in no uncertain terms if they get too close (ie in the same field) and producing huge quantities of milk; I don't know how they manage to walk.

Today we have naming of fields

The farm is strangely shaped along the lines of a miniature South America, with the house on the eastern coast of Brazil, a bit of river frontage on the west coast of Ecuador and a mill leat across the top of Venezuela. Accordingly, and not much changed since medieval farmers were doing their thing, the field boundaries are all shapes and trying to describe where you will be is not as simple as saying 3 along and 2 up. The naming of fields feels like an exercise not to be undertaken lightly, and maintaining the historical names if they can be extracted seems appropriate for somewhere that has been around for so long. Even so, I suspect names change every few generations. Last weekend we walked the farm with someone who had grown up here and he knew names for all but three of the fields. So we have Big Stone Horse Field and it's neighbour, Little Stone Horse Field, both stoney and where the horses were kept. Then there is Pretty Field, so called because it has a regular shape. Big Furze Down and Lower Furze Down are the names for the two fields that had been covered in gorse before they were ploughed up for arable purposes; gorse still flowers in patches in the hedgerows and creates a very prickly and effective sheep fence. Long Lands was probably named for the fact that although not large (none of the fields are very big), it is a fair uphill walk to reach the end. Higher Down and Lower Down sound like a joke but they do what they say on the tin, and Big Oaky and Little Oaky have a few fairly spectacular oaks in the hedgelines. Bull's field was where the bull was kept with his cows, and so on it goes. Having only to take responsibility for a limited number, we have named the nameless fields. One is now Mopsa's Meadow and another Fenn's Field. Nice to think that long after the dogs have gone their field names will survive. And yup - that's South America, not the farm!

In the eyes of the delivery men

When, last March (2005) I got out of the car and peered over the gate down the farm track, to the long whitewashed house with yellow window frames, I knew this was going to be my next and possibly last home. Peripheral to right and left were the old barns, roofless and in one case, covered in "dangerous, do not enter" signs, but they in no way detracted from the views rising above the house, nor altered the fact that the house sat sheltered in a dip surrounded by masses of space and enormous oak trees. The place felt untouched for decades and the quietness of the location was something I hadn't thought was possible to achieve. So love at first sight then. Living a long way from anywhere you make a lot of use of online-shopping; clothes, beds, tractor parts, and whatever else is needed. As a consequence you see confused delivery men (they are always men) frequently. The confusion is based on three things: there is no street name; they take pot luck in deciding whether to deliver to us or our neighbours because the farm names are very similar (but not the same); and according to delivery man lore, only sad, mad or bad people live so far from an urban sprawl. Last week was a prime example. A couple of chaps were delivering a new wardrobe and stopped outside the gate and phoned us to check if they really were in the right place - their drive down the grassy road and subsequent view of the derelict barns meant that they didn't see how it was possible that the place was actually inhabited by anything other than bats and rats. Even when they came inside the house they didn't believe anyone actually lived here permanently. I hadn't realised that to some eyes we appear to live in the equivalent of a rural slum. Me, I think it's beautiful, and rich with a life-time of possibilities and projects. It's clearly all in the eye of the beholder.

Tearaway Tamworths

Tamworths have got something of a reputation. I believe that they are a fairly primitive breed, with all the natural instincts that brings, and little of the softening of domestication about them. Known as flighty pigs, independent, and the Houdinis of the swine world, a few years ago a pair of Tamworths made national headlines for over a week when they escaped and trundled this way and that through the Wiltshire countryside, eluding capture for a considerable period of time. Yesterday morning I was making my way down the list of weekend chores when I heard my name being bellowed from the neighbouring farm. I downed tools and shot off to find out what was wrong and after a panted explanation of a new arrival Tamworth weaner having escaped up the road, we set off to head it back where it was wanted. Five of us failed in this task, and just as we were about to regroup, the alarm was raised that its sister had now also managed to leap from its new pen and disappear in the opposite direction. Throughout the day the few cars and tractors coming passed announced sightings of one or other of the ginger pigs and by dusk one had been recaptured and securely placed in its pen. Utterly exhausted by its escapade, it sank into fresh straw and fell fast asleep. As of writing, the sister is still out and about, but as our neighbours are currently the only folks round here with pigs I guess that it will be drawn back by piggish noises and smells and the desire for breakfast. Stop press! Great news - after 36 hours apart the Houdini twins are now reunited.

A party game for Xmas - make sausages

It has been an ambition of very many years to make our own sausages; convenience food in the best sense of the word. Firstly it seemed to be a guaranteed barrel of laughs, with enough double entendre to last a lifetime. Secondly it meant knowing the content was 100% high quality home-reared meat. Thirdly, I think sausages are delicious, they are quick to cook and in hot demand for barbeques in summer and for dark winter evening suppers. And lastly, no matter how I plead with the local butcher when he butchers our pork for us, he produces perfectly nice sausages but they are never quite coarse enough for our taste and always with rusk added even tho I beg him not to (he is convinced that they would all go horribly wrong without rusk and my line that French sausages are 100% meat has little effect - British tradition must be best!). So, thanks to Natural Casing Company's hog casings (fat sausage size - you can keep your feeble chipolatas) that last for up to a year in the fridge, we got together with our neighbours for a trial run before deciding how many Berkshire weaners to buy next spring (that's to say, how many pounds of sausages could we face making next summer). First you rinse the casings (including running the water through them which is a hoot) and soak for about an hour to get rid of excess salt. We used some chunks of venison from the unlucky doe that had got herself tangled in our fence and had perished before we could untangle her, with some of our neighbour's pork - Berkshire they think or perhaps Saddleback - it was the odds and ends from the freezer, but the tell-tale black bristles were still intact. A little salt, black pepper, fresh sage and thyme were added, the zest of two lemons, a sploosh of Chablis (dregs), and a sprinkling of home-made granary breadcrumbs when the mincer needed a clean through (the sinews can get caught up in the blades) which might account for a maximum of 1% cereal and I guess a great deal less. After mincing the whole lot on the coarsest setting in a 40 year old Kenwood we fell about while rolling the 4-5 foot long casing onto the sausage making nozzle before turning on the machine and feeding in the first dollops of coarsely minced meat. Luckily we had remembered to tie a knot in the end of the casing so when the skin started to gently billow we knew that sausage was on its way. It was much, much easier to do than we had expected, even more hilarious in a teenage playing-with-condoms sort of way, and fabulously tasty. As the meat had all come out of the freezer we ate most of the sausages that evening with celeriac, carrot and swede mash, russian kale in mustard sauce and roast tatties (all from our Riverford box). 10/10. And definitely found a new party game.

To be taken daily - a little bit of happy art

I've just received my 2006 diary: the Redstone diary of Happiness edited by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding. I've been chuckling and smiling my way through it, and admiring everything from the gorgeously perfect red paper pocket at the front, the rough mustard pages for me to scrawl on (carefully), onwards to the wonderful images. You get a topless young Elvis (from a more relaxed pre-six-pack era); gently erotic images from East and West; smiles and grins captured from across the world; absurdities like the visuals from a Chinese rusk packet from the fifties; Ganesh happily picking up sweetmeats with his trunk; some Manolo Blahnik and posh shopping bags for the happiness-is-a-designer-label lovers, and luscious Chagall (La Promenade shown here), McLean, Blake and Frost . It has cured me of Collins' diaries forever. My new diary ensures at least daily mini-happinesses for 2006.