The first noel

Well I have managed to drag my hands out of yet another box of chocolates for long enough to type and tell you a little bit about our first Christmas in our new place. After months of preparation, was our first homegrown yule all it was cracked up to be?

So first up the decorations… Disregarding the bags and bags of crappy plastic baubles and tattered tinsel that we seem to have accumulated over the years, we didn’t do a bad job of tarting the house up to resemble something out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine (if you squint your eyes just a little). We don’t want for conifers around the place so giving a good hair cut to one or two of the prettier ones to cover the mantelpieces and windowsills was not a problem. Ditto the ivy. Sadly not the holly so we had to ‘borrow’ (half-inch) some from the nearby woods. We did however spy an actual Christmas tree lurking at the bottom of the garden in a boggy area that we were planning to raze to the ground next year anyway. OK so it maybe wasn’t your classic Norway spruce but it fulfilled the brief of being a pine, roughly the right size and with enough branches to entertain a three year old for a good half an hour of tree decorating (it turns out that it also drops needles at the merest hint of a breath turning the living room floor into a forest-like carpet of spikes – not ideal when your baby has just starting crawling and putting everything in her mouth…). I also like to think that it was more of a Farrow and Ball shade of green – Leprechaun’s Crotch™ or some other such bullshit name.  Having selected our tree, we had wonderful festive visions of all heading out as a family, skipping through the freshly fallen snow, all wrapped up in our hats and gloves and scarves and perhaps humming a Christmas carol or two as we happily felled our little tree. As it happened, there was a howling gale and driving rain as we dragged two very pissed off children down to the bottom of the garden, whereupon their vocabulary was somewhat expanded for the worse as they watched their father wrestle with some viciously spiky branches before we sacked it off and retreated to the house, leaving Daddy to salvage remains of said tree and drag it out of the bog. Not a Christmas carol or flake of snow in sight. To be fair though once in the house and dolled up it looked ‘proper bo’ (although I imagine that any old stick covered in shiny, sparkly things would look pretty good...)

Before...

...after

Secondly on to the all-important Christmas Dinner. After four months of living the life of poultry rock stars (eating and drinking too much, trashing the roof of the hen house and most of the feed bins and making one hell of a racket) it was finally D-Day for our turkeys (or T-Day was we like to call it now). The day dawned like any other for them and they pottered about quite happy and oblivious up until the very end. Apart that is from one of the tom turkeys who put up a bit of a fight and ended up strutting around about the place mid-cull much to my husband’s horror. It was at this point that a large truck drove into the yard attempting to deliver a brand new sofa (turns out that they had the wrong address). They took one look at the dripping, bloodied knife in my husband’s hand and the mud and guts all over him and beat a hasty retreat back up the drive, uttering to his pal “we’ve got the wrong house, let’s get the hell out of here!” A bit more than they bargained for I think. A couple of hours later, birds plucked and dressed he made a start on the gravy. Yes I know. Three days in advance. Some people happily opt for Bisto but not around here. I was sent to gather whatever I could find on the veg patch to enhance the flavour (some weedy leeks and celery) and the stock pot was produced. Into which went necks, offally bits and then the feet, claws and all. Now I’m not sure if you have ever had the pleasure of smelling boiling turkey feet but let me tell you it is not one of life’s sweeter aromas. More of an olfactory nightmare in fact. Put it this way I found myself involuntarily dry retching as I walked into the kitchen to the sight of these clawed feet poking out of top of the pot. A minor domestic ensued during which I declared I would not be going anywhere near the Christmas gravy if the feet were not removed immediately. Upon which they were duly extracted and the gravy went on to become the star of the show. There are limits to an adventurous palate after all.  Gravy made, it was onto the rest of the meal. Our chosen bird (sans feet and innards) broke the scales at 12lb so we’re not actually sure how much it weighed. Suffice to stay we are still overrun with bloody turkey, four days later. It did taste utterly amazing though, and so it should as I had to get up at 5am to put the thing in the oven. As for the accompaniments I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I only managed to contribute the broad beans (albeit award winning ones) to the meal and had to tap my Dad for the sprouts. The potatoes and the carrots *whispers in shame* came from a well-known supermarket chain. As did all the porky bits, so Peppa lives to see another day, and quite possibly another year the way she is rapidly becoming one of the family. She snorts in pure delight every time she sees us and comes bowling through the field looking for a scratch on her belly or behind the ears. A real character you might think, or maybe just a guzzling greedy guts. Perhaps understandably given the fact that she has been getting the pig equivalent of Michelin-starred scraps out of the kitchen all over Christmas. Who wouldn't come running for the last tasty bits of roast potatoes and brandy pudding?

Before...

...after (check out the feet - would you?)

The Grand Finale

And so thirdly and finally to the pressies. I’d love to be able to tell you that for our first Christmas in the place I lovingly hand-crafted pots of homemade jams and chutneys and terrines and wrapped them in tasteful recycled paper adorned with pressed wild flowers. But that would be a Big Fat Lie. Asides from the fact that I haven’t had enough time to blow my own nose over the past 12 months, one of the things we have realised about attempting any remote form of self-sufficiency is that you have to hang on to everything you have got.  You can’t be giving away all your hard won grub, especially when the hardest months of the year are still to come. Plus the fact that not everyone might appreciate your nettle and rhubarb relish with pickled ground ivy quite as much as you do. So I’m afraid most of my gifts this year originated from Ye Olde Amazone dotte comme.  The ones that actually did manage to get here at all (others failing to arrive because of flooded roads and I can only imagine others where the delivery drivers were so alarmed by the scenes of feathery carnage that they were too scared to get out of their vans).  

So that’s Christmas done and dusted for another year. Nearly. We’ve still got New Year to go so the party is not quite over just yet.  For one thing, there’s a box of chocolates sitting here with my name on it that needs finishing before we start to make all of our clean living, self-sufficient New Year's resolutions. Hmmmm, I wonder if I can grow my own cocoa beans...

The twelve days of Christmas

This week’s post is brought to you through the medium of song. Ok, so I know that the 12 days of Christmas is actually intended for the days after the Big Day but I hope you will allow me some poetic licence in posting this on the 12^th December with 12 days still to go. Oh and I’ve provided the York Notes guide to the lyrics below, just to fill you in a bit on what we’ve been up to of late. So here goes…

“On the 1^st (2^nd, 3^rd, etc., etc.) day of Christmas my true love gave to me:

                Twelve slugs a-sliming[1]

                Eleven rats a-robbing[2]

                Ten leeks not growing[3]

                Nine chooks for roasting[4]

                Eight fields a-flooding[5]

                Seven hens not laying[6]

                Six drains a-leaking[7]

                Five crumbling barns[8]

                Four tons of kale[9]

                Three mad turks[10]

                Two porkie pigs[11]

                And a white hen with no tail![12]"

So there you have it. We’re all gearing up nicely for our first Christmas at our new place (read: have not yet done a bloody thing - apart from the meat obviously.... in that respect we are triply covered).  I’m sure I can pull it out of the bag over the next 12 days. And if I can’t there’s always next year. Merry Christmas y’all!

---

[1] This week we have had an inexplicable slug invasion in the house. Not sure whether this is to do with all the rain or our eldest daughter’s penchant for gastropods and bringing them into the back porch to "look after them". Either way we are running a little short on salt. Must add it to the 14^th page of the ever-expanding shopping list for Christmas. So much for self-sufficiency...

[2] Rats still at it. Although they are now having to form an orderly queue behind the turkeys – see [10] below

[3] My leeks still resemble blades of grass. At what point do you throw in the towel and put a raised bed down to a bad job?

[4] It’s been an epic week for chicken. My husband embarked on a marathon execution run on Saturday, dispatching nine of the Ross Cobb chicks. He is like a machine now, 40 minutes per bird and didn’t even stop for lunch. I have never seen breasts so large (oo er missus) but joking apart, one of them easily feeds a family of four. Maybe the rats are not that efficient after all…

Dolly Parton of the poultry world

[5] Desmond has not been as unkind to us as some parts of the country but we still haven’t escaped yet more centimetres of rain. Wellies and full waterproofs still very much the order of the day.

[6] We now have nine hens left and are getting a paltry offering of two eggs a day. Fair enough, four hens are designed to grace the dining table rather than the laying box, but for the remaining three who are still freeloading, they need to have a long hard think about their new year’s resolution or the stock pot will be calling.

[7] Perhaps a little unfair. The drains are actually working fine but there has been so much rain that the overflow has been perhaps inevitable. (Never in my life thought I would spend so much time thinking, talking or writing about drains. What have I become?!)

[8] No change there then. Yet. Although we have now cleared them all out and are gearing them up for their next incarnation. Watch this space.

[9] That and the sodding chard is all we have left to eat from the veg patch now. Oh and one solitary cabbage which we are saving for a sunny day (we can but dream).

[10] Not a great time of year to be a turkey but ours are certainly making the most of being on death row. Their days are spent charging around the pen like pterodactyls on speed making the most extraordinary noises and doing crazy (borderline rude) things with their wattles (they can become red and erect - no idea what the evolutionary design behind that is, go figure!). There is also definitely something of the Mick Jagger about them as they fluff up their feathers and strut about. Pleasingly they are now too fat to fit through the door of the hen house (a good sign). A slightly more tragic sign of their current weight was Snowy the Black Rock hen who was literally flattened and killed this week when one of the monstrous beasts accidentally sat on her. We were not too distraught given that she has not laid a single bloody egg in over ten months now. She was on borrowed time anyway…

Gimme Shelter (especially now I no longer fit through the hen house door)

[11] Strictly speaking we now only actually have one alive pig (sorry to break the news to you like this) but who am I to let a little fact like that stand in the way of a good lyrical line...?

[12] Not quite sure what is going on with this particular chicken but there aint any feather action going on at the rear end there at all. Most bizarre.

Missing something?

The Great Escape

Ever since we arrived here over ten months ago, one of the things which has really niggled at me is the fact that you can’t escape the place on foot without negotiating a complicated obstacle course of barbed wire fences, fast-flowing streams, steep-sided ditches and a series of five bar gates. All very well if you are in training for the next Tough Mudder competition, less than ideal if you have an increasingly heavy baby strapped to your front with a hyperactive three year old hanging onto one hand and an over-enthusiastic Springador bouncing around at the end of the lead in the other. So by way of an early Christmas present, my wonderful husband set about constructing a beautiful set of stiles across each of the fences leading from the house to the road and a mightily impressive bridge to take us all safely across the ever-rising stream/white water rapids and out on to the hill.

Thomas Telford eat your heart out!

After much measuring and scribbling and scratching of heads the wood was ordered and delivered, a bewildering array of power tools and cutting devices (I do often wonder on occasions like these how many are actually essential and how many are actually just for fun) were loaded into the back of the Landrover and off we trundled down to the front field to embark upon the project. I think it would be fair to say that my husband’s ‘attention to detail’ (borderline obsessiveness??) reached a whole new level on this project with every single piece of wood lined up to the millimetre with a set square and a spirit level before being screwed into place.  Despite the driving wind and rain and working in two foot of thick, squelchy mud (a killer workout for the thighs if ever there was one) it was all going swimmingly well. Right up until the point that is when we attempted to pack up shop for the day and leave the field. You know the tagline that Landrover are fond of peddling out in all those glossy Sunday supplements, the one where they tell you that a Landrover can go anywhere? Well, turns out they were wrong. Clearly they have never attempted to drive one across a boggy field in the middle of Wales in the middle of winter. In all my years working in the City, there was often mention to the fact that colleagues felt “stuck in a rut” with their project or their career. Well now I have a whole new understanding of that particular expression. Watching the tyres on the poor Landy (my husband’s absolute pride and joy – I often wonder whether he actually loves it more than me) getting deeper and deeper into the ruts in the field it became increasingly apparent that it was going nowhere, despite attempts to push it, get carpet under the wheels and rock it back and forwards. Unfortunately for our pride, this whole fiasco took place close to the side of the road where a steady stream of local farmers and neighbours were passing and quite obviously slowing down for a nosy and a giggle. I could just imagine the look on their faces as they thought, “Look at those stupid bastards at it again, will they ever learn?!” So as night fell, it was with heavy heart that my husband bid goodnight to his chariot of mud and we retreated inside. The following morning I came downstairs to find my husband frantically Googling and YouTubing the instructions on how to engage the 4X4 function on our tractor (another classic for our farming neighbours) before he headed out to rescue his truck. A complicated series of knots and ropes later and the Landrover was finally pulled free from the mud, a lucky escape given that a day later the whole field flooded yet again.

Stuck in a rut.... turns out you can't actually take a Landrover anywhere

Tractor to the rescue (please ignore the bird in this photo)

Speaking of escapes, we also managed to leave the house after dark this week for the ubiquitous Date Night, our first since January (I know, that’s what having kids does for romance!). All dolled up, animals fed and watered and children all cooperatively asleep on time for once, we headed off to our nearest pub, or ‘tafarn’ as they are affectionately known in Welsh. A wet and windy Thursday night in the middle of November in a tiny Welsh village with a population of c. 100 people, you could be forgiven for expecting to have a calm, peaceful evening with nothing but each other’s eyes to gaze fondly into whilst listening to the crackle of an open fire and perhaps the soothing dulcet tones of a male voice choir in the background. I suppose I should have known something was up when we struggled to find a spot in the car park before having to negotiate a bevy of heavily inebriated chaps attempting to leave the establishment in a fleet of taxis. As we opened the door we were greeted by a sea of Welsh farmers and their families at the wake of the much-loved and respected local gentleman. The expression ‘utter carnage’ does not adequately describe the scene as we stood six deep at the bar for over half an hour waiting for a long awaited pint. It was actually worse than a Friday night on Clapham High Street. Finally with our drinks in hand and an agreement made with the barman to bring us whatever food they had left in the kitchen (supplies of almost every alcoholic and soft drink and food item having been depleted after the afternoon’s hard mourning), we got to know pretty much every person in the pub and successfully managed not to actually have to utter a single word to each other all night. Shots of Jägermeister were ordered and downed, weird and wonderful local specialties sampled (a particular highlight being Guinness with a good slug of wild cherry cider in it – known simply as “John’s pint”) and at one point later in the evening I found myself standing at the top of a ladder precariously admiring one of my new friends’ roofing skills. Later still I became engaged in a conversation about robotic milking with a local dairy farmer and actually found myself deeply humbled by the technology and IT prowess of this fellow who was world leading in his field, having had dignitaries from China visiting his pioneering farm that very week. Having worked in IT consulting for so many years in the South East I had mistakenly thought that there would be no call for advanced computer systems, data analytics and digital technology, let alone global business trips in deepest, darkest North Wales – yet another example of how wrong many of my preconceptions about moving here have been.

The next morning, slightly the worse for wear and a wee bit sore from all the strenuous bridge construction, yet another of our preconceptions was shattered. Our neighbours, curious about the fury of activity taking place in the corner of our field, came for a wander to see what we were up to. Having spent many years locked in a bitter dispute with the estate landowner where we used to live in Hampshire over a tiny parcel of land where we used to grow our spuds, we were fully expecting some sort of discussion about where boundaries began and ended and who had responsibility for maintaining this and that. It turns out nothing was further from their mind and they looked quite bemused that we should even mention anything of the sort. It turns out that around here people are not quite so precious about their land and common sense is king when it comes to dealing with the folks next door. Amen to that. And so we spent the rest of the morning skipping about on our new bridge, playing Pooh sticks and jumping off the steps, happy in the knowledge that we can go off for a wander more easily now whenever we want to, although if my daughter has her way I’m not sure we’ll ever get much further than the bridge!

And off we go! (maybe)

Rain man

The rains have come. Oh boy have the rains come. We’ve had more than 20cm in 24 hours – that’s nearly enough to fill up a whole litre bottle of coke or dangerously approach the top of your wellies (especially if you are only 3ft high). It’s also apparently enough to completely overface our shiny (not to mention hideously expensive) new drains. Hard to know whether they are actually not working or whether a week of solid heavy rain would be too much for even the Gucci of drains. Long story short, we woke up this morning to find that we had a new lake on our ‘estate’. Not, alas, a calm pool of azure blue tranquility from which you could imagine (if you were so inclined) a drenched, white-shirted Mr Darcy emerging. More a swirling, brown bower of mud and sheep shit rising at an alarming rate beneath our stand of alder in the front field. You should have seen the delight on our daughter’s face when her eyes (after having seen perhaps just one or two episodes of Peppa Pig, ahem) alighted on the mother of all muddy puddles. Uncontrolled delirious splashing and jumping ensued for a good half an hour while her parents gloomily slopped about the field peering depressingly into overflowing drains and ditches and cussing the Welsh winter weather.

My answer to Mr Darcy...

To cheer ourselves up, I’ve been constructing a maternity leave ‘bucket list’ – i.e. a list of all the places I would like to go and things I would like to do before I have to face the inevitable and go back to work. Endless rainy afternoons have proved to be the perfect opportunity to start cracking through the list, which mainly consists of various tea rooms and vintage furniture and/or outdoor clothing shops. Oh ok then, and the odd pub if we’re being completely honest here. Anything rather than being holed up inside with two increasingly tetchy children accustomed to being outside the whole time with too much energy and not enough concentration for anything other than antagonising each other. Plus the fact with the veg patch in its lowest gear and the all of the big digging jobs requiring dry weather, it means we can leave the place with less guilt about not making progress than usual. So this week we’ve discovered a random self-styled ‘chocolate house’ in the middle of absolutely nowhere which serves a startling array of hot chocolate flavours (chilli, ginger, banana, amaretti = DIVINE) and homemade chocolates to die for. We’ve happened across tea rooms selling Florentines and Welsh cakes alongside battered enamel kitchenware and antique sleigh beds. We’ve bought enough socks to see us through to the next millennium and our knowledge of the whereabouts of the local hostelries within a ten mile radius of the house is rapidly increasing. All absolutely critical, you understand, if we ever actually realise our dream of hosting paying guests at our place. As you can tell I’m 100% committed to this market research mission, although if our cake consumption continues at the present rate I’m going to be rivaling the vital statistics of our ever expanding Berkshire pig, Peppa, who is now actually as round as she is long. Wow. Bodes well for Christmas. As do the turkeys who have bizarrely taken to sleeping on top of their hut, despite the gale force winds and horizontal rain we’ve had for the past week. They weigh so much already that they have actually dented the corrugated tin on their roof! And there was me thinking about ordering them some protein shakes from bodybuilding.com to bulk the little buggers up a little so we have enough to eat on the Big Day. Mind you, I might have to order them some webbed feet wellies from Amazon at this rate to contend with the rivers of mud flowing through their enclosure. It makes me chuckle to think that on my recent visit to a health spa (see bucket list above) receiving a Rassul Mud Treatment was considered to be the absolute height of luxury and relaxation. Ah the irony that on my one and only four hours away from the place and my mucky children since I arrived over nine months ago, I spend it covered in bloody mud! Now all I need to do is find a way to channel all the mud that the rain has generated around the place into a health spa product and I can make my millions and retire to an island in the Caribbean, far away from all this rain and wind and mud.  Then again, there’s a big part of me that loves the exhilaration and challenge of the wild weather. Maybe I’ll stick it out for just a bit longer… 

Welsh cakes - mmmm, blasus iawn!

Daily News: Rookie Farmer Pissed Off With Rain

Postscript: in case you were worried about the return on investment from our drains, you will be pleased to learn that not 24 hours later all of the water had miraculously disappeared much to our great surprise and relief. Just in time for the next relentless band of wind and rain, the remnants of yet another randomly named hurricane. Oh well, I suppose it's one way to teach your kids the alphabet!

Rat race

Frustrations have been running at an all-time high here over the past couple of weeks. First of all I sprained my ankle racing the dog down a dirt track in the murky half-light of early morning when I hit a rogue rock lurking beneath the piles of fallen leaves. So light duties only for me and the dog for a little while. Very darn annoying! As for my husband, accustomed as he was to being able to go out and stalk a fallow buck or two whenever he felt like it back in Hampshire, he has had a very itchy trigger finger with nothing remotely deer-like to have a pop at up here in North Wales. Such was his desperation to shoot something, he erected a full-on deer stalking high seat overlooking the turkey and hen enclosure and resorted to trying to outwit the rats that we suspect are operating a corn racket at our expense. After an hour spent getting into all of his stalking paraphernalia and sitting motionless on high alert, he saw but one rodent, which flicked him the Vs before disappearing headlong back down a rat run never to be seen again. My husband was raging. What a sorry state of affairs. Something had to be done…

The arrival of our friends from Dorset for the week with their two handsome Labradors and a veritable arsenal of new toys, sorry I mean essential weapons, provided the perfect counterpoint to get us out of our fix. The dog had a couple of playmates for the week to exhaust him with endless hours of his favourite Bumsniff & Chase game and my other half had an excuse to never have a gun off his shoulder for five consecutive days. A rifle range was constructed, amusing paper targets dusted off and set up (a baboon in this case… don’t ask) and hours were whiled away spent lying prone in a cow pat (only later did they realise, much to my amusement). And when they weren’t on the range, they were wandering about with the dogs and shotguns under their arms flushing out the pheasants that had mistakenly taken refuge in our woods. Panic not, there is not much danger of the pheasant species becoming extinct in our little corner of the world given the ratio of those hit to the ones that got away. That said, they did manage to bring down enough for us to enjoy a delicious meal of free pheasant fajitas. A particular high point of our food-for-free culinary repertoire to date I might add.

Home, home on the range....

And also a good warm up for what was to come the following week. Trigger finger well and truly itched (I’m actually quite surprised that he doesn’t have RSI to be honest) and a long sit down required for me and my gammy ankle, we headed off to the Big Smoke, my first time back in London in OVER A YEAR! I’m not quite sure what I was expecting after being away for so long. It all just seemed so familiar and I surprised myself by remembering the labyrinthine network of rat runs that I used to take to avoid the rush hour traffic in South West London. What was even more surprising was my voracious appetite for all of the many different types of food on offer. Without wanting to sound like the mighty hill billy I am inevitably becoming, I was all of a sudden overwhelmed by an urge to eat anything and everything that had very much NOT come from my own hands. Does that make me the worst kind of self-sufficient wannabe? Bear in mind that you are looking at a woman whose greatest indulgence for the past six months has been to buy a bag of ready prepared salad instead of traipsing up to the vegetable patch to scour the plot for the last mangy scraps of soil and slug-covered leaves.  I think I can safely say that there is no danger of us becoming all puritanical about the provenance of our food… We inhaled a Chinese meal with all of the zeal of a shipwreck victim after three months at sea. We pretty much bit the hand off the lovely man selling kudu biltong at the station (you see, even in the middle of the city his mind is always on sodding deer!). We ate sushi walking down the street in South Ken, not because we were hungry but just BECAUSE WE COULD. It’s probably a darn good job we were only in the capital for a weekend or they would have to take me home in a forklift truck. But for everything we consumed, there was always some sort of (perhaps sheer fantastical) discussion about how we could use what we have grown or caught ourselves to recreate in some way the plethora of cuisines we sampled. Pigeon paella or bunny burritos anyone?  Or how about some squirrel dim sum? However for the record (and you may absolutely quote me on this) I very much draw the line at rat au vin.

When we weren’t stuffing our faces, we were intent on getting our fix of culture and giving the children the Full London Experience. Which basically meant riding the tube on a wet Saturday afternoon up to the Natural History Museum with apparently every other family with children under ten within the M25. Now not a week before we had some friends visiting from Essex with their children so we played our trump card for any little boy (or girl or fully grown man or woman for that matter – let’s not be gendered about this) and took them on the steam train which runs from our local town and constitutes our one major tourist attraction. Now my kids have been on the steam train so often that they truly believe a full size, 1930s steam train is the most normal way in the world to get from A to B. While our southern guests gasped in awe at the chuffing billy, my two didn’t give it a second glance. Fast forward a week and my daughter’s eyes were on stalks as we trundled along the District Line, giggling in absolute glee at the number of stops and starts and the sights of London flashing by. So over stimulated was she by the journey, she conked out as soon as we got the museum and spent all of the hours set aside for Cultural Improvement Activities (at the risk of sounding like Mao Tse-Tung) snoring away in the pushchair. Ah well. Perhaps you can absorb culture by osmosis just by physically being there?

Normal...

...exotic

Replete with food and culture and just as we were perhaps sliding slightly into the territory of “oh bollocks, London is actually awesome, have we done the right thing…?”, we attempted to travel five miles to go to a party.  Now our nearest village is about five miles away and it takes us a little over five minutes to drive there, day or night, summer or winter. Unless you get stuck behind a flock of sheep being moved from field to field, or the cows coming in for milking (in which case you might as well whip out your newspaper and read it cover to cover and then have a short snooze while you’re at it) you can pretty much guarantee you will be at your destination five minutes later. Very much NOT the case in London. Kids asleep, babysitters briefed, make up slapped on in pantomime-like quantities to mask nine months of no sleep and being outside in the elements, we headed out for our Big Night On The Town. One hour and ten minutes later we were still heading. Well not really heading, more like standing. Stuck in an almighty gridlocked queue on Battersea Bridge while the fireworks rained down around us. Beautiful I’m sure but not when you have two hours in which to see all of your very best friends for the last time in quite possibly the next 12 months. We sat slowly stewing in the back of the cab, bemoaning the fact that we could have driven to Liverpool from our house in less time (as distance of 40 miles), helpless to get there any quicker. Coming home was somewhat less problematic, as we joined the hip and trendies by sharing an Uber (i.e. a taxi for those of you not down with the kids). I think we can safely say that neither I nor my husband (copious amounts of champagne and whisky notwithstanding) had the slightest clue of how this marvellous, high-tech service actually works. All we know is that we didn’t have to pay and we got home safely (thanks very much to our dear friend who made this happen!).

And so before we knew it, it was time to head back up the road and leave the Big Smoke behind us. Children exhausted and asleep in the back, we reflected on our weekend and what it felt like to be back in London. A range of mixed emotions it would be fair to say, from feeling very old and nostalgic to be back in the place where we spent the heady, carefree days of our youth to relief at not having to battle the hordes and masses on the tube every day. Sad to be leaving dear friends behind and excited at the prospect of bringing our kids to stay “once a quarter” (we boldly decided) and show them the sights and culture of our great capital. We came to the realisation that you don’t actually have to live somewhere to enjoy somewhere. In fact, the novelty factor can make a place seem even more amazing. Given the choice of city living and having the countryside as the novelty or vice versa we realised that we’d plump for the latter any day of the week. A sentiment wholeheartedly endorsed as I got out of the car to open our gate and inhaled my first lungfuls of fresh air. Total bliss. And despite the driving wind and rain we all enthusiastically got togged up and headed up the field to blow away the city cobwebs, check on our animals and collect some eggs and veg for dinner. I never thought I would have a craving for runner beans but after the excesses of the weekend they have never tasted so good. Even the kids couldn’t get enough of them! And as for my better half, we had not been home for more than a couple of hours before he was back up that bloody high seat, cammoed up to the hilt and gun at the ready, no doubt in his mind about the rat race he prefers…

High seat (not to be confused with a high
 chair - can't really feed the baby up this one...)

The league of vegetables

It’s definitely starting to feel like winter is on the way. The nights are drawing in, the trees are turning spectacular shades of reds and oranges and yellows and the place is once again overrun with dyspraxic pheasants from the local shoot with about as much sense of direction as the confused looking groups of Duke of Edinburgh expedition youths that we see trudging gloomily past now and again. Temptation has yet to get the better of us but it’s only a matter of time… The one advantage of losing the light so early is that it assuages the guilt of watching TV in the late afternoon. A happy coincidence given that the Rugby World Cup has pretty much taken over our lives these past few weeks. My dear devoted husband has religiously watched every single match and not one in real time (God bless Sky Plus). In these times of social media, texting and general 24/7 connectivity I remain utterly astonished that he has managed to avoid finding out the scores for hours, days, even whole weekends when he’s been away at work (i.e. in the middle of nowhere in deepest, darkest Scotland). I, alas, clearly a) give much less of a toss about the scores (and indeed sport in general) and b) am much more addicted to my smart phone than he is so I always seemed to know the results before he watched the matches.  This led to slightly awkward situations where my (pretty rubbish) poker face belied the result or I made myself very scarce towards full time knowing that the outcome was going to send him into downward spirals of depression and grumpiness. As indeed was the case with the Scotland match, after which he announced an official day of mourning, sported a black arm band and flew his tartan underpants at half-mast on the washing line. In a bid to escape the bitter disappointment of all of the Northern Hemisphere teams being knocked out of the tournament (not to mention the added sting that we had once again lost out to Ladbrokes) I took myself off to the veg patch to start clearing the beds. Nothing like wrenching some shrivelled up plants from the earth to cheer oneself up. Pausing to reflect and take stock of our relative successes and failings, I starting to construct a league table of sorts in my head (seems that the annual performance management cycles of the City are more ingrained in me than I thought!). If vegetables were teams who were the winners and losers of our first growing season?

Group A – Legumes

A tough group this one, with all the super star players that everyone wants to eat. The peas put in a good performance, plenty of form early in the season but after a full-on two weeks where we couldn’t eat enough of them it all went off the boil and we were left with a load of unripened pods, peas too small to eat and the pods too tough to bother with. Similar story with the broad beans – a short, sharp fortnight of glory then nothing. I like to think of them as the Chesney Hawkes of my veg patch – fairly easy on the eye, a ‘one hit wonder’ after their victory at the village show and then it’s all over and you never hear from them again. No I’m afraid the winners of this group have to be the runner beans. Slow to actually produce any pods but once they got going they’ve been loyally plodding away providing us with meal after meal of non-stringy, tasty greens. They also make wonderful snacks when you’re wandering past and fancy a munch and even the kids are big fans. Plus a very useful vehicle on which to load up dips and hummous. And of course they are fast (of course, being runner beans, *groan*) to grow: I can literally strip them of every bean and the next day there are a ton more. Group A winners sans doute.

Group B – Brassicas

The veggies that everyone feels they ought to eat but no one really genuinely enjoys (if we’re being completely honest here). Bad breath and flatulence central, otherwise known as ‘superfoods’.  This category is all about what actually managed to come up, stay up and then escape the jaws of the hungry bunnies and the plucking pheasants (who mysteriously seem to have no issue with direction when it comes to homing in on my broccoli the opportunistic buggers). The kohl rabi (one might say the ‘Accrington Stanley’ of the season…. “Who are they?” “Exactly!”) didn’t even turn up. Hundreds of seeds planted and not a single one germinated. Bottom of the group. We’ve had sprouts the size of peas and cabbages the size of sprouts. Dismal to say the least. The chard and the spinach has bolted and now tastes bitter. The one thing that has grown well and actually looks and tastes like something you wouldn’t mind parting money with at a fancy farmer’s market is the Cavolo Nero kale. Gwynnie would be so proud of me. I’ve used it pretty much every day, usually surreptitiously hidden in sauces and purees for the kids, but also out and proud in stir fries and it is pretty much the only thing I can confidently put in the dehydrator to make guilt-free kale crisps (if you don’t count the lashings of salt, oil and soya sauce I coat them in of course). Kale – you’re through.

Group C – Roots

Source of all of our rude comedy veg moments of the summer. Misshapen and forked carrots looking like weird, Tangoed versions of you can imagine what. Taste good too. In fact out of everything that we have grown this year, the carrots are the one thing that genuinely taste completely different to anything you can buy in a shop. The parsnips are not ready yet, nor the celeriac so to all intents and purposes they are disqualified. That leaves the beetroot, a good cropper, dual purpose as you can eat both the roots and the leaves, raw or cooked (as long as you stand downwind from anyone you are trying to impress later that day). And of course you have the added bonus of its sheer ability to make one believe that one’s innards are leaking out every time you visit the lavatory. It’s a close call but given that there is now a whole body of sports science evidence suggesting that beetroot juice can make you run faster, for the purposes of this whole tenuous analogy it pips the carrots to the post.

Group D – Alliums

Living in Wales you’d think growing leeks would be a piece of piss wouldn’t you. Apparently not. My leeks still look like blades of grass, seemingly trapped in some kind of stasis (in fact, they might actually be just grass, better go and check that out to avoid the ridicule of my fellow countrymen… serves me right for taking a shortcut and buying plants at Homebase I suppose).  The onions have put in a sound performance – they’re as big as anything you can buy in the shops and they make me weep like a Scotsman at a Twickenham quarter final (ouch, sorry) every time I cut them up. But I still can’t help but feel that by buying and planting sets (i.e. tiny baby onions) I’ve kind of cheated as all I’ve done is just made something bigger. There’s no real alchemy at play there. Unlike the garlic. You take one regular garlic bulb, split out the cloves, whack them in the ground in the dead of winter, remove the occasional weed and lo! six months later you magically have these huge bulbs, bursting with plump, pink cloves. They might as well be dancing the bloody haka on the raised bed.

Group E – Salady stuff

My greatest disappointment of the season. And where I have invested the most of my time, money and effort. The tomatoes in particular are the ultimate divas of the patch. Talk about high maintenance. To start with you’ve got all the potting up through two, sometimes three sizes of plant pot before the little darlings can possibly begin to contemplate dipping their precious roots into a grow bag, which incidentally cost a small fortune. You’ve then got to give each plant its own bamboo cane, attach it with expensive cable ties (adding more each week) then prick out the side shoots every couple of days. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough you’ve then got to water the bloody things every night, despite us investing huge sums of money on a fancy watering system (which seemingly was not enough to quench their insatiable thirst). All of this of course whilst they live in the lap of luxury in the balmy climate of the greenhouse, sunning themselves daily whilst the rest of us freeze our nuts off in Wales’ poor excuse for a summer. Oh and did I mention the riders? Do you have any idea how much Tomorite (a top of the range fertiliser) costs? It might as well be a Class A narcotic…. And then they don’t even bloody well get on the stage. I’ve had 4, yes FOUR, red tomatoes this year. And one of those was a complete mutant. I’m eliminating them from the competition for being complete time wasters. The cucumbers were not much better. Put it this way, no man worth his salt would want to brag about being endowed like one of these meagre specimens (although to give them the benefit of the doubt, they may actually have been gherkins but the seed packet got lost in the maelstrom of toddler chaos earlier in the year). The peppers and chillies never even made it onto the pitch. Which leaves the squash and courgettes. Once again a crazy array of different shapes and sizes, none of which I intended to grow but I was told by a horticulturalist that they are ‘free-pollinating’ which means I have effectively created my own Frankenstein pumpkins. Awesome. They get the winner’s slot on the grounds of that alone. Never mind the fact that they are the most low maintenance to grow and prepare (just whack a seed in the ground and a few months later pop the whole thing in the oven – job done) and have provided me with a solid meal on many an evening when I have forgotten to prepare anything else.

Fright night - mutant tomato

Frankenstein veggie genetics - these all started out life as the same variety of squash...

Group F - Fruit

Not strictly vegetables of course, but in the competition to make up the numbers, much like Italy at the Six Nations. The rhubarb will always hold a dear place in my heart being the first edible thing on the patch and seeing us through most of the summer (until we read that eating too much of it can cause kidney stones and the hypochondriac paranoia set in). The strawberries were a bit of a blink and you miss it affair, although partly our fault for not covering them up properly. The gooseberries and the raspberries were tasty enough but never plentiful enough to do anything with once I’d snacked my way through them whilst working in the garden (well there have to be some perks to the job!). The mulberry tree was a source of great excitement as it did actually produce fruit this year but like a cheap whore’s drawers it looked like a million dollars but dropped all its wares to the ground in the blink of an eye. Nowt left for us sadly. The pears are looking good, still rock hard but we are avidly awaiting the seven minute window when they are actually ripe enough to eat before they go over and spoil. That leaves the apples. One tiny little tree, one bloody enormous box of apples, which took me a good week to tackle into pie fillings, chutneys, jams and jellies. It has to be the winner.

I’ll spare you the painful, drawn out analogy of quarter and semi-finals (plus with six groups I’ve just realised that it doesn’t actually work out numbers-wise) and cut to the chase of the winner. It’s got to go to the garlic on the grounds that it is the only actual vegetable in which we are truly self-sufficient. We have not bought garlic for over seven years now and have been recycling the same ‘family’ all that time. It also has the ability to transform a fairly quotidian meal into something so wonderfully reminiscent of lazy Mediterranean holidays and expensive French restaurants (have you ever tried scrambled eggs with butter and finely sliced garlic? You should). Oh and apparently it’s good for you. And keeps the vampires away. I’m off to arm myself with some of my prize bulbs and a crucifix. Happy Halloween everyone!

Champion garlic

Burn, baby, burn

 Ah autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Crisp afternoons crunching through falling leaves and the homely smell of gently smouldering bonfires. Or, in our case, the acrid stench of burning plastic and plumes of black smoke filling the air like downtown Mogadishu. Yes we’ve finally got around to clearing out the first of many barns and having a good ‘burn up’, the term we have fondly adopted round here to refer to ‘the act of getting rid of any old shit through the medium of fire’. It probably then comes as no surprise to learn that my husband’s business used to be called ‘Twisted Firestarter Bushcraft’. Trouble is he’s much more Disco Inferno these days than Prodigy if I’m truly honest, hence we’ve recently rebranded to the hopefully less alarmingly titled ‘Wild Bushcraft Company’, (depending of course on your interpretation of ‘wild’).

Ok, dictionary masterclass and shameless plug over (sorry), let’s get back to that fire. The conversation one morning last week went something like this:

Him: I’m going to have a big burn up today.

Me: Are we allowed to do that?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I mean don’t you like need a licence or permission or something before you burn the entire contents of a barn to kingdom come? Are we even remotely qualified to do this?

Him: It may have escaped your notice that I pretty much do this for a living. Plus it’s our land and we can do whatever the hell we like.

Me: Whatevs. I’m staying well out of your way. And I’m putting the local fire brigade on standby just in case.

Him: Shut up *or words to that effect*

And off he trots down the drive, firelighters and matches in hand (sorry to shatter the illusion for anyone that knows him as a bushcraft instructor and imagines him painfully labouring away over his fire-by-friction bow drill set each day). To start with it was all looking rather tame – burning up the piles of scrub and dead wood left around the place. Then he got his tractor and trailer out and parked up outside the barns and started heaping old bits of furniture, rabbit hutches, plastic feed bags, tyres, old buckets, you name it, on it went and straight onto the fire. Now there is something incredibly therapeutic not to mention trance-like (original sense not the techno-house meaning – Paul Simon’s Gracelands was blaring out of the back of the Landrover while all this was going on… rather than Paul van Dyk) about watching something go up in smoke. We were drawn, mesmerised by the dancing flames on the piles of random stuff that vanished before our very eyes in no time at all. Another step towards making the place a bit tidier and feeling more like our own. And to give him his dues, it was all very controlled and passed without incident.

Hot dog

Except, that is, for the point in proceedings where he very nearly razed the entire place, outbuildings, farmhouse, the whole kit and caboodle completely to the ground. Rooting around in a small antechamber of the elderly Dutch barn, he flicks on the light switch in the hope of finding any final old clobber lurking away in the corners. Satisfied that he’s found everything he wanders off thinking, “that fire smells pretty close now, wind must have changed direction, huh.” It was only when he realised that he had forgotten his chainsaw gloves that he went back to the barn to find a swallow’s nest happily smoking away on the lightbulb, literally but seconds away from igniting and sending the whole place up like a tinder box. It doesn’t bear thinking about what might have happened had he not been such a forgetful klutz on this occasion. Mind you, in some ways it might have solved a few demolition and redesign problems for us, albeit in a very dramatic and extreme manner!

Panic over, we retired to the house to light our log burner which has recently creaked back into action (burning the arses off any poor unsuspecting birds nesting in the chimney over the summer) now that the nights are drawing in and we are getting frosts at night (already!). Word on the lane has it that Siberian swans have been sighted in the area which is apparently a sure fire sign that we are in for the mother of all cold winters. Bring it on. We are already moving into full-on ‘prepper’ mode, planning trips to the Cash ‘n’ Carry for apocalyptic type quantities of tins (sod being self sufficient when it's -10c and you're up to your arm pits in snow quite frankly) and dead-of-night forays to the council salt mountain down the road to stock up on grit for the drive. There have even been semi-serious conversations about investing in a snow plough attachment for the tractor. You watch, it will turn out to be the mildest winter on record. Probably no bad thing given that we have now burnt up every last flammable object around the place in the event of things getting desperate. And on that note, I'm off to chuck another log on the fire.