The Good Life Experience

It’s not every day that there’s a festival proclaiming to be all about your supposed life dream less than twenty miles away from your very own house. Now normally I have a massive aversion to anything remotely ‘festivally’ given my phobia of huge crowds of people, the endless queues for disgusting portaloos and one particularly bad experience on the Isle of Wight a fair few years ago involving a severe case of jet lag and losing everybody I knew in an over-exuberant swell of Dizzee Rascal fans. However, my interest for this event was piqued when I read the strap line: ‘culture, food and the great outdoors’. Does that not just sum up exactly what we are all about (ok maybe not the culture bit, unless that includes watching endless episodes of Game of Thrones, but the rest of it maybe)?

So I set all my festival prejudices aside and packed up the car for a family day out.  Back in the day, festival preparation would have involved trawling second hand shops for some suitably ‘bohemian’ outfit that could double up as fancy dress if the people you were going with took one look at you and said you looked like a twat. Then you had to dust off all of your camping gear and pack it into a funky but decidedly too small rucksack so you could lug it 300 miles across a field from the car park to the only free corner of the camping field, invariably next to the stinking bogs and/or the loud speaker. Finally there would be an epic trip to the supermarket to purchase the entire booze aisle to be then secreted into various items of clothing/bags to be smuggled into the festival proper. Oh and not forgetting the all-important wellies, which would have been pored over in magazines and online for weeks, before purchasing just the right pair to carry off the Kate Moss look and which, without fail, always sprung a leak somewhere in the middle of the first day, leading to epic paranoia about the onset of trench foot (or just stinky feet being a bit of a turn off for any potential pulls).  This weekend, our preparation involved three hours of packing the nappy bag with seven changes of clothes for each child, finding a waterproof cover to remotely fit the pram, pots of puree and umpteen snacks plus a million baby wipes (in fact the only item which would have also featured in our pre-child festival kit list). As for myself and my husband, in the interests of actually getting to the festival before it went dark, we literally walked out of the door in the clothes we were standing up in (and have been wearing for the past 9 months). It just so happened that those clothes were dirty jeans, a pair of wellies and a baggy jumper, i.e. perfect festival chic. Oh the irony!

As we drew closer to the venue it started to become clear that this was no V, or Latitude or Bestival. Rolling down the windows expecting to hear the deep thrum of the bass returned the dulcet tones of a few sheep and the faraway rumble of the A55. Then there was no queuing traffic and it became apparent that everyone was just abandoning their vehicles on the side of the road and wandering in, sans tickets, sans scaling a 7ft fence, nothing. Always one to tow the line of the law (ahem), we parked in the official car park in a spot less than ten metres from the entrance. So far so good. A quick glance to my right revealed a line of portaloos without anybody outside, and not one capsized or leaking any kind of bodily fluid. The job really was starting to look up. Having been relieved of the best part of a hundred quid on the gate (ouch) we made our way towards the line of artfully distressed bell tents to see what this ‘Good Life Experience’ was all about.

Family festival fun

The brainchild of Cerys Matthews (of Catatonia fame – remember Mulder and Scully and Road Rage?) and the folks behind the Hawarden (pronounced “Harden” just in case you ever want to go) farm shop, this was an eclectic mix of urban and rural, fields of tepees and fairy lights set to a soundtrack of harpists and vintage disco with the evocative smell of campfires wafting about and a fair smattering of Hoxton beards (at one point I could have been mistaken for believing I was actually wandering down Shoreditch High Street such was the density of impressive facial hair on show). For once my husband, not known for his love of shaving, found himself to be right on trend! The main thrust of the event was giving people the chance to sample the various delights of what apparently constitutes ‘The Good Life’. This ranged from cooking Mexican and French cuisine with some big name celebrity chefs (Tomasina Miers, Valentine Warner…) on a campfire to sausage and butchery masterclasses, to skinning rabbits and plucking pigeons. Then you had yoga classes, talks about books and poetry readings, for those less predisposed to the blood and guts side of things. There were guided walks with foraging experts including none other than the one and only Roger Phillips, arguably the leading forager in the UK if not the world and author of all of the treasured and well-thumbed tomes on our kitchen bookshelf. Like a teenager at a Justin Bieber concert (only with less banshee screaming and hurling of underwear), I was beside myself with excitement to be in the presence of this great man, lapping up his fungi pearls of wisdom and resisting the urge to ask for his autograph (not cool, not cool at all). Then there were any number of activities for the kids of varying degrees of danger according to the neuroses of the parents: making tote bags from hemp, pottery workshops and canvas painting all the way through to fire lighting, flint knapping your own arrow heads and hurling lethal throwing axes. It was all wonderfully wholesome and jolly good fun and just crying out for lashings and lashings of homemade lemonade.

Anyone for lemonade?

As I wandered about taking all of this in, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself as I reflected upon how far away all this seemed from our own ‘good life experiences’ to date. I started to think about what my alternative line up might look like based on everything we’ve learned this year and about what wisdom we could impart to anyone wanting a true taste of the great outdoors. I think it might go something like this…

~~~ BOGGY FIELD ~~~

•   How to catch a piglet in 467 easy steps – pig husbandry for the uninitiated

•   How to burn down an old hen house without setting fire to your neighbour's hedge and tree line – fire lighting for wannabe arsonists

• How to unblock fifty years worth of crap from your drains without getting wet - rodding and flushing for beginners

~~~ OVERGROWN FIELD ~~~

•   How to consume copious amounts of beetroot leaves/broad beans/cabbage and preserve your marriage - flatulence control classes for the grow-your-own couple

•   How to hide chard/kale/spinach in every single meal for a week with no one noticing – vegetable masking masterclass

•   How to plant seeds with children – 50 fail safe distraction techniques for toddlers

~~~ FALLING DOWN BARN ~~~

•   How to preserve fruit and vegetables without destroying every single pan that you own as well as the hob on your cooker - chutney and jam making for the easily distracted

•   How to cook deer, rabbit and squirrel in a 101 different ways - game cookery for the lazy/jaded

•   How not to drive to the nearest supermarket to buy a delicious ready meal when it’s pissing down with rain, you are on your own with two kids and you’ve got nothing to eat for dinner - exercises in ultimate willpower and self-control

All of this would be accompanied by music from the iPod blaring out of the back of the Landrover (Groove Armada being our album of choice at the moment when we have to tackle any particularly unpleasant jobs like cleaning out the water troughs or plucking birds).  So waddya reckon? Has this got legs? I’m thinking Cockerels and Dreamfields 2016 here we come!

Nature's bounty

Most people dread the end of the summer – that dull sense of foreboding that is engrained in us from our school days and the start of the new term. No more carefree days of doing as we please in the sunshine (yeah right), treating ourselves to days out and ice cream and not doing much work ‘because it is August’. Just endless weeks stretching out into the dark evenings with Christmas feeling a long way off. But this year, I’ve been secretly dying for our ‘summer’ (if you can call our soggy, sub 20c days summer) to be over so I can see what hidden gems we have in our fields and hedgerows.  As a wannabe forager of wild foods, autumn is where it’s at and this year (saddo that I am) I’ve been desperate to see what our little corner of Wales can offer to supplement our weekly food shop (although who am I trying to kid….it’s hardly the jars of fruit jelly and packs of blackberries that hammer our weekly budget so much as the cans of Fosters and bottles of Pinot Grigio…).

For once, wandering around the place at the usually infuriatingly slow pace of a toddler is actually ideal for doing a recce of what’s about and vaguely edible.  While she hunts for slugs and snails for her bug box and repeatedly removes her socks and wellies (still no idea why, especially now the grass is very cold and wet) this gives me time to get in and amongst it, pulling branches back to get a tantalising glimpse of the deep purple jewels beneath. It’s been really interesting (in a properly nerdy kind of way) to see the differences between food for free in Hampshire and the Welsh equivalents. In Hampshire it was all about bullace, wild cherry plums and blackberries. Here we’re overrun with rowan berries, hawthorn and hazelnuts (a.k.a cobnuts that cost pound for pound about the same as royal beluga caviar at any farmer’s market south of the Watford gap). Now I’m quite au fait with what to do with endless kilos of blackberries and plums (and would even go so far as to say that I pride myself on my hedgerow jellies) but concocting creations with my new gratis ingredients is presenting a whole new voyage of discovery. For starters, I have to overcome my own (primitive?) aversion to picking and cooking up anything that is such a shocking shade of luminous orange. These berries veritably glow in the dark! Isn’t that nature’s way of telling you to “bugger off and don’t touch me or I’ll knock you down in a second”? Then there is the whole matter of pectin. Are they high, medium or low? If I go through the whole ball-ache of picking, washing, preparing, boiling, straining, sugaring, setting, sterilising and bottling the bloody things will the end result actually be edible, let alone the right taste, consistency and sweetness? Challenges, challenges, I tell you. Thank goodness it’s not summer anymore so we could have an excuse to put off all this crazy industriousness. So having picked about 12 tonne of these orange buggers and a process that took over 3, yes THREE, days (two attempts at daytime picking forays with two kids in tow followed by two nights of boiling and straining and a third night to finish up) we have ended up with three modest sized jam jars of runny, dark orange gloop. Neither of us has yet had the courage to taste the stuff. I think we’ll save that special treat for when we have unsuspecting guests to visit…

Luminous orange rowan berries

The hazelnuts have proven to be a lot less hassle for a lot more reward. We’ve discovered that you can eat them green straight from the tree, easily cracked in the teeth to reveal a sweet, crunchy pea-like treat on the inside. None of this high danger nutcracker action with lethal shards of nut shell flying into your eyes. Just nice, soft, easy-access shells. No wonder the squirrels are going mad for them. We’ve spent this week trying to outwit them (although to be fair it would be some squirrel who could outwit my husband with a .17 rim fired rifle from the bedroom window). Squirrel pie all round. Delicious, especially with some fresh pheasant breasts added into the mix, courtesy of our faithful hound who, for once, actually managed to catch one on our morning run up the hill. Mind you, these birds are not exactly speedy, more like lumbering zeppelins needing the run up of a jumbo jet to get airborne. Or not, in this case. Good old Bru. Good timing too as he was in need of a fair few brownie points to atone for his sins elsewhere on the place.

Bru with Cecil the pheasant

It turns out he has a penchant for apples. And apples are the one fruit (apart from the aforementioned rowan berries) that we have in abundance. And that we all like to eat, even the baby who in the early stages of weaning can’t guzzle enough of them all mushed up.  So it’s unfortunate that I appear to have been scrumped by my own dog, no less, who seems to think that these Golden Delicious apples are exactly the same shape, size and colour as the tennis balls that he so loves. I sat and surreptitiously watched him one day as he bounded up to the tree and actually picked one directly off the branch, quite delicately, before throwing it up into the air and amusing himself by tearing around all the other fruit trees at a million miles an hour. Just as well the dog is not into red apples as we have precisely one specimen on the Cox tree, just at muzzle height, hanging on precariously as though from some illustrated children’s bible.   

Anyone for tennis?

Go on, eat me...

As well as the flora and fauna, we’ve also found some fungi around the place, which we believe to be field mushrooms but have not, as yet, plucked up the courage to eat. If this turns out to be my final blog post, you can assume that I lost the game of paper, scissors, stone and it turned out that they were not.

A quick menagerie update before I sign off. We still have our full complement of turkeys and are slowly preparing them for the great outdoors by limiting their time on the sunbed (heat lamp) much to their chagrin. We’ve lost one chick, not quite sure how, other than it looked like it might have just been sat on by a clumsy sibling.  The piglets have been released from their holding pen into their big enclosure and have been frolicking around, although that might just have been the after effects of having 12 volts up their arse from the new electric fence. They won’t be doing that again. (There are no long term effects by the way and it is just a short, sharp shock to remind them to stay on the right side of the boundary). Chauntecleer the cockerel has finally worked out how to crow and leaves no one in the valley in any doubt of his new found prowess. Fortunately for us he is a lazy sod and rarely gets going before 10am. Part-timer.  He has also very much worked out what to do with the laydees. So much so in fact that he is bordering on becoming a sex pest or needing to be on some register. We’ve even had to isolate some of our hens into a ‘safe haven’ to give them some reprieve from Chauntecleer’s amorous advances.  I feel like opening a poultry branch of RELATE to see if I can improve marital relations but fear that there may only be one solution to this. I wonder if he will taste nice with rowan jelly…

Only 80 growing days till Christmas

We’ve done our Christmas shopping early this year. And when I say shopping I don’t mean all the novelty underwear, boxes of Toffifee, soap-on-a-rope and all the other festive crap that we feel compelled to buy each year. I’m talking about the actual Christmas dinner. And the meal for Christmas Eve, and even perhaps Boxing Day if we’re lucky…

The one thing around here which won’t be having much luck from Saint Nick this year are the three Wirral Bronze turkey chicks, or the ostriches as we like to call them (check out the photo - they are very strange looking creatures). Although I would hasten to add that their luck is very much in at the moment given the amount of love and attention they are currently receiving from my husband with thrice daily meals and drinks, a top of the range heat lamp and (what was) my favourite organic cotton supersoft duvet cover which he has appropriated for their bedding. Never let it be said that I am jealous of other birds but….. It’s quite hard to believe at the moment that the strange, skittish creatures could actually grace our Christmas table. If the chap who sold them to us knows his stuff we may still be nipping down to Aldi to fight with the hordes and masses come Christmas Eve as they apparently have a strong suicidal streak and will “die for fun”. So we’ve removed all their belts, razors and shoe laces and are hoping for the best.

Christmas dinner. Maybe.

 By way of back up and to ensure we have the option of plenty of poultry based meals in the run up to the festive period, we’ve also just bought another load of Ross Cobb chicks.  The first batch have now been successfully dispatched after what, we hope, was a rather lovely life, clucking about in the sunshine with their best mates, munching on worms and corn with not a care in the world. The whole process was actually rather peaceful, no struggling or squawking or stress, which I’m convinced is reflected in the taste and texture of the meat. The chicken liver and heart pate which we made was to die for (if you pardon the pun) although that may have had something to do with the copious amounts of cognac which were involved in its creation. Ditto the thighs and wings which we enjoyed with a homemade barbecue sauce. We’ve also had a couple of whole birds for Sunday lunch. Needless to say we’ve munched our way through five birds already so we’ve gone for 20 chicks this time. We also decided to spare the cockerel from the first batch who is now rapidly approaching the size of a small pony and is still wandering about with a befuddled look on his face wondering how he managed to escape death row. We’ve called him Chauntecleer and his supposed new role in life is to ‘befriend’ our laying hens with the aim of producing our own cross-breed chicks.  What he is actually doing at the moment is eating all the layers pellets, shitting all over the eggs in the nesting boxes and making feeble attempts at crowing, sounding like some poor 13 year old choir boy attempting (and failing miserably) to hit the high notes. If he doesn’t buck up his act and work out what to do with it soon he’ll be at the front of the queue come the next D-Day (Dispatch Day).

Chauntecleer. Confused.com

You can’t have Christmas without a delicious baked ham, studded with cloves and smothered with honey for pure sweet and salty loveliness. Mmmmm.  Enter stage left, Peppa and George, our Berkshire and nearly Berkshire piglets (the latter of which was *ssshh whisper so we don’t hurt her feelings* an accident when the Gloucester Old Spot x Large White boar hurdled the gate into the Berkshire sow’s pen and spent a night of unbridled passion on the wrong side of the fence). At just three months old, they are smaller than the dog, fit easily in the back of the Landrover and, you would therefore think, are an absolute doddle to handle. Wrong, oh so wrong. Having lovingly prepared their new pig sty, complete with soft straw bed to sleep in and a Belfast sink (I know, a bloody BELFAST SINK that I campaigned hard to put aside for the new kitchen and lost out to some sodding pigs!) to eat out of, it was time to release them into their new home. Easy. Open door. Pick up pig. Carry pig to enclosure. Release pig. Only it didn’t quite work out like that. As soon as the back door of the Landrover was opened I swear to God I saw a definite glint in that piggy little eye as it paused, obviously eyeing up the situation and thinking, “these clowns clearly don’t have a clue what they are doing here - let’s have some fun with this”, before literally hurling itself at great velocity through my husband’s waiting arms and out into the open field. There ensued a good half hour of Benny Hill style escapades as one small piglet played two grown men off against each other, darting stealth like under bushes and charging through legs and open arms, going every which way but into the sty. Every time they got close it dodged breezily passed them with a snort and a squeal (I'm sure of laughter or delight) as my husband huffed and puffed after it like some lumbering big, bad wolf in his steel toe cap welly boots. It was into this scene of porcine chaos that our poor unsuspecting neighbours wandered, out for a quiet afternoon stroll with their grandchildren. I’m quite sure that the last thing they expected to see on their afternoon constitutional was a fully grown man launching himself like Shane Williams on the try line on top of a tiny piglet. With an almighty thud, a cloud of choice expletives and blood curdling screams the pig was recaptured. From that moment on I can categorically say without a shadow of a doubt that every single house in our valley (and the next) will be in no doubt that we now own pigs. Absolute comedy gold but admittedly not the most auspicious start to our pig husbandry career. Just as well pigs are hungry little buggers. A couple of days or rattling the bucket of pig nuts and we are all best friends again. All that is until we dust off the Delia Christmas recipe book and start planning the yuletide menu… 80 days to go and counting.

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