Hatches, matches, dispatches

It feels like spring has sprung early here in our little corner of the world. The snow drops are out in full force, little white heads nodding in the wind like extras in a Daft Punk video. The primroses are holding their own too, nuzzling up against each other in their enviable spot overlooking the stream. And we have even seen daffodils bravely poking their heads out of the mud to see what 2016 is all about after a nice long snooze.  Pretty much the same as last year I’m guessing, give or take a few trees and a little less water sloshing about the place. At least I hope that’s what I’d be saying if I were a daffodil living here.

Get Lucky?

Life is just a bed of (prim) roses

And of course spring would not be spring without the arrival of some new chicks, freshly hatched from, in this case, Gloucestershire. I never, ever thought I would end up married to a chicken fancier but I fear, alas, that this may be now the case. It turns out that my darling husband, fully embracing this smallholding lark with both arms (and legs), has been doing a worrying about of homework into old breeds of hen and decided that life could not go on without the addition of some Cotswold Legbar and Burford Brown chickens to our brood. Now if you, like me, haven’t exactly got your chicken breeds down pat, these pretty birds are the poultry equivalent of an It girl on Ladies Day at Ascot. All flamboyant feathers and Farrow & Ball colours with a permanent look of disdain on their beaky faces. Perhaps rightly so as these (hugely expensive) birds were hatched in a heated, designer barn, I daresay made from the finest Cotswold stone, with oak beams and floor to ceiling windows that would put our house to shame. So imagine their disgust as they were wrenched from their plush living quarters to be ignominiously bundled into a cardboard box and hurled into the back of a beaten up Landrover Defender (that my husband now assures me is a collector’s item and worth a fortune since they stopped making them last week). Four hours later they arrive to find themselves in the middle of a muddy field in the pissing rain, not a silk cushion or a Waitrose corn meal in sight. No wonder they didn’t venture out of their little house for a week. I could see the look in their eyes which said, “WTF am I doing here? I’m a Cotswold Legbar don’t you know. Perhaps this is all some horrific nightmare and I’ll back in the balmy, affluent south of England in a few clucks”. At times I can totally empathise with that!

WTF am I doing here?!

Tough luck chucks. You’re Welsh now. And that means you get to support the best rugby team in the world. Yes spring wouldn’t be spring without the Six Nations and that of course means lots of matches. So don’t expect to get anything done on a Saturday or a Sunday for the next eight weeks. It seems that everyone and everything around here stops for the rugby. It's like a scene out of 28 Days Later when Wales are playing: no cars, no tractors, no people, even the sheep seem to fall silent until you hear an audible cheer or groan (or just an almighty sigh in the case of today's nail-biting draw) rolling around the valley when the final whistle blows. Even time itself seems to work differently while the tournament is on. Our builder came round this week to ummm and aaarrr at various wonky walls that we want removed and at the end we asked him when we could expect the quote.  In a momentary lapse to my City alter ego, I was fully expecting him to say something along the lines of COB Friday (Close of Business for those of you not subjected to BS corporate speak day in day out) but instead he simply responded, “before the match”. Fair enough. Given the score, it's just as well we didn't wait until afterwards as we might have borne the brunt of some of that red shirted frustration.

Come on Wales!

And finally to dispatches. What better way to herald the start of spring than to feast upon a lamb grown in ones’ own fields. What a charming idea, we thought. Let’s ask the farmer next door to bring us one, we thought, fully expecting our request to be met with the delivery of a neatly, vacuum packed lamb in all the requisite cuts, ready to cook. Little did we expect said beast to arrive at our front door on the back of a quad bike, bleating away to its heart’s content and still very much alive. Fortunately my husband has the wherewithal to quickly resolve such situations and before you could say, “are lambs allowed to ride on those things?”, it was fleeced, gutted and hanging up in our larder fridge. Meat doesn’t come fresher than that, as Greg Wallace might say.  And no sooner had we butchered little Larry, then it was time to say goodbye to dear old Peppa. Now you may have gathered from reading my blog that my husband has no compunction about knocking off the odd animal or two. But with Peppa I definitely detected for the first time a flicker of hesitation as he prepared for the big P-Day. He deliberated for ages about which rifle to use and then which ammunition to ensure it was all as quick and painless as possible. And then when the day finally arrived he kept putting it off and putting it off, sneaking up to the pen to feed her one last scoop of pig nuts and give her one last scratch behind the ears.  He also went to huge amounts of trouble preparing her bath, finding an enormous cast iron thing on eBay and then spent SEVEN HOURS filling it and heating the water to exactly the right temperature (which, incidentally, he has never done for me). It would all have been quite endearing if said bath was not to be used to scald dear Peppa to remove her hair once the deed was done. In the end, after one final scratch, she was happily munching away on a banana (her favourite) and knew nothing about it at all. All very peaceful and stress-free. Less so for my husband and his (sort of) willing helpers who were then tasked with defuzzing her and cleaning her up for the larder. I wandered in later on and poked my head into the fridge to see the end result and it was all a bit Lord of the Flies to be honest. The bacon butties will be worth it though.  Especially with a Burford Brown fried egg thrown in for good measure. And perhaps a win next time for Wales. I don’t ask for much…

The alternative January workout

At this time of year you can’t escape the bombardment of diet and exercise information, even supposedly living away from it all in the hills of North Wales. Everywhere you turn you are faced with pictures of trim, bronzed beauties promising us abs like theirs and 12lb weight loss in 3 days by signing up to their fool proof programme. Except you would have to be a fool to believe all that in the first place. Right? If you really do want to lose some of the lard and get a bit fitter and stronger, may I suggest the alternative, wannabe smallholder slash mother-of-two workout. It doesn’t guarantee you any particular results other than keeping various dependents alive, warm and vaguely entertained. Any benefits are solely derived as a bonus bi-product of stuff you needed to do anyway and by sheer virtue of the fact that you don’t have time to get your mitts anywhere near the biscuit tin. Exercises are typically performed according to necessity and can be repeated as often as you are physically able!

Exercise one: The bin pull

Works:  arms, legs, nose

Putting the bin out used to be a two minute job. Tie up the bin bag, dump it in the wheelie bin and move it to the front gate. Nowadays it involves lugging two super-sized wheelie bins (super-sized ones only arrived after much begging and pleading and submission of an actual business case to the county council stating that we needed large bins to accommodate 2 x baby bi-products) to the end of our drive, negotiating large pot holes and expansive puddles along the way. When you are not trying to keep the bins from capsizing down the ditch at the side of the drive, you are dashing back and forth trying to capture the really stinking items that invariably blow out of the top as you battle the gale force head winds. A good warm up if ever there was one.

Heave!

Exercise two: The jerry can yoke

Works: legs, arms, shoulders

You would be mightily surprised at how much one average-sized pig can drink. In the middle of winter. In the wet weather. We have to fill up two 25 litre jerry cans with water at the workshop and lug them back up the hill to Peppa’s field every day. They weigh an absolute ton and every time I do it I feel like Geoff Capes in the World’s Strongest man, with 25kg gripped in each hand and my legs trembling beneath me as I stagger one slow step at a time through the ankle deep mud. Not sure about strengthening the arms but I'm pretty sure that it has made mine longer.

Bring on the gorilla arms...

Exercise three: The bleep test

Works: cardio, legs, reserves of patience

Every morning we set out for the animals/veg patch/swings and every morning it takes me on average ten attempts to actually make any headway. I believe that the Swedish call it ‘Fartlek’ (snigger) which means ‘speed play’ and is a recognised technique for interspersing regular paced running or walking with sprints. I seem to remember doing something similar at school where we had to run increasingly fast in time with the bleeps. Now I find myself dashing back and forth up and down the hill to retrieve the three year old who insists on wandering off in the exact opposite direction to where we want to go, before charging back to keep the pram moving and stop the baby from whingeing. Now the bleeps are less about keeping the right pace and more about masking all of the cursing going on under my breath as I dig deep for the patience and fortitude to keep me calm and smiling. At times like this I can identify with Captain Scott on his expedition to the Antarctic, where he had to leave his food parcels and retrace his steps over and over just to ensure he had enough reserves to get him to the pole and back. Oh yeah, except…

Exercise four: The mud shuffle

Works: Thighs, thighs, thighs!

As the place increasingly starts to resemble the Somme, so getting about is becoming increasingly precarious. I have lost count of the number of times that I have now gone arse over tit and ended up skidding down the hill on my derriere (hence my waterproof trousers are now essential wear every time I leave the house). In a vain attempt to remain upright we have adopted a slightly bizarre shuffling gait where you barely lift your feet out of the mud and instead focus on retaining as much traction as possible to mitigate the risk of slips. Looks hilarious and is a killer workout for the thighs.

Exercise five: The swing push

Works: Triceps, biceps, schmiceps

“Higher mummy, push me higher” is a very popular refrain ringing out from our place at the moment. Having just mastered the ‘big girl swing’ our eldest is now obsessed with swinging as high as she can. And it seems that her boredom threshold is a lot higher than mine, not to mention the strength in my upper arms. We can literally spend an hour on the swing, me bargaining with her on the number of ‘big ones’ mummy has to push before she can rest her poor aching arms. Can be combined with a squat action for the perfect all-over body conditioning workout.

Exercise six: The log lift

Works: arms, shoulders, back

If you burn wood at the rate at which I burn wood you spend a lot of time traipsing backwards and forwards to the log store to fill the increasingly dilapidated log baskets with the fruits of our chain sawing labours from the summer. With the temperature finally down to somewhere near freezing and seasonal norms we’ve had both wood stoves raging away all day and night which requires some logs, let me tell you. I can see my husband getting increasingly twitchy as what we once thought were our vast and plentiful stocks are dwindling rapidly and it’s only January. I think he just wants an excuse to don his rather fetching chainsaw trousers and boots and go play with his mega powerful new toy. 

Work it!

Exercise seven: The rod thrust

Works: legs, shoulders, a filthy mind

This is not half as exciting as it sounds. You basically have to squat down, feed telescopic rods up a clay pipe and then shove them backwards and forwards as fast as you can to release any built up silt or leaves. It is invariably accompanied by my husband shouting at me for not using the right technique and if I’m really lucky I get a face full of crap as it comes shooting out of the end of the pipe. Ah, who needs a clean, air-conditioned gym when you could be working out in the great outdoors?!

Giving the drains a good rodding

So there you go. I can’t guarantee you any particular results other than feeling like you need a very long sit down every evening and a good night’s sleep (if you were ever to get the opportunity with two small kids in residence).  The beauty of it is that it is completely free and you don’t need any special equipment other than what you have anyway. I would however strongly advise that you wear something wind and waterproof to avoid getting soaked to the skin and freezing your bits off in the process. Of course you could just go for a nice, long walk instead...

PS. If you fancy a little workout for your mouse finger and haven't done so already, voting is still open for the UK Blog Awards 2016. All you have to do is click here and it takes less than a minute to complete. As I'm unlikely to win any real fitness competitions any time soon a blog award might be quite nice. 

New year, new normal

It was exactly a year ago today that we arrived here and embarked upon our crazy new adventure. I can hardly believe that we have been here for 12 months and have seen the full cycle of seasons (sometimes all in the same day). Through all the giggles and tears we’ve learned a lot about how to grow a few veggies, raise your own animals for meat and more than we would ever care to know about drains and ditches. There has been a fair amount of swearing, a lot of laughter and more mud than I thought physically possible. But more than that I feel like we have evolved as a family in ways that we haven’t even realised so that things we once took for granted now feel hard won and equally, things that once used to blight our daily lives are now not given a second thought. So here, in no particular order, are my top ten new norms that now seem to characterise our daily life.

1.       Parking

This used to be the bane of our lives, coming home every night and wondering whether some cheeky-arse commuter had nabbed the spot outside our house and disappeared off to London for a week, leaving us to park miles away from the house and struggle to the front door laden with baby, laptops and the weekly shop. Once a source of constant stress, we can now park wherever the hell we like and never, ever have to worry about it. Wonderful. Although I do sometimes miss the pleasure of blocking in some flash motor with our beaten up Landrover, then waiting for some po-faced grey suit to come knocking on the door, only to face the wrath of a 6'3'' hairy Scot and a brusque lesson in parking etiquette before finally being allowed to drive away. Never got bored of that bit.

2.       Food

Once upon a time I used to get a bit hungry of a morning, wander along to Pret a Manger, purchase a lovely cup of coffee and a croissant and eat it. Just like that. Now I can easily go three hours after waking before I finally get anything to eat such is the long list of mouths that need feeding before my own. Forget Maslow, this is the all new  Smallholders Hierarchy of Feeds – see figure 1.1 below (can you tell I am going back to work next week and needed to brush up on my PowerPoint skills?!)  There is a strict order of feeding that starts outside and finally works its way back to me. Once we do all sit down for a meal there is then is another hierarchy for who gets the scraps. I can honestly say that hardly anything gets wasted here at all. Forget the kilos of waste that each family is supposed to generate each year. I think we are single-handedly working to turn this statistic around.

Figure 1.1 Smallholders Hierarchy of Feeds - Order of feeding

Figure 1.2 Smallholders Hierarchy of Feeds - Prioritisation of leftovers

3.       The hot water lottery

We never, ever used to give hot water a second thought. Turn on tap, out pours lovely, steamy hot water, take a long shower, and take another one, and another one after that if you like. It never ran out. Now we are at the mercy of the elements and the wood stoves. If you somehow manage the perfect alignment of the appropriate hours of sunshine on the solar panels and/or the right type of wood on the fire (Ash I’m told is the hot one) for exactly the right length of time before you plan to perform your ablutions, then you might, just might, get a tepid shower. For one person. Woe betide us if we have any house guests or need to bathe the children more than once after unfortunate mud accidents (occurs almost daily). Our one saving grace is the electric ‘power’ (in the loosest sense of the word) shower which guarantees hot water, but at a dribble and costs more than our whole electricity bill for the rest of the month. Hence we are only allowed to use it at Christmas and on our birthdays.

4.       Phones

I wonder where he is. I’ll just give him a shout. Errr no. Actually that won’t work because he could be bloody anywhere. Now we use our mobile phones like walkie talkies to converse with each other. It saves charging about the place pointlessly wasting ones voice with two kids in tow. And it also means we don’t have to see/smell each other (see point about hot water above). We also both seem to have unwittingly adopted the characteristic Welsh sign off on all our phone calls, ending every conversation with a high-pitched “tarr-aarr”. If we carry on like this we may soon be mistaken for locals.

5.       Opening hours

If you had told me a year ago that I would not be able to buy anything in the local town between the hours of 12-1pm, on a Wednesday afternoon or at the weekend I would have laughed loudly in your face and told you not to be ridiculous. This is 2015 after all. But somehow, now this feels like the most normal thing in the world. Of course you wouldn’t want to go and buy a bag of pig nuts at lunch time. How very uncivilised. And unspeakably disorganised to find you have run out of food at the weekend. It’s taken us a few wasted trips into town and a few hungry and grumpy critters earlier in the year to learn our lesson but we’re now firmly in the groove with the Welsh rhythm of retail. Then again, if you need a pint of milk and a paper at 5am you will have absolutely no problem at all…

6.       Money

Just as I was leaving London the whole touchless payment revolution was in full swing. I thought moving to the backwaters of Wales we would be back to bartering eggs and potatoes for half a shilling and thr’pence. How wrong I was. Forget touchless. Here we have telepathic payment. You don’t even need to get your card out or even have it on your person. I actually have no idea where my purse is these days because down at the Farmers Mart (source of anything and everything you could ever possibly need) we just put everything on our account. They now know our faces so we don’t even have to tell them our names or address. Easy as. The only snag is when you get the stinger of a monthly bill. The “time of the month” has come to have a whole new meaning here as we each start to dissect the bill and start squabbling over who bought what and why.  Turns out the stuff isn’t actually free after all.

7.       Community

We used to live in a small commuter village in Hampshire so thought we knew a lot about rural communities and how they work. Moving here has been quite a shock to the system as we are just now starting to realise what a tight knit and deep rooted community we have moved into. There are farming families that go back generations and people who have lived and worked here all their lives. Everyone knows everyone and although we cannot actually see another house from where we live, our new neighbours are already becoming good friends. At least I hope they are. We received some delicious beetroot chutney and a couple of enormous swedes as an offering over Christmas which we are taking as a token sign of inclusion. It sometimes feels a bit like playing snakes and ladders: you have a great conversation with some folk in the pub or with the lovely ladies at the Farmers Mart and you feel like you have climbed the rungs of the acceptance ladder. Then you get spotted with your Landrover stuck in the mud or one of your pigs keels over and you come sliding all the way back down the slippery snake of credibility. I think this may take us some time…

8.       Outside

Back in the day going outside was a finite, structured activity to walk the dog on our predefined route or to take a trip over the road to the swings. It took roughly an hour, possibly more if the weather was nice and we met someone we knew for a natter. Nowadays we spend most of our time outside, regardless of the weather or the day of the week. So much so in fact that the baby will only sleep in the pram outside during the day. Most days I set out with some task in mind (planting seeds, pulling weeds, digging up stones for our new herb garden) and most days we don’t even start said activity and end up playing in the streams or building dens in the hedgerows. The only downside to all of this gallant element-braving is finding and donning the appropriate clothing. This can take anywhere up to an hour by the time you have located the right fleeces/socks/scarves/hats/gloves/coats/wellies and then wrestled with both children to get them on whilst simultaneously trying to find the rain cover for the pram and then negotiate with a three year old to wait while you pull on your own perpetually soggy waterproofs. By the time you have done all that you feel ready for a long sit down and a cup of tea. Only you know that it could be hours away by the time you have mucked about outside for a while and then finally managed to persuade child back into the house and then started the whole disrobing process all over again.  Cue a bit of gratuitous Excel to get the corporate juices flowing again.... I think I need all the practice I can get!

Figure 1.3 Reckon I am back in work mode yet?!

9.       Mud

Mud and shit (in every sense of the word) have become an omnipresent feature of our lives. We are either digging in it, clearing it out, or washing it off something or someone. Our back porch has become like a quarantine holding area where you have to remove every item of outdoor clothing before being allowed into the relatively clean area of the kitchen and the rest of the house. My children, although they apparently disregard a lot of everything else that utters forth from my mouth, would never, ever dare to wear their wellies past the sacred threshold. Ditto the dog (although he obviously doesn’t wear wellies. Yet).  They have worked out that the fear of me bellowing “WELLIES!!!” and the potential consequences are not worth the risk.

10.   Rains and drains

I couldn’t let a summary of the year go by without mention of the drains. A year ago, I barely knew what one was and have probably walked over thousands on the pavements of London without ever giving them a second thought. Now I have an acute mental map of every single pipe under the place and can almost calculate from lying in bed the number of centimetres of rain per hour that is falling on our already saturated land. A recent statistic revealed that over ONE METRE of rain had fallen during the month of December at the weather station just down the road. That is the most rainfall that has ever been recorded ever, anywhere. With news like that we are just thanking our lucky stars that the house and workshop have remained dry. Ok so the fields may resemble paddy fields and the streams are thundering like waterfalls but we've not resorted to the sandbags just yet. And on the up side it is a fantastic new training ground for the crazy Mud Run that I have entered in April (I was signed up in a moment of weakness – and I thought I might as well embrace my new mud-filled existence. Wish me luck!).

So there you have it. A year on.  A year older. A little wiser maybe but still a long way to go. I do still sometimes feel like I'm living someone else's life and I'll wake up to find that I've just nodded off on the 06:12 to Waterloo and it's all been some crazy dream. It’s back to work for me next week, my maternity leave/early retirement now having come sadly to an end (although it might mean I get to spend a little more time sitting down and drinking cups of tea whilst they are still vaguely warm). I will endeavour to keep posting my blog as and when I can but suspect that they may be a little less frequent than they have been this year. If you have enjoyed reading (*shameless plug alert*) I have entered the UK Blog Awards 2016 and voting is open from now until the 25^th January. If you would like to vote for me, all you have to do is click here, enter your name and email address and the category you think I deserve to win and voila you are done.  It only takes a couple of minutes and I will be eternally grateful.  Ok plug over. Happy New Year everyone. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2016!

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)