Songs and Smells from the Country : Part 2

Oh dear, Vicky. I'm imagining you wading through the flood in your cellar, wondering just how much damage water can do to air-dried hams. Can't you just air dry them again? I'm sure that the kids wouldn't notice if you were to slide a couple of slices between some country white in their lunchboxes.

I was so looking forward to it myself. I've been dreaming of it for months - when was it that we came over to watch the Pig Fest? March? All that saliva wasted.

Oh well, at least we can make more Christmas decorations (I have visions of the hams dressed up like a Christmas tree as they paddle off to a better place than the Tin Drums).

Our baubles are probably in an unpacked box somewhere so let's get together and I'll try and remember how Steiner nursery taught us to do angels. The kids will probably slope off and watch X-Factor re-runs and we'll be left with a wad of cotton wool, a bottle of red and cosy fire. Sounds lovely. Shall we practice our altos at the same time? Beats an afternoon in Churchill Square, don't you think?
Gx

Songs and Smells from the Country

Dear Vicky
A quickie before I get into the new super-eco Xsara and head off on the interminable school run. Loulou's football has been cancelled again, so we'll walk the dogs while Ellie shops with her mates rather than hang around for the late bus. Why can't we have a proper bus service in the country? One that brings children home, perhaps? Actually I know why because I wrote to the MD of B&H buses to ask. He told me that if I could prise everyone out of their 4x4s and encourage their children to take a bus every now and again, it might just about become cost effective. The school bus gets the local kids home and it's my fault if Ellie wants to go to a school where she's likely to learn something and so I have to hang around in bus stops in the middle of nowhere to pick her up. Rant over.

Luckily my lovely Xsara is averaging 117mpg. Or something like that. I filled up with £50 worth of diesel last week and I've done 350 miles on half a tank. That's very exciting to me. Jed worries when I say that to him. He thinks I should be impressed rather than excited. But I'm shivery with delight. I personally am saving the planet (which is also why I'm sitting here in hat and gloves)...

Who'd have thought I'd have a Xsara? I was so battered-Saab when I lived on the seafront... Now I spend my time sniffing to see where that dead mouse smell is coming from in the new car. Such a shame that I have to pump "Sea Mist" through the vents to veil the hideous stink where once I could have had the real thing by winding down the window. And mice didn't crawl into my car to die in Brighton. Apparently they swing in our trees here.

Did Martha find the kittens? I was so worried at your bonfire party that a fox would stealthily nick them while we were all quaffing your lovely red. I did love your cavalier attitude - 'There'll be plenty more kittens darlings' you said, waving the kids away from the wine table. And you're probably right - this is the 3rd litter? Don't suppose you have mice crawling into your car to die, do you?

Right, off on the endless school run.
Lots of love
xx

Finding warmth

Dear Gilly,

I did enjoy our warble on Sunday. Never could I have imagined two years ago that I would be an alto in a village choir. Not that I am an alto, or a soprano, or a singer at all, but kind of you to assure me that in five weeks time Linda will have sorted that all out and I will be one small part of a beautiful melody. I never imagined that singing could be so difficult, nor did I know that the tunes that most of us recognise and sing along to are often the soprano bits. Laughton Lovelies were sopranos and strange that we Ladies of The Dicker (including you) were the Altos; it was quite clan-like. Villages and choirs...how very English, how timeless, I thought, how unexpectedly exciting to be part of it. But to my children - how very middle-aged.

My father arrived to stay for the week on Sunday evening. He came with food poisoning, poor thing. When you come from 3,000 miles away with food poisoning what you really need is a lavatory, warmth and a washing machine. We could offer none of these things: the downstairs lavatory and the washing machine broke last week. On the same day our heating oil completely ran dry. So last night I lit the Aga. I have been holding out as long as possible because it turns me into a schizophrenic. On the one hand it was one of my favourite features of the house when we first viewed it, but I know that it is an environmental sin to run it. I remember Dave saying how he liked the really old Agas and he's not known for his sentimentality. I think ours dates from the 1950's and when we moved it hadn't been used for years. I begged Dave to mend it, so he did. But now he would have it ripped out in an instant. To him it's yet another Bloody Thing...and our lives are filled with Bloody Things - tables that graced grandmotherly kitchens and won't fit through doors; sofas and chairs with springs abounding; flotsam and jetsam that we trail along behind us from one house to the next. To me, however, it has every right to be there and the house wouldn't be the same without it. It sits stubbornly at the end of the kitchen with dinner medals down its front like some cantankerous old relative guzzling coal and then refusing to cook anything.

Since we moved to Starnash I have become aware of how much fuel it takes to keep us comfortable. It is not even particularly cold for the time of year but without central heating the inside of the house is the same temperature as the outside and we're just not accustomed to it. Two days ago we had a large wood pile out in the yard. To build that wood pile Dave and a friend took a day to fell a dead tree, transport it and split it into logs. That's quite a lot of hard work and energy to get the fuel in the first place. It has taken only a few days use up almost the entire wood pile. During half term I came down first thing every morning before the children were up and lit a fire in the sitting room which is a small enough room to be tinged by the warmth of the fire. I felt like a parlour maid.

In the kitchen is our strange wood burning stove which we picked up for a tenner from a farm sale. It is not a pretty thing. It looks like a reject from the Soviet Union's brutalist years. We now know why it went so cheaply: it is a phenomenon of inefficiency. I feel like Casey Jones when I stoke it, throwing wood on as fast as I can, it burns with fierce promise and yet it never gets hot. Last night we had three of us tending fires simultaneously. This sounds like extreme inefficiency and wastefulness and I only mention it to say that all that effort, all that fuel, amounted to almost no change of temperature in the house and yet when I flick the central heating thermostat up to 21 degrees on passing (when we have fuel) the whole house is warm within minutes. It makes you think, doesn't it?

I have just been to check on the Aga. I have raked the ashes from its bottom and tentatively fed it a few tasty morsels of coal. I peeped over the red hot fuel chamber and it shot out a tongue of blue flame at me followed by a belch of black smoke. Charming! It is a difficult beast...you have to build it up at just the right time of day so that it is hot enough to cook a meal with. Too much coal and you either put it out or super-heat it and strictly speaking to give its existence any justification I should be thinking of ways to use it twenty four hours a day when alight. I should be baking loaves of bread and cakes, there should be a casserole on the hot plate, clothes should be airing above and the water for a family bath should be drawn off after the meal (as it takes away all the heat for cooking). Even used like this, it is still an environmental saboteur which is why I fuss about it, hissing at it to behave when Dave is around muttering in the background about scrap metal and super efficient German wood burners.

I just had to have a little rant. It is only a few days until our bonfire party and I look out of the window and can only describe the weather as being in a strop. It looks set in, the wind blowing any which way and the rain splashing messily against the window panes. As I look out I can't imagine it being any other way. Perhaps we will all snuggle round our fires indoors after all. But no matter what, we will have a party!

See you then, or maybe at Lewes Bonfire on Thursday - we have never been, and I think it is a must.

With love, Vx

Things that go bump in the night

Dear Vicky

So sorry that we haven't been able to make your lovely idea of 'art in the woods' a reality so far. Life seems to be so busy at the moment with Post grad work, real work, child-taxiing and the endless ebb and flow of loss adjustors as the house sinks ever further into the Sussex clay... But let's not worry about waiting for a sunny afternoon when life finally settles down. The rain doesn't put me off at all; if one of the kids - or you with your magic camera or paintbrushes - could capture some of the colours of autumn, we could have our own exhibition. Poetry and paintings.

I haven't quite got around to your sprout recipes either, but as always, I love your enthusiasm!

Funny you should mention the rats. It's that time of year when they start looking around for a suitable winter home. Last year, we had an infestation - I think they liked the under floor heating in our former eco home. The rats of Broomham Lane will be taking their stash of acorns a bit further when they realise that we're not going to heat this house in the way that globally warmed-Dave did.

In fact it's not just climate change that's keeping me mean on the heating front; the prospect of filling up with a £350 tank full of oil every month as the frost covers the ground is actually quite terrifying. I remember when we moved in last Feb and the oil ran out almost immediately that we went to bed in our jeans. You did too, didn't you? Neither of us realised that in the country, you don't wait five days as we did for the oil man to arrive; you pop down to the local garage with your 20 litre cans and fill up with paraffin rather than wearing all your clothes to bed.

Anyway, why don't shops sell proper jumpers anymore? Not even the charity shops with their old lady cast offs seem to be able to help. (I've just remembered your top tip about charity buying down the Sham. I wonder if the ladies of Hellingly et al wear 2 ply?). I've found myself get very grumpy with small children in over-heated houses who come over here to play and complain about the cold. I know you're on my side about this one, and force yours into layers and rugs on knees.

Heating is only a dilemna when Wendy comes down to look after the dogs when we go away. From a hot London house to the reality of country living, it's a bit of a way for her in many ways. She comes, not just for the dogs, but the transformative powers of the woods and the solitude of the house which is the best medicine when you're going through a divorce, but since she's been doing it, her emails are beginning to make her look battier than me. She sent me a link about Weill's Disease after being kept awake at night by 'scurrying sounds' and suggested that I get the pest controller in before she came down the next time. Actually, it was more of an ultimatum. I told her (after the pest controller had come) that it wasn't rats but mice, a natural part of country life if your house is surrounded by oaks, but she still insisted on us napalming them. I'm not convinced that we can't all live together, but she refused to open the dog food cupboard after my warning that she might come face to face with a mouse.

But it was when she raised the subject of jumping ticks that I wondered if she had lost all traces of her country roots. Correct me if I'm wrong but ticks neither like human blood nor jump. I'm constantly deftly twisting them out of the dogs' necks, and I confess to finding it all rather satisfying. I do it by hand now (18 months ago, I took one of the pups to the vet rather than do it myself!). I hold the revolting little thing just long enough for its legs to appear. It's not just to make sure that I've got rid of the whole thing but to watch it try to walk away. Only then do I squash it... Ah the strange joys of living in the country. But trying to persuade Wendy that these things are not going to bury themselves in her warmest places is an uphill battle...

Right, off to the big city to look for a car that doesn't consume the world's remaining oil reserves. I've even been a little seduced by the new low fuel economy high drives that I always used to secretly hiss at at the school gates. Why do I feel that just because I spend my life dodging tractors in narrow country lanes I now need a 4x4?? I'm forcing myself to think Ford Focus. Gone are the days of Saabs and Volvos. The sheer amount of driving means that the future of the planet is in serious danger if my kids continue having a social life. As a bio-fuelled Skoda driver, I know you'll forgive my forsaking style for pragmatism.

Enjoy the rain this weekend; at least you can spend the time you would have put into watering on a good book.
xxx

Sprout Pasta

Dear Gilly,


I write - with months of sunshine and births and deaths and growth and decay between now and our last letter and all I can remember are snippets of what's happened in that time. That's terrible, and I have resolved not to let weeks slip by without some record of them, or else they are just scritchy etchings on my memory; a sensation; a smudgy vision.


I have three photographs of my grandmother on my wall. Three smiles at three different times. I study them carefully and in two of the pictures she is quite clearly happy. In the most beautiful one though, the smile barely disguises the moments before. I can only make my own story up for her, and how wrong that will most likely be. So, in my view words are the thing. We all write more than we have ever done before perhaps...texting, tweeting, emailing, msn, facebook...hours and hours spent giving each other insights into the moment, but then it's all gone - into the ether, nothing left over. Did you listen to the radio this morning? Van Goughs letters - all however many hundreds of them - have been collected together and put on the internet for all to read. In the end, they are what is left...his art is what we know him for, but his letters will form what we know of him.

So, our Indian Summer has ended. Three weeks of low golden sun and rainlessness. But today the rain has come. There is condensation on the mirrors. I woke up in an off mood. The Today Programme was on the radio so I opened the curtains to let in the light and there was nothing but a sort of pallor that I could look out on but which did not manage to filter into our room at all. The clouds were hanging low like udders, and the trees, still darkly leafed, look bloated and tired. So I trudged from bathroom to bedrooms waking up the children. It isn't cold but the quality of light made me fumble around for my candlewick dressing gown for comfort - it truly is a bed-spread and not a nice thing. I'd left my wellies in the yard overnight so I tipped out the water and poked my bare feet into them trying to tell myself that this was nothing to be drippy about and to think about soldiers in trenches and what their feet had to put up with...but all that did was to bring to mind the giant rats that might have snuggled up in my boots overnight. In the gloom I went to let the chicken out and feed the pigs with Peggy the puppy lolloping along at my side and I had the most fleeting yearning for an extra hour in bed, underfloor heating and a power shower.

The other day I tackled an old pig shed near the house to try and reap a clutch of eggs I'd discovered. I used a strange rake-like implement to try and gently haul them in from the furthest corner and as I did so, feet slightly parted for stability, a Thing the size of a weazel shot between them and then another so that I was dancing on the spot with dread and fear. Dave ran to get his pop-gun and we had a small difference of opinion about trying to point-blank shoot things that move at the speed of light with something that takes several minutes to load and then shoots at a squew. A few days ago one of our hens was in a very poorly way. There was nothing for it but to put it out of its misery and neither of us are at neck-wringing proficiency yet, so Dave said to me, 'Can you just hold the chicken while I shoot it?'...

So, in the pig stye we went back to the rake and in the end we found twenty bad eggs and five giant rats which each had Dave whooping with joy as they scarpered out of the pig stye, through the leaves, straight for me!

This morning my friend Charlotte came to help. She comes on Wednesday and Friday mornings. We drink tea, gossip and work and it doesn't feel like work at all. We only had a little time so we started on the beans, taking down the bean poles, stripping off the beans that can be saved for seed and leaving the roots in the ground for their nitrogenous value. In the next bed we noticed that the sprouts were looking a bit lacey. We searched for caterpillars and found two and then we noticed that many of the sprouts were ready to pick.

I love sprouts. I always liked the idea of them as elfin cabbages when I was a child and can't quite understand why so many people can't stand them. Dave had come home for lunch with a friend and I had Monty off school with a cough. The fridge was beleaguered with nothing much more than a rind of parmesan, a couple of rashers of bacon and half a pot of creme fraiche to hand. Monty asked, 'What's for lunch?' 'Sprouts!' I beamed, and he ran away howling and clutching his stomach. So, with little choice I made the following -

Sprout Pasta (this, I realize is not a good name, but you get the gist)

serves 4; Prep time: 15 mins; cooking time: 15 mins

Ingredients

4 rashers of bacon, thinly sliced

2 cloves of garlic crushed with salt and olive oil

A couple of handfuls of Brussels sprouts cleaned, halved and briefly boiled

4 good handfuls of dried pasta, boiled

Creme fraiche - enough to give a creamy consistency

Grated parmesan

Finely chopped parsley

black pepper

Method

Boil the pasta and at the same time fry the bacon in a little of the garlicky oil. Plunge the sprouts into boiling water for a maximum of 5 minutes. Add the garlic and oil to the bacon pan for just a minute or two and stir so that the garlic cooks but doesn't burn. When the pasta is cooked, drain it well and add to the bacon. Quickly drain the sprouts and add to the bacon pan too. Stirring all together add the creme fraiche, parmesan cheese and parsley. Season with pepper (not salt). Serve immediately in bowls.

Maybe I should think of a more enticing name, but I have to say that Monty asked for it again at supper.

I must go now and think about the next meal. It will involve beetroot.

Much love, V xx

Chaos and snow

Dear Gilly,

Three weeks since I last sat down to write and the time has just gone and with it taken all the little things I wanted to tell you...like the Escape of The Pigs - although we did talk about that, and the slodginess of the land and life after the frosts thawed. Oh how I wanted to bemoan mizzle, and the suck of glaucous mud on an overlarge wellie-boot. I wanted to have a womanly natter about the marvel of having Spouse who can make hundreds of litres of bio-diesel from used cooking fat (good thing) but how utterly foul is the fatty slime that is gaily slooshed around the back yard as he runs from bio-diesel shed to drain and back again (very bad thing). How one slithers about with this awfulness underfoot as one makes one's treacherous way to the chicken hut in the dark. One mustn't grumble, mind. No, no...

We are a family born mainly in February and this year are some Big Ones. Yesterday (1st Feb)was my mother's 70th, Thursday 5th - Rose's 20th and Monty's 7th (seventh birthdays being tremendously important), the 10th is Dave's father's 90th and the 11th is my grandmother's 95th. My Pa is coming to stay with us so that he can see my grandmother on her birthday. We had my mother's party here yesterday - 15 of us crammed into the little sitting room. On Thursday Rose will come home from Nottingham for her joint birthday with Monty and on that same day Dave will demolish the kitchen and take down the wall between the kitchen and the 'shepherd's hut'. Nevertheless we will have a tea party; dust on cupcakes and cucumber sandwiches. On Sunday we will clear a space in the debris to rustle up a celebratory roast dinner for Dave's father's 90th. I imagine it will be a surreal affair; candles and rubble as if a bomb has just fallen and we're carrying on regardless. These days I seem to be holding my breath as if under water and yet I am rushing hither and thither trying to keep up with expectations. In my saner moments I think I might have gone a little mad, and when I'm not loathing living in such interminable chaos, I rather love it because when I'm sane I see that there is no point in trying to fight it when every day we move the entire contents of one room into another and the next day back again.

It is exciting however; making this our home. But after nearly a year of living out of boxes and bin liners, surrounded by other people's taste from another era, I'm worried I might miss our scruffy time-warp existence just a little bit. Then again, to give things a home, to impose some order, to unpack belongings that have been put away for a year...three years even (since our previous house move), will be very exciting. And I have missed these things, so I will not be de-cluttering, I will be re-discovering.

Today I woke up really early, turned on The Credit Crunch (a.k.a the Today programme) and heard about the Chaos before I saw it. So I got out of bed and looked out onto a blue-white landscape: the UK brought to a stand still by snow.

Surprise, surprise! How exciting! How dreary it would be if we Brits had the foresight to have chains hanging in our garages to snow-proof our car tyres so that people could go about their daily business like the rest of the sometimes snowed-upon world. How glorious that all the schools closed down when the snow was just an inch deep. Trains stopped running, so Rose couldn't go back to Nottingham and so, surrounded by chaos inside and out, what choice did I have but to go outside and make a huge snowman with all my children? I do love the snow. I love England and the English in the snow, because we are always so thrown by it and so childishly excited by it.

I had to go and take special care of the animals, to make sure they had fresh straw for warmth and that their water troughs didn't freeze over and to find receptacles for keeping their food dry - easier done with chickens than with pigs. It is nowhere near as cold as the last time I wrote when the piglet died. The other three were absolutely fine and we didn't have to give them penicillin. But it is a dilemma...what do you do if your hitherto 'pure' animal contracts a contagious ailment that could jeopardize the health or lives of the others? Medicate or isolate? Or what?

What keeps me awake at night as February creeps on are seeds. Zillions of them in enticing green and white packets from Chase Organics. Each tiny seed needs tender loving care and knowledge of its likes and dislikes. Get this right and each tiny dot of a seed has the potential to turn in to a triffid of sorts. That means potentially zillions of triffids with gazillions of bugs and caterpillars finding homes there! It seems like a lot of work to me. However, the bounty will be wonderful...

With all this work in mind i should perhaps go and lay out my potatoes for chitting and while I'm doing that I will be thinking about ways of setting up a modern day Land-Army group (a bit like a book group). I think it would be enjoyable and more productive to sometimes do all this sowing, tending and harvesting with other like-minded local people. My idea is that no money exchanges hands but everyone gives a little time on each others smallholdings or allotments, friends are made and things get done that would be daunting for one person but are easy for several.

Ah, now Dave has returned with a bottle of wine. We're planning menus for the Tin Drums tonight. I think I will refer to those seed packets...after all that is the point of us being here.

Much love,

Vicky x

A life for a life

Dear Vicky
You poor things. But think of that little pig as the glue to your new relationship with the neighbours, a little sacrifice for your new way of being?

I had to kill a Myxi wild rabbit the other day and cried my eyes out as I stood there in my yellow marigolds with it twitching in my hands. The kids (and Jed) watched in a mix of admiration and horror. They hear so many stories of my childhood in the country from both me and Gory Grandpa that I don't think they quite know what I'm capable of. They held the puppies pretty close that night.

Penicillin? Does that mean that they'll no longer be organic? I'm not entirely convinced by the argument anyway; our milk comes from the cows opposite who get anti-biotics if they get mastitis because cabbage leaves just don't work. But it does mean that they won't get the premium milk price. I'm with the cows on this.

We're still waiting to exchange on Three Acres (today please?) but went down there to have a chat with the pigs yesterday. I realise that Demolition Dave who actually owns them (and the sheep, the chickens and the sweetie Jack Russells who are kept outside with frozen water in their bowl) and I might have different ideas of how to raise animals. That'll be an interesting thread to this smallholding debate. Interesting that I wrote "threat" instead then....
lots of love
Gilly

Not a good day!

Dear Gilly,

The beautiful hoar frosts have almost gone - I almost began to believe that we were going to live forever with everything around us sparkling and silvery and the sky perpetually tinged pink and everyone over the age of forty telling their children that this was a proper winter like we used to get when we were children. The boiler has roared away for days now like a dragon in the laundry room guzzling up the oil. We can't light the Aga because we can't find charcoal for love nor money, but then I noticed some burned scraps of wood in the fireplaces and with sheer determination and perseverence managed to get the darn thing alight again. A bit late maybe as the temperature outside zooms up from -9.5C on Friday (full moon on hard frost at midnight...the light was amazing).

Today, however, we were having the Neighbours round for Sunday lunch. We bought this house off them and it was to be our first proper 'social' together - so in my mind it was imperative that the meal was cooked on the Aga - that the beast and I could work in perfect union just once. All was going well. The Aga was red hot and raring to perform. The neighbours had been invited for 1pm and I was working on the premise that they would be prompt. The children were considering getting out of their jim-jams at 12.59pm. The house was in a tip but I'd found a linen table cloth for the kitchen table and the food, miraculously, was cooked and ready to serve (slow roasted Morrocan Style hogget, ratatouille, rosemary and sea-salt roasted potatoes). It was like Ready-Steady-Cook as we counted down to 1.00. By 1.05, when they arrived, I felt almost relaxed. We had a glass of wine and sat down to eat fairly promptly. It was all very easy-going and we got on to the topic of pigs and how sweet and lean is the meat of milk-fed pigs; how intelligent they are; how easy they are to keep; how you wouldn't want to pass out in a drunken stupor in a pig pen because you'd have been eaten by the morning. I was feeling very proud of our thriving pigs, relieved that they's made it through the cold weather - when all of a sudden Monty burst through the back door shouting, "There's a dead pig in the field!"

He was right. There it was, poor little thing, keeled over and dead as anything, with the others all snuffling round it. Very glad the neighbours were round. They called vets for us. Got advice over the phone. The children were very stoical about it (only Louis shed a tear). Dave removed it from the other pigs and laid it under an oak tree and we tried to work out what on earth had happened - only an hour before I had watched it foraging around with the other pigs, but in the morning Dave and Louis thought it looked a bit under the weather - snuffly and off its food.

Phoned our Pig Lady. She said sometimes they just die like that. It had had nothing odd to eat. Phoned our new Smallholding friends in Chailey who had a dead pig last week. They said it was pneumonia. Got to get the others penicillin first thing tomorrow. New Smallholding Friends have got loads that they would have given us but we'd have to inject it into their bums every day for 3 days! Thought Dave might be ok with that, but apparently I'm calling the vet first thing while he takes dead pig to knackers in Ringmer. It's a sharp learning curve for us ex-townies!

Love, V xx