In Praise of Rocket

I'd like to trumpet about salads for a minute. I used to hate salad, although it seems strange to say it now; when I was growing up in Belfast in the (mumble)ties, salad meant lettuce, cucumber and watery tomato. And perhaps a boiled egg. Oh, and salad cream - mustn't forget the salad cream. The Wiki says that salad cream is similar to mayonnaise, which I find extraordinary - it bears about as much resemblance to mayonnaise as it does to dog sick. In fact... I reckon it's about half way between the two, but that's just my opinion. Anyway, I was quite vehement in my dislike of salad.

But that was then, and this is now. When you grow your own food, you don't have the luxury of simply parroting your list of childhood dislikes - any food aversions have to be closely examined and get-rounds looked for. Most of the time, what you remember disliking isn't the food but poor preparation - frankly boiling something to death and leaving it to die on the side of a plate is not the way to endear vegetables to any child. Sometimes though, you genuinely don't like the taste of something no matter what you do with it (although I haven't quite run out of ideas for Witchypoo's beetroot aversion).

But since I've been growing - oh, the salads! Tangy lamb's lettuce, fiery nasturtium leaves and flowers, juicy baby chard, sweet basil and coriander, chopped apple and celery - you name it. And then there's WP's influence - walnuts and pumpkin seeds, goat's cheese, garlic croutons and dressings galore. I find I'm quite keen on salads, and very happy to eat a sandwich at lunchtime that's just leaves with a little of our green tomato chutney (which looks like it will run out neatly just as the new crop ripens up). One vital ingredient of such a salad, though, is rocket.


Since the name "rocket" actually refers to quite a few different salad herbs depending on where you hear it, I'm talking about Eruca sativa "Skyrocket" which you can buy from Thompson and Morgan among others. It has an upright habit which makes contamination with grit etc less of a problem, and because it's frost tolerant (it survived -2C last winter) you can grow it all year round in a greenhouse or polytunnel with a bit of protection; a late September sowing in my tunnel stood all through the winter along with my winter lettuce and Japanese saladings, and was so welcome I can't tell you. The only problem I've had is bolting, but since it's best eaten as baby leaves I really can't complain (and anyway, it'll make seed saving very easy when my stocks run low). With only three or four weeks from sowing to picking, I try to sow once a fortnight during the summer so that we never run out.

The flavour is sweet and nutty, strong enough to make itself heard above the clutter of even the busiest salad, and there's just a hint of bitterness too - which increases in older plants. I think the nicest sandwich I've ever eaten was a home-made challah loaf with cold leftover goose, a see-through sliver of Jarlsberg, a dab of chutney, and some rocket salad (Dec 22nd 2006). I can't believe it but I'm hungry just thinking about it, at half past midnight. Shame the only edible thing around is my eraser!

The elderflower champagne gets its first test-drive tomorrow, despite the weather. Here's hoping...

Did you know...?

I may be changing my mind about being prepared to buy non-organic maincrop potatoes. Did you know that once the "new crop" varieties have passed through the supermarkets and the big bags start to appear, they're routinely sprayed or fogged with a chemical to inhibit sprouting? I'm not sure if it's the same chemical in the UK, but the Americans use CIPC or Chloroprophan. I feel ill.

Slave labour and the accidental permaculturist

I've had a request to explain chicken tractors from McBurro, and although I'm not sure if he's taking the piss or not (largely because taking the piss is his default mode) I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to do just that. At the moment I've got four birds in an area about twenty feet square*, where they are very happy doing chickeny things like dust-bathing, playing King of the Castle on the old log I put in there for them, chasing bees up and down or just persecuting the poor thing at the bottom of the pecking order. How like humans they are.


A chicken tractor scores in the no-dig department, because it's basically a very confined run (taking the chickens down from 100 square feet each to about 4). All the frustration and aggression of a chicken's normal day is focussed on about four square feet of soil** - which naturally gets ripped to buggery and all the roots, seeds and bugs are removed from it. It also gets crapped on. What was that I was saying about private equity firms? The point is, you can use them to dig and manure your soil. Chickens, that is. Not private equity firms.

A tractor can be a very simple thing to make, since it's basically just a box frame clad in wire or mesh. Some shade is a good idea too, unless you fancy your birds pre-cooked, and you have to allow a little space for a feeder and drinker; if the birds are layers, you might want to have a nestbox too. If all that's beginning to sound a little involved, it needn't be. I'll take some photos when eventually put mine together. Some time next year, then.


For chickens, this is a temporary hardship. Generally speaking, we try to give the chookses everything they need to stay well, happy, and at least moderately feather-covered. What we don't give them any more are scraps - or at least not so many of them. The reason for this is that the tyre-built worm bin is now doing so well that it's a little frightening. A few of weeks ago I packed it - packed it, now - with cauli leaves, stems and roots topped off with kitchen rubbish. Last week I opened it up to see how things were going, and everything is gone. I mean, gone, as in not there any more. I was so suspicious at how the level in there has dropped that I cleared away all round the bin in case the rats had got in despite the concrete base (the one pictured above is on a base of corrugated iron and old phone books) but no; the worms have just broken the waste down into a tiny volume of incredibly rich compost. It's like there's a black hole in there. So now, pretty much everything except for the choicest morsels goes in there; meat, veg, cardboard, eggshells, you name it. It's all grist to the mill.



*As opposed to twenty square feet. An area twenty feet square has an area of four hundred square feet, or about a perch and a half (obviously more if you have bantams). Or about 52 square varas if you live in Texas.

**Pretty much the same thing that a pharmacy dispensary does to an adult male human.

On Snoring

Snoring sucks. Apparently I have a new hobby, which is stopping breathing when I'm asleep. May Dad has done this for years, and I know how annoying that makes it; any snoring is impossible to habituate because it stops and starts, and when this is coupled with WP's ultra-light sleep in the early hours of the morning it won't be long before she's talking to herself on planes and sneaking into support groups for men with testicular cancer. Then I know I'm in trouble. Time to arrange a nasal spray, see if I can't find some way to breathe at night!

In the meantime, it looks like another day of shower-dodging. The weather from MetCheck says we're looking at more of the same for the next couple of weeks - alternating bands of warm and cool weather studded with showers. This isn't universally popular with the crops, and unless it stops soon grain in the fields won't ripen properly, forcing flour prices up. Again. Question is, why do they never come back down again?

Another instance of mouse cuisine left for me this morning. Although I can't prove it, I think Number Two Cat has been attending "nouvelle cuisine" evening classes. I never taste his offerings, but his presentation is definitely improving. I mean, we're on to garnishes now...

Biodiversity in Action

Remember February, hmm? Me talking about how introducing all those nice plants was going to boost biodiversity in't Hollow? Well, the good news is that it works. The bad news is that the first visible arrival is a female blackbird who has taken a liking - a strong liking - to unripe strawberries and nearly ripe raspberries. A newcomer to the garden, she has made herself a nest in the Posh Neighbours' cypress tree from which she can keep a close eye on me as I toil away. If I linger too late in the garden she begins to scold me, and by the time I've reached the top of the garden she's down noshing away on the remainder of my embryonic soft fruit like a private equity firm getting stuck into a juicy high street chain. Verily, it is time to sort out the fruit cage.

I bought the ironwork for the cage a couple of months ago and it's been lying in an increasingly rusty heap ever since. This isn't a problem, since I need to Hammerite it before using it in any case. When it comes to actually putting it up, Ian (HWzD's resident engineer) has foolishly offered to give me a hand since I'm not used to welding, so this weekend's task is to pre-drill and treat all the sections according to my only slightly mad plan.


There's another species currently missing from the Hollow, though, and I can't think of a single plant that might attract it. I'm speaking of constructius numptii here - that's the lesser-spotted numpty to the less scientifically inclined, or to give them their folk name, builders*. Yes, the builders are supposed to be here to finish off our house renovations, and are yet again conspicuous by their absence. For anyone who has never had to deal with their accursed ilk, it might help to know that in October 2005 - 2005, now - WP and I purchased a rather nice bottle of champagne with which we intended to celebrate when the builders finally rolled away. This was supposed to be May, or possibly June 2006.

The champagne's still in the cupboard, sadly, as numpty activity at the Hollow didn't so much finish as sort of peter out. Every so often I lose my temper and shout at someone, and somebody with a paintbrush and a screwdriver puts in half a day and promises to come back the following week. Without fail, they lie. Finally, we've reached the point where the defects period ended (28th April) and I gave the builders six weeks to finish off outstanding works. Summoning up all their might, they gave me a painter for two days and the ubiquitous bloke with screwdriver for a few hours, and then cleared off again. The architect is very keen to prevent us from entering into dispute with them, but so far as I can see it's only a matter of time. The question is, how long should I leave it before getting some other numpties in to complete the work?

In other news, Witchypoo's overhaul of what the Posh Neighbours persist in calling our "North Garden" is underway. We know this because Wingco appeared clutching a piece of paper which shows, contrary to all expectations, that he owns a two-foot strip of land between us and our own top gate. No doubt a solicitor's letter will follow (he's very fond of them, and we're trying to collect the set). In the meantime we'll smile and carry on as normal, so a local landscape gardening outfit made up of two charming but worryingly overweight brothers has swung into action. Even now they're charging up and down the slope on dinky little diggers looking for all the world like Tweedledum and Tweedledee visiting Legoland. Yesterday they attacked an 8'-high clump of root balls and turf, a leftover from when we cleared the slope of overgrown laurels, and the slope was briefly aswarm with rats** and slow worms. The slope is WP's project and I'm leaving it to her (beyond being given donkey work to do later, no doubt) - I just spoke sweetly to our mortgage providers to arrange the dosh for it. At the moment I'm just enjoying the unusual sensation of watching someone else's plan come together without it being my back that's sore in the evenings!



*The usual sources are queerly silent on the subject, but as far as I can work out C. numptii overwinters in drifts of Snickers bar wrappers in empty buildings and, after a brief period of activity in early spring, pupates until emerging to feed on tea and biscuits in a van parked halfway up the road. After this they disappear, presumably to mate but I'm not even going to consider that.

**Anyone else have neighbours who order their bird nuts in 5kg bags, and think that "the occasional rat" is a small price to pay for being Tit Central? In my experience there's no such thing as the occasional rat, and yesterday's invasion of the Queen's First Heavy Widdlers was proof that I'm right. On the bright side, the landscapers said that the ones that got away from their dog hid under the Shed Where The Nuts Are. I predict a riot.

In accordance with HWzD's policy of recycling, this article previously appeared in The Ecologist Online - but I'm putting it up here as well so that I don't get confused about what I've told whom.

Time Haemorrhage

I've found the new government carbon footprint calculator, and I'm in the middle of using it in the hope that it'll give me a smaller number than the last one did. I know, I know - that's like a dieter trying scales in all the chemists down the High Street to see if there's one that says another couple of pounds has been lost. But what can I tell you? We're considering swapping my gas-guzzling CR-V for a Smart Car or something like it*, and the Government's web site says that's an extremely good idea. It also poked me in the ribs about the light bulbs, so I've checked the prices - joy! Light bulbs direct have GU10 energy savers for £2.67 each - it would seem that the time has come. Question is, do I replace them as they blow (to save resources) or do all of them now?


Yesterday was a bit traumatic for me, because nothing happened. Nothing. To clarify; I rose, helped WP get the Sons off to school, and blogged. Twice (once for the Ecologist). Then I remembered that it was time to pay road tax for the CR-V, and was plunged into an agony of indecision about replacing it. Opted for the 6-month tax disc in the end, the decision having been taken to amend at least one of our acts of environmental aggression. Then I remembered I had to renew the SORN on my old scooter - which we've got to clean up and sell on before I knock it over (again). Then it was time for lunch...

You get the picture. I have nothing against days off. So long as I'm psychologically prepared for them and have time to relax and enjoy them, they're great; but when a day just... dribbles out of my ears like that, I hate it. It's exhausting. I put it down to tiredness. But no more! It's time to resurrect... the List. Three blocks; urgent, pressing, and never-gonna-do-it.

Hoe sweetcorn and squash patches
Knock back weeds in chicken run B, fence off trees, put the chooks in to clear it
Weed remaining paths, and general weeding
Water and mulch round plants that will take it
Dig a space and plant globe artichokes out
Make shade shelter for chooks
Sow early carrots, radish and spring onions
Cut insect nets, and cover cloches.

Make chicken tractor
Put training wires along the wall***
Put strainer wires for soft fruit up
Pre-drill and treat metalwork for fruit cage
Reposition fruits on giant pumpkin and pinch out side-shoots
Lay piping and drippers along the wall

Dig over future corn and perennial beds
Clean out and treat the chicken house
Clean out greenhouse and garage, organise
Membrane greenhouse
Prepare orders for remaining fruit trees
Dig out old apple tree
Cut up log pile, any redundant wood to woodpile
Any big stumps to chicken run (they love playing King of the Castle)
Nervous breakdown, debtor's prison


*Which brings me on to a gripe: the inland revenue will allow 100% "Enhanced Capital Allowance" relief on an eco-car for me (I'm self-employed) but only if I buy a spanking new car. This puts me off going for the relief, largely because I can't really afford a new one. Or can I? The relief means that I pay no tax on the full price of the car, which I'm assuming is a saving of about 20% so a £7000 car only costs me £5600; then there's the lower insurance, lower vehicle duty, and lower fuel costs. I wonder how much my CR-V is worth these days? Time to look into this properly...**

**Ahahah. Starting a bit of research off on this I stumbled across this comment on the hydrogen-powered MicroCab; "the Micro Cab comes with a built in hydrogen detector, which would warn you in the event of a leak." So, then. It goes "beep-beep-beep" giving you just enough time to say "What's that? Oh, sh..."

***This requires the Posh Neighbours to be away for a day, since it involves drilling two hundred - yes, two hundred - holes in the wall between us. This might sound a lot, but there's twenty-three meters of wall, and six wires supported every 50cm. I don't want the noise to annoy anyone, and I don't want Wingco dancing about with another solicitor's letter even though it's my wall - no, I don't know why it would be a problem, but experience has taught me that there'd be a covenant or a verbal agreement or he'd own the air between my drill and the wall or something like that. Best not go there.

The Stupidity Continues

The Hedgewizard has a syndrome. I know some of you have suspected this for quite some time, but as well as a congenital inability to sip* the Hedgewizard suffers from CRS, which stands for Challenged Recall Syndrome or Can't Remember Shit, depending on what mood I'm in when I speak to you. Assuming I can remember who you are in any case.

Neurologists tell us that when we make a memory, it isn't written permanently onto a circuit (or "engram" in medico-speak). Instead, every single time a memory is "replayed", it's also re-recorded. Since our experience of things - even our own memories - is subjective and we tend to edit out unpleasantness, our re-recorded memory may be different from the original version. This, you have to admit, is pretty lo-fi. It explains why witnesses to a crime often contradict each other, and why we talk about old folks viewing the past through "rose-tinted spectacles". It also, frankly, sucks.



In case you're tempted to think that the way to preserve fidelity in your most treasured memories is to not recall them, I have to add the rider that if they aren't refreshed for a long time memories get harder to access, and may eventually fade entirely. The memory isn't like Buffy the Vamire Slayer, bouncing around the satellite networks for all time (and getting its episodes maddeningly mixed up in the process) - it's more like the Doctor Who archive in the 80s BBC, covered in dust and mouse droppings with some tapes ending up in a skip and others being smuggled out by pimply trainees for "private viewings". Oh, and the filing system sucks too. In what primitive world would I ever have needed to search for memories under the heading "late summer, smell of sawdust" or "peculiar haze in the distance"?


Like the comic book artist Obsidian, I'm one of the merry band of people whose memory functions with scary accuracy if the subject matter stimulates me, and hardly at all when I am not paying attention. Sadly, this means that although I can tell you the plot of a Doctor Who storyline watched once when I was thirteen, I fall to pieces over more routine matters such as where I put my memory stick, where I'm supposed to be at 11am today (oh, fuck!) or what exactly my own shorthand is meant to say.

I'd like to mention at this point that I can read my own writing, no problem at all. I can tie my own shoelaces and find my own bottom when it is itchy, too, but can I make even the slightest bit of sense out of the irrigation plan I made last night? Can I buggery! Each individual bit, apart from one, seems to make at least some kind of sense, but I've written a list of connectors needed at the bottom (complete with ticks to show that I actually checked them at the end, although I have no idea how) and it seems to bear as much resemblance to the diagram as the Government's approach to fuel taxation, road building and fartling about with the railways resembles a coherent transport policy.

And while I'm annoyed, can someone please explain why I've just found a tick wandering across my hand when I haven't been outside today yet?



*As in beer, wine and cider. Gulp yes, sip no.

Cat's Bum Curd

How could I be so stupid? I thought so hard about the garden layout! I took arcane measurements. I watched where frost lingers. I sketched shade zones and wind funnels and rain shadows. I DREW PLANS! So how then can it be that when I spoke to Witchypoo in expansive tones about how the peach trees are to be trained in fans up the long wall between us and the Posh Neighbours, with kiwi vines dripping milk and honey into our upturned throats, she asked me exactly how it was all going to be watered - and all I could do was make peculiar movements with my mouth like a goldfish making an unexpected acquaintance with a kitten? How could I be so stupid as to miss a twenty meter long wall?


Okay, calm. Okay, fine. Under control. I have a spare tap connector halfway down the garden and I can run a pipe through the hedge to a length of soaker hose and cover the whole thing over with mulch; it'll just need to be drained every winter, that's all. Oh, and it'll have to be run from the mains. Oh, arse. I should explain that the Hollow sits on an ancient river bed that's now the side of a ridge, so we're growing in fine alluvial sand that holds water slightly less well than the London 2012 Organising Committee holds onto public money. To make the bare soil retain moisture and nutrients it has to be top-dressed with a mulch of organic material once a year at least, and any watering has to be done under the mulch if it's to reach the roots - so a soaker hose is ideal. After all, it's only money, right? Right?

Father's Day approaches, and I was totally unable to find anything for The Man Who Isn't Interested In Anything. It's my own fault for trying to shop in Poole, as its shops are heavily skewed towards tech services (music, phones, games), service industries (travel agents, banks, solicitors) and fast food outlets. I reckon that about two thirds of the retail space goes to the above rogues, leaving only a third trying to sell you your actual, physical things - and most of them only want to sell you plastic things in any case, which I am not keen to buy. But I am only the voice of one snivelling in the wilderness, and eventually I returned home dispirited and decided to Make Something - an activity that always seemed to make Dad vaguely pleased when I was a child. Confused sometimes, but vaguely pleased.

By happy co-incidence we are awash with eggs right now (happily not literally), so I decided to send him a jar of lemon curd - one of the ways we keep in control of our egginess, mainly because it's so easy to make. For every egg you need the zest and juice of a smallish lemon, 40g of sugar, 25g of butter grated straight from the fridge, and a teaspoon of cornflower. Bung everything in a reasonably big saucepan, put a moderate heat under it, and beat it like hell until it goes thick (usually about 3 minutes), then turn the heat off and beat it for a further minute. Bung into jars, leave to cool, put in the fridge. Pack and send to my Dad on the Isle of Man, although the last step is optional if you'd rather eat it yourself. Two eggs makes a jar, more or less, and it seems to keep for ages in the fridge - a month at least.

A word of warning! Do measure the sugar - last year I made a big batch where I didn't bother. It was still good, but caused much lip-pursing and was duly labelled "Cat's Bum Curd - It's a Bit Sharp!"

Cat's bums and calamine

Hokay. Digging done - check. Corn planted - check. A few physalis (chinese gooseberry) plants I happened to have lying around planted - check. Ground dug - around 15 square meters over several days. Ants nests disturbed - four (two black, two red). Ant wars accidentally started - one (the blacks won and are even now carrying off the reds' larvae as victory spoils). Emergency elderflower started - one gallon. Chicken pox spots dabbed with calamine - 134 (approx).


And so my day has gone. I am still trying hard to recover from the images thrown up by seeing the Magic Numbers singing the Beatles "She's Leaving" (currently available on BBCi) - I mean, nice version but some unfortunate faces pulled while singing by the two girls. Okay, so artsy types sometimes gurn a bit while performing but that snarl... Still, the snarl was as nothing compared to Romeo's mouth. The man has a beard which currently has a neat little hole in it, precision-drilled by laser to reveal a tiny little wet mouth. When he sings, he looks like a cat's bum. Oh, my.

There are more spotty things than ladybirds...

My children, for example. Yes, last week Number Two Son had the dreaded chicken pox. This was a very traumatic event for him (and thus for us) as, being 4, he makes a drama out of every crisis bigger than dropping a carrot. We dabbled him with calamine, dosed him with antihistamine, bathed him in bicarb, cooled him and soothed him and kept him calm and well rested until he began to recover. In return, he infected Number One Son. At fourteen, chicken pox is no joke and N2S is absolutely carpeted in angry red blisters and is quite depressed. Oh well, at least it saves us the trouble of trying to get him vaccinated later, as routine vaccination is only just beginning in the UK.


Just to save anyone asking the obvious question - no, chicken pox is nothing to do with chickens. The name is quite ancient, and the best best for its derivation is from the Old English giccin - "itching". Boring, no? But very, very itchy especially in older patients. N2S is upstairs as we speak, positively vibrating with the urge to scratch. Which, of course, he mustn't.

Debs is coming to lunch. A friend from work who lost her husband to cancer on Christmas Day, Debs lived most of her life in Catford and has never tended so much as a window box. Green things fill her with horror (especially when they end up on her plate) so visiting us is always a bit of a gamble for her. How do you cook for someone who goes pale at the sight of peas? When she comes to lunch I always tell her she's welcome to turn up earlier than lunchtime so long as she doesn't mind mucking in in the garden - which of course guarantees that she turns up at lunchtime on the dot. I despair, really, but it does give us an excuse to have a joint of meat.

Right - what's to do? I still have to dig over a 6'x9'' patch of ground - the final bit of the area I'm growing corn on this year. Eventually this will become strawberry patch B, but this year it's corn followed by green manure, next summer it will be potatoes and then the strawbs will go in in the autumn by which time it should be a workable soil. At the moment it's clumps of bone-dry compost in so much sand that it won't stay wet, so there's some work to do there!

I also have to start off my emergency elderflower champagne. The trouble with using wild yeasts is that they're fragile, and this year I succumbed to an old vice; I washed the bugs off the flower heads. You'll notice I don't tell you to do that in my recipe - I forgot I was using wild yeast, and unfortunately washed it down the sink. A few days into the alleged ferment, nothing was happening so I detailed WP to plop a sprig of unwashed flowers into each bottle - it's kicked off now, but it runs the risk of having a bacterial ferment in there too, courtesy of having sat for too long. But since it's so easy to make, I blagged a couple of big lemonade bottles, grabbed a few of the remaining heads from the tree round the corner, and set another batch off to soak - so today I just need to strain it and put some sugar in. Note to self - DON'T BE SUCH A NOOB!

Still, it could be worse. I could be asking you all to make this. I wonder if you use wild yeast in that recipe?


Come to think of it, there's a slow worm at the bottom of the garden...

We're Closed

No, my shadowy friend, you may not come in.

That's because we're closed. We're closed so that I can eat my lunch, in fact.



It does not matter that you can see the top of my head through the office window. It does not matter that you have a prescription that you would like me to fill. It does not matter if you make a pantomime of reading the sign again and checking your watch, or make the letterbox flap repeatedly in an annoying manner. For we are closed.

If I may quote Gordon, my first boss, as he spoke to an aggressive customer on his final day; "As an employee of **********, I can't apologize enough for the fact that you feel you've had poor service. As an individual, however, I don't need your lip. Fuck off, sonny."

Flowery Prose

Oh, there's something about planting out that really makes you feel like the garden's going somewhere. This weekend the curcubits have finally gone out - no, scrap that. I hate that word; let's say the "squash family" have gone out. The celeriac, calabrese and brussels have been transplanted, and the last sowings of peas and beans are in. It's round about now that something mysterious happens in the garden and it all begins to look like it's been done on purpose. *sighs*

Aphid balance is a while in coming, though. There are ladybird adults and larvae all over the place, but the blackfly have already started on the broad beans and ants are farming greenfly and scaly wossnames all over the place, so I still need to wage my petty little war for a few days more. Not to mention the female blackbird who's found my strawberry patch...

But the big feature of today was that we finally got round to picking elderflowers, about a fortnight later than expected (but that's OK, the cool weather put them on hold for a bit) due to lack of two litre fizzy bottles. This drink is one of the joys of summer, and it's a doddle to make with no special equipment at all. Simply take...

...well, one elderflower tree really. That's a picture of one, you can't miss it. In fact, if you have a sense of smell you can't miss the blossoms either because they have a strong floral scent - I'm tempted to say they smell "green" but shall refrain. Synesthesia is such a personal thing. Anyhoo, you only need 5 or 6 "heads" of flowers to make a gallon of champagne, so what are you waiting for?

Pick nice young flower heads, where the flowers have not yet started to drop petals or turn brown. Don't leave them sitting around for hours, or the smell will change and your poor cat will be thrown out into the garden, accused of incontinence*. You'll get pollen on you, but don't worry. It doesn't stain. Boil a gallon (4.5 litres) of water in a large pan and leave it to cool, then throw in the elderflower heads (having shaken any bugs off them first) and a couple of sliced lemons. Put the lid on, and leave it for a 24 to 36 hours before straining it through a clean cloth or a sieve (if you don't mind a few petals - I don't). Add one and a half pounds (750g) of sugar and two tablespoons of cider vinegar, and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Pour into bottles that will stand pressure - champagne bottles if you're posh, but to be honest I prefer lemonade bottles.

You're finished with the messy stuff now. Put the tops on to keep fruit flies out, but don't screw them on tight yet because the wild yeasts on the flowers go to work on the sugar - just stand the bottles in a corner and keep an eye on them until they don't seem to be fizzing any more - 7 to 14 days depending on the weather. Then screw the lids down, and put them somewhere without expensive carpet (in case they, you know. Explode). Give them another week or two to generate enough gas to carbonate themselves, and you're set - just refrigerate the bottle before you need it, and serve over ice with lemon. The drink is light and green floral, sort of like lemonade but with a beautiful flowery kick to it. Oh, and just a bit alcoholic. Try it once, and I defy you not to make it every year.

This year is quite a comedown for us, since we're only making a gallon - we usually make several (it keeps for up to three months supposedly but never gets the chance to at the Hollow. The very idea). This is because of another unexpected side effect of growing our own food and supermarketing less often; we don't tend to have many fizzy drinks bottles around any more, and will have to save some up for next year. I much prefer fizzy drinks bottles for elderflower champagne, because knowing when to screw the top on tightly is a black art. If you get it wrong with a glass bottle with a cork in it, you've got a sticky mess to clean up, possibly with broken glass in it. If you get it wrong with a plastic fizzy bottle, the "crimp" at the bottom pops out and the bottle may fall over. If this happens within the first day or so, you've jumped the gun so you need to let some of the pressure off daily until things slow down a bit. Most forgiving.

I have to 'fess up here and say that I've whipped the recipe from "Fruity Passions" by Margaret Vaughan & Mary Hardiman-Jones. This book's been out of print for a while now which is a real shame - not because it's a valuable recipe book (although it is) but because the text is screamworthy. I don't remember the BBC series on which the book is based, but I'd love to see it. MV comes across so much like Hyacinth Bucket that I refuse to believe that Patricia Routledge didn't base her characterization (or that of her earlier incarnation, Kitty, on MV. Let me give you a little sample from the recipe.

"Was it the tiny wild flower bouquets picked by Sarah's little daughter, the music, the food, the balmy night, the company or was it the Champagne that produced the spirit of happiness at that mid-summer soirée? Perhaps a little of each. Whatever, people still talk of it with pure pleasure..."

*Sorry, Treefrog. I haven't forgotten.

The Tax Man Giveth...

...and the tax man taketh away. Except sometime he forgetteth to giveth.*

Oho, it's tax credits review time. For overseas readers, "tax credits" are an insanely complicated system (with rules changing every year) of fiddling around with tax relief at source. Here in Britain, it seems to be part of Gordon Brown's attempt to elevate taxation from the merely complicated to the profoundly metaphysical. Every sodding year I get out my big wobbly pile of tax credit advices; every sodding year I try to get my head around the figures; every sodding year, I fail. I just can't understand them. Y'see, when we moved back to the UK I had to fill in the forms to get N1S and N2S back into the child benefit system, and a tax credit file was raised. Because your credit awards are based on your previous year's income in the UK and ours was of course nil... they showered us with cash.


Very nicely, thank you. Of course, we knew it was all going to have to be taken back, so that was OK. It was just nice to have it for a little while. The following year they sent us a rather opaque assessment notice saying that they were going to have to recover amount X from our future awards, and that we were only entitled to the basic child element award. Let's call it Y.

In the real universe, we'd just be getting further notices each year telling us that the amount outstanding was now X-Y, then X-2Y, X-3Y etc (an oversimplification I know), but no. Amounts carried forward from last year; amounts to be carried forward to next year; adjustments to the sum; and so on, until it became obvious that the amount outstanding could only be understood as

(Apologies to any mathematicians who read this. You may laugh now.)

I was a bit alarmed to notice that far from decreasing by amount Y each year, the amount we had to overpay was actually increasing each year, despite us not being given any more money. I picked up the phone, and the nice chap at the other end explained that no, it was just the way the debt was calculated that made it look like it was increasing, whereas it was actually falling. But not by anywhere near as much as Y. He tried to explain, he really did, but as we talked I began to realise something a little disturbing; he didn't really understand it either. I mean, he thought he did at the start of the conversation, but when asked some direct questions he began to flounder and eventually admitted defeat.

So now, a supervisor is going to do what earlier tax advisers had told me was not possible; he's going to generate a summary sheet with all the figures for each year stated in the same format*, and then I can actually see what's happening.

Allegedly.

Let's wait for something a bit more likely as well, shall we? Just in case.



* I'm trying out my American RPG script. Like it? I'm personally very fond of folks from the USA, but they do sometimes give me the giggles and their whole attitude to the medieval period is one of those times. The Heath Ledger film "A Knight's Tale" just sums it up for me - and a cracking watch it is too!

** One of the more endearing features of the tax credit system is that they change the format of the summaries every couple of years, so that you can't relate one to another. This makes trying to understand your tax affairs a bit like nailing jelly to a wall.***

***If you enjoy that notion, try this one.