How to Make a Simple Worm Bin from Free Materials

When you grow your own food, compost is always at a premium. Moisture retention, planting, mulching, seed compost, top dressing - you can never have enough of the stuff, and if you're like me you try to compost as much of your kitchen waste as you can. However, there are food items that you can't put in a regular compost bin because of the risk of attracting vermin; bread, rice, meat, fish, dairy, and anything that has been cooked. In the winter, even raw food scraps may tempt rats to move in, leaving you no option but to throw good organic material away. If you'd rather not, a worm bin may be for you.

Last year I made up a simple five-tyre worm bin which was entirely free to make, and it's eaten all the food waste from our family of four very successfully (with a little help from the chickens). Yesterday I broke the bin down to empty it, and split the active vermicompost (worm compost) to make two new bins, which will cope more easily while conditions are cold and will give me a little spare capacity in the summer. So, here's what you do.

Materials list:
Large paving slab (or use pre-existing hardstanding). Freecycle is always full of them.
Five used car tyres. Any local tyre dealership will be amazed you want them.
A bin lid, or similar. This is the tricky bit - keep your eyes open!

First, choose a level spot that will have some shade in the hottest part of a summer's day.

Unless you modify the design to collect the nutritious liquor the worms produce* then this will run into the surrounding soil - so it makes sense to place your bin in the shade of a deciduous tree.

Put down a hard base such as a paving slab.

This provides a rodent-proof bottom for the bin, and so needs to be big enough to make contact with the bottom tyre all the way round. Make sure that the slab is approximately level so that the bin does not lean, but allow a little slope for drainage.

Pack the rims of the tyres loosely with "brown" composting material.

The packing provides a low-nitrogen, high-oxygen bedding area for worms that are not feeding. You can use dead leaves, hay or unbleached shredded paper, which has been dipped in water and allowed to drain. In the photo below I have used spoiled straw, simply because I had some to hand. Put the largest tyre in the middle of the base to form the bottom of the bin.

Load the bottom tyre with starter.

This is a bucketful of material already rich in local composting worms, and there's no need to pack it down as the action of the worms will do this for you. There are firms around who will sell you hugely expensive "starting packs" of worms or worm coccoons, but there is nothing magical about them and you do not get many; far better to ask a friend or neighbour for a bucketful of compost that's just at the finishing off stage, when there are plenty of worms in evidence anyway. These worms are native to your area, and appear like magic when there's work to be done.

Place the tyres in a stack, making sure it is properly upright.

Use your smallest tyre at the top, if you have one. There's no special reason for the stack being five tyres high, other than it makes it a convenient height for most people; you could just as easily use six. However, this won't make the bin work any faster - that is governed by the number of worms, surface area, temperature and what you feed it with. You can always make a second bin!

Add the lid to the top, and secure it.

An old bin lid is ideal for this since it has a handle to loop an old bit of bungy through, but whatever you use make sure that it is big enough to shed water away from the middle in a rainstorm. The lid needs to be secure to stop rats from pushing it aside, but a couple of bricks and a piece of board work just fine. The bungy is hooked into two U-shaped pieces of strong wire which are pushed between the tyres, but I could just as easily have run a bit of bamboo through the middle of the bin and tied a length of baling twine from one side to the other.

And that's it, you're done.

A caveat; concerns have been raised about the possibility of toxins including selenium and volatile organics leaching out of tyre rubber, and this is something that you might want to consider. However, so far as I have been able to make out the problems with tyre rubber are associated with disposal, and through the creation of rubber dust when driving; the actual tyres themselves are pretty inert even when exposed to ultra violet light. A project to study the feasibility of tyre-chip field leach systems in New York State found that

• Leaching under conditions operative in leach fields does not contribute concentrations of semi volatile or volatile organic compounds that are of concern for groundwater protection.

• Leaching under conditions operative in leach fields’ results in higher metal concentrations. Of the metals measured in the leachate, iron and manganese were found in the highest concentrations. Although elevated over that measured for stone, the concentration of both iron and manganese were typically below secondary water standards.

This leads me onto the subject of where I stand on the whole notion of organic food production, something I'll cover in a later article.

Coming up - using your worm bin!

*One easy way to do this might be to dig out a shallow trench at the lowest edge of the base slab, and place a length of guttering topped with chicken wire (to keep out leaves and debris) into it. This could then run into a buried jam jar, and provided the gutter and exposed sections of the slab were screened from rainwater by leaning pieces of board, the worm liquor would collect in the jar. I will be trialling this in the Hollow as soon as time allows.

Obligatory cat picture!

The Opportunistic Ecologist

In 2005, Dan Box, Tully Wakeman and Jeremy Smith put together an article for The Ecologist Online called The End of Cheap Oil - The Consequences. It made for sobering reading, but attracted little comment; after all, peak oil (the top of the rollercoaster for oil production) was just a concept, as no-one knew when we'd hit it. Well, it seems that we hit it in 2006. The oil industry attacks the figures behind that study of course, but then again we've had headlines about oil companies lying about how big their reserves are just lately, haven't we?

For me, the most alarming part of this deal is how quickly production is forecast to decline - and how quickly the cost of crude will rise in response. If the models are correct, we needed to mitigate our usage of petroleum at least ten years before the peak to prevent reserves from being used up frighteningly quickly by the continued rise in demand. I'm afraid it looks like we just missed that particular exit on the economic freeway, but don't blame me; I'm not the one with the map.

And I want to be wrong about this, as with climate change. I so, so want to be wrong. A friend, moved by my recent attack of Weltschmerz, loaned me his copy of Michael Crichton's State of Fear and, for as long as it took me to read the book, I felt giddy with relief and optimism. Of course! The whole thing climate change thing is just a scam by environmental scientists to boost their funding! And then the book was finished, and ten minutes on the internet showed some of the scientists quoted in the book climbing over themselves to get away from the damned thing. So much for that.*

But wait - what's the world's reaction to the news on peak oil? Nothing, that's what. Most everyone is carrying on as usual and one could be forgiven for thinking that this is all just a bad dream. Nothing to see here; move along. The monumental lack of attention - public attention, at least - gives me a very strange feeling of being in a distinct minority while the machine trundles on regardless. It's a bit like Kevin McCarthy running down the highway at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers yelling "You're next!" while everyone carries on as if he isn't even there.

This collective indifference is the engine that allows intelligent people like Jeremy Clarkson to remain firmly in denial. I mean, look around you! Nothing is wrong; everyone is grumbling about the price of petrol, yes, but by and large they're still gassing up and buying their BMW 135i coupes (220g carbon per km, to save you looking) and planning their weekends in Tuscany as per usual. How could anything be wrong? And so Jeremy makes jokes about the Eco-Nazis and everyone has a little chortle at the greenies' expense. Everybody can't really be wrong about this. Big companies and even governments can't still be planning their finances a decade ahead on a set of completely flawed assumptions.

Can they?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. Nobody wants to be the first to point out the elephant in the room, because doing so would be career suicide. This is bad news, and nobody wants to hear it. We'll make changes all right, but not until things bite us in the ass. We'll stop driving our cars so much when we can't afford to do it, and not a moment sooner. We'll change over to buying fresh food every day or two when energy-intensive processed food is too expensive and we can't afford to run a freezer anyway. We'll stop drinking imported Mexican beer when... no, it's too horrible to contemplate.

So what's going to happen? Well, lots - read the article. In the meantime the word to go with, apparently, is transition - which sounds so much better than crash landing, don't you think? Major social and economic change is coming, and much sooner than anyone seriously expected. Some of it will be easily predicted; some of it less so. One thing is for sure - the successful entrepreneurs of tomorrow are the ones who look carefully at these predictions today.

Which is not to say that we are individually helpless. There are some changes that we can make personally before we have to that will make transition easier (not, please note, easy) for us than for those who wait until change is forced upon them. And so is born a new animal; the Opportunistic Ecologist.

Psst! Wanna buy a used wind turbine?

*The science in the book was slated by just about everyone who working in, or reporting on, climate sciences. At least somebody liked it though, since Crichton was awarded the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (2006) Journalism Award despite the book being a work of fiction. This made everyone laugh so hard that the AAPG subsequently renamed it the "Geosciences in the Media" Award.

Nestlé Makes Supermarket Cereals

Today was mainly given over to writing (or more properly speaking to research, since I didn't write a word). I hate it when you hit a brick wall over some insignificant yet vital detail, something that should be dead simple but isn't. I'm sorry to be so vague about what the hell I'm talking about, but apparently I shouldn't be talking to anyone about the actual subject matter of the book until contracts are signed, and that's probably weeks away yet. Ho hum.

The other meaningful activities were the making of a gallon of mead - my first - and giving blood at the nearest centre, where I made a bit of a spectacle of myself by coming over a bit odd, probably because I hadn't eaten anything since my Writery Biscuit Break six hours previously. Note to self - don't skip lunch when giving blood. Getting up off the couch was a bit of a trial as my legs were simply not obeying me, so it ended up being a cross between Day of the Dead and the Hokey-Pokey. I'm a bit fuzzy about the details, but the next thing I knew I was lying on a comfy couch with something sweet in my mouth, and with slowly mounting horror I realised it was a KitKat bar.

I don't do Nestlé, because of the Baby Milk Action boycott. If you haven't heard of that, by the way, and care a fig for children, you really ought to read it. Anyway, we won't have knowingly have anything made by Nestlé in the house - and they make such a lot of stuff! Happily, our continued move away from processed foods has cut out most of the Nestlé crap already, so it's not as hard as it used to be - but oh, but look at this. A list of supermarket "own brand" cereals that Nestlé supplies. I hadn't seen that - bugger, there go the bran flakes. It's back to shredded cardboard in the mornings for Hedgewizard.

So what did I do with my mouthful of KitKat? I ate it, partly because to not do so would have been a waste of food but also because the nurses were already giving me that look that one reserves for unexploded bombs, potential nutcases, and Richard E Grant. But I felt guilty doing it and made sure that I didn't enjoy it. Maybe I should have put some sand in my mouth to make sure. Too far? Yeah, maybe.

P.S. This entry included a twenty-minute break to deal with a mouse, which has eluded me but seems entirely unafraid of me (except when I dropped my torch, which scared the crap out of it quite literally). In the course of finding my mousetrap in the shed, I discovered that the lid was not quite on the worm bin, and there's a bloody rat in it - so there' now a rat trap in the bin too. I also discovered, while looking for a right glove to pick said mouse up with should I corner him, that we are the proud posessors of eight - count 'em - left gloves and no right ones. Someone, somewhere, has a funny sense of humour. And where are the Bleedin' Cats when all this is going on? Missing, that's where. Number One Cat has herself a comfortable billet with the new neighbours, who think I'm hard throwing her out at nights, and Number Two Cat has gone to eat Scrawny Next Door Cat's supper for him. It's a hard life.

Hedgewizard's Bookshop

Not Safe For Work

It's funny, but not a lot of people read the blog at the weekend. If you'd asked me before I had a stats system installed, I'd have expected the weekend to be the busy time - but no. And that, people, means only one thing.

You're reading this at work, aren't you?

Oh, you naughty people. I'll tell the boss on you, I will. Or I'll post porn to make you embarrassed to have the browser window open.* Actually, now that I think about it, that cheers me up immensely because instead of being a pursuit I'm a distraction. I never wanted to be anything else!

A strange day today - not in the Hollow, which has been straightforward enough (weeding in polytunnel, planting cyclamen, making rose hip syrup and kedgeree, cutting back raspberry canes etc), but in the news coming from my parental family - a foresight of death. "I think this will be my last winter," it went. Now, there'd be nothing strange about that if it was coming from my mum, who has been predicting her grisly end every time she has so much as a cold since about 1980 - cue an off-the-cuff rendition of You'll Never Miss Your Mother When She's Buried 'Neath The Clay.** But it wasn't. This is from Dad, and that's new. Mind you, it was via Mum, so it's possible - just possible - that he said nothing of the sort. After all, Mum loves to predict the end of the line for him just as much as she does her own journey to the Compost Heap That Needs No Turning.

Still - makes you think, doesn't it? I'm not sure about what, mind...

...oh, silly me. Obviously it makes you think about cats.

*What's that you say? One more page of porn won't make any difference? Shame on you. Shame, I say.

**Or possibly a new planned resting place for her ashes, of which she is also fond. So far we've had Roselawn (where her own mum is buried), under the cherry tree (sadly abandoned when said tree pegged it due to fireblight) and at the top of Slieve Donard. I ruled that last one out of the question, I'm afraid, because it's a hell of a walk. The last time I was up there it snowed on me, sideways. Before you accuse me of being cavalier with my old mum's dying wishes, let me just point out to you that she's not dying and has been making these trembling last requests for nearly thirty years now, generally to fill the gap between her second glass of scotch and the inevitable teary rendition of Danny Boy. I can't blame her for the Danny Boy thing though, it's genetically programmed to come out in all Irish people once they hit a certain age. I wonder how many more Christmases I have before I find myself upright at the dinner table, bleary-eyed and spilling sloe gin all over the place, reeling off and when ye come and all the flowers are dying while all my younger relatives look on aghast?

Self-flagellation

I'm so cross with myself. For weeks I have been trying to remember if the brass 4-way distributor on the water system for the garden should be taken in for the winter, and have put off doing it because I could not find the instructions that told me. This morning, the distributor took the decision for me by bursting one of the 4 connectors.

Arse. Now it's a 3-way distributor, until I can fix it. Why do I do this to myself? So on the job list for today is disconnecting that (water tunnel first), bringing in the last of the physalis and enough rosehips to make a spot of cordial, planting out the rest of the cyclamen on the Slope, and (if there's time left) planting out the Aquadulce broad beans and ryegrass green manure.

Later. Perhaps. Oh, and on the thread of escapism, here is Dunecat.

Panserkat

Oho, The Golden Compass looms ever closer. Excited? I am - but you can't see what I'm doing.

Like it or loathe it, Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is going to be big business, if New Line has anything to say about it. This is nothing but good news so far as I'm concerned (even though I don't subscribe to Pullman's atheistic take on gnosticism), because I yearn to be dazzled by visions of times and places far different from my own. High concept is all. When I was in my teens my father (a man I once termed impractically practical) used to shake his head sadly over my fantasy books and role-playing games, and accuse me of escapism - in his Presbyterian world view, a sin that fell somewhere between sloth and infanticide. And yet now when I try to speak to him about matters environmental his fallback position is always sure, it's all a cod - Irish slang for a confidence trick. Now how's that for escapism?

*

In other news, I've signed up for some member experiments with Garden Organic, something I neglected to do last year out of sheer disorganization*. I dearly wanted to take part in the project to calculate the carbon footprint of my garden, but in the end this lost out to "Using Comfrey in the Garden" and the garden bee survey, both of which are current projects in the Hollow anyway.

In other other news (Mike Myers' Fatbastard voice, as per Kitchen Witch's instructions), I've had an e-mail back from Peter Hopton, the managing director of Very PC, a retailer which advertises in The Ecologist Online and thence on my own column. Very PC makes a range of computers with much lower power consumption than standard PCs - but it only displays the power used by the green ones, not the regular ones. I thought this was a bit odd, since it doesn't really point out the profligate nature of your bogstandard ninjabeast, and I said so; here is Peter's reply. Well done that man.


Thanks Hedgewizard,

I'll see that the figures are done, but it requires quite a lot of practical work you see.
A typical PC uses in excess of 70W idle, some of the worst (like one particular dell dimension model) use 200W+ on idle, more when they are under load. Even the 'green' computers of our competitors are using 40W idle up to 65W on load. We are undoubtedly the technology leader.

Best Regards
Pete Hopton
Managing Director, Very PC


I can't give you armoured cats today, I'm afraid. But how's this to make Mog proof against rats?

* An asterisk? Floating about on its own? Such things cannot be in this universe! ...Actually, this just denotes my sudden realization that I have no stored versions of the entries in this blog. Even though most of it is transient crap, it's my transient crap and I'd be most upset if Blogger suddenly evaporated in a puff of methane and the whole thing just disappeared. I wonder how hard it would be to save it all in some way... any ideas?

** I lost the form, and when I lose something it stays lost. I once lost a small strongbox containing all the family's documents - birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports - whilst sitting at a small desk. Five years and a house move later, and they never turned up.

Frog Tarts

It looks like winter is on the way, but there's still time to indulge in a spot of celery soup if you're that way inclined. I grew celery for the first time this year; I'd always been put off by all that talk about preparing trenches and tying up, but this year I took a look at the mysterious self-blanching celeries, and the instructions basically said Sow, plant out, come back much later, eat which is really much more my kind of thing. And they grew a treat, even when practically everything else was drowning.

The outdoor ones are finished now, slain by the first frosts, but the tunnel-grown plants are still going strong. The supermarkets still have British celery too, so I thought I would share Witchypoo's recipe for a delicious cream of celery soup. After this the tinned stuff tastes, well, tinny, and as salty as hell. Have a go.

1 head of celery, chopped
1oz (25g) butter
2 onions, chopped
4oz (100g) cream cheese, or grated cheddar
½ pint (300ml) vegetable or chicken stock
½ pint (300ml) milk
3oz (75ml) single cream

In a large pan, fry the celery and onion gently in the butter for five minutes. If you happen to have a spare rasher of bacon around you could chop that and add it too, but it's not essential. Add the stock and simmer for 20 minutes, and then whizz in a blender until smooth. Stir in the cheese and milk and simmer for a further 10 minutes, then season to taste. Stir in the cream, and if you really want to push the boat out then a tablespoon or so of brandy really makes it something special. You can warm the soup through gently just before serving, but don't bring back to the boil after the cream goes in. Garnish with a swirl of extra cream, and perhaps a sprig of celery leaf too.

The best accompaniment possible to this soup (or any other, for that matter) is what Number Two Son calls star bread. This is made by Ian Temple who is Quite Possibly The Nicest Man In The World. Ian runs a little bakery in Weymouth called Sgt Bun, and quite often pops in to see me with a loaf or two simply because he's passing. Did I mention that he's a nice man? Earlier this year, though, Sgt Bun fell afoul of our most British of diseases, the men with clipboards. Trading Standards - acting, they said, on a complaint - told Ian and his wife Val that they would have to change the name of their Frog Tarts, because... well, of course. No frog in 'em.

The same went for the Pig Tarts (no pork) and surprisingly enough the Paradise Slices (not made in paradise). This rumbled on for a bit until the local paper got hold of it, and a petition was raised, and then suddenly Trading Standards revealed that Ian could call them whatever he liked if he provided a list of ingredients. Unsurprisingly, sales of the contraband cakes went through the roof. I'm not going to bang on about the importance of supporting local businesses (I should hope the logic is self-evident) but I can't help but wonder how Trading Standards would react to a complaint about a Tesco tiger loaf (no endangered stripy predators) or an ASDA hedgehog bloomer (no spiny mammals OR frilly knickers, how extraordinary). Anyone got time to kill this weekend?

Oh, I nearly forgot the cat! Yesterday Imperatrix said that the best part of cat bathing is the depressed rat look afterwards. Hmm. How about the angry alien look? Klaatu barada nikto! Klaatu barada nikto!

Introducing Cat Week

It's high time we had more cats on this blog, I think, and to remedy this I'm going to post a cat every day until the postman tells me to stop for a week, irrespective of what the post is about. Or longer, depends how it goes. We'll start with something completely tasteless, shall we?

How to Wash the Cat...

1. Put both lids of the toilet up and add a hefty squirt of pet shampoo to the water in the bowl.

2. Pick up the cat and soothe him while you carry him towards the bathroom. Note that unless this is the first time you have done this, some degree of protective clothing may be required. The author recommends chainmail and a welding helmet.

3. In one smooth movement, put the cat in the toilet and close both lids. You may need to stand on the lid.

4. The cat will self-agitate and make ample suds. Never mind the noises that come from the toilet, the cat is actually enjoying this.

5. Flush the toilet three or four times. This provides a "power-wash and rinse".

6. There is no 6.
   

7. Have someone open the front door of your home. Be sure that there are no people between the bathroom and the front door.

8. Stand behind the toilet as far as you can, and release the lid.

9. The cat will rocket out of the toilet, streak through the bathroom, and run outside where he will dry himself off.

10. Both the toilet and the cat will be sparkling clean. I'm working on a version of this which includes acid for limescale removal, but have temporarily run out of working cats.
    

11. It might be a good idea to take a holiday for a couple of weeks, or at least check inside your slippers before putting them on.

Needless to say, this article is ONLY A JOKE* and the instructions should NOT be followed. Cats are precious creatures with just as many rights as humans, including the right to be given food. Now. Oh, sorry, I wasn't supposed to type that? Well, just put the gun down and I'll feed you. No, you go first. Oh, all right then.

*As is Number Two Cat.

Trashcat

One of the things that's happened this week that didn't make it into my article about designed obsolescence is that the cats broke their cat flap. Well, I say that, but actually they had a little help from Number Two Son, who suffers from FFS (fiddly fingers syndrome). Being four years old, he can't help but touch things; at least it's an improvement from stuffing them in his mouth, but it's still irritating. This week he played with the pussy flap and left it in the locked position, but partly open. This was confusing for the Bleedin' Cats, who ended up trying to pull it open and then ram themselves through* while it tried to shut on them. The result - crack. Flap in two pieces.

So. I glued the bits back together again, and although the thing works the join is not all that strong - the first bit of rough treatment and I will have rather more ventilation in the kitchen that I'd like. After repair comes replace, but rather than buy a new unit, I got to wondering - how easy or otherwise might it be to just replace the damaged piece?

Onto the net. A few false starts, since Catmate don't own up to having a web site (or even existing at all). Clearly they don't want to hear from me, so it's off to the middle men. Googling "catmate spares" shows a few hits. Reading the text next to the link narrows it down a bit, and with a bit of persistence I have it down to three sites, with a price less than half of the new unit and environmental benefits to boot.

I'm surprised it was so easy. With so many products actually designed to die just outside their warranty period - oh, yes, designed - most manufacturers would rather you completely replace the unit that bother them with queries about piffling little bits. This is a relatively new concept, but within a few years the price of oil will make sure that it's a short-lived idea. I hope.

*And what could make a cat wish to leave in such a hurry? More tomorrow...

Waterworld

Oh look, it's raining. Again. Actually it's been raining hard for about 36 hours now, and I'll be glad when it stops. I've nothing against rain, you understand, even though I have not yet worked out how we're going to harvest it in any reasonable quantity; it's just that we're a little downslope from the rest of the development behind the manor house, and that means we take their runoff. This is fine most of the time, but when it's been raining for a few days and the woods are already saturated, a downpour means that thousands of gallons of silt-saturated water thunder down to join the runoff from the houses, and the silt trap under the road is soon overwhelmed.

Even that wouldn't necessarily be a problem, as the water drains through a pipe into a soakaway under our lawn, except that the soakaway is twenty years old and has no silt trap of its own, which means that it's now pretty much useless. It needs to be replaced, and I can't see us having the money to do it any time soon. In the meantime, once the soakaway backs up, water geysers up around the access point and cuts the one-inch-thick tarmac surface to pieces - something that can't be ignored, and a job for the spring.

So. The eventual replacement of the soakaway would seem to be a golden opportunity for us to install a holding tank for all that lovely surface water, which could be used to water the Hollow garden... except that an ex-neighbour warned me that he thinks that some of the other houses may have illicit underground connections into the drain, which means it may be contaminated with grey water. So - where do I go from here?

Quite apart from the issue of how safe or otherwise the water is, there is the matter of funding. From some casual asking around, it appears that everyone dumping their runoff into my property is just Part Of Life*. The fact that excess water sweeps down the path towards the hatch for the septic tank may not be, though; the septic tank serves about twenty homes, and the hatch is on my property. I wonder; if the excess runoff threatens to flood the septic tank, is it my fault? Or if protecting the septic tank means a new soakaway, is that something I can bill the Septic Tank Fund for?

Of such things property disputes are made. And occasionally armed seiges... thankfully, help is at hand, for Brits anyway. There's a handy forum called Garden Law where people knock these things around, and retired conveyancers et al give you their opinion. I last consulted these during the Saga of the Three Inches and they advised me to ignore Wingco completely. I'm glad I listened.

Coming soon... cat week.

*Albeit a shitty part. A mean, tobacco-stained, rambling, bum-groping, smelly-assed drunk part of life.

Bedside Manners

I reckon I make pretty good porridge (that's "oatmeal" across the pond). I was born in Ireland, but my family are Scots going back a few generations so the tradition is there, even though I'm now a cappuccino-guzzling southerner (and, if not proud, and least very comfortable with that). My Dad has his own way of making this delicious and under-rated dish, and I've modified it a little following a chat with the head chef at the Causeway Hotel a few years ago.

The trick, he told me in a conspiratorial whisper, is to use pinmeal oats with a long simmer, and pop a little whiskey* in two minutes before you serve it out. That's the luxury version, but here's mine. Give it a try, and then ask yourself why anyone would buy the instant stuff, which tends to be stuffed full of sweeteners and flavourings.

Starting well before it's needed - a couple of hours if possible - put a measure of good Scottish porridge oats into a pan, and add to this one measure of milk and one and a half of water (if we're low on milk I use only water, and add enough powdered milk to make up the difference). Bring up to the boil stirring the whole time, and then knock the heat down to its lowest setting and add a little salt*** before covering closely and turning the heat off. The scots would no doubt leave it on the heat for hours - or preferably overnight - because that extra bit of cooking makes the difference between porridge being chunky and gritty, and being smooth and creamy to the extreme. Regardless, I find that sitting for an hour or two in a warm place is satisfactory - one of these days I'm going to make a pot insulator.

At the last minute warm it back up - and I do add that splash of whiskey (or whisky, I'm Scots Irish, remember) on days when I'm feeling sorry for myself! Hopefully the stoical Stonehead will chip in to disagree with every single aspect of the above. He's a writer-turned-crofter up near Insch in Scotland, the keeper of a highly interesting self-sufficiency blog, and the recent victim of a hit-and-run driver. Do pay him a visit at Musings from a Stonehead and say hello from me.

All this is part of my bedside manner at weekends, along with supplying my love with a cup of strong coffee. First thing this morning Witchypoo was a bit low, owing to a heavy cold.

WP: Aargh.

HW: What's wrong?

WP: The stiffness has gone into my neck...

HW: You want me to rub it for you?

WP: Yes pleas... AAAAARGH... yes, right there...

HW: (rubs) You want some coffee?

WP: Ooh, that would be nice. Aargh...

HW: Still sore?

WP: Aah! Yes...

HW: (long pause) I suppose a shag's out of the question, then?




*There'll have been a sharp intake of breath from any Scots reading that, since I've just betrayed my Irish origins. Scotch is of course spelt whisky - there's no e in it - but the Irish version of the drink is spelt whiskey. The word whiskey, by the way, is an Anglicisation of the ancient Gaelic term "uisce beatha" which translates as "water of life". The two drinks are largely similar, but the Irish don't use peat in the malting process so the earthy undertone that it brings is absent from whiskey. Scotch whisky is of course much more widely known, but this is due to Ireland's "economic difficulties" which have only been resolved in the last couple of decades. If you've never tried a bit of Irish** then Old Bushmills is the best seller and relatively easy to get hold of, but my money is on Green Spot - an unmalted pot still whiskey and unmistakably Irish.

**...no, it's too obvious. Save me from myself.

***How much is very individual, but of course most people eat too much salt generally in the processed component of their diets. Here in the Hollow we really only eat processed stuff in emergencies, which means that bread is probably the biggest source of sodium; however Witchypoo, who doesn't eat much bread, has had to start adding a little salt to her food since our doctor ordered blood tests to find out why she was prone to cramp. The answer - surprisingly - not enough dietary salt.

Serial Stupidity

I've got my annual infection, you'll be glad to know.

No, not that one - the other one. You see, every autumn when things start to cool off it's time to hack back various things in the garden - corn stalks, squash plants, raspberry canes and so forth - and all of a sudden the compost bin is fuller than a sumo wrestler's lunchbox. It's time to turn it.

Usually I don't compost grass, because the soil in our lawn area is so poor (effectively subsoil) that it needs all the help it can get. Clippings usually get left where they fall, which helps build a humous-rich top layer and also has the happy side-effect of speeding up the mowing process. The only times that grass makes it to the composter are when it's been left too long between mowings, when it's covered in leaves, and the final cut of the year. Sadly, this means that there's never enough compost.

But, like wardrobe space, compost is something you can never have enough of. Moisture retention, planting, mulching, seed compost, top-dressing... the uses are endless. Sometimes I've been tempted to collect organic material from various places and bring it back to the garden, but once you realise how much things reduce in volume as they compost - a wheelbarrowful of assorted stuff generally makes half a bucket of the black stuff - it suddenly doesn't seem like such a good idea to walk a mile for some spent hops.

Green manures are also useful for making compost, and there are specific crops that can be used to make compost rich in particular salts; comfrey for potassium, forage peas for nitrogen, and so on. This is a good way to work any unused corners in the garden, provided you don't leave them long enough to become slug havens. I haven't done this until now, but next spring the comfrey patch will be mature enough to start harvesting - and I'll have to have a think about growing green manures in the gap between fruit trees. Thrift or folly?

Then there's the worm bin, which at five tyres deep has eaten around nine months' worth of kitchen waste from our family of four that wasn't suitable for the chickens. I'm impressed. It's just about time to empty it - another week or two, maybe - and make the second bin so that we can compost through the winter without worrying about rats. The beauty of the worm bin is that you can deal with cooked food and meat scraps too, which would otherwise attract vermin like a Whitby nightclub attracts goths. I'm a little apprehensive about the quality of vermicompost from the existing bin because I've seen so much conflicting advice about what to feed it with - I'll post about how I get on when I start the new one. The only problem with the design I'm using is that there's no sump so the liquor is wasted. Any suggestions?

By far the most unual addition to the compost bin so far has been the compost bin itself, as its taken it four years to begin to weaken due to rot. I can't say I'm unduly bothered about that since it was made of untreated scrap wood in any case (apart from the uprights, which are old tanalized fence posts) and my design allows for individual panels to be replaced, but it's as splintery as hell and every year I get a gash on my hand when I turn the compost.* And every year, the cut gets infected. I know from past experience that if I put a smear of antibiotic ointment on it it will get better overnight, but something about this bothers me. If I don't allow my immune system a bit of a tussle now and again, won't I end up as immunologically enfeebled as HG Wells's martians? So I'll put up with the stinging for a few days, and I'll defeat the invading bacteria on my own. In fact, I'll put that on my to do list in the sidebar.

Have a nice weekend. Oh, as a favour, can any car drivers please check that the tyres are correctly inflated? It will help to reduce your fuel consumption (the US Department of Energy reckons that each psi point costs you about 0.4% by increasing your rolling resistance, but that may be too conservative an estimate becase they measured it in track conditions), and fuel isn't getting cheaper any time soon.



*As I've said before, gloves are for wimps.

Capitalism Broke My Wheelbarrow

My wheelbarrow died today, while I was digging that hole I was on about in the mercifully fresh air. I'm a bit upset about this, because not only am I somewhat strapped for cash at the moment but I was actually quite fond of the thing. It was only a cheap one, but it was big and light and a cheerful colour, and it did the job very nicely thank you, even if the handle grips had a distressing habit of coming off when you were carrying heavy things. At the end of the day though, the fact that it was made of plastic was its undoing; one unusually firm knock in just the wrong place with a spade, and it was toast. However, its demise leaves me with a problem - it's my Rs, you see.

We all know the chorus; reduce, reuse, recycle. The trouble is I don't think I can reduce my need for a wheelbarrow - when it comes to shifting compost up and down the garden I'm afraid pockets simply don't cut it; it takes too many trips, and Witchypoo complains if the wash comes out with leafy bits in it. Re-using it seems unlikely unless we decide to attach a bungy cord to my belt, dress me up as a chicken with gigantic rubbery feet, and have me try to transport coloured water in it while being pelted with wet sponges by the neighbours. It's a Knockout re-enactments aside though, I suppose that just leaves recycling.

But wait a minute! What happened to repair? Was it ousted by reuse in a bloodless coup? Fair enough. But what about return - should I perhaps take it back to the store where I bought it, along with all the unnecessary packaging from my last foray? Or rethink - should I have bought a plastic one in the first place? And how many of these re- words are there in any case?

Googling "reduce reuse recycle" produces more than half a million links, which I think is carrying research a bit too far. But it also produces a lot of other highly worthy re- words, all jostling for a scrap of your attention. Replant, rethink, refuse, resist, respect, restore, rediscover, reinvent... oh, it goes on and on. Of course, the "waste hierarchy" had to be kept short and punchy otherwise our collective attention span might not have stuck it out to the final syllable. It's a real shame that refuse got left off the list, though, because in truth the problem is our consumerist society itself.


Yes people, capitalism broke my wheelbarrow. And I can prove it. If we take two companies in competition with similar products, in a bit to outprice each other they will both turn to mass production, then cut labour costs, and finally skimp on materials to get the price down. In other words, they'll end up selling tat as an entry-level product, and that's what most people will buy. I'm not saying that my nameless wheelbarrow was rubbish*, even if the colour made me feel like a walking advert for the company in question, but it clearly wasn't up to the rough and tumble of garden life. My guess is that the plastic is only designed to last for one or two seasons before becoming brittle - something that I believe is called "designed obsolescence". That's not a new trick, by the way - nature is doing it to you even as we speak, since if we didn't all eventually join the Compost Heap That Needs No Turning there'd be no room for our children and that godawful din they call music these days.

Where was I? Oh yes, refuse. We really ought to refuse to buy this kind of crap, since it's pretty much disposable. There are still retailers out there who sell quality gear - Manufactum is one of them although they can't help me with my wheelbarrow - and it's my intention to seek them out. So. Re-imagine, revitalize, reclaim... oh, it makes my head ache. I shall do the only sensible thing and renew the barrow with a piece of sheet plastic off someone's skip and some strong glue, and then retire to the study to recover with a cup of tea. I may even recline for a time.





* Just in case they send the boys round to catch me in a big net and take me away in their orange lorry - oh, now look what you've made me do.

Rather too many raspberries, really...

Oh, sweet Jesus, make it stop! (is weak with laughter)

I've had to quarantine myself in the office. Apparently it's been too long since I had lentils in any real quantity. Eaten regularly there's no problem, but have a lot of them after a long break and...

There are times, when you've eaten an unfamiliar carbohydrate, when you don't really want to be in the same room as anybody else. We all get them. Well, today I don't want to be in the same room as myself. Perhaps I should go out and dig a hole or something. Yes, that sounds like a plan. More later.

Perhaps quite a bit later.

Before I go, a quick vid about the science of escaping from your own farts. No translation required...

Recipe - Green Lentil Thing

Well, it's done: thirteen pots of mixed berry jam (raspberries, wild strawberries, blackberries) - and it tastes fabulous. Welcome to winter. Oh, on that subject, I thought I might share a seasonal recipe with you. I half-inched this from The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook (Colour Library Direct, 1998, available from all good grot shops) - I'm not vegetarian as such, but we don't eat meat every day and having our own produce makes veggie recipes essentially free.

Green Lentils with Fresh Ginger and Spices

175g/6oz green lentils
A pint of veg stock
2tbsp rapeseed oil (aka canola oil, vegetable oil)
1 medium onion
1" piece of root ginger, peeled and grated / finely chopped
1tsp garam masala / madras curry powder
1 tsp cumin seed
1 tsp coriander seed (crushed)
four cardamom pods, seeds only, removed and crushed
1 medium carrot, diced
400g chopped tomatoes, plus a squirt of purée (or replace both with a can of chopped)
50g/2oz chopped mushrooms (or 4 tbsp mushroom powder*)
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp cider vinegar

• Pick over and wash the lentils, put in large pan
• Just cover with hot stock, bring back to boil, cover and turn off heat
• Gently fry onion, ginger and spices until soft
• Sling onions etc into lentils, bring back to gentle boil (stirring)
• Add carrot, simmer for five minutes (stirring)
• Add tomatoes, simmer for five minutes (stirring)
• Add mushrooms, simmer until lentils are soft enough (stirring)
• Add soy sauce and cider vinegar, adjust seasoning, cook for another 2 minutes
• Serve hot with a little rice, naan bread, a slice of lemon, and a sprinkling of fresh parsley.

Dead easy, and very tasty indeed - even Number Two Son, that most conservative of eaters, loves it. The lentil cooking time varies according to how old they are (mine took 30 minutes) - I haven't grown lentils yet, but it's something I might try next year as I've seen the seeds for sale somewhere. Or was it chickpeas? I forget. Oh yes, I forgot the asterisk...



*If you're using dried mushrooms or powdered mushrooms, which I generally am, then they get thrown into the hot stock as soon as it's made, and left to their own devices rather than added as above. Wild mushrooms only have a short season, so every other year I pick lots of them and dry them for storage. Ceps are particularly good, but I'm not fussy.

Blowing a Milligan

A good sharp frost last night has meant the practical end of the primocane raspberries and wild strawberries, so I've taken them off the sidebar at last (actually I took the wild strawberries off a few weeks ago, which was premature). Raspberries in November? No problem - that's why I love Dorset so much. Okay, so there haven't been many at a time since the weather turned cold, but hey. I've been putting them in the freezer to save up for jam*, and when I pulled them all out last night I found I had seven pounds of them; not bad, when you remember I only planted them last winter.

For those who may not be aware of it, "raspberry" is Brit slang for doing this. What I didn't know, however, is that the word is originally cockney rhyming slang; raspberry tart, get it? I'm guessing the reason I failed to know this is that in my childhood the word was made "respectable" by Spike Milligan in The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town, a series of sketches performed by The Two Ronnies. I never met the man, but did hear a lovely story from a friend who was lost in the labyrinth of Broadcasting House (home of the BBC) and bumped into him.



Michael: "I say... Mr. Milligan?"

Spike: (turns) Is he?

Michael: Er...

Spike: Oh, I suppose he is. Yes?

Michael: I'm looking for Studio Eight.

Spike: Are you? Oh, good. (turns to leave)

Michael: (persisting) And I can't find it. Could you tell me the way, please?

Spike: (looks thoughtful) Let's see now. (pulls Michael close and points theatrically down the corridor) Go down this way, right to the end, and turn left. Right?

Michael: Right.

Spike: No, left. (describing a circle with pointing finger) And then all the way down that corridor to the end, and turn left again - right?"

Michael: (cautiously) Er... okay.

Spike: (smiles and continues, making a series of curious chopping gestures) Then take the service elevator halfway along - it's hidden behind a weather map, I think - and go up one floor. Left out of the elevator, along to the end, right all the way to the corridor, down the stairs, and turn left. (is now unmistakeably miming fly fishing) Then keep going until you see a sign just like this one. (gestures to the sign above the door, which says "Gentlemen")

Michael: Um... and then I'll be near Studio Eight?

Spike: No, you'll be back here -but I'll be gone by then. Good luck! (strides away)




*No, I have not forgotten about making sloe jam. It's next on my jammage list. Seriously.

MORE LOST

It's been a while since I actually said anything much about the garden, but that's because once again I've not been out there as much as I'd like. Hopefully now I can remedy that and knock a job or two off my list (at the bottom of the right-hand bar) because - at last - my freelance days are thinning out a bit and I can get on with some stuff. Watch me run out of money by Christmas, though!

That last post seemed to strike a few nerves, and I was reminiscing on another car trip from hell at work in Chickerell yesterday. You see, on the way to Yeovil there's a stretch of road that is prone to clogging up with traffic at the best of times, and one Saturday last summer it was worse than ever. There were road works signs up, and I could see the line of traffic stretching off into the distance. It looked bad. After a dispiriting ten minutes in the queue we noticed a road sign pointing left which said "East Coker 1.5 miles", and I remembered that on the other side of the jam there is another sign which also says "East Coker 1.5 miles". So logically, these two hypertext markers should be linked by the East Coker webpage, right?* So off we turned.

The road was pleasant, but full of twists and turns between high hedges, and more prone to ups and downs than Monika Lewinski. Within around eight seconds I might as well have been blindfolded. We drove on in this fashion for what seemed like an age, and eventually even Witchypoo was heard to say "Well, this is quite some mile-and-a-half!" One turn later, however, we came to a fork in the road. With no signs.

Now, in the apparently fondly-remembered days of the Second World War, the Home Guard in southern England took down road signs, as an act of sabotage to confuse any invading Germans, who presumably had not yet invented the compass. The signs of the day were wooden black-on-white finger posts, and they were carefully taken down and stored in local depots until the threat had passed, when they were dusted off and put back into use.

Except in East Coker. Perhaps there was a fire, or a particularly virulent local woodworm outbreak. Perhaps the Home Guardsman who stored them dropped dead, and even now there is an undiscovered hoard of the damned things bricked up in somebody's cellar. Regardless. There are no road signs around East Coker.

On the grounds that turning right would take us closer to the road we had just exited, we turned left. At the next turning, likewise innocent of sign, we turned right. And so on. And then, just as we had begun to lose the will to live, we entered the glory that was East Coker. At this point things should have got a lot easier, but as we entered the village we got stuck behind an extremely elderly gentleman in a small car, who was transporting half a dozen eight-foot fence posts by the simple token of passing them diagonally through the front passenger window to the opposite rear window, making it look as if the car had been impaled. It seemed that this made it difficult for him to reach the gearstick, and his dog, somewhat indignant at the arrangements, was attempting to sit in his lap as he drove. Or perhaps the dog was doing the driving and the man was only there to work the brakes, that might be more likely. In any case, the old gent was only managing about ten miles an hour and it looked quite likely that he would shortly snag his fence posts in the hedge. When we came to the next fork, we went in the direction that he didn't.

We then discovered that East Coker acts as some kind of vehicular singularity - a black hole for cars - as unsigned fork after unsigned fork kept leading us back to where we started. The only signs we saw during those hellish two weeks** inevitably said "East Coker 1.5 miles". And then - at last! - there was the flash of passing cars. We had found the Main Road of which Legend Spake, and turned out onto it only to find that we were on the same main road where our adventure began, except a couple of miles further away than when we started. We were so traumatized by the experience that when we eventually crawled back to the sign that had started all the trouble I didn't dare to say "I think I know where we went wrong". Even though I did.

Anyhow, as I recounted this story at work I opined that East Coker inhabited some dreadful twilight world from which it exerted a baleful influence over our world of sunshine and sanity, pulling cars and airplanes and quite possibly submarines into its ever-hungry maw - sort of like a Somersetian Bermuda Triangle. For those unfortunate enough to be trapped there, they probably have some sort of agricultural brain removal device, and then send you back into the world as some sort of evil clone. Just then Janet - remember Janet? - chirped up "I used to live round East Coker. There are tea rooms there."

That explains a lot, I muttered darkly.



*I know, I know, but my sense of direction is so poor I'll clutch at any mental model that shows even a glimmer of promise.
**So maybe I exaggerate. But only a little.

LOST

Still no date for the new series of LOST on Sky, dammit. I want to start my countdown, because this is one series I'm quite happy to admit to being hooked on. Will Jack and Kate get back to the Island? How did they get off it in the first place? Is Charlie really dead? Where the fuck is my car? Oh, wait a minute - reality intrusion!


Yesterday, Witchypoo and I made another of our frantic forays into civilization (Another? So soon after London?) to pick something up from Southampton, so naturally we combined it with a shopping trip to save fuel. As we started the second leg of our journey, we had to negotiate a roundabout* to get back onto the motorway.**

"Where are you going??" Witchypoo enquired sharply as I began to exit the roundabout. I stiffened. You see, we've been in this situation many, many times before. I opined that I was going to the city centre, and she informed me (rather sharply, I felt) that it was in the opposite direction. "But don't we have to go west now?" I ventured.

"Please," Witchypoo said with some scorn. "I did live here for quite a while, remember?"

I had to acknowledge that this was indeed so. "All right," I said, "I'll believe you. Although for the record, all the signs say that the centre is the other way."

"At last. Thank you," she said heavily as we pulled back onto the motorway. "Anyway, we're going to the docks, and there haven't been signs for those yet."

"Actually, there have. That was four junctions ago."

There was a long pause as the car gathered speed.

"Ah."

"Ah?"

But this is the exception that proves the rule; I have a poor sense of direction, I admit it. Coming out of any high street shop, I will automatically turn the wrong way***. If I'm visiting someone and have to ask where the bathroom is, I also have to ask how to get back. I could get disorientated in a broom cupboard, so it isn't often that I'm right and when these moments come along I have to savour them. The family are well used to me going round a roundabout three times while engaged in a heated debate about maps with Witchypoo, while from the back there is only the gentle hiss of air being squeezed out of the children as the centripetal force slowly crushes the life out of them.

We outdid ourselves a little later, though, and all because poor Witchypoo is on crutches right now. It so happens that two nights ago, in the maelstrom of angst and recrimination that is the preparation of dinner chez Hedge, she accidentally fetched the corner of the skirting board a hearty kick. There was a distinct squishy click and she proclaimed in a ringing voice that it hurt a little, or words to that effect. Within ten minutes swelling had set in, and before long her poor foot could have made it as a prop for Resident Evil: The Dorset Outbreak, no question. You know the chorus - "Accident and Emergency, x-rays, crutches".

At any rate, when we finally limped into a labyrinthine multi story car park in Southampton we were pre-occupied with WP's new disabled status, and the procurement of a wheelchair to make things a bit easier. Witness, then, as we walk away from our vehicle without checking for the floor and area numbers. Behold as we take a ride in a small and tatty elevator. Marvel as we totter across a footbridge. Observe how, as WP negotiates the hundred horrors that make car parks so much fun on crutches, the only one who's supposed to be paying any attention is, er, me.

Fast forward four hours to the moment we are supposed to be leaving Southampton, having set aside enough time to reach Number Two Son on time, plus half an hour for traffic. Except, as we now realise, we have no idea where the car is. None. On closer examination the car park is the size of an aircraft hanger, and is entirely symmetrical. Each floor looks identical. Got that mental image? Good. Now insert into the picture a man so hopeless that he gets lost tying his own shoelaces, and subtract from the picture the sainted wife who usually rescues him in these situations, but is now waiting helplessly in the Shopmobility hut.

It was a sad, sad moment I can tell you. Actually, it was seventy minutes' worth of sad moments all piled up together into a soggy, tottering heap in which I stalked through one identical cavernous chamber after another, apparently climbing three levels only to find that I was back where I started. The car park had obviously been designed by Maurits Escher. It was only after I had developed painful blisters from my sparkly new shoes that we finally realized that, after all that, we hadn't gone back across a footbridge and thus were in the wrong car park entirely.

The case for the defence rests, m'lud.




*For non-Brits, this is what we call any sort of gyratory system. Because of the crowded road network in the UK our roundabouts specialize in narrow, non-standard lane systems (often as little as eight feet wide) with extensive traffic signage and sometimes contradictory road markings. Add to this the fact that here we drive on the left, and that other road users seem to think that if they drive close enough to your vehicle you will climb up your own bottom and evaporate, unfamiliar roundabouts can be a stressful experience.

**Hello again. We have to stop meeting like this - people will talk. The wiki says that motorways are "high capacity roads designed to carry fast motor traffic safely." Here in the UK however, they serve a dual capacity as car parks and as a storage facility for supermarkets - at any given time, most of the nation's fresh food is somewhere on the motorway network - with food transport accounting for 40% of all UK road freight. This is what happens when an industrialized nation with an extensive rail network decides that it's not prepared to maintain it, and rips it out - with hilarious consequences! - as portrayed in the alleged 90s sitcom Oh! Dr Beeching!, the only hilarious part of which was that it was ever made in the first place.

***Unless I anticipate this and deliberately go in the opposite direction, in which case it will turn out that I was right in the first place.

Hedgewizard in the City, Part 3

A few weeks ago, Witchypoo and I ventured to the capital to sit behind a very pleasant but sadly wide gentleman to see the spectacle that is Lord of the Rings, the Musical. I had a few reservations about this, I'll be honest with you, because I'm a Tolkien fan. Not the scratchy-robe-and-latex-pointy-ears kind of fan, I hasten to add; I just enjoy the books and everything that has spun off from them over the years. A little too much, WP says over my shoulder, but ignore her. She doesn't understand. Anyway, I was a little concerned. Was I going to a buttock-clenching Wagnerian feat of endurance requiring a survival blanket and some Kendal mint cake, or - worse - a thigh-slapping Oklahoma-style romp? Were the orcs going to be required to sing?


In any event, LotR was neither of the above. Despite a folksy start in the Shire (and yes, I believe one or two thighs did get slapped) it turned out to be a very watchable experience. Noisy, sparkly spells were cast, audiences were menaced by orcs, elves inexplicably bungy-jumped from trees, and diminutive west-country gentlemen did battle with a very unpleasant giant spider. And no, they didn't make the orcs sing. If I had to mention one grumble about the show it would be that it, like the books, is simply too short. This led to a slight undercurrent of pantomimish haste that bubbled up from time to time. "Master Frodo has been struck down by the Morgul blade, and is near death! But wait, here is Elrond to heal him with his magical powers!" Whoosh! "Come on, Master Frodo, get the fuck up! There's only ten minutes left before the interval!"

At the end, the audience rose as one and applauded until our hands were sore. Not because there were any truly great performances (there simply wasn't time for them), but because we all appreciated that the cast and crew had done something very, very clever. There never was a giant spider, you see, nor great wizards nor tree giants nor anything like them* - it was all illusion but, for a time, they were able to make us believe it. It came as a bit of a wrench to leave the theatre and the titanic battle of good versus evil behind - but then we walked out into the aftermath of the England versus South Africa Rugby World Cup final, which at least softened the transition. It got me thinking about illusions, though.


Consider the archetypical british countryside, for example - fields, moorland, hedges, that sort of thing. There's a temptation to think of it as eternal and unspoilt, but of course that's just an illusion that we all buy into; it's all man-made. If the fields weren't cultivated, the moors grazed by sheep and the hedges hacked back to within an inch of their life once in a while, the whole thing would revert to overgrown scrub in five years. Take the dispelling of the illusion one step further, by reflecting that the whole landscape - fields, heath, woodland, all of it - exists only as a thin skin of topsoil two or three feet deep that a JCB could remove in the blink of an eye in what landscapers blithely call a "site scrape". They do it all the time, generally to make space for more roads and supermarkets (of which there is an obvious shortage).

And what about us? As I travelled back through London I reflected that our civilization is no less illusory than the Balrog that breathed a poisonous cloud of bits of black paper all over poor Gandalf on stage. Some futurists and politicians will tell you that our technology will save us, that pollution-eating nanobots will lock away all the carbon and the nuclear industry will give us all the power we need to continue indefinitely. But it isn't true. The unbitable bullet is that there are simply too many of us on the planet, and according to the Energy Watch Group (an independent and startlingly well-connected advisory body) we passed the peak of oil supply in 2006. Change is coming. The only thing that stands between us and entropy is human civilization, and civilization is an engine that still runs on fossil fuels. Can we really give it a major rebuild in the little time we have left?

So what am I saying? Well, basically, take a look around you and see what the cast and crew have managed to make you believe is real for a while - isn't it clever? - and give the boys and girls backstage a big round of applause. All good things, and all that.

Still - bungy-jumping elves, though. That was worth seeing.





*The orcs on pogo-boots were real, though. No way would any human actor have put up with that kind of treatment.

Mouldyberry Wine

It's been weddings all day today. Weddings on the radio, weddings on TV, wedding talk at work... so I thought I might as well continue the theme. Sort of, anyway, by featuring something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. Because, you know, I can. So.

Something old; My gardening trousers. Actually they're not as old as they look - they're more abused than anything else, really. I try not to wash them too much these days as it's frankly only the stubborn understains that keep the garments together at all, but now and again I have to succumb and surrender them to the none-too-tender ministrations of the Hotpoint. Such as last week, when it was discovered that I mysteriously smelt of fish - a mystery solved by my eventual admission that I've been dispatching large numbers of caterpillars over the last couple of weeks, and wiping my fingers enthusiastically on my trews. Who would know?

Something new; My web counter. Invisible without the correct password spoken at the full moon in elvish*, it nevertheless tells me for the first time that - shock, horror! - people actually come here and read this garbage. This is something of a shock.

Something borrowed; Kitchenwitch's writing style, and The Ecologist Online's green credentials - in each case, until I get some of my own.

Something blue; Or more accurately, something that was briefly blue. Yes, it's my long-awaited recipe for Mouldyberry Wine, taken verbatim from my Book of Mad Scribblings, volume 3.

• Simply take 12 lb of frozen berries** (goose-, red- and black-) and put in a box while the freezer defrosts.

• Remember them a week later and sniff them suspiciously.If possible, get someone else to sniff them too so that it will not be completely your own fault.

• If not actually rancid, pour into a bucket and mash up before adding 16 pints of boiling water in an effort to kill off whatever was already eating the berries.

• Leave for a day or two, vowing not to forget about it.

• Two years later, rediscover with some surprise.

• By now the fruit sugar will have fermented with some exotic wild yeast, but if it somehow hasn't perished add whatever sugar is open in the kitchen - 3lb 2oz - and top to 3 gallons with water.

• Start with new starter bottle.

• Two weeks later, try to start again with a restart-type yeast and a heater to help it along.

• Another two weeks later, admit the terrible truth; you put sugar into it the first time round. It isn't stuck, it's finished.

• Discover that against all the odds you have made a reasonable dessert wine, albeit one with a very faint, smoky aftertaste. Hmmm...

• Recruit a reliable drunk for safety testing before drinking yourself. Obviously.
  

*A helta ar caita caimanna! (Admit it, you're curious.)

**Accepted from various nice people in accordance with pagan dietary restrictions.

The Worst Game in the World

I'm rooted to the spot. My teeth are chattering. I need to know what's round the corner, but I can't summon up the nerve to look. I need to empty my bladder.

Rewind.

I'm not one for keeping my PC hugely up to date, for several reasons - including those of finance, stupidity and, er, not really needing to anyway. Once every decade or so a situation arises that said PC cannot cope with, and I then go through the humiliation of asking a PC-building friend what it'd take to bring my model back up to Kick-Ass-Ninjabeast status. Said friend then laughs, points out kindly that the PC is now so old that it has more in common with an abacus than a modern machine, and points me in the direction of one of the retailers who specializes in selling under-spec bundles at unbelievably low prices to morons like me.

Sigh.

Happily, this means that when it comes to PC games I'm in the happy position of being five years or so behind the times, making it the cheapest form of entertainment known to man. Not that I actually have the time to play the things, you understand. I just like to look at them... well, okay, the last bit was a lie. But anyway, this week I broke open the tomb of Thief: The Dark Project, which came out in 1998. It's rather good.* It's first-person-perspective (which I like), and it's not a shoot-'em-up, which I thought would be a good mix. My reasoning is thus.

My matey Bivouac is a past master at shoot-'em-ups like Quake and Hexen and so forth (see? See how old I am??), and watching him play is like a masterclass. The level loads, and in he goes.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Bits of alien/zombie/nazi/vicar** rain down all around, but before the last piece even stops rolling he's out through the door strafing left to avoid the monsters homing in on the sound. And he's shooting as he goes. Blam! Blam! Blam! Powerup! He's trundling up the steps and into a new area - it's a killing zone, a sort of area from which mutated boy scouts are raining frag grenades on him. But he's not there any more, no. Pausing only to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at the crack he's noticed on the far wall, he's activated some weird decoy thing that they're all still shooting at, while he gets round behind and slaughters them with a pair of nail scissors. You get the picture. Five minutes later the level is clear, he's clocked all the respawn points and collected all the ammo and healing, and he's moving on.

Did you spill my pint?

Then it's my turn.

The doors open and the starting monster shuffles forward, weapon raised to kill the player... but there's no-one there. The monster pauses, confused. It's been created just to kill the person behind the door when it opens, but it can't see anything. After a moment it turns and walks slowly in the opposite direction, its AI having dropped into a mindless patrol mode.

...after a few minutes I peek round the door from where I was crouched behind it. Nope, still too close.

...another few minutes and it's reached the far end of the corridor. It's now or never. Blam! Blam! Blam! I wonder if I killed it? It's too far away to see. I'd better wait another couple of minutes and see if it comes back down to find out what shot it.

...no. Must have got it. Cautiously down the corridor. Oh good, there's the gibs. And some healing, that's nice. Now I'll just...

...aargh, Jesus Christ! Where did that come from? Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! I can't even see it any more! What way am I facing? Are those my shoes I'm looking at? Blam! Ow, yes, those're my feet. Fix viewpoint! Fleeeeeeeeeeee! Thank heavens for that corridor - now I can frag the damn thing when it comes in after me. Any minute now.

Aaa-ny minute now. Ah, here it comes. Blam! Blam! Blam! Right. Time for another look outside. Time elapsed so far? Twenty-eight minutes. I may even finish the level this week.

You see, I'm a naturally cautious person when it comes to getting my arse kicked, virtual or otherwise, so it made perfect sense to me to buy Thief because it's a sneak-'em-up - the aim is to get into a castle or whatever, find the thing you're there to steal and get out again, without raising the alarm. Perfect for my sneaky-sneaky-cautious approach.

At last, someone I can bully.

Or so I thought. Actually, it makes me worse. The guards are tougher than me, so I'm rightly afraid of them, and any noise brings more of them running. The consequences of failure are... so... *weeps* I'm so frightened! I've been hiding behind this tapestry for two days now and I need to go wee-wee but even that probably makes a noise. A bit of help, here?




*By my standards, which have just about caught up with 1998.

**I said that last bit out loud, didn't I?