Sad Songs

Updated! If you have contributed to - or just like the idea of - the Window In Your Heart slot, please don't forget to link to it using the instructions in the post. I'm touched that people are willing to share some of these very intimate songs and have been very moved by some of them, including Rentman's poem, probably written by Mary Elizabeth Frye. In fact, I put a few of the songs onto my little Sony MP3 player to listen to in the garden, but have since had to take them off because staring out across the fields feeling wistful isn't getting me anywhere but cold.

I know that this sort of thing isn't for everyone, since to "get" the vibe you have to have been heartbroken, and to have come to terms with it afterwards. Too often sadness gets brushed under the carpet in our society, as if it's a disfigurement that should be hidden and never spoken about; but although sadness can be painful, there is also a beautiful poignancy about it too. Some things should be felt, and welcomed. It's okay to be sad.

Sleeping With The Enemy

Here in the Hollow, mice are a perennial problem. Largely this is the fault of the ginger lawn ornament fondly known as Number Two Cat, who brings them into the house and then loses them, or has a nap, or just plain forgets about them; but when it comes to catching and ejecting them then inevitably both cats are missing and it's down to yours truly to sort things out.

So. I always have funny dreams when it's windy (reversible ice-creams and geese that wash dishes, that kind of thing) and Friday night was blustery indeed. After two hours tossing and turning, I woke up in the small hours convinced that something had just run over my bare arm, and I sat bolt upright and switched on a light. There was nothing to be seen, and the silence was broken only by Witchypoo threatening me with violence if I didn't turn the light off - so I did, and slid back into an uneasy half-sleep where I wasn't sure if I was awake and listening to scratching noises, or asleep dreaming about having a mouse in bed with me. It wasn't until said mouse had a good scratch a few inches from my head that the matter was settled, and I promptly ejected myself forcibly and did the Mouse-In-The-Bed dance (for those not familiar with it, this is quite similar to the Mouse-In-The-Trousers dance, except with less screaming).

Properly awake at last and somewhat wide-eyed to boot, two minutes searching showed a few mouse droppings under the bed (although the culprit had naturally hidden when the light went on), so we did the peculiar search routine that everybody does when a mouse is around until I decided that a trap was the only way to go, and stumped off down the garden with a torch to get one. The torch is a fairly feeble little affair, so you can imagine my surprise when I walked into a tangle of brittle twigs.

"Ah," I thought, "the walnut tree has dropped a branch." This isn't that unusual; after all, the tree has been shedding bits of itself on windy nights for years. I tried to go round, but met only more twigs. It wasn't until I lifted the torch up a bit that I could really see what had happened.

"You were gone ages," said Witchypoo, as I returned to the bedroom with the trap. She had by now adopted the standard "mouse alert" position (stout footwear, clothing clutched tightly to body, ankles together and arms tucked in, anxious expression).

"The walnut tree's fallen down," I told her, wasting no time.

"What?" she said. Actually it was more of a high-pitched disbelieving whimper, really.

"The walnut tree has fallen down," I repeated.

WP made the whimpery noise again, and then collected herself. "How much of it?"

"All of it," I told her. And then, for the sake of clarity, "It's fallen down."

We trooped outside, where WP made the whimpery noise quite a few more times - and at one point when a single twig fell, she actually clutched me in terror. It wasn't really until the next morning that I could see just what had alarmed her so, which for the sake of suspense I'll post here.

Beer Prices Set To Rise

I've just had a bit of a shock. According to Mark Hastings, director of communications at the British Beer and Pub Association, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK could rise from £2.20 to £4.00 over the next twelve months. I'll pause now for the screaming and the running in and out of buildings, such as accompanies earthquakes.

...okay? Right, let's get on. Breaking things down, the BBPA says that the increase is happening because various things are getting very expensive very quickly - such as;

Barley and hops. A third of the UK's barley production is bought by the brewing industry, and prices are increasing partly because farmland being turned over to biofuel production. So that's an early post-peak problem then.

Metal. Kegs and cans are now valuable enough to be targeted by thieves - oh, joy. Thanks guys.

Transport. Beer is heavy and bulky, and as fuel prices rise... well, you get the picture. A post-peak problem again.

The importance of beers and ales to civilization can't be overstated. In medieval London there was one public house for every fifty inhabitants, and weak micro-brewed ale was the main liquid consumed by everyone, including children, with only the very poorest having to make do with water. There was a very good reason for this; it was safer. Water-borne infections such as cholera could and did kill you, whereas the water in ale had been boiled when the mash was made and then kept preserved somewhat by the alcohol from fermentation.

"The future lies in the past."

Learn to like homebrew, that's what I say. The brewing industries have responded to the squeeze on them for the last few years by merging and laying off jobs, forming every-larger brewing consortia and centralizing their distribution. But these pressures are not going to go away, so while this response might seem like good sense today, from a slightly longer-term perspective it's absolutely mad. The future lies in the past, since before long small breweries will be able to distribute their wares to local premises and homes much more cheaply than the big boys can lug the stuff up and down the country. In fact the Hook Norton Brewery Company may well be having a bit of a laugh shortly, since it delivers all of its beer by horse-drawn cart (provided the biofuel boys don't scoff all the oats first, that is).

So it's kit beer for the Opportunistic Ecologist, at least for now; in the longer term, entrepreneurial types might also consider setting up a microbrewery, barley farming or possibly moving into aluminium theft. Wild hops do grow hereabouts, so maybe next autumn I'll have a try at a few gallons of beer from scratch. Of course my throat syndrome may make testing difficult, but heck - I'll soldier on. Never say I don't do anything for you.

A Song of Trees

Well, here we are on the arse end of Christmas - I hope it hasn't been too traumatic for anyone. Just about everything that I've been up to over the last week has been to do with trees; digging stumps out, planting new ones*, and wassailing them too - and I'm sure it will surprise nobody when I say that the last option was by far the most fun. Of course we all know just how much the Hedgewizard enjoys digging, but I'm afraid that traipsing around the Hollow Garden with a bunch of reconditioned hippies bearing cakes and cider beats it by a long, long way.

For anyone who isn't aware of it, wassailing is an extremely ancient custom (predating the celebration of Christmas in these Isles, if not Christmas itself) which involves visiting neighbouring houses and orchards in order to sing and offer your blessings to the fruit trees; or, if you prefer, making a lot of fuss and noise until bribed with food and drink to go the hell away. Traditionally it wasn't done until "Old Twelvy Night" (17th January) but knickers - I'm so confused about the date myself that I hadn't realised I was supposed to be in work this morning, so I doubt the trees begrudge me a couple of weeks.

And thus it was that the Hedgewizard came to lead a bunch of pagan folk, fluffy of robe and full of beard**, around the boundaries of the Hollow with smouldering torches and drums, exorting them not to fall over chicken fences and concealed pipes, while from time to time shrieking "Pears!" or "Peaches!" as we hallooed yet another undistinguished twig. Oh, I do look forward to when the poor things start to look as if they were planted on purpose...

*In case anyone's interested; an american elder for year-round elderflowers, a Tommy Knight for the latest of late apples that should keep until early June, a highbush cranberry that will be used for a spectacular wine, an Avalon Pride peach which is allegedly completely resistant to peach leaf curl, a Morello cherry for cooking, a Sunburst cherry for eating, and a Victoria plum for just about everything, including prunes. We may not get much of anything, but it won't be for want of trying!

**And that's just the women! Joking. Don't beat me.

Sloe (Gin) Jelly Recipe

Let's just get the US/UK thing out of the way, shall we? Brits and Americans mean exactly the same thing when they use the words jam and jelly, the first having fruit pulp included, the second being strained off the pulp. Where the confusion occurs is that Brits use the word "jam" as a catchall term for both products; whereas in the US "jelly" is the generic term. Got that? Right. Now that it's out of the way, this recipe makes a jelly, simply because you strain it off the pulp.

Sloe jelly is an unsung hero, partly because people don't tend to favour ramming themselves into prickly hedges as much as they used to, and partly because you wouldn't normally - normally, now - get much jam for your pains. This is a shame, because it's quite possibly the finest fruit jam you can make; tart, tangy and mysteriously dark. The good news is that there's a cheat, which is the addition of cooking apples. Apple brings out the flavour of the sloes and mellows their bitterness, helps the jam to set, and plumps the jam out to three times its original volume, making those prickly little prizes go a lot further - and here's how it's done.

Take one kilo (or two pounds) of pricked, frozen or frosted sloes. Add just enough water to cover, and simmer until pulpy (you may need to mash a bit). Once that's done, add two kilos (four pounds) of washed, chopped apples and the juice and peel of a lemon and again simmer until pulpy.

Strain off through scalded jelly bags or fine muslin into a suitable container. You shouldn't squeeze the bag to hurry it up or you will have cloudy jelly, so leave the whole deal to dribble through overnight.

Next day, measure the juice and add 450g (1lb) of sugar per pint, and stir it over a medium heat until it comes to the boil, skimming off any scum. Boil until setting point is reached, then ladle into hot jars and seal.

One of the nice things about this jam is that you can use sloes that have been drained out of sloe gin; you might expect there to be less taste to them, but you'd be wrong. The recipe is exactly the same, but the gin gives a richness and complexity of flavour to the jelly that might surprise you. As an optional extra for the regular jelly, you can add a couple of tablespoonfuls of Crème de Cacao Brown. Go on, give it a try!

<< Previous sloe page

Sloe Gin Recipe

Sloe gin is one of my evening pleasures. Of course you can buy perfectly good sloe gin in the supermarkets here these days, but there are two problems with this; the first is that it's probably a fad that will run for a year or two, and the second is that it's relatively expensive. Still, the taste is quite good so if you just want to know if you like the stuff you could do worse than try it - but really, why bother when it's so simple to make and gives you the added bonus of walking through the world's secret places?

Take a large jam jar, or a kilner jar, and fill it with pricked, frosted or frozen sloes. I've always maintained that life is too short for pricking sloes*, so I've found that a good hard frost or an overnight stint in the freezer work just as well at cracking the skins, which is what it's all about. Do resist mashing the sloes though, or you'll have a sludgy haze in the drink that's quite a bit of trouble to remove.

Add some unrefined sugar to the sloes. I use about six tablespoons per pound of fruit, but you have the opportunity to sweeten the drink more at the end - at this stage it's all about drawing out the flavour of the berries.

Completely cover the fruit with gin. Unlike using whisky, the gin flavour will more or less completely disappear so you might as well use the cheapest gin you can get hold of. Now put the top on tightly, give it a good shake, make sure that the fruit is still covered, and put it on your kitchen windowsill. The reason for the windowsill instruction is that you'll need to shake the jar once a day for the next three weeks or so, but once that's done then put it away in a cool dark place and mark your calendar three months ahead to remind you to come back to it. That's right - three months - although if you're in a hurry six weeks will do.

When you come back to the jar, shake it once more and then strain the fruit off; don't throw it away because you can use it for making sloe gin jam (of which more this evening). If the liquor is clear, good. If not you'll need to pour it through a coffee filter, moistened with vodka to avoid losing too much of the fruit gin wetting it. Adjust the sweetness to taste with unrefined sugar, bottle, and label. Ideally you'll put the bottle away for another few months to mature - it does improve - but if you really can't wait the drink is essentially ready now.

Enjoy your taste of autumn, and cast your mind back to when you picked the sloes - as I've been doing as I write this post and sip a little of last year's brew. Cheers!

* ...is this too obvious a joke to make?

A Murder of Crows

The penguins are trying to invade again. It happens every year, but I'd forgotten about it until I had this conversation with Number Two Son last night.

Hedge: What d'you want to be when you grow up?

N2S: (a pause) A policem... a firem... (longer pause) ...a penguin.

And it's no bloody wonder, because we're being bombarded by bloody penguins in greetings cards, on telly, even in the advent calendar we bought for him in an unguarded moment. It was an impulse purchase because we found one that counts down to New Year rather than Christmas, you see, but once N1S started to eat the little chocolates we discovered that they were all the standard Chrimbly crap; a star, a donkey and all that, and then quite unexpectedly - a penguin.

Where did all this penguin nonsense start? Oh, of course, it's supposed to be related to the North Pole. Now I get it, except that there aren't any penguins at the North Pole. Armoured bears, possibly, but no penguins. Wrong pole completely, I'm afraid; penguins are entirely confined to the southern hemisphere, although I have just passed a happy moment or two imagining what polar bears would make of them.* No, here in the Hollow we have crows at Christmas.

The crows have been massing for two days now, and I'm wondering if there's going to be a crows' court. If you've never seen one of these before, it's quite remarkable; a large group of the birds gathers - fifty or more - in a flat open space. After a while they move apart to leave a clear circle in the middle, into which one crow walks with its head bowed submissively. Up until now it's been a fairly noisy event, as you can imagine, but once the single crow moves into the middle the rest of the group falls into a sudden and eerie silence.

Presently the crow in the clearing begins to speak, cawing and muttering, and for as long as this goes on the rest of the birds are silent and relatively still. Eventually, though, the "defendant" bird falls silent, and at this point one of two things happens; either the court disperses, or a smaller group of up to half a dozen birds will pursue and kill the defendant bird, with the entire group following if it makes a break for it. The noise is deafening. The defendant bird is killed as cleanly as possible, usually with blows to the head or neck.

No-one seems to know why crows should do this, but it has all the hallmarks of a formal execution. With so many crows present it cannot be about food, territory or mating rights, and once the defendant bird has been killed the others leave the body untouched (unlike, say, road or predator kills, where they have no scruples about eating it). You can see why it's called a crows' court, and it gives the name to groups of birds from the crow family; a murder of crows, a parliament of rooks, an unkindness of ravens.

And why should this be? Damned if I know. You see the Hedgewizard is not yet old, nor bald, nor wise; but given time he will be all of these things. Stick around.

Updated!

*And thinking possibly a stir-fry.

Window In Your Heart: Songs of Sadness

Like the songs says, losing in love is like a window in your heart. More than a decade ago I suffered a mild breakdown when my marriage ended, but just when I had willed myself into that grey twilight where nothing could touch me, along came one song that cut through everything. That song is Mna Na H'eireann as sung by Kate Bush. Even today, long after that old wound has well and truly healed, I dare not play it in the car for fear of weeping.

I'm guessing that I'm not the only one to have such a "window in the heart", and I'd very much like to hear some of yours. If you like the idea, then please take it as a meme and post the button below into a blog entry of your own with the link to this page intact, and encourage five interesting people to do the same. Even if you don't have a space of your own, add your song in the comments box below, with no more than 100 words explaining why it's important to you. Of course, some things are too personal - in which case just give the song. I'll post the best ones as updates, and we can all have a good weep, what do you say?

The html code for the button is this;

<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://hedgewizardsdiary.blogspot.com/2007/12/window-in-your-heart-songs-of-sadness.html" target="_blank"><img style="width: 152px; height: 70px;" src="http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f131/heletari/WindowHeart.jpg" alt="Photobucket" border="0" /></a></div>

The Songs

Ally: "For me, The Bangles 1989 song Eternal Flame sums up a particular period of my life that was particularly full of shattered glass. I was nineteen and in my first year at University. I ended up in halls of residence with someone I had been to school with and was very fond of. During our first term, I fell in love with him and one thing led to another. He ended up date-raping me after I'd had one too many glasses of wine... I know it's a good song. But I still can't listen to it without getting that same pain in my chest as I did then." (Hedgewizard's note: this is a heavily abridged version of a very powerful post on Ally's own blog - please do visit and see what she has to say.)

Linda: "Unfortunately for me, I experienced my first love and heartbreak, not in the heather scented heaths of Scotland, but in the 70's in Southern California, where the hills were alive with the sound of Bee Gees and Jim Croce and the Eagles. The best I can come up with is Don't Ask Me To Be Your Friend by Lobo that sums up the candy-pop era of my mostly imagined and tragically brief love affair with a James Dean-esque motorcycle jock."

Aoj: "A few years after Himself and I got together, I was in a mess. I loved this man more than anything. I knew he was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. But he was in his late 30s, had had plenty of relationships but nothing ever serious and he never settled down with anyone. He was fly by night, take it as it comes and move on just as easily. He was independent and the thought of "two becoming one" was an anathema to him. Yet he had asked me to move in with him so maybe I was the one. But I was insanely jealous of any woman from his past, imagined present and imagined future. Like most men, he wasn't averse to the flattery of female attention. He wasn't a flirt but if anyone started to flirt with him, he'd lap it up. He'd told me several times that he didn't love me. Can you imagine what I went through? I was tearing myself apart at the seams. Friends who knew him well just said that was ridiculous and of course he did, it was blindingly obvious to them, he just wouldn't, or couldn't, admit it to himself. Eventually I had to sort myself out because if I didn't I would end up having a nervous breakdown and destroying everything and I was not prepared to let that happen. Then I heard this song and I used to wish he'd just listen to the lyrics and understand that he just had to open up a chink. It really would be OK. That song is Honest by Kendall Payne."

Seawitch: "Every River by Runrig always does it for me - evokes deeply buried emotions and brings back memories of those who have moved on ....... both within this world and to the next one"

Steve Mudge: "Brokedown Palace by The Grateful Dead, and most definitely Lisa Gerrard--who I play when I'm happy and sad!"

Older Songs

Nez: "Last Goodbye from Jeff Buckley's album Grace. It's the late 1990s. My mum had died in 1992 (cancer) and this had just decided to catch up with me in a big way. I also broke up with a lovely guy somewhere around this time (he WAS lovely, but I wanted him to be my big brother more than anything else) and that I am an only child whose dad had already died when I was 5 - car accident. I was not a happy chappy. Weight loss, doctors, counselling, happy pills were all involved. It was not a good time."

Rob: "The Spirit of the Great Heart by Johnny Clegg and Savuka... Reminds me of my home country, lost family, lost friends, a past childhood with all its innocence and happiness that can never be brought back."

Rentman: "I'm more a poetry type. I found Do not stand at my grave and weep in The Nation's Favourite 100 Poems compiled by Griff Rhys-Jones. It allowed me to come to terms with the death of a daughter some 10 years earlier. I still can't read it aloud."

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Hedgewizard: "Mna Na H'eireann as sung by Kate Bush. I had literally fled from the Vampire Wife in Shropshire back to Ireland with my two-year-old son and a raw and broken heart. I wrapped my mind in grey cotton wool, but even when I couldn't connect with anything else, this song cut right through my defences. It hurt, but at least I was feeling something."

Antionette: "Sanvean by Lisa Gerrard. I had lost a beautiful cat companion, and both the song and the experience unlocked a huge wave of grief from an earlier (human) loss."

SpiralSkies: "If You're Not the One by Daniel Bedingfield. Acoustic version. I can barely type the words without welling up."

Hardup Hester: "Family Portrait by Pink. When it comes to myself I'm callous & hard hearted, but this song always reminds me of the effect my divorce had on one of my four children. They were all over 18, and the others seemed unaffected."

Sian: "The Promise by Tracy Chapman because of broken promises."

Laney: "Everybody Hurts by the Corrs. This one reminds me of a low period of my life that ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me. When my sons father left me without even a goodbye, I was devastated and completely and utterly alone. I was quite into The Corrs at the time (he got me into them), and I spent my whole pregnancy listening to their albums."

Giant Killer

Remember when I said that the trees would forgive us for wassailing too early? Well I may have been wrong; when I surveyed the damage the next morning the walnut was holding out the tiny piece of mistletoe we hung in it, like a gesture of apology. "There'll be no more walnuts," it seemed to say. "You might as well have this back."

Yep, it was a big tree. When I paced it out this walnut was sixteen meters (or 52'6") tall, and it must have made a hell of a noise when it came down. In fact when the neighbours came a-calling it transpired that it had made people jump three properties away, making it quite surprising that we didn't hear a damned thing - and this from a man who gets kept awake by the noise of a fizzy drink whispering ten feet away.

Regardless, if you'd asked me I'd have told you that you couldn't drop sixteen meters of tree into the garden without hitting something irreplaceable, and yet that's exactly what happened; the tree missed house, garage, cars and newly-planted trees all, and fell square onto the garden's only ornamental border where it squashed an old Portuguese laurel pretty much flat. The crown more or less filled the little patio I made last year, but the thicker branches missed the convict-built garden furniture by about two inches - opting instead to smash up two inherited plastic chairs. A point well made, I think.

So that was the reason for WP's little squeaks of terror. The tree had landed with a thump that pushed some limb-stumps nearly two feet into the ground and sent twigs flying for thirty feet in all directions, which would have boded ill for anyone on the patio where we had out of sheer determination enjoyed a glass of elderflower champagne on a very windy day in July. If you can call six months a near miss, we barely escaped with out lives!

The worst part about all this is that the walnut wasn't just a thing - it was a living being who had been there for longer than the house had, and a link to the past. It was planted when the Big House was merely being considered, in around 1860. I feel - we both do, actually - as if we have lost an elderly family member, someone perhaps mostly unregarded but always there as a comforting presence in the background. No longer will we watch the moon through the lacework of his branches, or curse the squirrels for throwing his walnuts at us. The tawny owls will have to find somewhere else to shout from, and the woodpeckers somewhere else to look for grubs for their chicks. It's immensely sad, but all we can do is look forward to the young tree that will take his place in the peculiar way that trees continue. In time, there will be summer leaves again.

Testing Times

Well, look at that, Yule again. Some of you might remember that last Yule I danced around in the open air and let the winter sky suck all the heat out of the top of my head - but I can remember the sensation quite well enough, thank you, and feel no urge to repeat the experience this year. Instead, I'm thinking of some of our friends for whom this Yule is unexpectedly difficult.

Yule - and Christmas too - are seen as the time to gather family around, so when one of the three Ds (death, desertion, divorce) intervenes it often becomes a painful time. I spent just one such Yule just over a decade ago, and went through a nervous breakdown as a result. It's another experience I have no urge to repeat.

So although I'm feasting and marchpane-making and generally making a nuisance of myself today, I'm going to add a new feature which in a gush of ill-judged sentiment I'm going to call Window In Your Heart. I'm going to post the one single song that takes me right back to that horrible time, and you can all weep along with it. Or laugh until your hemorrhoids fall out, if you wish - after all it could be something really dire like "I am a cider drinker" by the Wurzels. But it isn't. You'll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, I hope everyone who's celebrating today has a cracking good time. And if you're not celebrating today - why not? The earth is turning back towards the sun - it's the best excuse you'll have all year!

Roasted Parsnips Recipe

Now, don't make that face. If you just puckered up, chances are you haven't encountered parsnips since your mother indulged in the apparently genetically-programmed practice of boiling parsnips until death, followed by mashing down to pulp and serving onto the plate with a wet slapping noise that made your heart sink. If you've not tried them roasted grown-up style, you don't know what you're missing.

Parsnips have an image problem, it has to be said. Perhaps they should rename themselves like cornish sardines, but what else could we call them? Dorset lifesavers, that's what, because with this year's summer being Absent, Presumed Drowned our potato harvest was poor to say the least. Just as well we grew lots of parsnips, which didn't seem to mind the wet one bit.

Not many people know that prior to the arrival of the upstart spud in the sixteenth century, parsnips were an important staple food throughout europe and had been since the time of the romans. Extremely hardy, reliable and heavy croppers, and easy to store for months at a time, parsnips were the best way to sweeten food for the majority of the population, for whom honey was out of the question. It wasn't until spuds and sugar made their mark that the parsnip declined, but I think it's rather a shame that they've become linked with stodgy wartime cooking in people's minds. The good news is that we're just coming into the season for parsnips in the stores now, so here are a couple of decidely grown-up snip recipes to try.

Roasted Parsnips

This really couldn't be easier. Scrub and peel some parsnips, removing any woody bits of the core, and cut into potato-sized pieces; you could also cut them like chips if you like your roasted vegetables crispy, but do be careful they don't burn. Preheat the oven to 200C (400ºF, gas mark 6), and toss the parsnips in a saucepan with a couple of tablespoons of oil and a scattering of freshly-ground coriander, black pepper and sea salt. Lay out on a lightly-greased baking tray and roast for half an hour or so; turn them halfway through, and if you like things spicy then sprinkle them with a little cayenne pepper. Serve with some good gravy, and winter will never be the same again.

Curried Parsnip Soup

I smell of parsnips. Not a general observation you understand, it's just that now that the celery is almost finished I've been chopping up 'snips to make them into curried parsnip soup, one of our seasonal staples that I really look forward to with some warm star bread. Our parsnips are mammoth again this year - one weighed in at almost 2kg - but like most soups this one freezes really well and is a great standby (so long as you remember to leave it out to thaw). It's fragrant, filling, and warming rather than spicy.

Curried Parsnip Soup

Three or four medium parsnips (or one of ours!)
A coarsely-chopped onion
A crushed clove or two of garlic
1 tbsp plain flour
½ tsp each of curry powder, ground cumin and ground coriander, to taste
¼ pint milk
About a litre of vegetable or chicken stock
A cup of leftover cooked rice (optional)

Fry all the vegetables together in a little butter or oil for 4 or 5 minutes, so that they are soft but not browned, then add the spices and flour and cook for a further five minutes. Pour in the hot stock, stirring, and then simmer for about 20 minutes or until tender. Make sure you have used enough stock to just cover the vegetables - remember you can always add more later if it's looking too thick. Add the milk, then remove from the heat and blend until smooth (or force through a sieve).

We like a little cooked rice in the soup, which really gives some body to it - if you're doing so you'll need to heat the soup through again afterwards, before serving with the garnish of your choice; a swirl of cream, croutons, crisped bacon, grated cheese, chopped parsely... whatever takes your fancy.

The Last Word on First Chickens

Blimey. All sorts of blog memes fly up and down these days. I try to do as many of them as I can even though I'm temporally challenged - I have a vague sense of unease that I've forgotten to do something about books - but mostly I'm not too worried. Now, however, Chile Chews has given me the Roar for Powerful Words! award - an award, mind, with a badge and everything - which is entirely another matter. Oh hang on, it's only another blog meme. Never mind. I get to post the camp lion.


Before I deal with that, a couple of people commented on my last post that there's an instinctive difference between killing and eating a meat bird, and doing the same to your first batch of layers. I couldn't agree more. I think the difference is intention. Meat birds are functional creatures, brought onto the patch for the express purpose of turning grain, grass and scraps into meat in thirty weeks or less. When it's time, it's time - otherwise they get gamey and tough and it's all been a bit of a waste of effort. That first batch of layers, on the other hand, are there for far more than egg-laying. They're your fellow conspirators in the business of learning about poultry-keeping; they cut down on your kitchen waste; they power your chicken tractor (whether intentionally or not); they provide eggs and hours of amusement and delight for your children; and somehow they become entwined with you in a way that no later batch of birds will. It's kind of like your first love, except with more feathers.*

Next year we'll be moving towards a rotating plan for poultry. I have yet to work out the details, but basically if we can get a layer to go broody we'll be bringing in a "guest rooster" for a fortnight once or twice a year. The eggs and broody hen will then move to a broody coop for the duration, and when it's time all the youngsters will be moved to a separate meat bird run and house. We'll be aiming to use this new stock to replace our layers every year or two, and we'll eat any males and unwanted layers. At least, that's the plan... but I'll have to learn more about chicken husbandry as well as make the new house and "shelf bra" run** before we're ready for that.

Back to the camp lion. Hmm.

' The Shameless Lions Writing Circle created this award and states that A Roar For Powerful Words is "the chance to scream from the mountains the good news about the powerful posts that are produced every day in the blogosphere, despite what some mainstream columnists and journalists claim."

Recipients of the award get to publish the campy lion image on their page and note three elements they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing. To keep the award circulating through the blogosphere encouraging and rewarding good writers, recipients are expected to nominate five other people in turn. The new recipients then do the same, passing it on to five other people, and so on.Well then, let's get to it. Three elements for good, powerful writing, then? '

Vocabulary.
No, I don't think you have to spout like you've swallowed a dictionary, even though I do myself sometimes, but words are the tools you use to open up someone else's mind (unless you're a neurosurgeon). It helps to have the right tools, and to keep them sharp.

Voice.
Not an easy one to explain this, but "voice" is all about a writer's style and choices; structure, language, punctuation and so forth. Everybody has one, but some people are instantly recognizable - like Bill Bryson and Stephen King (when Richard Bachman turned out to be a pseudonym for King I wasn't one bit surprised).

Message.
You can have all the style and technical prowess you like, but if you don't come across as caring about your subject no-one else will want to read it. This isn't always easy, and about 90% of blogs fall on their arses because they're dull, dull, dull!

So. Five bloggers?

Kitchenwitch, particularly because of her voice. No matter if it's Mr KW's manky old CX or how to make table favours out of old toilet rolls, KW's whimsical writing voice always makes me giggle like a nun in a sex shop.

Stonehead, particularly for message. Stoney's made some hard choices and continues to do so every day, and he recounts things with a dry, understated tone that says a lot about his nature. He also has an absolute ceiling of one exclaimation mark per month, like an old boozer that only lets himself have one small whisky on his birthday each year. Stoney won't do the meme (he won't have time), and I don't give a rat's ass. That's not what this is about.

La-Que-Sabe, for all of the above in this particular post. I defy you not to feel something.

Spiral Skies, where you can actually watch Jen developing her own voice. I'm fascinated, and Jen definitely has a future in writing if she can just get real life to back the fuck off for a while.

The World According to Nez, for being personable and readable but mainly for having absolutely stonking photography and bugger the mauve lion. Go Nez!



*Probably.

**Because you pick 'em up and pop 'em in.

Finishing with Chickens

I'm slightly surprised that no-one had a problem with me wandering off down the Hollow garden with a pair of gleaming poultry dispatchers and a grim set to my mouth, but I bet that I'd get slated if I post this over on the Ecologist Online. It might be fun to see... no. A shortened version for there, I think.

When people get their first batch of layers they always crow about it (sorry). Like I've said before, it's the easiest bit of self-sufficiency you can do; simply set up a run and knock together a henhouse, and you're ready to go. Point of lay birds are around £6.50 locally at the moment, and with supermarkets selling organic eggs at £1.98 for six your birds will pay for themselves in a month. And such eggs! Until you've tasted eggs from free-range, grass-fed hens on the very day that they are laid, I'd venture to say you have no idea what eggs are meant to taste like. Of course you need a bit of knowledge and a little space, but a basic book like Katie Thear's Starting With Chickens has all you need.

So. Everyone always posts when they get their first batch of layers, which is nice, but after a few years the hens lay less often and the off-lay period in the winter gets longer. Not many people post about what happens next. I'm sure there are quite a few old hens spending peaceful retirements in quiet runs (where they keep a close eye on shocking behaviour of the Marans next door, and fret about answering the pop-hole to strangers) but I suspect that they are the minority. And here’s why; our birds arrived in March 2004, and for two years we were eggs-a-go-go, with surplus to sell or trade most days. In 2006 there were fewer surplus eggs, but there were still plenty for the family and so we carried on. This year though, eggage was unreliable in the Hollow all summer. For the last month there were no eggs at all, and there was no putting it off any longer. The girls had to go, but there was a problem.

You see, in raising and caring for chickens you get a real sense of what a chicken is. Chickens may be stupid* but they have a certain dimly-formed consciousness and real character, and they certainly let you know when they're distressed. They also have a certain chickeny smell about them, and once you've realised that supermarket-bought chicken meat has that exact same smell about it it dawns on you that they're the exact same thing as Doris who greets you every morning by attempting to crap on your left boot. It further dawns on you that you have entrusted the raising, care and killing of your future meal to an organization that is rather better known for training its employees to tap dance than it is for giving a shit about animal welfare. All of a sudden those Compassion in World Farming videos don't seem so abstract any more. Not for the fainthearted, that one.

I'm happy with how the chickens have lived, even if I had to make them wear clip-on beak rings from time to time in order to stop them pecking each others arses off. But how to kill them as quickly and painlessly as possible? Wringing their necks is easiest, but there's a knack to this and having somebody show you how to do it is pretty much essential and I haven't found anyone who'll show me (yet). Too tentative a tug and you may break the neck but not kill the bird, causing much distress to all concerned, but too enthusiastic and you risk pulling the head off all together - not recommended. I turned to Stonehead for advice, and he pointed me in the direction of these dispatching shears.

Lacking the hydraulic grip of a crofter, I managed to borrow a version of these that has handles two feet long so there's no mucking about. You'll notice that the bars don't quite meet - but one decent tug on the handles and the bird is dead. I understand exactly what Micro2nd means about not being calloused about the killing though, because chickens don't just lie down when they're killed - the startle reflex (which doesn't involve the brain) makes them flap and jitter for a minute or so. The first time I did this I was convinced that I hadn't made a clean kill, but I remembered the advice I'd been given and waited a moment or two and sure enough the bird was dead. The other two were easier, since I knew what to expect. In case you're not convinced by that, chickens do exactly the same thing when beheaded - I'm not going to link, but if you've not seen a bird killed before there are youtube videos you can watch to give yourself some warning.

Once the birds had been drained for a quarter of an hour, plucking them was actually quite enjoyable once I got the hang of it. I'd been given one bad piece of advice (in my opinion) which was that you should dunk the bird in hot water to loosen the feathers - don't. Unless the water is actually scalding - around 80 degrees - all it does is make the bird (and by association, you) wet. I may come back to try this with really hot water next time, as I'm told it really speeds things up if you get it right (the world record for plucking a scalded chicken is just under five seconds). But plucking a still-warm, dry bird is a whole different experience, and I actually felt quite close to the birds as I worked on them.

Drawing (gutting) the bird was the bit I was really dreading, and the first one was as tricky as I'd thought it might be because I had very little idea what to expect, but by bird number three I'd got the hang of it. A couple of hours after starting I had one bird cut up and simmering away for soup, and the rest in the freezer. Not bad for a beginner!

A few tips which I didn't pick up from the books I looked at;

• Don't kill birds around the moult, as the emerging quills are a pain to remove.

• Don't kill birds first thing in the morning - wait until they've emptied their bowels as all that stuff has to go somewhere!

• Don't kill all the birds first and then pluck them afterwards; the quicker the plucking is done the easier it is, so do one at a time.
  

A freshly-plucked cat, yesterday.

So. Was it horrid? Well, I can't say it's my favourite garden job, but it's not as bad as unblocking a drain and I wouldn't pay someone else to do it for me.

*Very few people are aware that casseroling a chicken actually raises its IQ.

The Fateful Day

Well, the day's finally come - the chickens are for the pot. This was always a plan when they didn't lay reliably any more, and we're moving over to a yearly rotation next season - but still, these are our first birds; they've been with us for 45 months and I'm very grateful to them for all the delicious eggs. I'll be just as grateful for the soup, believe me.

I suspect today's posts are not going to win me any new friends, but there you are. I've accepted responsibility for how the chickens have lived - how they've been fed, and housed, and doctored - and I'll also accept responsibility for how they die, so please don't knock it unless you're vegan. I have borrowed a pair of handheld dispatching shears, and taken advantage of the offer to dispatch a poorly chicken for practice; so now I can be sure it will be quick and clean.

No cat picture for this post as I feel the levity would be out of place - no doubt once I've done this a few times I'll get all matter-of-fact about it, but for now this is a big deal for me. I'd better go and get on with it then...

The Silence of the Pigs

As I watch the grim faces of the shoppers passing by, I can't help but reflect again about how stressful retail christmas can be. I'm glad I'm 90% out of it (like a lot of pagans we still do some of the Xmassy things), but some people are very into it. Take Alexandru, who gave me a massage (the first professional one I've had) back in February when we were holidaying in Nottingham. I never pass up the chance to talk to someone with a different perspective on things, so while I lay on my stomach with Alex attempting to break each of my ribs in turn, I got him talking. It didn't take him long to tell me how much he was missing home.

"Did you go back for Christmas?" I asked him.

"No," he said sadly. "My vife, she was vorking. You know. Is dentist. I vished to go home though, because Christmas... you know." He gestured in the air with one of my feet, which surprised me because I had thought I knew where they both were at the time.

"You don't like Christmas here?"

He laughed. "No. Here it iss...." His hands came briefly into view as he gesticulated. Jesus H, was that a knife he was holding? "Iss nothing. Is buy, is sell, but... nothing. You know."

I agreed. "What's Christmas like in Romania then?"

His eyes sparkled, and he switched over into a long kneading movement that was less painful than the agonizing knuckling he'd been giving me before. Reminiscence hurts less than regret, I was discovering. "Ahhh," he said, as if savouring a fine wine. "Iss beautiful. Iss magical. Iss..."

"Ow!"

"...so sorry. Is difficult to explain. The clear air. The dark - so dark. The first flakes of snow. The screaming of the pigs. The children..."

"Wait a minute, the screaming of the what?"

But of course. Working class people in his area, he told me, don't eat very much meat. It's too expensive. But during the summer everyone who can afford to buys a piglet and keeps it in their garden, where it lives through the autumn on scraps and occasional grain. It gets trips to the woods to forage, and lives a pretty good life; until the snow starts, and then you stun your pig and hoist it up on the porch and... well, you get the picture. It wasn't the procedure that surprised me - the EU hasn't got its hooks in too deep yet - but that the noise was part of Alexandru's mental image of Christmas. No distant sleigh bells for Alex, no sir!

One of those moments when I'm glad not to be posting related images for once. I give you...

In related news, Number Two Son (who participates fully in everything, even when he's not supposed to) is playing First Constipated Angel in the nativity this year. I'm not sure if the constipation thing is actually scripted, but there you are. You takes him as you finds him.

"...and lo, the Constipated Angel did come unto them, and they were sore afraid...
And as for the Angel, well... he was just sore..."

What Christmas Means To Me

Some people really ought to take December off. Take my friend Bob, the postmaster of a small Post Office. Bob is mild-mannered. Bob is softly pleasant to look at, in a sort of beige jumper, glasses and bald spot way. Bob is softly spoken.

Except in December. In December the oncoming hordes of emotionally and intellectually bankrupt shoppers break over poor Bob's head like the first wave of a tinsel-bedecked storm, and because he's in retail, he can't retaliate against their stupidity.

Except when he knows them.

So there I am in the queue, waving to Bob who completely ignores me. This is unusual, but as I wind my way towards the post office counter I become aware that something has happened to Bob; the stress has sharpened his tongue, and I can see why.

"Ooh, I've been waiting for ages," says one fragile-looking octogenarian. "It's not like you to be behind, not like you at all."

Bob's eyes glint dangerously behind his glasses. "Imagine that," he says drily. "It's as busy as a post office at Christmas in here." But he forces on a smile that would not only curdle milk but possibly also churn it and press it into cheese moulds.

The woman in front of me is next. She is carrying so many plastic carrier bags that she is too wide to negotiate the gap in the queue barrier, and it takes my help before she can herd her little flock through the gate. As she puts the bags down they all fall over immediately, and the shop is briefly a riot of oranges and spools of ribbon. At last she is ready to speak to Bob, who is wearing his best "I'm harmless" expression. I am not fooled, but the Bag Lady beams at him.

"A book of first class stamps please," she says, after a few pointless but time-consuming remarks about how busy the place is.

"I'm afraid we don't have any of the books left," Bob says reasonably. "But I have them loose."

The customer is panic-stricken. "Oh dear..." she dithers.

Bob tries to rescue her. "It's all right," he says, waving the sheet of stamps. "You don't have to have the sheet of a hundred. You can have just the number you want."

The choice appears to dazzle and distress her. "Oh... I'm not sure... how do they come again?"

Bob's eyebrows, already raised to make his "harmless" face, now threaten to leave his head altogether. Suddenly he has a brainwave. "The books have six or twelve in them," he offers. "Would you like six, or twelve?"

Narrowing the choices to two does the trick. "Oh," she gasps. "Yes, six would be right. Although..." she interjects as Bob starts to tear them off the strip, "perhaps twelve would be wiser. Yes. I think the twelve."

A few minutes later after a long pause while the Bag Lady struggles to locate her purse, because of course she had not realized she was going to need money in order to pay for the stamps until asked for it, it is my turn and I step gamely up to the plate. I give him the traditional Dorset greeting* and he responds in kind.**

"I can see you're busy," I say, rather redundantly. "Just some letters to send off airmail, then. Let's see. This ones for the States... this one's Canada... and one for Holland... this one's for, er..."

But I get no further, for Bob has abruptly ripped open his security screen and launched himself at me through the gap. "I CAN FUCKING READ!" he yells. "Give them here! Right! America! Europe! Europe! America! Australia! Do you want any stamps?? Twelve? Okay! Six pounds thirty PLEASE!"

***

That's the last time I let myself be the final customer in Bob's post office at lunchtime...




*A strange little forward nod of the head, an eyebrow-raise, and a rising single syllable; "Arr?"

**The correct response is also "Arr", however the cadence is falling and no eyebrow movement is required. It is also permissible to respond with the name of the person who has just greeted you, as if they had asked you who they were.

***Okay, I know Fizzgig's not a cat. But he's just so cooool...

On Writing, and Time

Oh, dear. I knew I was asking for it this week - booking up every scrap of time is never a good idea, and so it was inevitable that this would be when the remainder of the fruit trees would turn up. The poor things are going to have to wait until Saturday, and of course Metcheck is forecasting the Wall of Rain. Some things never change!

Yesterday saw Digiveg and myself trekking down to Devon for a meeting with our publisher, Green Books, which really couldn't have gone better. We have a commission for a gardening book (shouldn't say anything more than that) which is due to come out in spring 2009. I now know how the book will look, how big it will be and how much it is likely to retail at, and we've identified our target market - so it's all looking rather real at the moment! I'm over the moon.

Except that with work still proving elusive for Witchypoo, it's still a grinding necessity for me to hold down a day job (albeit part-time). Today seemed worse than ever - yesterday Digi and myself discussed the philosophy of Time in the car (well, you have to, don't you? Why else take a long car journey with a buddhist?), and today I put theory into practice by crawling through a nine-and-a-half hour working day at approximately fifteen minutes per hour.*

I think, on reflection, that I'm with Spiral Skies on this one; trying to write for a living makes one far less tolerant of being forced to do anything else. Spiral is being much braver than me by wading straight into a novel - if she succeeds it should make an actual living for her, whereas my non-fiction is easier to get into print but will make less actual money. But we're not in it for the money, right?

Right?

*Well, it makes sense to me, all right? During a lecture series some years ago I formed a theory that went a little further than the standard observation that time crawls if you keep looking at the clock; I calculated that from the first glance at the clock time decays exponentially to a singularity that is an equal time away from the moment of the observation as is the start of the lecture. This only holds true if you check your watch because you sincerely think it must be time to go home by now.

In other words, if the lecture began at 9.00 and you looked at your watch at 9.30, another apparent half-hour's worth of waiting would only get you to 9.45, then 9.52.30 and so on - a sort of temporal fletcher's paradox. A one-hour lecture would therefore never end. This might strike you as absurd, but I can reveal that it actually happened during a spectacularly dull forensics lecture. Contrary to what you might think I am actually still in there listening to Mike Jepson droning on and on and you, friends, are just hallucinations that I have conjured into being to stop myself from going mad.