Chick

A quick update for you, but no photo I'm afraid; Chicken For A Hat has been triple-welded-with-titanium-reinforcements to the nestbox for the last 48 hours, and when I tried to introduce her to the concept of letting me have a little look yesterday, she introduced me to the concept of a painful rap on the knuckles, so I took the hint. This afternoon I found out that she has at least one chick in there, for I spotted it in the pop hole, looking at me. Well, not at me to be frank, I doubt it can focus that far; but certainly it was looking. Then C4aH spotted me, gave a warning note, and said chicken toddled back into the nest box.

All together now - Awww.

So cute. So fluffy.

So nice with thyme and garlic.

In other news, the Thrush From Hell has been extremely busy nicking any strawberries not nailed down, and after three days of eating the unpecked half of berries left scattered around the garden in gay abandon, I thought to hell with sharing the crop and netted the whole lot to buggery. I've been earthing up, cutting back, top dressing, planting out, weeding, hoeing, sowing, staking and generally not managing to keep up with everything. And now, to top it all off, I remember that I haven't updated the "to do" list in the sidebar in a decade or so. Pardon me while I remedy that...

Bacon

As a young adult I was vegetarian for two years. It was eventually a lifestyle change that ended this period - less time to cook meant that the easy option became more and more attractive, and basing meals around meat is a lazy cook's mainstay. The question of "What are we having for dinner?" is so much easier to answer with "pork chops!" than it is with "leeks au gratin with sautéed potato and spiced chickpeas for protein", but if truth be told the concept of a daily ration of meat belongs to the age of oil, and thus is destined to fade into history over the next few decades. We're eating a lot less meat in the Hollow these days, but if there's one thing I'll really miss when the time comes, then it'll be bacon.

When I was a vegetarian the thought of bacon used to wake me in the mornings. I hallucinated the smell of it (I had always accused the flat downstairs of cooking it on a Sunday morning, and it was quite a shock one morning to discover that they were on holiday and the smell was purely in my own head), and I have to confess that a couple of times I broke ranks for a sneaky bacon sandwich, cooked on the run and gobbled down as fast as possible. Crunch on the bite, oozing flavour, and satisfying right down to the tiny crumbs of rind left on the plate afterwards; never any leftovers with a bacon sandwich, no sir.

At least, that was the memory. For some reason, in the years that followed bacon sandwiches never really lived up to that memory. I blamed supermarket meat for it, thinking of meat "plumped" with phosphates and water, but even switching to organic bacon didn't quite do it. Something was missing, and it's only this morning that I figured out what.

With the rest of the family away for a few days, I made myself a bacon sandwich at breakfast. Two rashers of decent bacon, two slices of bog standard supermarket white bread, ordinary margerine. Nothing special about it, apart from the indecent haste with which I prepared and consumed it. And there it was - the golden bacon sarnie of legend! And the missing ingredient!

Speed!

With no table to set, no noses to wipe, no stuck toys to retrieve and no conversation to distract me, from fridge to stomach was all accomplished in less time than it takes to boil an egg. The bacon was still crisp and hot from the grill, and the bread so quickly snatched from the toaster that the marge disappeared into it like a boatload of sailors into a Thai brothel. All these years, the missing ingredient has been greed itself!

This peak oil breakfast has been brought to you by Exxon. The idea of eating meat every day will form the basis of a yarn to be spun to incredulous great-grandchildren, should I live that long...

Chicken For A Hat

I seldom name chickens. I’ll name cats quite happily* and Number Two Son gives names to everything from his goldfish down, but when it comes to chickens I’m just not sure about the whole thing. We refer to them by their place in the pecking order from time to time, but generally names like “The Black One” or “The One With The Baldy Bum” do just fine. However, I’ve made an exception for Chicken For A Hat.

We bought our present flock at auction a month or two ago, and after a few teething problems with size differences they’ve all settled down extremely well. We bought four black rocks (although I did have to kill one on veterinary advice) for reliable eggage, and two blue marans in the hope that one of them might make a good broody. In doing so I unwittingly invoked Sod’s Law, rendering the blue marans redundant, because one afternoon a couple of weeks ago I discovered that one of the black rocks appeared to be welded to the nest box.

Regular readers will know that although we don’t have a cockerel (nasty, noisy, randy things, like gym teachers at a convention) a broody has been part of the Plan for this year. Incubators are expensive and need a fair bit of attention, and then you have all the business of lights and keeping cats away once they hatch out; a broody does all of this for you and is therefore much to be desired, and all you need to do is supply some fertile eggs. Since they remain viable for several days at room temperature you can buy these at auction or by mail order, but in this case I shot out to my friend the Chairman and traded a jar each of mango chutney and wild berry jam for eight eggs from his cockerel-infested flock. The next morning, much to her surprise, Chicken For A Hat woke up on top of a respectable pile of eggs.

A broody hen is one that decides to sit tight and hatch out a clutch of eggs. The timing and frequency of this seems to be utterly random, although it’s more likely to happen in warm weather; the bird goes off lay and eats less, stops leaving the nest box much and pecks irritably at the other birds if they disturb her. She pulls as many eggs as she can manage under her skirts (I’ve heard of birds successfully hatching fifteen) and may pluck out some of her breast feathers in a half-assed attempt at making a proper nest. She also gets hotter underneath and inflates herself impressively, hovercraft-style, until she looks more like a particularly tetchy piece of headwear than a bird. Then she just… switches off.

A broody in full swing turns into an incubating machine. Beyond one or two very short breaks for food and water each day, she doesn’t budge except to turn the eggs to keep the temperature and humidity even. Being broody seems to be infectious (like complaining in a restaurant, I suppose, except with less chance of getting a free dessert) so it’s a good idea to move the hen and her eggs to a broody coop in the middle of the night. This is essentially a sheltered nest box at ground level with an enclosed run (although you can also get broody boxes that have no run, just vertical slats that confine the bird but let any chicks wander in and out – handy if she seems to be losing interest). Broody coops don’t need a perch, but a wide ramp to help the chicks manage the lip into the coop is a good idea, as is putting the thing on a slab or a heavy mesh base if you suspect there are rats about; a broody hen will not move off her eggs even if attacked by rats, so look after her.

I’ve got some work to do this weekend because the eggs are due to hatch on Monday, give or take. I may get eight chicks, I may get none; but the Chairman’s flock are all general-purpose birds, so we can take any hatchlings for meat from 15 to 30 weeks. This will be very welcome, as chicken has dropped off our menu more or less completely since we went organic. There’s always the option of keeping any good layers as additions to the regular flock, but 30 weeks is beautifully timed for Christmas dinner!

*Actually I don’t so much name them as wait for them to name themselves; once they’ve been around for a while a name just seems to present itself. There’s been Mackerel, for the bars on her fur; Celeste, for the sound of her purr; and Treefrog for a particularly bad sketch I made of him. And Baron von Rattigan, for… er… you know, I’ve never been sure where that one came from. A neighbour of mine once trumped all those names though, by naming her tabby Cooking Fat; once you’ve heard her shouting “There’s a mouse! Where’s that Cooking Fat?” all becomes clear.

Fizz

Since the elderflowers are just about ready to go in the fields around the Hollow, this would seem to be a good time to remind anyone who wants to have a go at the easy elderflower champagne recipe that now is the time to scrounge about for empty fizzy drinks bottles. I've got enough of them for a couple of gallons of the gorgeous stuff, so all I need is a couple of sunny days to bring out the flavour of the flowers and then I'm all set.

One of Number Two Son's two goldfish died yesterday, which gave us a good chance to do the "D" talk. N2S was thoughtful for all of twenty seconds and then said "Hey, I know! We can ask Father Christmas to bring us another fish!"

"Not a bad idea," I replied. "But won't the wrapping paper get all soggy?"

Number Two Son looked at me with pity. "Silly Daddy," he said. "He'll bring us a dry fish that hasn't been swimmed yet."

Spring

It was Number Two Son's fifth birthday just recently, and a few days ago an extremely disgruntled courier staggered down to the Hollow with two very large cardboard boxes. These proved to contain a trampoline, a very generous grandparental gift, and after hiding them under a sock* for a few days Number One Son and myself dragged them out to the garden for assembly.

The actual trampoline was extremely easy to put together and an impressively simple piece of engineering, but the instructions were written in a manner that somehow conveyed the sense of a foreign language, even though they were in English; "locate into the slot the safety tab here as indicated" being a nice example. We were able to work things out, but as we slapped together the safety netting, cushioned edge, padded uprights and apparently mandatory safety notice,** N1S could see the emergence of a pattern.

"What safety precautions did trampolines have when you were a kid, Dad?" he asked. I thought for a minute. "There was a little bag attached to the frame," I said at last, "to put your teeth in during the journey to hospital." I remember the only privately-owned trampoline in 1970s South Belfast with some fondness and more than a little fear. It was on the far side of the Sloanes' garage, invisible from the house and therefore, in the minds of children everywhere, practically municipal property. However, so hazardous was this device that using it unaided was widely regarded as suicidal; you took a mate with you to watch you bounce, and holler if you started drifting away from the middle.

I was never injured on the Sloane's trampoline myself, but I did see an older boy making a mess of his dismount and falling through the mat with one leg on either side of one of the massive springs. He bounced once, a hard little bounce that spoke of boundless pain and surprise, and then toppled motionless to the waiting earth with a horrible breathy squeak. The tale spread through the neighbourhood like wildfire and it was more effective than any laminated safety sign, I can tell you; we could not have been more careful of the spring-loaded beast if it had been surrounded by skulls on sticks, or festooned with the testicles of the unwary.

But then again, it was the 1970s. In the 70s we hurtled around in vehicles uncluttered by seat belts and innocent of airbags. In the 70s we heated our homes with monoxide and trimmed our hair with chainsaws - or so you'd think, judging by the impressive welter of legislation passed in the last decade or so under the bloated grey umbrella of "Health and Safety".

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we should go back to the 70s*** nor change over to an Indonesian approach to road safety (where a dozen people routinely sit on the roof of a bus, ducking down every time it goes under a bridge, except when someone forgets). But some time in the recent past somebody set up a department staffed by maybe a hundred regulators, gave them salaries and a coffee machine, left them to it and then unexpectedly died in the elevator on the way out. Now no-one knows where they are or how to stop them. They've been ticking away ever since, chucking out reams and reams of directives on how things can be made safer and safer, and making less sense every year.

F'rinstance, we have a fluorescent tube flickering at work. It's annoying. A few years ago I would have turned the circuit off at the fuse box, stood on a chair to take the old one out, and replaced it with a new one from a nearby electrical store. Ten minutes, tops. Now however, H&S policies in the workplace mean that I have to contact our maintenance department. Then a third party maintenance firm send a van out from sixty miles away because they're the lowest bidder to replace the tube. The last time this happened, said van didn't have the right bulb on board and had to return the following day. Net result? I quietly retire the old tube and do without the light, until so many tubes have gone that we can't see what we're doing any more, although this itself should probably trigger a "risk assessment".

That's not an isolated problem, by the way; there's hardly a day goes by that I don't see something in the paper about the gonzos at the Health and Safety Executive stopping someone from doing something. The quaint English custom of conkers was all but killed off a few years ago (for anyone that doesn't know, this involves passing a length of string through the large seed of a horse chestnut, drying it, and then using it to try to kill someone else's dried horse chestnut seed. It's more fun than it sounds), Christmas Puddings may no longer contain a coin, and nationally fewer village fetes and town festivals are held every year because of the rising costs of complying with daft legislation.

My point is this. Life is an inherently risky business. No matter how hard we try, we can't eliminate risk for ourselves and we certainly can't eliminate it for our children - although we can suck all the fun out of their lives by trying. Using N2S's trampoline as a metaphor for life, does sticking a mesh enclosure around it (which he hurls himself against with great joy, trusting it to save him) merely keep him safe - or does it stop him from perceiving and calculating risk all together?

* It's quite incredible, but the invisibility field generated by just one of N2S's socks is quite potent enough to hide two six-foot boxes. I've long speculated about why both sons are unable to see their discarded socks and put them into the laundry basket, and this experiment shows just how powerful the effect is. I'm actually very relieved that I didn't use one of Number One Son's socks. In his case the invisibility field is so powerful that even I might not have been able to find the boxes again (except possibly by scent).

** A legal nicety. Some years ago an enterprising security firm began supplying potentially lethal intruder deterrents; razor wire, electrified door handles, tear-gas tripwires, that sort of thing. Test prosecutions resulted in judgements designed to deter householders from using these devices, as a result of which we all now understand that we have a legal duty of care towards any visitors to our property - even if such visits are by an uninvited unshaven man in dark clothing, and occur at 2am. This is why my chickens are protected by a fence with a sign on which says "Caution! Electrified fence! Do not attempt to steal these chickens if you have a heart condition or pacemaker!", and why N2S's trampoline has a similar warning notice. After all, we wouldn't want the burglars to be bruised if they were tempted to enjoy an illicit moonlit bounce now, would we?

***Although it's an interesting thought. There was a highly interesting party in Dundrum in about 1984 that I'd like a second crack at, except this time without drinking half a bottle of stolen cherry brandy before attempting to speak to the girl in the white dress. I wonder what happened to her? After the dry cleaning, I mean.

Families, and the Cohesive Power of Dogs

Some time ago, as I drunkenly lamented the lack of playmates for Number Two Son within walking distance, my friend Digiveg suggested a dog. "Needn't be a big one," he said sagely. "I grew up in the middle of nowhere - take it from me, a dog'll be the best friend that boy could ever have out here. Waiting for him when he gets home, always ready for an adventure - right through the summer, you won't see the pair of them for dust."

At the time, it all seemed so right. N2S traipsing through the sun-kissed, chest-high grass, glasses dusty with pollen-flecks; tousle-haired mutt a few yards ahead, tongue out and tail wagging, checking every few minutes to make sure his little friend and master is safe behind him. And then the music starts playing, and I realise it's only something out of Little House on the Prairie. Said dog will spend most of the day trying to clean its arse on the carpet out of sheer boredom, and it'll be left to muggins here to walk the wretched beast in the pouring rain while N2S plays Zelda on the Wii.

My attitude to dogs is odd, really, given that I grew up in a doggy household. My earliest memory was of Rory, a huge rescue mongrel, who used to let me squirt him with a water pistol and pull his ears, yet pinned the postman to the wall and kept him there for three hours until my mother came home. My job was to open the huge, malodorous tins of whale offal (or whatever was in 1970s dog food) with a hacksaw-cum-opener that would have given Freddy Kruger pause for thought. I guess that was why Rory loved me as much as he hated every single other child in the neighbourhood (Stephen three doors down would regularly lose bladder control at the mere sight of Rory, even when he was tied up; childhood is made of such innocent pleasures).

Thankfully my moment of weakness on the mutt front passed before I did anything stupid, and we remain resolutely a cat household. Cats are neater than dogs, and more self-reliant. Generally speaking they are either well, or dead; they are more reserved than dogs and would never dream of sniffing your crotch or humping your leg uninvited. Or invited, come to that. They eat less; they bury their stinkpods in any recently disturbed earth that isn't defended with holly clippings, yet can't be bothered to walk as far as the vegetable patch for a dump, so that's all right. They have a bunch of annoying habits too, but I'm willing to overlook them for now.

Tweet

1st May was apparently International Dawn Chorus Day, which came as something of a surprise to me when I turned on the radio. The premise is that you set your alarm clock to 4am – and yes, there is a 4 in the morning (I checked) – and open your window before scurrying back to bed. Over about the next hour the orchestra tunes up, and if you listen carefully you should hear some sounds that you’ve never heard before.* This is particularly pertinent any time over the next few weeks because local songbirds are joined by returning migrants, everyone is looking for nest space and a mate, and the result is a jam session that shouldn’t be missed.

Living on the edge of woodland we get a good dose of it each morning, and since it’s as loud as an alarm clock it does wake us up daily in the early spring. This week’s additions have been a cuckoo and a lesser-spotted squeaky wheel bird – I know, I know, but it sounds like a squeaky wheel and I haven’t spotted it yet. The yaffles (green woodpeckers) have moved down from the woods to the gardens for the summer, but thankfully these particular noisy gits don’t get their act together until 9-ish when they’ve had tea and toast – early risers they are not. I wasn't listening to any of it today, though, since we travelled up to the book launch party for The Self-Sufficientish Bible by Dave and Andy Hamilton (released May 9^th by Hodder and Stoughton), so coffee at 4am was mercifully unlikely.

Self-Sufficientish is something of a phenomenon; a bulletin-board style forum where the content and advice isn’t generated by a panel of all-seeing and all-knowing experts, but by the readers themselves. I’ll review the book as soon as I get hold of it, of course, but in the meantime why don’t you pop over and see what’s in their forum, and on the website? It’s well worth a look. It was great to finally meet some of the people I've had arguments chats with over the last couple of years - people like Andy and Dave Hamilton, the Fee Fairy and Supernicky, Red, Thomzo and of course the Wombat, to whom respect is due. Any man who actually has a crack at extracting sugar from sugarbeet in his own kitchen deserves respect. Even if the result tasted a bit… well… beety!

*Including the gentle murmur of a thousand disturbed spouses asking of their beloveds, “But why, darling, are you waking me up at this most blessèd time of day?” or words to that general effect.

**A man who actually has a crack at extracting sugar from sugarbeet in his own kitchen deserves respect. Even if the result tasted a bit… well… beety.

Spring mushrooms

Wild mushrooms. Putting aside for one moment the worries that people have about identifying them properly, and the woeful lack of any culture of picking them here in the UK*, there’s still the fact that mushrooms are an autumn thing, right?

Wrong. As a matter of fact, although mushrooms are much more abundant in the autumn, there are substantial crops of several species around at different times of the year – if you know what you’re looking for, and where to look. Right now it’s the turn of the St George’s mushroom, an inconspicuous but solid affair with pale gills and a very distinctive sweet smell that drifts for quite a distance. Colonies grow in grassland where they show as a distinctive ring of darker green grass, especially visible after mowing; give them a few days of warmer weather in late spring and up they pop, although the sweet smell actually starts a few days before they appear. They’re good raw or cooked, with a sweet and almost perfumy taste, and a mature colony can give you quite a big harvest over a week or two.

Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!*

The landscaping that we did in the Hollow in 2004 carved up our own colony, and although I’d been afraid it might die altogether, after a two-year absence it has reappeared as two small fruiting patches – at opposite ends of the garden. And very welcome too, now that my other springtime species, the morel, has just about finished now. Black morels are quite distinctive, like little hollow brains turned inside out. They’re fiddly to clean, not least because they tend to grow in sandy soil, and best dried for storage because, like ceps, drying them seems to bring out a better flavour.

Black morel

Finding morels can be a bit hit or miss, but they tend to appear in fairly dense patches so it’s well worth looking. Happily for me the bark mulch that we bought in for the paths on the Slope was heavily infected with the stuff, and this year it came up on both sides of the path. There is one species that you can confuse it with, known as the false morel – the difference is that the edible morels are hollow from the base of the stem to the tip of the cap (they look like they've been made with a rubber mould) whereas the false morel's stem runs up inside to the tip of the cap, and is itself solid or stuffed with a cottony mass. Provided that you’re aware of the lookalike species you’re unlikely to make a mistake. Field mycology is often like that.

See? Is hollow with no central stem.

Both of these species are good to watch out for, because they crop in the same spot year after year. Picking doesn’t harm them, because the vast bulk of the colony is below the surface – the part you see is only the fruiting body, like apples on an apple tree. I do leave undersized shrooms in place though, and pop old manky ones up into the forks of trees in the area – this is to help the spores spread on the wind to establish new colonies. If you have any woodland near your home, see if you can find any old maps to find disused footpaths – these are often good places to look for woodland species because generations of foragers will have been scattering the spores from their baskets as they head for home!

*Migrants from other areas put us to shame here. Seriously. As a foraging friend of mine said recently, "If you want to know where the mushrooms are, follow a Pole with a basket. If you want to pick any, get up before him."

** Although inconventiently enough for white supremacists, St George was Turkish. With a Palestinian mother. Still, huzzah!