End of an Era

I've been holding my breath for a couple of months now, but it's finally happened; this week is the last in which I will be primarily working as a pharmacist (druggist). Barring an unfortunate few weeks in December which were booked several centuries ago, from now on I can truthfully put 'writer' into the occupation box on survey forms since that, primarily, is what I'll be doing.

I've spoken before about how odd the public perception of writers is, but I had expected to feel rather different this week. Elated, perhaps; the sort of light and airy feeling that you can only ordinarily achieve by forgetting to put your knickers on. Instead of that, I feel... odd. Dislocated. It's almost like a bereavement, except without the grief. I think I'm just feeling exposed, mostly, as I kiss a partial goodbye to the whiny bitch that is pharmacy in the 21st century.

As I drove slowly through the back lanes of an unfamiliar pocket of Dorset last week in the gathering darkness, in search of a previously arranged interview for a planned project, I felt a chill wind blow through the core of me. This, after all, is what I signed up for; goodbye to the comforting tedium of wage slavery with its regular pay packet, and hello to the brassy uncertainty of setting my own goals and priorities, touting for business, and hoping to the gods that somebody is prepared to buy my work. My last day of mainly-pharmacy promised to be feel very odd indeed.

But hey, this is me - so naturally the fates intervened. An unduckable pharmacy conference has popped up its head this weekend, locking me into three days of travel, boredom and (if I get my way) alcohol, and this morning a hefty set of proofs arrived in the post. The lovely publishers need them checked in minute detail and sent back - by Monday at the latest. Given that I will get home late on Sunday night that won't be a problem, will it?

But perhaps shell-shocked and exhausted is a more realistic way to make the transition between two careers than hollow and dislocated, after all. Regardless, as of next week work starts on Fimp - of which you will be hearing much more shortly. Excited? I am - but you can't see what I'm doing.

Wish me luck!

The Little Mushroom Who Wasn't

Once upon a time in some woods, there was a little mushroom. (Actually he wasn't a little mushroom at all but just the overground part of a vast and incredibly long-lived organism weighing more than an elephant, but that's not important right now.) For most of the year he was on holiday (...never mind) but if the summer was nice and the autumn was wet, up he would pop and all his friends would be very pleased to see him. One friend who was particularly pleased to see him was the wizard who lived in the Hollow. Every year the wizard came and gave the little mushroom a lovely ride in his basket, and as they walked through the woods the little mushroom would wait until the wizard wasn't looking and sporulate through the gaps in the basket, which is slightly pervy when you think about it but the wizard didn't seem to mind. The wizard and the mushroom enjoyed their walks through the woods, and when they were finished the wizard would take the little mushroom home to tea.

...or at least, that was the plan. However, this year's summer wasn't nice. It was cold, and damp, and bleedin' 'orrible. And this year's autumn wasn't wet. The September rains failed and the weather warmed up, just to spite me. And lo, there were no mushrooms to be seen – at least not in this neck of the woods. I've had disappointing forays before, but never never have I led a party of twenty people on a walk through a normally productive area and failed to find one single, solitary edible mushroom (except stinkhorns, and they don't count). So, my basket – and my dried mushroom jars – are empty, and the early frosts we've had this week mean that they will very probably remain so.

Would whomever kidnapped the little mushroom please release him?

Sticky Chickens

Ahh, chickens. If I've been relatively quiet lately it's because this blog depends on two factors in my life; the Hollow Garden, and my rather odd sense of humour. The sad truth is that for the last few weeks I've been working so hard I've seen very little of either of them. Until, of course, I try to change anything to do with the chickens.

Problem; the 'chicks'* are now sexually mature, and have taken to fighting. The Buff Orpington gets the worst of it, since he's a bit smaller than the Plymouth Rocks at this point, and yesterday I had to rescue the poor bleeding thing before they really did him a mischief. Staying quietly out of the way was no longer an option for him; the Rocks had his number and were quite keen to punch his ticket, in a manner of speaking. Time to separate them.

'No problem,' I said to Witchypoo. 'We'll move him down into the empty half of the main run, and he can sleep on his own in the broody coop. He can stick beside the Big Girls so he doesn't feel isolated.'

In anything to do with chickens, sadly, every solution causes three new problems. Problem number one was that Monsieur le Buff has higher hormone levels than a Wimbledon ball boy - and he was corralled next to six feathery lay-deez. First he found his voice for the first time (and boy, did he find it), and then he found his wings - clipped and theoretically flight-incapable, but what is physics compared to a raging... er, a raging whatever-it-is-that-chickens-use?** Needless to say, when I got home he was in the run with the Big Girls showing them what a Big Boy he is. They didn't look particularly impressed, I have to say.

Problem number two was that Big Boy was not invited into the coop at the end of the day. Chicken ladders are an acquired skill, and he opted instead to attempt to insert himself into the mini-woodpile that the Big Girls perch on. It was getting dark when I found him, but he still had enough energy to lead me a merry little dance around the run for a few minutes - which didn't get my vote as I was still wearing my Writery Suit. I caught him and passed him over the fence to Witchypoo for insertion into the broody coop.

Problem number three was that Big Boy was too tired to co-operate with the nest box. With his head stuck out of the pophole into the run and his arse hanging out of the inspection hatch he did the only sensible thing and simply fell asleep, leaving WP and I to stuff him in as best we could. I expect we'll find it looking like an overstuffed pillow in the morning, but hey.

By this time the other two Big Boys, who had earlier been watching with interest from the top of the gate to their run, had also dozed off. When they're awake they're easy to scare back into the run, but they were too far gone to be intimidated. They were also to stupid to be shoved, and simply hung onto the lintel of the gate for all they were worth - which is how I came to be prizing two upside-down, madly flapping bundles of squawking death off the gate, one toe at a time. Who says growing your own is dull?



*See that? Although I still call them 'the chicks' they are so obviously hulking great brutes now that inverted commas are needed to indicate that I am not actually in need of an urgent eye examination.

**Oh, great. I wish I hadn't looked. Ever passed an ice-cube with a kiss? Well, never again.

The Lengths I'll Go To For Pear Cider

What's this, what's this? Twenty minutes to spare; twenty glorious, golden minutes where no-one is asking me to do anything, check anything, talk to anyone, read anything, or do the monkey dance again. For the last week, the only such moments have been the ones I've spent hiding in the toilet.

I should explain.

Regular readers may remember that Witchypoo has recently returned to full-time work at fairly short notice, leaving an overlap period before I reduce my own commitments (of which there are three weeks remaining). This was deemed to be A Good Thing because it will give us back a little cash float, a luxury we have not enjoyed for some months, but the crossover was never going to be a comfortable time. This isn't simply because we are both working now (lots of couples do that) but because my writing career is slowly gearing up, there's the microholding* to run and then there's the Transition Town stuff.**

Which is why it's been a bit of a strain to have Witchypoo away in Latvia for a week.

Late last week, WP's work discovered that they had an opportunity to send someone to a conference in Latvia, and only WP was available. After a hasty conference with me she agreed, but there was only enough time to arrange travel and a hotel before she was whisked away, leaving me with two children and more french beans than I know what to do with. Crucially, there was no time to arrange any currency - but no worries, she would use her cashcard in Riga, right? Right?

Wrong. The Rigan*** cash machines turned up their collective noses at WP's card, leaving her stranded with only £2.37 and a second-hand shirt button with which to negotiate a foreign country. A panicked telephone call and some frantic work from me revealed that the attempts at a foreign transaction had triggered a security lockdown on her cards, despite the fact she had discussed the trip with them beforehand, and they would like to speak directly to her on our home telephone number. Now, please.

Which was tricky, because as previously discussed SHE WAS IN LATVIA.

All was sorted out - eventually - but this is the sort of situation that the phrase 'institutionally moronic' was made for. The bank may be made up of thousands of well-trained, pleasant and helpful staff - but taken as a whole it behaves like the thick kid who picks his nose in the back of the class.

Still, at least I have Latvian pear cider.




*It's too small to be a smallholding, but I hesitate to use the word 'vegetable plot' because then people think I'm just messing about with a few runner beans in the summer.

**Which is, incidentally, your fault. Collectively. Somebody left a comment ages ago expressing the confident hope that I'd be in on the kill when our local Transition Town Initiative started up, so I went along to a meeting - and given that I can't keep my mouth shut even when underwater, the rest was inevitable.

***I can't help thinking the Rigans were a race in Star Trek TNG at some point looking, as all other alien races did, completely human apart from a single-piece latex facial prosthesis. Deanna Troy probably attempted to thought-shag one of them, which distracted everyone from the fact that they were cutting up and attempting to steal the Enterprise piece by piece. It was only when Data, with his keen eye for detail, noticed that his comfy chair had gone that the plot was discovered, and he only realised that because his cat had taken to sleeping on his wig. The Rigans were confronted, phasered thoroughly and tractored until they were sore, and the day was saved. Huzzah! Er, but I digress. Again.

File Under 'B'

I should like to thank our prospective Conservative candidate, the splendidly-named Richard Drax, for his recent intervention in our relentless slide towards 'fuel poverty' (which, after all, is where we're all going to end up in a few years). This kind man has supplied us with paper, with which I can light the woodburner, for the last three days running. Admittedly he has stuck a picture of himself on each sheet for some reason, along with some seductive prose about 'wanting our country back'. This got my attention, but I'm afraid he lost me again with six hundred words of waffle topped off with the truly terrible '...as Conservatives we are striving to achieve the impossible and more besides.'

Mr Drax plans a new Earth, yesterday

...don't. For the love of Pete, strive to achieve the possible. And if you must bombard me with leaflets containing less information than the plot of a particularly poorly-scripted porn flick, at least print them on recycled paper.

The Second Famine Year

Oh, my aching wallet! The price of organic chicken feed has gone up - again. Since I changed away from Scats chicken feed last year (they now only call their feed 'GM free' rather than organic), there has been a big increase every time I buy a bag of it. The matter is - well, hardly chickenfeed!

The title of this yarn, by the way, is not intended to trivialize the suffering of people in countries suffering from real famine. It is simply an observation that we have just had our second disastrous summer season, and were it not for imports half the population would be starving. Things are bad enough - another bad summer might well be one too many.

My model for egg production in the Hollow is simple: I have half a dozen chickens because at their very lowest point (the moult) six will still produce enough eggs for the family and a few to spare. Surplus eggs go onto a little table with an honesty box on it, and the money from that buys the feed; in other words, I get free eggs. As always, I like to support organic practices when I can, but I have to be pragmatic about it because my neighbours are. If I put the price of my eggs up, they stop buying them. This is simply because they don't care much about the 'O' word - not when there's a chicken farm round the corner selling allegedly* free-range eggs very cheaply.

So, what to do? Do I tough it out and wait for the price to come down after a better harvest year - at least a 12 month wait? Or do I chuck in the organic feed in favour of the petrochemical-grown stuff? Do I perhaps start to boil up a bucket of 'mash' (basically every scrap of organic food and garden waste that doesn't run fast enough) on top of the wood burner every night, to cut the feed bill down a little?

Or do I go in for a spot of guerilla chicken farming? I can see it now...

'Right girls, this is the spot. Out you go - quickly! Go, go, go! Scrawny, you take the side border. Butch, take care of that hedge. Chicken For A Hat, you're on point. Come on, ladies, move it! Quickly, get those ornamental alliums... don't miss the geraniums, there's good calories in them... shit! There's a light on, somebody's coming... GET BACK IN THE VAN! Come on, come on, the police will be here in a minute, get in! Okay Witchypoo, floor it!'



*Oh, don't get me started.