All I want for Christmas!!

I have just seen this trailer for a new series by Jane Goodall and it looks wonderful.

Although it seems dreadful to utter the C word, we have had our first Charity Catalogues come through the post already so I might as well put it out there that I would like this Series for my present this year:)

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/jane-goodall-teaches-conservation?utm_source=Paid&utm_medium=YouTube&utm_term=Aq-Prospecting&utm_content=Video&utm_campaign=JG

Then I can go back to enjoying our wet, Spring-like August and praying for an Indian Summer through September and October to give me some kind of harvest this year.  It was too cold, wet and windy to plant out early, not really until late May, and it has come back in July, making for such a short growing season on the top of my hill.  The shortest I have every known.  I have just germinated some more French Beans and Sugarsnap peas because the last lot have not done well: these will need a couple of days to harden off and then I will plant them out, probably with fleece, to see if I can possibly get a bit of a harvest for the freezer.

Yesterday a photographer from the local paper came to take photos of me and Eddie:  he behaved like a pro but I was not very happy about having my own photo taken.  The photographer was a lovely young lady who said it made a change from football matches!!

Today I have been clearing piles of papers from several years ago and researching suggested supplements online for therapeutic ketosis and immune support.

Life has thrown us another curveball in that a house we have long had in the back of our minds for our old age has just come on the market.  But we cannot bear the thought of leaving our present home for at least four or five years.  So what to do?  It is unique, as our present house is, has even better views than we do and is just on the edge of the village instead of down the lane in a small hamlet.  The last owners of this other house have been there for 35 years so if we do not take the plunge now, will we lose the chance?

It is very expensive which might just take the choice out of our hands; we are having ours valued on Monday.  This other house is modern, smaller, and we would want to spend quite a lot and make some substantial changes, but it is on fairly level ground, five minutes from the bus, ten minutes from the doctor and shops, yet has a paddock which would take the geese and ponies, a stable and huge workshop garage, garden shed and is fully dog proofed.

However, it has street lighting which I hate, a busy road running past, and is semi-detached which we are not used to.  Oh dear, this is so very hard.  I know what I would say to someone else, but it is quite different when it is your own home you might have to leave, which you have loved and rebuilt over 40 years and where all your pets are buried and which has all the plants and trees from friends and family now deceased.  Here we just walk out of the gate onto a lane with trees all round, where we feel totally safe, comfortable and at home.  But good sense suggests that we think extremely carefully about our decision as in all the years we have been here, we have never seen another house, except for the one now for sale, which has things that we both need and want.

We went to look at it yesterday: it is not surrounded by trees as we are here.  When I went to bed last night our owls were hooting and chatting in the big trees outside the bedroom window. Our pheasants and badgers creep over the fields and through the undergrowth and the hedges we planted 30 years ago and wait for us to feed them every evening. How can we leave them?

But, if things go badly for me healthwise in the next little while it would be much easier for me to manage in this other house, and if I die before my husband, he could actually continue on in this new house whereas he says he could not manage here alone.  Oh, how hard it is to grow older physically but stay young mentally.

You have to admit that life on this hill is varied!

 

 

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Bringing order

With the worst of the winter theoretically ahead of us, I have been ordering wild animal food to get us and our visitors through the hard times ahead.

We have flaked maize, peanuts and chicken pellets for the badgers: mixed grains and pellets for the pheasants – which is also eaten by  some birds especially the yellowhammers who only seem interested in the mixed grains: feeder seed and peanuts for the seed eating birds: dried mealworms especially for the wrens and robins: fat and seed balls: fat and insect pellets for the ground- feeding non-seed eating birds: and mealworm crumble with added fats for anyone we may have missed out on, which is scattered along the tops of the stone walls and amongst plant stems and roots for the shy visitors.

Thus we have a lot of feed to store and sacks and plastic tubs were piling up in the porch and making the outhouse difficult to negotiate.  A couple of hours’ work this morning and we have it sorted into old feed tubs from the ponies, labelled and shelved.

Shelf of apples above:

At the same time we had a sort out of the outhouse which has helped make things more logical and easier to find.

Now we can get into the chest freezer without first lifting off piles of dog food and trays of stored apples!

The hay loft is stacked with hay, and the spare bay in the barn has tins of horse feed and tubs of garlic powder.

The freezers are full of cooked pears and apples, blackberries, soup, turkey in gravy,  leg meat for curries, red cabbage cooked with juniper berries, apples and onions, as well as some bread, butter, cheese and fish, and some veg,  etc.  The pantry shelves are groaning with tinned goods, home made jam, chutneys and sweetcorn relish (a wonderful American recipe) so we are ready for whatever the weather throws at us, I hope.

Although it rarely happens nowadays, I find it difficult to forget the days as a child when not only was our cottage snowed in and we had to jump down from the first floor to dig out to the front door, but the whole village was cut off for over three days.  Some days after walking across the fields with hot bran mashes for the horse we had to sit with our wellies in the stove oven to melt the snow inside our boots so that we could pull them off.  Oh, the chilblains!

Our first winter in this cottage our lane ended up with twelve foot snowdrifts partly caused by snowploughs trying to get through and merely pushing the snow to each side of the lane, causing more problems, as they never got through anyway.  Last winter the worst problem were the icy layers within the snow which often made walking impossible and driving out of the question.  Our lane was never cleared or gritted.

This year we have probably over-compensated but we begin with a warm feeling of preparedness as we look over our stores.

But  –  pride comes before a fall!  No pun intended.

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River of Stones – today’s pebble: “Tiny puffa jacket on antennae-fragile ‘pins’: no teenager in ‘heels’ but – just a wintry Robin”.

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Insect Nightmare!

Since there was such an overwhelming response of pleasure to my last post I decided to give you more of the same today, especially since the bugs of yesterday brought another experience back to my remembrance!

Some years ago, about 20 in fact, I was alone at home in the morning, as usual.  I had walked the dogs, washed the breakfast pots, fed the poultry, let the hens, ducks and geese out into the orchard and the next chore was to groom the ponies and muck out their stable.

Before letting them out into the field I always pick out their hooves first, to get rid of any stable muck that might have got stuck into their feet, so that fresh air can get into the frogs of their feet and prevent any nasty grunge building up and developing bacterial infection.  You see the way this post is going?  Look away now if you are of a tender nature.

This I did, then put the ponies out.  Then I mucked out the stable which took about 40 minutes.  After mucking out I always changed my clothes since they would smell of horse:  I am quite happy with the smell but people tend to look at me oddly in shops if I roll in reeking of manure and strong horse.

In the bathroom I was about to disrobe when I felt a strange feeling in my hair, a sort of tickling.  I looked in the mirror and parted my hair: my whole scalp looked fine but rather grey and then I noticed it.  My whole scalp moved.  As one.  As if the whole skin was a single, live entity.  It was really, really frightening.  I couldn’t make out why it looked so odd, so went and found a magnifying glass and went back to the mirror in the bathroom to take another look.  You can guess by now I expect.  My whole head was one moving, heaving mass of lice.  No skin showed at all, not a spec. (I assure you this picture does not begin to do it justice.)

The overwhelming feeling was one of claustrophobia: I felt trapped with this alien invasion.  Trembling with panic and tears I rang my husband in the office and screamed down the phone: calmly he said, “Wash your hair in paraffin”.  He told me where he kept it and without further ado I brought the can into the house, upstairs into the bathroom and after stripping my clothes off whilst standing in the bath, I washed my hair in pink paraffin.  Then I shampooed it three times to get rid of the smell.

How had I caught the lice?  I could think of nothing I had done that morning which could cause this dreadful predicament.  But then I remembered picking out the ponies’ hooves. I went into the field, called them up and examined them: yes, they had lice.

Clearly, when picking out the ponies’ feet with my head lovingly pressed against their flanks the lice had migrated wholesale on to my freshly washed head of hair.  (Against all intuition lice actually prefer clean hair to dirty or stale hair.)

Every spring horses can pick up louse eggs from the grass where wildlife has passed through: foxes, hedgehogs, mice, rabbits, birds etc. all have their little ‘friends’ which accompany them through life and of course they drop off from time to time and then have to look for another host on which to lay their eggs.  Poultry are also susceptible to the same problem and I was used to dusting all our animals with louse powder as a preventative each spring.  Neither of the ponies had ever had lice before, we always dusted them well in time.  But this year it had been warm and damp unusually early and I had clearly left it too late.

I immediately tied the ponies up and washed them in paraffin too.  They hated it and it was three years before I was able to wash them again.  Perhaps it made their skin feel sore or perhaps they hated the smell. But it killed the lice.

Then I returned to the house and washed my clothes in Jeyes Fluid, a liquid made from coal tar.

My hair and clothes smelt for at least three months after this: I discovered this the next weekend sitting in a warm church meeting as the smell of paraffin and coal tar gradually emerged from me in a miasmic cloud. I was so embarrassed by the smell I explained to the assembled company what had happened. Naively I was more bothered by the smell than the fact that I had caught lice, I’m not sure what the others thought, they were far too kind to say!!

NB  I am now sitting here scratching my head like a maniac and feeling itchy all over.

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