Slow News Day

Horse Chestnut bud still firm closed

Another short and sweet post, I'm afraid. We are in an event gap between the funeral which took up most of the last weekend, the piggy movements which followed it and the coming weekend for which the calendar is also blank. It has been raining too much for anything but cursory tidying outside and a bit of photography of signs of spring. 

Burns Night came along on Thursday giving us a minor excuse for a wee celebration. I had kept a bit of Scotch back from Christmas (Elizabeth had won it in a raffle) for the day and we had made, as usual, our own haggis from our own lambs.

This gets done as a tray-bake, sitting in the oven with a butter paper covering the top so that it does not dry out, rather than trying to obtain some natural gut to stuff. 

Another named storm tracked through - Storm Georgina - but this one came with only 'Yellow' status warnings and did us no damage - it just re-filled all the puddles. That has been the way of recent weather - we get a dry day when most of the surface water drains away but then it rains like mad at night and we are back to sloppy surface mud again. All yard and livestock jobs are done in wellies.

Rosie and Polly keeping me waiting. 

The new lamb (Tigger) continues to thrive and we are now in a daily rhythm of shepherding the family out of the shed mid morning, once Lily has had her breakfast, and round to the front lawn.

By mid afternoon, Lily has done with wandering round on the damp, almost non-existent grass and is back at the gate, baa-ing her pleas to be allowed back into the warm, dry straw of the shed. I grab a bucket of 'grub' and lead her home, with Tigger running along close at heel.

My first 'Irish' lapwings. 59 birds in this pic but I think around
75 in the flock down by the local lough.  

Lily's sisters are keeping me waiting on the lambing progress. Polly, we know, was tupped on 5th October, so she is not due till 5th March, but the other two (Myfanwy and Rosie) did not give me any such clues.

A tiny self-seed holly from Mum in Law.

I am reduced to checking their nethers every day and looking for any signs of bagging up. It is perfectly possible, of course, that they are not pregnant at all, but they do have that look, matching Lily (as was) and Polly in girth and shape. Either way, Ram 'Pedro' will not be around long. His days are numbered. I have had no interest from my attempt to sell him via Done Deal, so he is booked in for his final journey in 2 weeks. His aggressive butting of the ewe Myfanwy, has sealed his fate.

That's about it on this slow news day.

Pussy Willow.

A Genuinely Short Post (Honest)

A welcome cold snap

OK, I know I have many times recently started a post with comments along the lines of "not much to say, so this is going to only be a few paragraphs" and then gone on at normal length. Well, this time, I genuinely have little to say, so I might be for real here. Added to that, one major 'thread' of narrative is under that embargo to which I have already alluded; the main characters in those episodes do not like to be spoken of 'on here' and there is no arguing with that.

Frosty East Field

Main event for this post was the 'Little Christmas' or 'Ladies' Christmas', (Nollaig na mBan or, if you prefer, simply Epiphany) when the men take over the reins of the household and try to treat their women-folk to a complete day of rest.

When you can only find 4 ducks it is a sure sign that #5 is off
hidden up somewhere laying a surreptitious late egg. When
she returns it is then a race against the magpies to find the egg
before they do. 

It is nothing that heroic, so does not generate me much Blog text but it is fun to do and much appreciated by Lizzie. I have to do all the kitchen and dish-washer duties, provide tea on demand and cook the main meals. Also, on this occasion, carve a good snack's worth of thin slices off the 'Parma'-style whole leg of ham mid afternoon and pass in the gorgeous chocolates we were gifted by our French visitors at Christmas (Thank you, Marion, Clara and Augustin). It all went very well.

Frosty early morning view from the new kitchen windows

I have also tried to progress from knowing that we have "around 30 chickens" to doing some kind of census to get an exact list. This is mainly so that we can report egg production, health and progress more accurately and to identify whether we have any 'passengers' who are contributing nothing and need weeding out. Tough old, cut-throat world?

We both wish the cats would not catch these cuties and we are
always amazed how tiny they are in the hand. A goldcrest, of
course. 

Obviously, with the birds free-ranging this is not that easy - you walk one way round the site with your notepad and pencil and try to record who is where but by the time you have nearly finished, are you double counting hens who have gone widdershins round the house and come to meet you again? I scratched down a list of 28 hens by name if they have names, and by a rough description if not. I now have a list that says such arcane things as "Stumpy", "Big Red", "Grey / Dark cape" and "Flat black / big crest" and is peppered with codes like 'A-head' and 'A cheeks'.

Poor little mite. At least we have a strong population of goldcrests
here, so this one will not really be missed.

The 'A' thing stands for Araucana, which is a weird 'fancy fowl' beloved of show folk which has tufts of feathers sticking out of the top of its head and sideways from its cheeks. The latter give it a strange hamster-like look from the front. Pure bred A's lay blue eggs which are quite nice, but we only have crosses between A's and other types, so we only get white eggs and we get hens which are mainly hen-shaped but have some bizarre A-tufts on their heads.

I now need to take my list into the coop at lock-up and double check. I better not bore you with a complete list of all the birds as a fancy tabular addendum. You might think I was trying to flesh out a slow news day. As if.

The half moon goes down into that big patch
of new morning sky where Storm Eleanor
decapitated our larch. 

Finally, we are now at Day 9 of the two major New Year's resolutions. First that #DryJanuary - we are both sticking to this as per the agreed rules; one 'day off' allowed. Mine is going to be Burns Night, Liz went for Nollaig na mBan and brother Mark has a gin tasting he has booked in on 15th. So far so good.

Knitting project gets finishing touches.

Second, Liz was determined to get out all the unfinished major knitting projects and finish them. She loves knitting up the pieces of a garment but hates the stage where you sew all the bits together, so as at NYD, I had a lovely Aran pullover which was all there but for the assembly and Liz had a blue cardigan and a green woolly in similar states. Well, true to her resolution, my Aran is finished, the cardy just needs buttons (and even has a neck-warmer / 'snood' in the same wool, to go with it.) and the green thing is very nearly completed.

Publicity shot for the Men's Shed. The lads were doing a 'bucket'
collection at the check outs in local SuperValu, "Duffy's". 

And that, genuinely, is it. Till next time.

In with the New, (Not) Out with the Old

Roscommon has the eye of Storm Eleanor
pass overhead at around 6 pm.

Fox! My one word text brings Liz running to join me in the garden but we can hardly hear each other over the cacophony of Guinea Fowl alarm calls. We've not seen one on the property all year, since the November 2016 attack but now, two days into the New Year we are back in the firing line.

A new gin for Liz to try. Blackwater.

It was fairly calm (though we were expecting the latest named storm, Storm Eleanor by evening) but lashing down with rain. I was just wandering about looking for eggs, and had come round the corner of the barn, headed for the orchard when all hell broke loose 30 yards away at the top of the 'allotment'. Guinea fowl were exploding into vertical flight and shouting blue murder about foxes.

...and a weird new beer for me. Loved the
goat logo. Very quaffable. 

I saw the fella straight away, with a bunch of feathers in his mouth (but no bird). He was a fine big adult looking first a bit put out that he'd near-missed the Guinea but then a bit concerned that I was running towards him, flapping my arms and roaring swear words at him like some lunatic. He took off smartly through the hedge and was gone. That's when I got a chance to text Liz.

The Guineas having a fox-free dust bath in the tunnel.

The Fox-Success Gods were on our side this time. The pouring rain had most of the birds hiding in the sheds anyway and it was an easy job for 2 of us to shepherd the rest home - geese and ducks. The Guineas now settling down and chuntering and scolding loudly (as they do) could not wait to go 'home' either, so by 15:15, still broad daylight, we had everybody locked up for the night, safe in case Brer Fox should try again.

A baffled turkey?

Well. For a given value of 'safe'. Eleanor is now roaring around noisier, if anything, than the 'Orange warning' one, Dylan. I fear, as ever, for the tarpaulin roof of the chicken house. (We have just been out for a check round at half past six and so far all seems OK. It's just very very noisy. We mainly feel helpless and powerless.)

Meanwhile, away from Storm Eleanor and her kind, all is chugging along nicely as we chug gently through New Year and welcome 2018 in. The remaining turkey hen seems somewhat baffled but that might just be us anthropomorphising like we shouldn't. We were amused to ponder whether she is thinking that she has nothing in her folk-memory or hard wired into her DNA to tell her what to do with the 25th, 26th, 27th, the New Year and so on.

Baffled Turkey Hen

She is also a bit lost-looking now the Guinea cock-birds have  dropped her like a hot potato when they received their new 'women'. Up to then the boys viewed it as their duty to shepherd all three turkeys around and mind them. Now she wanders about wondering where her 'brothers' and her 'minders' have gone.

New Year's Eve supper.

New Year's Eve went very well for us, and nice and quiet. We ate the celebratory haggis supper and sipped Scotch Whisky (no 'E' because this was Famous Grouse, a gift from Santa). We watched a nice Irish-flavoured 'rom-com' movie ("PS I Love You", based on the Celia Ahern book) to fill the long evening and then did the 'First Footing' thing. We have both decided to try our hand at 'Dry January' - no booze till the 31st EXCEPT that we are taking the Scottish Amendment which allows for a dram of whisky on Burns Night (25th). We are not alone, by all accounts. Cousin 'Win'  and  her Peter are doing the same and bro' Mark is taking a gin-drinkers version in Swindon. There is a pre-booked gin tasting on 15th Jan which it would (obviously) be churlish to refuse, though he's not too bothered about Burns Night and Haggis. I'll keep you all posted on how we all do.

One off design handbag by Con and Santa

I can now, at last, post pics of this Santa delivery which I have been dying to show you but unable to do so lest I spoil the surprise. Friends of the Blog may recall that my good friend and archery coach, Con, is also a fine leather worker. He is the national go-to expert on Medieval footwear, frequently called upon to create repro shoes for museums and 'interactive' exhibitions (i.e. where the museum visitors get to try on the items) and asked to try to make a shoe using the archaeologists/historians' suggested techniques. "Nope, they WOULDN'T have been able to do it that way!"

Con also makes items for sale through the website - archery gear as well as shoes, 'jewelry', bangles and (ta-daaaa!) one-off design hand bags. With Santa's help we conspired to get Liz involved in the design without being allowed to know what the final result might be. She'd 'chosen' a cocktail glass for her 'logo' and Con was able to sneak off and contrive a cocktail-glass-based design for our bag. Liz is over the moon and the new bag is now the bag of choice, filled with all the usual 'clutter' of notebooks, spare tissues, lotions and potions and 'stuff' that keeps herself on the road.

My old favourite billhook may be 100+ years old.

Finally, that line in my title about "Not out with the old". I have in my 'man-shed' a treasured favourite farm implement, my bill hook, bought over 30 years ago 2nd hand in Surrey. It has a forged blade marked with the forger's stamp. "I.H.   J Harrison   Warranted" I was chatting away about favourite tools on the Internet and got talking to a lad who is a bit of an expert on old English toolery.

The stamp on mine told him that it was made by the company 'I Harrison', long since absorbed into Spear and Jackson, and forged by the son of the firm, John Harrison. The chap has all the pattern books from these firms and was able to identify my billhook as being originally from 1916, over a hundred years old! I loved it in an obsessive way before. It was my most precious piece of kit. There will be no stopping me now!

Silvergirl. 

And there you have it. In the time it has taken me to type these last 8 paragraphs the roaring wind of Eleanor has quite died away... unless she is just teasing us as we sit right under that eye. More on all this soon. Happy New Year to all our readers and don't throw away those old tools. They might be historically important!

Possibly taking the love of Prosecco a bit far? Now you can
emerge from the bathroom smelling of it!

Just a couple more pics because I have them.

Final loaf of 2017.

Back In The Kitchen

K-Dub on the big Kango

This week saw K-Dub and myself swinging back into action after our respective Christmas breaks and in his case a call up to the big smoke to do some 'proper' work (as in 'paid' work). "What's the story, Bud?" (or just the Dublin slang "Story, Bud?") is how he announces himself on the phone and we are straight into discussing what, when, how on any jobs. This week it was the decision to finally go for the break through, smashing out the wall at the end of the existing kitchen so that the two spaces become one room with a little 'waist' in the middle where we will leave stub-walls to form a 5' wide 'arch'.

The hole is started but K-Dub has to make running repairs to
 the big Kango.  

You can imagine that our announcement that we were going to smash a huge hole in the end of the kitchen, caused a certain amount of anxiety within the 'main stake-holder'. Visions of rubble, dust and plaster fragments everywhere. What she hadn't realised but was also concerning K-Dub, is that the rumble set up by the massive Kango-hammer sets anything on shelves vibrating and moving gently towards the front of the shelves before leaping to its doom like a gang of lemmings.

Mad hour, then, clearing all the kitchen vulnerables into multiple shopping bags which are now stacked all around the corners of the Dining Room. Liz need not have worried, though. We are good, house-trained builders and we do not create mess inside your house. This kitchen has the internal walls lined with stud walling insulated with foam blocks and plastered over that. The Feb 1012 blog at  http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/02/bathroom-floor.html gives you some idea - in one pic you are looking up at the bathroom floor / kitchen ceiling. We knew that we could chop out all the external wall (concrete, rocks, masonry)  and the window frame without actually breaking into the kitchen. We just had to screw a board a cross the window inside, so as not to leave a huge 2'+ square hole.

A board covers the hole where the window
was. This is the only change you see from
'indoors' for now.

Six or seven hours later after lots of noise, rubble, dust and shovelling, we have our hole, roughly 5' wide. We have thereby created a weakness in the upstairs (bathroom) wall which we need to fix by slotting in a couple of 6' x 4" concrete lintels at the top of our hole, and we have exposed the wooden joists of the bathroom floor, so those guys need a 'stringer' of 6 x 2 and a joist-hanger from this to each old joist-end. We reinstate the shower pipes which are mainly just 'push-in' hand-tight connections and we can safely leave the job for the few days over the weekend. Nothing will fall down and we can still use the shower. We are now also ready to get the 'Sparks' in for some electrical first fix.

Liz's tray-bake version of haggis using our own lamb bits. 

The main other event affecting the week was Burns Night which regular readers will know we like to celebrate. We think we are in a minority here; we know of no other people locally who do a Burns Night and our comments on social media meet with blank incomprehension and dead silence. I have never seen haggis for sale locally. That does not worry us as Liz makes her own haggis using bits from our own lambs (breast-meat etc. plus we keep a lung back from one of the carcasses specifically for this purpose.)

This year we could not do the meal on the correct date (25th) as we had a meeting in the village, so we moved it to tonight (Fri 27th). It was, as ever, delicious and the haggis, 'neeps' and tatties with onion gravy was nicely rounded off by a gooseberry cranachan (whipped cream, oats etc) and accompanied by a wee dram of whiskey. It should have been Scottish, of course but the nearest I could get in the local supermarket was Bushmills, which is from County Antrim. Close enough.

Our village's indoor handball court. 

Finally, there is the '365' thing now only 4 days away from finishing. My nipping around everywhere has made me something of an unofficial photographer for the village, certainly among Liz's circle. This brings me an occasional 'commission' - the most recent was to be sent down to the local hand-ball court. Coming from Sussex, hand-ball would be a sport I had had absolutely nothing to do with and first 'met' as a series of strange abandoned outdoor courts  in Irish villages.

Looking down onto the court, through the
perspex wall from the top of the 'stand'. 

These sit in their respective villages as just 3 walls around a rectangle which is roughly 20' by 40' and the walls are roughly 20 feet high. We have never seen an outdoor one still in use. But in the local village we are rather special in having a modern, fully indoor one and an active thriving club. Ours has a perspex wall at the top end which protects spectators but allows them to watch the action from a ramp of stairs and at the top of this 'stand' is a kitchen and bar area.

That's all I know and those are the photo's I have fired into the Village Development Co. I have never seen anyone playing the game, have little idea what this involves and am completely ignorant of the rules. I guess it is a little like squash but with a bigger ball and no  racquets.

Towser at speed.

Of Home Grown Haggis and Mad Poems

Appropriate veg.

This household has always loved the haggis and has generally celebrated Burns Night despite not a one of us having any connection to Burns's countrymen save going there on holiday as a child. The college where I did my post-grad research used to do a superb feast and Liz and I even used to seek out a good Burns Night supper in a favourite pub in Kent where the hosts would "pipe the beast in" properly. We had our tame authentic Scot (Rest in Peace, Joe Cosgrove of the sea-dog leathery skin, gruff Merchant Mariner accents and salty sailorman grey beard; we will never forget your renditions of Address to the Haggis) do the poem.

Bud break in quince.

Now that we are doing the small-holder thing and have our own lambs, we can make our own haggis, of course, and this Liz does every year. Haggis tends to use the more 'gribbly' bits of lamb, heart, lungs and what are euphemistically called 'trimmings' - the bits of edge and end which the butcher will not sell when he is cleaning up a nice joint for the shop display. We now arrange with our own slaughterman/butcher to give us back the 'offal' on the day after slaughter, and then keep all the trimmings a week later when we go down to see the carcasses butchered up.

'Steak Lady's daffs looking promising.

This gap of a week makes assembling the ingredients a bit more complicated, but Liz gets round that by using this years heart and lungs 'fresh' but saving some frozen trimmings from last year to go in with them. Our other peculiarity is that we found that you do not need to stuff the ingredients into a bit of gut, a mad made "cover" or a sheep's stomach (the latter would be huge anyway!), but can make a 'tray-bake' version in the oven.

The surviving half dozen young Buffs
3 hens and 3 roosters.

I don't often do recipes on this blog but here, for the sake of it, is the recipe Liz uses from the BBC website but adapted for home use after point 4.

Haggis

This is an authentic recipe from Scotland and the ingredients and methods of cooking may be unfamiliar but we hope you enjoy the results.

Ingredients

Heart and lungs of one lamb
450g/1lb beef or lamb trimmings, fat and lean
2 onions, finely chopped
225g/8oz oatmeal
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground dried coriander
1 tsp mace
1 tsp nutmeg
water, enough to cook the haggis
stock from lungs and trimmings

Preparation method

1. Wash the lungs, heart and liver (if using). Place in large pan of cold water with the meat trimmings and bring to the boil. Cook for about 2 hours.
2. When cooked, strain off the stock and set the stock aside.
3. Mince the lungs, heart and trimmings.
4. Put the minced mixture in a bowl and add the finely chopped onions, oatmeal and seasoning. Mix well and add enough stock to moisten the mixture. It should have a soft crumbly consistency.
5. (Liz's edit) Brush a lidded casserole with melted lamb fat and put the mixture in. Press either a butter wrapper or a greased piece of tin foil down on top of the mixture, cover with the lid. Bake for one and a half hours at 180ºC.

These seed heads can go onto the
compost now the birds are done with them

So there you go. We will be enjoying ours with home grown mashed spuds and 'bashit neeps' even though the accompanying 'dram' will be Irish Jameson whiskey (with an E) or possibly poitín as we don't have any Scotch in the house.

Meanwhile, I have resisted temptation to paste in a chunk of the famous (Fair fa' etc) poem but this is because we have our own semi-homegrown madness to publish. I don't have a great deal to do with the social media system 'Twitter'. I have an account and it can be diverting but I think it only works if you have a smart phone and the time to be always on it. People post up what ever they are thinking at the time and then move on, so it is by definition ephemeral. When I go onto a computer twice a day or there-abouts, morning and evening, I would have to scroll back through hundreds of these little quips just to catch up; there would be no point. 

Goose, duck and chicken eggs.

Occasionally, though, one of these people with, probably, too much time on their hands does have a moment of inspiration and creates or shares something which catches the attention with its sheer lunacy or amusement value. Liz spotted one of these last night; an "app" which creates a poem out of the 'tweets' you have posted ('tweeted'). You can choose from a choice of three poetry styles; Liz went with 'Rondel' and sent the app off beavering away to find my (thin and far between) tweets which are mainly about farming and small-holdering. 

We can now bring you, by the magic of Twitter, the following masterpiece which may one day make it to the English canon and your grand-children's school-book anthology. Or not.

On goats

by Matt Care

Probably not that impressed by the poem, but happy
not to be in the haggis. Feste the lamb is getting very
big now. 

We have control over the spend?

Place or I'll be in the dog 'ouse.

Through to Ivy at the December end.

You need an excuse?

Damn! Puts down Visa-debit card.

Smaller ones so now I have 2 pairs.

You'll be grand. Welcome aboard!

Westie dogs barking from upstairs!

Cracking image!

Old names, though, don't you agree?

The onion'. One in every village?

Was caught munching on the fig tree

Can't beat a topp sausage.

..... Follow that Rabbie Burns :-) !!!