Of Projects Past

Sausage pies - sausage meat from our pigs and suet crust
from our lamb suet. 

A bit of our Kent life came back to greet us today when friends Mark and Cathy dropped by on a whistle stop tour of the Republic seeking out cousins and old family roots in Bray, Ballinagare and Tallow (Co.Waterford - so far south you can only go further south by hopping into Co. Cork). These guys are real friends from my 'Cambria' days, the time spent as an active volunteer on the famous Thames Sailing Barge while she was being restored in Faversham.

More baking for the visit. We like to lay out a good 'spread'.

My recent life seems to have been cobbled together as a series of long projects and readers who have been with me for 'ever' will recall the rebuild on the 1961 Citroën 2CV car which had been a twin-towns gift from the French town of La Chapelle d'Armentieres to the Kent town of Birchington (see posts around May 19th 2009). This was followed by my involvement in the Cambria project (posts such as 21 June 2008 and Oct 31 2007). This was all followed, of course, by the biggest project of all, our move here, restoration of the house (Dec 2011 to May 2012) and then creation of the small holding.

Tea Brack. Moist and delicious

Back in the 2CV days I knew little of Thames barges except that there was an old boat yard in my town (Faversham), through which I walked my dogs and where they seemed to be always doing up these "big old boats" - the yard was always strewn with equipment, ropes, folded red-ochre sails and an old crane, and echoed with banging and hammering, the scream of power-planes and drills and the bangs of 'maul' hammers. Then my aul' Mum came to visit and came round with me on the walk. She stopped dead as we turned the corner onto Standard Quay and whooped with delight "Thames BARGES!" Growing up in Bromley by Bow (London) in the 30s and 40s she had seen these lovely craft moving up and down the London River in trade (they were still trading up to the 60's as they could move 170+ tonnes of cargo about with a crew of just 2 men which kept them economic until well into the age of steam, though they stopped making new ones in the 30s).

There will be 'tay' - Mark and Cathy getting ready to tuck in.

My Mum's enthusiasm piqued my own interest in them and I started reading and researching the type. By coincidence the group looking after the decrepit rotting hulk of Cambria had just secured a £900,000 Lottery grant to completely rebuild her in Faversham led by project manager Will Collard and Master Shipwright Tim Goldsack but seeking volunteers to help with unskilled stuff and showing the public round. I had read about it in the local paper and decided to volunteer my services but did not know how, so I kept walking the dogs and knew that eventually I would see someone.

Bearing gifts including these US Deep-South food packets and
rigging parts - see main story.

Step forward, then, Mark, who visited us today. He was the first man I saw, tiptoe-ing through the boatyard junk in a big yellow hi-viz coat. He'd been involved in Cambria for 15 years already by then, when they had no money and used to try to keep out the weather of the beloved wreck using bits of old plank, chains, tarp and concrete. "Excuse Me!" (I might have said) "Are you to do with this barge and how can I get involved?" The rest is history, covered fairly well in this blog - I was put to work in a gang of superb volunteers (including Cathy), a very happy and productive, enthusiastic group working regularly right through to launch day and beyond. I even kept running the website and the Cambria blog on moving to Ireland, right up to this year.

All good things must end, though, and the distance and lack of real contact meant it became harder and harder to keep the website fresh and to keep track of new stories and the website has realistically been superceded by the involvement of the still hands-on, closer members of the team who mainly use Facebook to publish stories and pics of their adventures. Good luck to them, then and I have parked up the old blog that was so much part of the actual restoration process (visit http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/ and hover cursor over the 'News' word in the black bar, then click on either 'blog' or 'blog archive'. The restoration took 3 years or so between 2007 and 2010)

So, Mark and Cathy came and enjoyed a bit of a cold buffet. We like to put on a good spread - Liz says she likes the table to say words like 'plenty' and 'ample', though not actually 'groaning'! They also had the farm tour. They are readers of the blog and they both said they were delighted to see the place for real that they had only ever seen in pics. Mark's camera hit over-drive at one stage shooting pics of Towser at a top window, then geese on the lawn and Rambo the ram coming up to the field gate to say 'Hello'. They came bearing gifts too - they had offered as they were coming over from Kent, to bring anything we might need so, among the generous bounty were some Zatarain's (US Deep South) food mixes which we used to enjoy buying from the excellent world-food/deli in Faversham, 'Macknades' (but can't buy over here). Also some yacht-rigging gear which I need to haul the bee swarm lure box into my tree next year; living by the Kent coast they have much better access to yachting chandlers type shops than we do in Roscommon! Thanks very much for all this 'stuff' Mark and Cathy. Safe journey back to your hotel tonight and then on back to the UK tomorrow. We have high pressure weather just now and not a breath of wind, so you should at least get calm seas for your crossing.

Clara and the Bandit

A bit of entertainment this afternoon in the form of a mercy mission to go and rescue a broken down motorbike using the 2CV and trailer. The bike is a Suzuki Bandit 600, amusingly the same engine size as the rescue car (though 4 cylinders) and luckily just fits into a 6 foot long trailer. It belongs to K-Dub, our friend, carpenter and shed door wrangler who, despite having ridden bikes for ten years has to submit to the new safety training laws now introduced to Ireland before he can take his test and get a full licence. His fault, he admits - if he'd taken the test "years ago" none of this training would have been needed, but he let all those deadlines drift by and now has to pay the €400+ and do the IBT (Initial Basic Training) including 16 hours of one-on-one on the road riding.

K-Dub and Carolyn actually own about 9 bikes between them but all of them are off the road or in need of work and many are up in Dublin where K-Dub's home and work are. One is the wooden bike I have already described, and this Bandit is a second brought down from Dublin and not quite sorted yet, so it has broken down a couple of times. I am told it is a bit of a slow, lumbering beast but is therefore perfect for this training - you do not want a thoroughbred racer which is always itching to get blasted up to 185 mph, when you are tootling round the road cones on your best behaviour.

Anyway, this time it died on the main N5 Dublin road just beyond Ballinagare at 9 o'clock at night as K-Dub was on the way home from the latest IBT session and he pushed it into the first lay-by he came to, in order to try to get a look at it. Luckily this was just outside the garden wall of resident bike-nut, old Paddy who is the spitting image of Grand-Dad Silverwood, and like him gabbles away in a thick accent (in his case Dublin, where GD-S 'does' you in Scouse), very fast without his teeth in, rapidly gave K-Dub his life story plus tea and sustenance but then, bless him, offered to park the bike in his secure back yard while the rider got rescued and then came back for the dead Bandit. Lovely old bloke, he was completely intrigued by the 2CV, its tiny engine and 1986 reg. He took pics on his mobile phone and bantered away with us while we loaded the bike. Thanks, Paddy - you are a true gem! The bike is now rescued to the home for some tender loving care. Carolyn tells me this is an electrical problem and the bike is not firing on enough cylinders, and she's the qualified engineer as well as the Bandit's owner, so I'm not arguing.

Meanwhile you can see from this picture how big the goslings are new getting. Apart from Fotherington Thomas (far left in this picture) they are almost as tall as the parent birds. Here they are enjoying the ramp up to the enamel bath which I have 'clothed' with some spare butyl liner as the geese were stumbling between the laths of the pallet. Now they splip-splop happily up and down and leap in and out of the water like pro's. I will take a close up picture  soon, so you can see the start of feathering up. They have some wing and tail feathers starting, though their bodies are covered in fluff still.

The gander is now in full moult so the orchard is well decorated with his big wing feathers and I amuse myself by sticking them in the cracks in fence posts which gives a bizarre effect which has you thinking of Indian squaws. A friend ask me if this was 'magical'. Not as far as I know but maybe the goose-spirits will be amused and come and guard my little goose family.

And one last time I will post a picture of how amazingly clear the pond has become. This is a water lily planted in the deepest part of the pond in, yes, an old blue kitchen colander! Hey - the proper baskets are expensive. We are recycling here!

So, as we sit here we await the arrival of a car load of Silverwoods who have been out on a car version of the modern 'Treasure Hunt' idea, which is called 'Geo-caching'. We are fascinated to find out what this is all about and how it works.

They seem to have been on a good circuit on this one all the way up to Tullamore and Athlone, which is close enough, they decided, to break off and divert to us, where Liz has been all afternoon baking cakes and savouries to sustain their geo-cached-out troops.