Au Revoir to AB

AB rocking the mesh visor. 

Farewell then, Augustin (AB), our Help-X volunteer of the last 4 weeks, who I dropped to the railway station this morning for his journey onward to Dublin. It nearly didn't work; as is commonly the case, Castlerea station was all locked up and gone away, unmanned and the ticket machine out on the platform was crashed and inoperable.

Nailing the docks (Rumex)

He and 2 other passengers decided to get on the train anyway and throw money at the first railway official they saw. A text later told me that they had all arrived safely in Dublin and had not been arrested for 'hobo-ing'. AB had done a month in Belfast prior to his month here and is now planning a month in the capital and one in Galway before, apparently, heading for Sweden. Yes. Sweden. It's a French thing, he tells me. They all want to see Ireland and Sweden. Works for me.

The pig paddock has never been so clear

Regular readers will know we've had a great time with the lad and we have done LOADS of work, mainly around Autumn-tidying, clearing nettle patches and pulling out of them, big heaps of old prunings and tree branches (incl. the Christmas tree from 2016!). If this was me doing the volunteer side, my mission would be to leave every place in a far better state than when I arrived. If that is also theirs, then AB should be very proud of himself. We are transformed.

Heavy rain stops play on what was to be
our last task.

His last working day was going to be yesterday and we were going to strip away all the grass growing from cracks in the concrete on the back "terrace" and then mix some cement and fill the cracks. Well, lashing rain in advance of the next named storm (Brian) put a stop to that and we both took a day off after having got up at the crack of dawn to nip down and help a friend move some cattle. AB's last job was on Wednesday, then, when he had a good session at bashing docks with the brush-cutter. We'd translated the stinging nettles as "ortie" but could find no such common name for French docks, so we called them 'Rumex' which amused AB ("It sounds like it should be an insurance company!").

My current favourite evening snack. Goat's cheese and strips of
our bullace-plum "fruit-cheese". 

All good things must come to an end, though, and although we loved having AB, we are home birds, a bit set in our ways and enjoying of our own company, so we were both looking forward to un-shipping the 'help' and getting our house and our routines back. No offence, we hope, in either direction.

One of the cats supervises the wine racking.
(pic by Liz)

One amusing side-line to this is that although AB was the easiest bloke in the world to feed (he ate everything we cooked for him and came back for seconds every time. Liz jokes that her worries were only about whether she'd "manage to fill him". He has a bullet-proof appetite) there were 2 minor mis-matches to his preferences. He does not like fish (he's OK with shellfish and prawns) or cooked cheese, so out of solidarity we avoided fish and cheese for 4 weeks. No pizza, then, and certainly no cheesy fish-pie. We are so going to make up for this, now that AB has gone!

I'll leave the last word to our friend and Archery Coach, 'Con'. We were over to his on Wednesday to help whacking in some tree stakes, to clear the shooting field of its 3D target "animals" (into dry store) and to fold Con's 2 enormous cone-shaped tent canvases. Con obviously likes AB and loved teaching him to shoot for those 4 weeks so in my little 'farewell' to AB on Facebook, Con replied,

"(He is) a big man with a big smile and willing hands - may he enjoy every step of his Path."

A dog on your lap is no protection
when this cat wants to come aboard.
Not NOW Kato!

Meanwhile, as we wait through the gap between Ex-Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Brian (how can you take those two names seriously in the same sentence?), our only other entertainment seems to have been racking off the wine. This was meant to be a 3 week kit but has taken us more like 2 months, possibly because we'd let the kit get old and maybe the temperature. yeast or the stabilizer were not up to much. We thought it had nearly done so we "killed" it with the stabilizer and it just took on a new lease of life, fermenting madly for 5-6 weeks before it finally calmed down enough to be 'racked' (bottled). It is surprisingly good and we find we prefer it to the shop-bought Ozzie Shiraz we had been drinking on the non-gin and non-beer evenings. Bottoms up!

Head Cheese

Brawn - the red is carrot, the green is fresh parsley.

The brawn is made. This is Liz's first time making it and she'd never eaten it before but not letting those minor problems get in the way of a good cookery experiment, in she went, internet recipe to hand and just me at the end to tell her how genuine it looked and, Wow! the gorgeous flavour and texture. Tick that one up to the 'keep' repertoir along with others like Yorkshire Puds (again, she had no experience of them; they didn't really do them in Ireland) and pretty much from the get-go, became the best Yorkshire cook any of us know.

We were amused to learn that brawn is called 'Head Cheese' in France but also, dredged up from Liz's folk memories of books she read long ago, also in some famous literature. She could recall a fairly detailed description of the killing, cutting up and processing of a pig in "Little House in the Big Woods" (with its better known stable-mate, "Little House on the Prairie")

"As soon as the hog was dead Pa and Uncle Henry lifted it up and down in the boiling water till it was well scalded. Then they laid it on a board and scraped it with their knives, and all the bristles came off. After that they hung the hog in a tree, took out the insides and left it hanging to cool. When it was cool they took it down and cut it up. There were hams and shoulders, side-meat and spare ribs and belly. There was the heart and liver and the tongue, and the head to be made into headcheese, and the dish pan full of bits to be made into sausage" and later "Ma scraped and cleaned the head carefully and then she boiled it till all the meat fell off the bones. She chopped the meat fine with her chopping knife in the wooden bowl, she seasoned it with pepper and salt and spices. Then she mixed the pot liquor with it and let it stay in the pan to cool. When it was cool it would cut into slices, and that was headcheese". See? Nice children's literature!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas round here. We got a superb result on the tree buying. We like a 'real' tree and need one about 6 feet tall. As well as being hard to find round here - with local traders telling you "we stopped doing them" and not knowing where you might get one - they can be pricey. Last year we had to go all the way over to Ardcarne Garden Centre, half an hour away and choose from trees which were up in the €50, €60, even €70 range. We were even contemplating lashing out the €250 on a decent artificial one because it'd see several Christmases out and pay for itself in the end. Then we were walking round Balla-D and one of Liz's knitting ladies tipped us off that our local supermarket, SuperValu were doing them for €20 or €25 if you spent just €30 on groceries. So here we are, erected and dressed today, our 6 foot 'cheapie'. Very nice it looks too both from inside the house and also you can see the top through the window from down in the lane.

Beginning to Look

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. We are behind the curve a bit locally, as the McG's down the road already have their tree displayed in the front bay of their house, all twinkly multi coloured lights and tinsel, clearly visible from the road. Our problem is that we can't find any for sale. Unlike Kent where very garden centre, every farm entrance and everything even vaguely like a craft market or boot sale had trees by the dozen from late November and the verges seemed to be littered with roughly made cardboard notices saying "XMAS TREE'S!" (or some such apostrophe'd up grocer-speak) we had seen not a whisper. Even the guy running the Christmas wreaths, yule logs and table centre-pieces stand in Balla-D market "didn't bother with them any more" and didn't know where you could get one. I asked in a variety of shops. No joy.

Fortunately we subscribe to the news-feed in Facebook from ace local (half hour away) garden centre Ardcarne and they were suddenly advertising them "From €29!"). That was our Saturday morning sorted. Admittedly we were a bit horrified by the prices - needless to say the €29 ones were all the threadbare, thin, short and damaged ones. These were all the newer, more fashionable 'Noble Fir' which apparently sheds its needles less, rather than the Norway Spruce we always bought in UK and seemed to be around €55 for a 6 footer.

We baulked and went to look at artificial ones thinking they might be cheaper in the long run. Indeed they might in the VERY long run. Anything at all realistic and large was €169 up, and often €299 up. Yoiks. We bit the bullet and got us a real one. We needed a decent tree to go in our Living Room bay and be tall enough to be visible from the rather high-silled window from outside.

Trees round here are subject to 'style police' rules. Amusingly, given that Christmas tends to be about overstatement, garish, tat-ness and lairy colour, the Style Police here dictate that the tree must be mainly silver with a bit of red and only tiny amounts of other colours. Tinsel is silver, the lights are clear rather than multi-coloured and baubles are 99% silver. A few red ones are allowed if they were gifts. Toys of course can be any colour but end up mainly red.

We do have stuff of other colours but this gets used up in other rooms, so gold tinsel, for example, goes round pictures in the Dining Room or the stairs balustrade. The small strand of old multi-coloured lights, which pre-date the style police, get draped round book shelves. We also work a system where we try to each buy a Christmas Tree decoration for each other each year and welcome any gifts there-of, so we love this year's heart shaped 'stuffed toy' decs from Mazy Lou. Thank you Mazy!

We think it looks nice. We were worried that the pups and kittens would wreak havoc, pulling over the tree and so on but so far the only damage sustained was to the feather boa you can see at the base of the tree in the pics (shredded by pups), the tinsel round the picture pulled down by a kitten (and this is above the hot range!), and a dangly bauble-on-string-of-gold-pearls disentangled from the stairs and chucked on ground. The kittens do not seem to be able to resist the slithery, pearl-over-pearl rattly movements of this as they attempt to grab it and can't quite grip it. Hours of fun. Luckily it is a cheap old thing with the plastic 'pearls' welded to the string, so there's no danger of a string-breaks, pearls rolling around like marbles style accident.

Merry Christmas.

Yonder Peasant

Here are some pics of Haggis looking a bit like 'yonder peasant' and needing the Sire and his man to walk that way first so that the snow can 'lay dinted'. You can see how the snow clings to the fur around his feet and he also looks a bit miserable in the church one. There is also, for fun, a nice pic taken from the aft deck of SB Cambria, of the temporarily-out-of-commission barge Ironsides covered in snow, with "Chambers Big Building" (as we barge-folk call it) in the background.

This morning Dad is off back into work (it's that weekend) but is home by 10. He heads for the barge to take some pictures but also to help with the job of shovelling all the old sawdust out from between the floor frames prior to the new floor-of-the-hold (actually called, somewhat confusingly, the "ceiling"), bagging it up and carrying it up onto the deck and then down onto the quayside.

That done, and some warm soup inside him, Mum and Dad head off in search of Christmas Trees eventually finding a suitable one at Brogdale Farm, the famous local fruit research station and collection of heritage varieties of fruit trees. This is soon back, erected and covered in the usual bling. Tasteful? Maybe not....

Incidentally, some of my readers are, I know, family, and may have received a Christmas Card from Mum and Dad. If so, did you notice that the picture on the front is of one of out previous trees in our front room, the cards being from a website where you upload a pic and choose wording etc to get your own cards made.

Have a good rest-of-weekend

Deefs

All better

Within a few hours, my pain from yesterday was gone. I tried to hang it out a bit, but was busted when I leapt down from Dad's lap and landed with a shoulder-blade stretching thump to collect a proffered sweetie, without wincing or squeaking.

Unfortunately, today it's ol' Meggie's turn to be off the weather. She's off her food, taking only a half hearted interest in sweeties, and is mooching around looking fed up, ignoring breakfast and not being impatient for supper (which is a sure sign all is not well.)

Today is Mum and Dad's last day off work - back to the old routine tomorrow, so they have a bit of a tidying blitz - stuff to and from the loft and to and from the shed. Christmas tree bought yesterday is erected and dressed. Mum says it is a bit like "the tree that taste forgot" - no news there then!

Look after yourselves.

Deefer

Not bad, eh?

Not a bad tree, we thought. Nearly there now - cards keep rolling in. We even got a Happy Hogswatch card (One for the terry Pratchett fans there.

Look after yourself

Deefer

The North Wind Shall Blow

...and we shall (maybe) have snow. Brrrr - it's turned really cold and we're all glad Dad leaves us fairly shaggy at this time of year.

Some more pics of Reculver yesterday and a nice artistic one of the Christmas Tree taken without flash

There's a story attached to the one of me, head and shoulders. You can't see it but I'm up on a low wall on the landward side of the sea-wall, where H and I kept hopping up to look inland, scouring the reed beds for prey animals (we being steely eyed hunter-killers an' all). Along near the Oyster farm the wall is only 6 inches tall from the sea-wall side, but the drop down to landward is a good 5 feet, onto a 45 degree downsloping "buttress" bit.

I was hop-skipping along here without a care in the world, when I hop-skipped a bit too carelessly. There was a skittering scritch of claws on wall, and my front legs went over. Dad watched in horror as in slow motion I scrabbled to reverse, then seemed to have succeeded but was still off balance. I did a little slow motion dance trying out various limbs on the edge and various limbs in thin air, but my body was slowly moving over the precipice. After what seemed like ages, but was only a few seconds, I gave in to the inevitable, dropped my nose and leapt, 5 feet down and 3 feet out, as Dad gasped "Noooooooo!!!".

But I landed perfectly and ran on down the 45 degree buttress, stopping eventually and turning to Dad with a look that said "Didn't hurt! You see - I meant to do that!"

Paratroop forward rolls next

Deefs

The Forest is Coming to get Me

Not content with taking us to the Forest, Dad has decided to bring a chunk of forest (OK not the same one!) home to the house. This has me mildly concerned, as you can tell from the first picture, which Mum thinks looks like me about to have a .... um.... Number 2

But by the second pic we are all looking nice and festive, and we are so chilled with the idea of humans doing daft things to trees in the living room, that we agree to sit (momentarily) in front of it to accept a sweet. Hence the slightly "looking upwards" aproach, at Mum, just out of shot.

We are, of course, Haggis to the left of the photo, my ears in the middle, with me below them, and Megan on the right. Let's not list the "out-takes" with me racing towards Mum or racing towards the cameraman - I never did quite master the sit and stay when there was bribery involved. Meg and the H might get there first, you see, and steal MINE!

Merry Christmas

Deefs