Pimping Two Babes for the Lads

Diane (who died on 21st Oct 2014) and her disreputable
Border Terrier cross, 'Ragworth'. 

Ignore that dubious title for the moment. First up today we remember that most excellent Friend of the Blog, 'Diamond' (Diane Loraine Walsh). Rest in Peace, lovely Lady. Today (25th) would have been her 61st Birthday. The thoughts of this Blog are with her husband, John, Her Family and all those readers who knew and remember her. I am also told that today is the 602nd anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and the 75th of the Dedication of the local village church here (Lisacul village), but maybe more on those later.

4 young poults. From the colour of them, almost certainly sired
by our Marans rooster, 'Gandalf'.

With the majority of this year's young chickens having hatched in June, a whole bunch of these are starting to come 'of age' (poultry keepers frequently use 21 weeks, or "point of lay" to denote maturity though that varies wildly between varieties.) from now through November. We had 19 chicks across those early batches and have since added another 7; the 'Manus' and the ABs, bringing our total to 26. The place is fair heaving with young poults. The law of averages tells us that we are likely to end up with 13 hens and 13 roosters though that, too, can vary wildly.

Existing alpha-rooster, Gandalf

In the hard-hearted 'business' world of small-holdering, we would generally keep or sell as going concerns, all the hens, especially if they start laying good eggs but have to dispose of the roosters. If you are lucky you might sell, or give away a few and you might keep one good one if your hen/rooster ratios can sustain it (you want about 7:1, so if you are adding 13 hens to your flock there should be room for one more roo', if not 2). If we can, we will make the(se) keeper(s) either pure-bred Marans or Buff Orpington. 

Our #2 rooster, sex-change 'hen', 'Herme'.
See earlier post
 http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/04/
mazy-lou-and-airy-fox.html

The rest of the roosters will be for the pot and you need to identify and cull them out as soon as they become a problem, fighting with each other or challenging your existing lads. As the girls start to come up to point of lay and (we hope) start popping out the good eggs, the boys cannot help but give away their own sexual identities by squaring up to one another, flaring their cape feathers and bowing down beak to beak preparatory to a few, beginner-ish flying 2 footed kick-outs. If you do not sort them it can get bloody and injurious very fast. What we will do between now and Christmas is to 'sort' them before they become a problem.

We love the colouring on some and we hope they are hens. This
one is optimistically called "Silvergirl"

That's probably enough on chickens. I said "If you are lucky" above (selling roosters) because just when you have your glut of spare males, so does every other chicken breeder you would know. It's like having too many courgettes and hoping other veg-fiends might not have grown courgettes this year.

2 Guinea Fowl boys in search of some female company?

Friends of the Blog may recall that our story of owning and trying to breed Guinea fowl here is not a happy one. We currently have, and have had for many months, two cock birds who are happy enough and tend to wander about like 'the management' minding any turkeys they can find or piles of food. In our Guinea story these guys are preceded by our first pair (Henry and Min; 2013) who tried to breed but we lost H in an RTA. This left M to desert her impressive stash of 16 eggs in the hedge on the far side of our lane. We incubated these and hatched, I think, ten. We managed to sell 5 as youngsters but then had the other 5 stolen by Mr Fox. So far, no roast Guinea fowl for the table.

Dillisk biscuits. 

Henry was briefly replaced by a white bird we called 'Blondie' but he/she was famous for his/her unwillingness to stay here and need to hike off Eastwards. Blondie eventually deserted for good. Subsequently we bought 2 boys (2015) from Sue and Rob (called Apollo and Belvedere) hoping that at least one would pair off with poor, lonely Min, of the heart-breakingly continuous 'buckwheat buckwheat' calls. Belv' did so and all was quiet for 2016. However we never saw more than one or 2 eggs and there was no breeding success. This year, Min fell ill and stopped being able to repel the attentions of our rooster, Gandalf. Before we knew he had nailed her well and truly, flaying all the skin off her 'saddle' with his spurs. We tried to isolate her (not easy to catch!) but she went downhill fast and died within a few days.

Cheesy fish pie. We missed this while we hosted Augustin
who professed a loathing for fish and cooked cheese. 

So in 2017 we are left with the 2 lads, Apollo and Belv' and, although we think they are OK, we think they might enjoy some female company. We livestock keepers are, after all, meant to keep our stock to the "Five Freedoms" (freedom from starvation and thirst etc), one of which is "Freedom to Express Natural Behaviours". In my opinion, that includes being able to mate, breed and bring up young if possible.

Growing fast, the young turkeys. This one is male.

Step forward, then, our newest friends who I mentioned a few posts back, who happen to own a goodly flock of Guineas and are happy to find me 2 hens of sure-fire female-ness (Guineas are notoriously hard to sex). They have promised to get the birds to us by early next week. I have, I hope "pimped" some lovely ladies for the lads. Watch this space.

New limbs for the archery bow.

I will finish with a completely random waffle, the fruits of an addled mind left out watching over dogs on the front lawn today. I said that today was Birthday for the late Diane and also the anniversaries of both Agincourt and the Dedication of Lisacul Church. Agincourt is 602 years ago and 602 (cc) is also the engine size of my beloved Citroën 2CVs. So today handily brings together all manner of "my favourite things". Diane represents friends and Kent, the 602 brings in France and 2CVs as well as archery (Agincourt) and Lisacul Church stands for the local area and the Community here whom have made us feel so welcome here in Ireland.

No Blue! It may BE fish on the menu but we are still not giving
you any even if you try to take up station on the Dining Table.

Sorry about that. It just kind of bubbled out of no-where.

A Fictional Wife

Those ducklings are growing up fast. 9 days old here.

Somewhere in her 'legacy', followers of the late, lamented Diane ('Diamond' on this blog) will find a varied collection of sayings and expressions which her friends still use, always with a fondly remembering smile. One of these, 'Finish Holidays' , comes from the Greek island of Poros which Diane visited every year from teenager-hood (when she went with Mum). She loved the place and the people and knew many of them very well; some now café owners she would have bounced on her knee when they were baby sons and daughters of then café owners.

They learn about left-over petits pois

When she went to those cafés in recent years and tried to sit in the normal 'public/customer' seating areas she would be quickly gathered up by the owners in scolding tones and shepherded quickly 'out back' to the family seating areas and quickly plied with Metaxa. Many of them clung proudly (as you'd expect) to their Greekness and only learned the necessary amount of English to do the business of café-ing but also were proud to try out their stilted, awkward phrasings on Diane as Diane gamely delivered her quite reasonable Greek replies. One of these was when they all assembled at the quayside to see her off on the ferry back to the mainland - they would hug her and say, sadly, "Ahhhh Finish Holidays". Finish Holidays has stuck here as a catch phrase whenever holidays or breaks are ending.

Finish Holidays. The borrowed chooks
crated up for the homeward journey. 

Where is all this going? One of the jobs this week was to return our 'borrowed' chickens to their rightful owner at the end of their little Christmas sojourn with us. These half dozen came to us on 4th Dec when the owner was temporarily unable to keep them at home and have been living in one of our big rabbit runs ever since. I dared not put them actually in with our gang as the group contains a fairly feisty rooster and all 5 of our then roosters were trying to have a go at him through the mesh, as he was back.

15 more bales of straw for the neighbour's bullocks.

Well, that problem is now solved and their little holiday was over. We had to crate them up and whizz them home yesterday. The owners are fellow archers of mine and this delivery gave us a chance to sort a funnier, less tricky issue.

The clean air here allows for some lovely flamboyant
growths of moss and lichens seen on over-wintering trees.

There is a running in-joke at archery because so few of us/them ever show up with our spouses, that we are only pretending to be married and that our wife/husband/partner does not actually exist. This leads to a load of silly banter at shoot coffee-breaks when we try to explain where we got the cake or home made biscuits we have 'produced'. Liz was quite enjoying being a "work of fiction" and when I said that she could come too on the 'chicken-run' and meet these couple of friends she almost declined because it would blow the gaff and she'd lose her fictional status. It is now 50/50 whether the friends deny all knowledge at the next meeting (No! Matt didn't bring anyone -he came alone!) or decide to bear witness of Liz's existence.

Polly's fleece. She is a Jacob x Suffolk. 

Meanwhile, life chugs on and I have little to report. I am happy that no news is good news - our poor friends Sue and Rob have too much news and are not having a happy time; they are actually waiting for 'the third thing' to go wrong and professing that disasters always come in threes. First a pregnant Nanny goat went into labour about 3 weeks early and delivered 3 tiny kids, one still born and the other two managing only a couple of shallow gasps each but unable to start breathing. They died in seconds/minutes.

A 'pussy hat' and gloves. You may need to look that one up
in the USA/Trump news. 

The next morning they were still trying to get over that tragedy when the billy goat rocked up pumping blood from a horn-bud. He had ripped one of his big spiral horns clean off and goat horns have a very good blood supply. He was in real danger of bleeding out but they managed to grab him and stem the flow. Off to the vet then and he managed to only be 'woozy through blood loss'. He is quiet and recovering. We are told that he will probably grow back a smaller, soft horn.

'Our' Syrian refugees hit the national news. 

And local town Ballaghaderreen suddenly found itself in the national news when a story broke that a large batch of Syrian refugees was to be accommodated in a 200-bed 'failed/closed' hotel in the town. Initial reports were all a bit alarmist and had some local anti-foreigner types passing out leaflets saying these would be ISIL terrorists in disguise, images of jihadists beheading people etc.

I am glad to say that it has all calmed down a bit now and less alarmist, even welcoming voices have started to be heard. All the journalists have moved on, as they do and TDs are saying how proud they are of the way Balla-D accommodates its diversity. I expect when the (80) children and adults do arrive (in March) it may not even get a mention. The leaflet man is, by all accounts a local 'character' with 'form' in this area.

A Rather Sad Spring Break

The new cat, Soldier, is well settled in at this stage and
exploring the garden. 

It has been a miserable cold wet May and in any other circumstances, a Spring break in the Greek Islands would seem like a brilliant idea. The Med, sun, warmth, café life, ouzo, seafood, maybe a swim, what could be better? For poor Lizzie, though, these are not "any other circumstances" and she must head for the Island of Poros on an altogether sadder mission, to settle the affairs of our late friend Diamond (whom I should probably now call by her real name Diane). More on this mission in a future post.

Local beekeepers say that a good horse
chestnut tree is worth an acre of clover.
This fine example grows right opposite
JD Bob's place.

Heads down feeding frenzy for the Hubbards at 4 weeks+

Release day for the Hubbard poults.

A well stained thumb attests to the fact
that we have been 'shepherding' again. 

Park life?

Meanwhile, after a fortnight of reasonable weather (OK, a tad chilly and prone to showers) we have been hard at it catching up on the garden. I have weeded through the veg patch (which sometimes seems like the Forth Road Bridge; by the time you finish, you have to start again at the start) and we have blitzed the big raised-bed garden and mulched it down with well rotted chicken/goose muck. With the new mower, I have been able to buzz off the pond-garden and the orchard, nicely topping off the plantain and dock flower shoots coming in the latter. It all looks very neat and Liz paid it the delighted compliment that "It looks really neat - like a bit of parkland!" We don't normally aspire to a site too 'manicured' but we both love the current 'deliberate' look, the 'lawn grass' is mowed and the shaggy meadow bits look like they have been left deliberately. Planned!

Plums (Victoria)

Some good fruit-set, especially on the plums which were worst affected by that late frost in April, tell us that we might have got away with it. Obviously, it is only May and no-one is counting any chickens. June-drop is still a way off, but those frosts struck just as these plums were coming to the end of the blossom season and in my memory, that should mean that fruit would fail to set. Here we are, though, with the withered remants of flowers now washed off by the showers and with tiny plums revealed in clusters. Who knows, but we might get some decent crops of fruit this year. It's a promising start anyway.

Baby (Conference) pears forming

Other than that, Soldier the cat is now well settled in and loving it here, the 'Hen with One Chick' fusses on doing a good job of protecting the little one. She even had a go at Liz this morning as Liz tried to nip from kitchen to utility room to retrieve some underwear for the Greek trip. In the goose dept a fair amount of chaos. We had no intention of allowing any geese to go broody this year - we do not want any more geese and I hate having to 'off' them but one out-voted us and yesterday morning she appeared to have been joined by 2 more on the same nest. 2 of these hopped back off mid-morning. It could all end in tears and smashed eggs.

3 broodies?

The bees seem to have given up notions of swarming for the moment, probably due to the cold weather but we will stay vigilant and if the weather warms up, we know what to expect. The pigs thrive on and one of the lambs is coming up to needing his final journey. That will be Feste, our first-born, January 6th baby, ear tag 00001F. He's booked in with Ignatius G Victualler on June 9th after Liz is back from Greece. He will be smaller and younger than lambs we have sent to slaughter in the past, but he is entire, and we dare not allow him to 'get at' Mum Lily as happened last year, but the butchers love that and assure us he will be like a tender New Season Easter lamb in the size of joints and the eating.

We take one final cut from the purple
 sprouting broccoli which has done so
well. The bees can have it now as it
blows away to flower. 

So, fare well then Lizzie and good luck on your rather sad trip to Poros. I know that you will do Diane proud.

Timbuktu

Timbuktu

A brilliant result this morning means we have one less thing to worry about in our busy season, our trusty little Fiat Panda sails through its NCT (=MOT) this morning without even picking up an 'advisory'. This baby has just been our BEST EVER car of all the vehicles which have passed our way since we were wed even including all the 'posh' cars I used to run as 'company' cars and then just because our salaries allowed it. Most of those I never actually owned, as they were always on repayment deals which had you paying just the first 3 years' depreciation.

The Panda we bought as a 2nd car, a "little run about" for Liz to mainly use nipping about with Diamond. We never dreamed it would get much mileage on it or would be used for anything heavy or gruelling. It got named 'Timbuktu' as the UK number plate looked a bit like that word spelled badly. It came from the Fiat dealer in Sittingbourne (Kent), Burgess's and we happily paid off the loan over 2 years. It has turned out to be an absolute gem of a car which by now owes us nothing but keeps on keeping on. Diamond fell ill for the first time (Leukemia) within months of the car arriving so it quickly became a high mileage hospital visit/medical taxi, before being one of our emigration 'convoy' and then a builders' van and lately it is a farm run-about. It has been fitted with a tow hitch and is now also our trailer tug.

Hubbard chicks at Day 9, now with wing feathers. 

We are constantly amazed how much you can fit in it due to its blocky shape. If I buy lengths of wood now I can saw them to 8 foot lengths at the yard and they sit with one end in the passenger footwell and I can still close the back door. I don't think I could have done that in the 'posh' Citroën C4. Every week it happily hauls home from the feed merchant a 40 kg sack of 'Cosyglo' (smokeless fuel) plus various 20 and 25 kg sacks of animal feed as well as all our weekly shop. It is as "at home" on the long Motorway run down to Silverwoods where Liz possibly gives it more 'hammer' than it'd like. We hope to keep it going for a good while yet. We were given a rather coarse Timbuktu quote by one of our builder/contractors, but I'll save that to the end of this post.

Liz has been enjoying trying out some beeswax furniture polish. The wax cleaned up very well through the washes, boils and strains and gave us the required yellow disc which just needed the discoloured bottom sediment/scum scraping off it. This was melted and blended 4:1 with coconut oil (the only ingredients therefore being food-grade; you could happily eat this stuff if you wanted and can certainly get it all over your hands as 'hand cream' while you are polishing. Liz reports her hands and nails feeling marvellous at the end of the job.

Polishing an 'Uncle Barrie' turned wooden bowl. 

The mixture cools and semi-sets back to a white colour (the coconut oil, we guess) which remains workable provided it does not get too cold. We tried it out first on some bits of wood which didn't matter so much - the underside of our beech dining chairs and it produces a lovely lustre and a superb smell. It is now getting used to shine up our turned-wood fruit bowls and, when we can clear the table for more than a few minutes, will get a proper test on the dining table top. It is good stuff.

Testing the new polish on the underside of a chair. 

We were amazed when we looked it up, how much this stuff is worth, not that we would be selling it. We found a polish featuring turpentine and beeswax retailing at €11.59 for just 250 ml and the wax itself we have seen at £3.50 for 100g (£35 per kilo!). One of our bee-school lecturers stressed to us how important was the wax and kept reiterating that rule of thumb that bees create only 1/8 as much wax as they do honey. Comb is an amazingly strong but fine and delicate structure.

Jam jar alchemy. 

The beekeeper eventually gets the used comb 'back'; we are advised to rotate the frames out of the hive at one third per year and we are always scraping off 'brace comb' (wild comb) built by the bees in the "wrong places" in the hive. Brace comb though, is also delicate and only available in small quantities - I cleaned up the old frames from our failed hive today and gained only a smattering of fragments in the bottom of a bucket, maybe 70g?. Bees 'sweat' this stuff from glands under their abdomens and then manipulate it in their mouths to shape it into comb. Quite right that it is pricey, then!

New run for the giant rabbits

Meanwhile, the giant rabbits, Goldie and Nugget moved in to their proper big run today, having outgrown the little purpose-built 2 square meter, portable runs they have been using up to now. This is 3 m wide by 15m long and has bumpy ground, banks and trees to keep their digging instincts satisfied. They seem very happy with it and Nugget (as expected) has already started burrowing. The cat, Blue, joined them for a while, had a curious sniff inside the new 'bedroom' and play-chased them around a few times but he then got bored with them and they got bored with being chased and sat looking at him curiously.

Blue (cat) stalks the rabbits while the lambs and Polly watch.

We hope they will do a good job of keeping down the tall grasses, rushes and other herbs wich grow in there; it is the last remaining 'waste land' in this garden for which we have never really found the proper use. We tried to keep a path open through the jungle but as we never used the path it vanished, overgrown with tall vegetation.

And so to that dodgy rhyme from 804-Pete, our gravel-man. Learning that we'd come from 'Kint', he couldn't wait to tell us his story and rhyme. Allegedly a school mistress had set the class the job of fitting the word Timbuktu into a poem. 'Johnny's answer (why is it always Johnny?) was.

When Tim and I went down to 'Kint',
We met three ladies in a 'tint',
For want of something else to do,
I bucked one and Timbuktu.

I'm not about to explain it to you, so if you don't get it then ask Johnny. Have a heart - my Mum reads this. Talking of which, today that same lady, the 'Pud Lady', reaches a magnificent 88 years old today, so a big Happy Birthday, Mum from this blog.

Froggy Would a-Wooing Go?

A stunning picture of frogs 'borrowed' from this months entry
for the Irish Wildlife Trust's Facebook photo comp. Sorry but
I do not yet know who the photographer was except that it came
 from a group called "In Touch With The Wild".

It is funny how your childhood memory plays tricks on you. The 'wildlife gardeners' in us look forward to that annual milestone which is the frogs spawning in the local ponds and pray once more that they will adopt our new pond. Last year I tried that trick of importing spawn but was very late and was not successful. This year we are delighted to see that at least 3 frogs have found us 'naturally', presumably males, though I have heard no calling yet and we have no spawn. Also, the snow last night has, presumably put things on hold for now. The first we know of this spring happening is usually (sadly) that we start to see road-kill frogs in the lane and I often find myself be-set by an 'ear-worm' of the childhood song, "Froggy would a-wooing go". In my memory this song had the following lines "..and under his arm he carried a bow, for to shoot at the pretty little doe, among the leaves so green-oh". I was always a bit confused about why froggy should be taking his bow when he went wooing, and also why he'd be aiming at deer but, heh, it's a childhood playground/nursery song; it didn't have to make sense. Liz couldn't help me either as it must be a perculiarly English song and she had no memory of it from her Dublin schooldays.

My snow drops 'in the green' arrive
from England in perfect condition.

Of course, these days you don't need to go bothering your aging Mum or racking your brains for childhood stories - it's all up there on Google, so I nipped in just to check my wording prior to posting it here and making a fool of myself. Silly aul' codger! It turns out that I am remembering it all wrong and that I have conflated the beginning of one song with the rest and the chorus of another.

The 'Froggy' one goes

A frog he would a-wooing go,
Heigh ho! says Rowley,
A frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no.
With a rowley, powley, gammon, and spinach,
Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.

(the rowley-powley being a suet pudding covered with jam) This goes on for 12 verses or so.

The snowdrops are quickly planted in our bank.

The 'Leaves so green oh' is entirely free of frogs and the bow was actually carried by a gamekeeper whom, you will be pleased to know, does not actually shoot the deer, anyway.

The keeper did a hunting go
Under his cloak he carried a bow
All for to shoot, a merry little doe
Among the leaves so green, oh

Jacky boy
(Master)
Fare thee well
(Very well)

Hey, down, ho, down, derry, derry down
Among the leaves so green, oh

and so on. So now you know. Pud Lady (Hello Mum!) probably knew this anyway.

A little snow overnight and black clouds promise more
this morning

On the bucket of spawn thing I am actually being naughty (and probably illegal) too. You are not meant to relocate any wildlife but more importantly, the modern ecologist's view is in favour of letting succession happen naturally, letting the first invaders who find your new pond have their day and then get ousted (possibly) naturally as later, slower species arrive. When we created new ponds in the King's Wood forest in Kent it was always tempting to 'scenically' plant up immediately with rushes, water lily, marginals and so on, but the Kent Wildlife Trust and BTCV preferred leaving it. That way the environment was always more varied, having 'new ponds' as well as 'old established' ponds, with one group of specialised species surviving briefly in the new untill they were ousted by the 'old pond' species.

Waking up to new snow from the bedroom window.

Similarly, they (BTCV etc) liked the old way of coppicing, where a few men would only cut a small area each year (known as a 'cant'), rotating round every year to other areas, returning after 15-20 years. This way, in a small area of forest you would have tracts of new cut, first year re-growth, 2nd year, 3rd year and so on, and the species which favoured any one age could easily move around following the coppicers. Now it is done with bigger machines (where it's done at all!) and bigger areas are cleared in one year, so the wildlife has to travel bigger distances to find the next suitable patch. Nightjars were always a case in point. They are a ground nesting bird typical of heaths but used to use our newly cleared cants till the re-growth of the chestnut started to over-shadow them. Bluebells are also supposed to do better in a cyclic management system. Chestnut, when mature, is a bit dense for them but coppiced every 20 years it is perfect and you get those lovely years when the bluebells come up just after a coppicing event, to bright open skies and sunshine.

The sheep and the East Field

Well, our snowdrops 'in the green' arrived safely from Wisbech in England. Thank you 'Anchs'. There was no sweating and no bruising, so well done the post office and the packaging, I guess. These were quickly into the ground on a sandy bank under the larch trees just inside our front gate. The crocusses on the front lawn came up well but took rather a hammering from wind, sleet, hail and rain and are all but over, but will live to fight another year. I was reading Anne's blog where she says that she plants both yellow and purple crocus but that only the purple come up the 2nd year. We seem to be doing slightly better, with some yellow making it. We are pleased, too, that neither the geese, nor the sheep touch them. Even in the snow this morning I noticed goose tracks all around and about, but nobody had walked on them. I don't know why this should be. Perhaps the geese are focussed on eating grass and do not bother with areas which are 'not grass'.

Liz reads out her eulogy to Diamond at the dinner in
Bridport (Dorset). Picture by Sian Lewin

You may recall that Liz is currently off in the UK. She is at a meeting of the members of a chat forum she inhabits on the internet. There are 19 of them gathered for a long weekend of foodie eating, social drinking and healthy walks along the beach etc. They happen every year and the gang call the event the AGM and this one, being the first since Diamond died (she was one of the group) was a memorial to her name. Liz had written a short, entertaining eulogy full of Diamond-style quirky humour and in-jokes. Famously (among us anyway) Diamond's final words that anyone heard were when she saw husband John off at the door to give the dog a walk, she asked "could you bring me back some posh cheese?" The Posh Cheese was so amusingly and typically a Diamond thing that it is remembered with affection and so Liz's eulogy ends as follows.

"Good food, good friends and good times were important to (Diamond), so it is wonderful that, thanks to our host, Deborah, we are able to come together over this lovely meal to remember her. Can I ask you to charge your glasses: the toast is, of course, Posh Cheese."

RIP old friend. Never forgotten.

Up at the Crack of Sparrow's....

Long term readers will know that in working life, I worked in the rather rough-tough world of cold store, warehouse distribution where the culture and language were rather more 'fruity' than you'd use in polite company. We didn't really do 'swearing' in our house - I think the baddest word I ever heard my Father say was 'ruddy' and that was very rare. You pretty much had to swap modes on the drive to/from or you'd have been a bit shocked every day. Now in these rural parts in the soft spoken 'wesht', I am back surrounded by clean language once more but I do remember some of the choice warehouse expressions with affection and amusement. I used to love one in particular for describing getting up early for a shift which was "I was up at the crack of sparrow's fart"; the idea that sparrows wake up early anyway and the first thing they do is break wind, and even at the start of that there is the first cracking open of their rear.

I only gave you all that because this morning was one such morning - with Liz booked on an 0800 flight (Ryan Air to Stansted this time) so us needing to leave here at 0600 and alarms set to 0520; not quite as early as my work day 0415s but bad enough. There were no sparrows about, certainly none with any flatulence issues, the rooster had not even crowed yet and the dogs were mighty confused as to why they were being walked around in the pitch dark. Liz is off to Darkest Kent again. This mission had been planned to share Diamond's 58th Birthday with her and John and to enjoy her moved into the new house and 'holding court' from her posh hospital-supplied all singing, all dancing, anti bed-sores mattress bed. Sadly, as you probably know, Diamond lost the battle with cancer on Tuesday 21st but we had the flight booked, so Liz has gone over anyway to spend some time with John, Mazy and the Kent contingent who worked so hard to support Diamond in the last days.

I don't know if you are involved at all in internet chat groups, Facebook or Twitter, but I know Diamond and a lot of her friends used to 'hang out' on both FB and on the chat forum which was originally the Guardian Newspaper's group "Guardian Unlimited (GU) Talk". That group has since been officially closed by the paper but was reborn privately as "Not the Talk" which has since morphed into "Just the Talk" with a lot of the original gang still hanging on. I love that this group of friends have come together in a private discussion group on FB and had what has been a lovely, happy, story-telling, memory sharing, pictures-of-Diamond posting, memorial inventing, on-line wake. Friends from all round the world (Australia, Bogata etc) have joined and rejoined in their various time zones to keep this chat going for over 60 hours and 700 posts now. Diamond, who loved all this stuff, would have been delighted and thrilled. It is internet Social Media at its best. I know some people don't 'do' social media, Facebook and so on but I think it has its moments.

A fair old haul then!

Back home I have been left to deal with the pork collection from our pig butcher and we have got quite a haul. We had estimated that the pigs, alive, had reached 91 kg each so that, with the 'industry standard' conversion figure of "around" 72% yield, we should be expecting 64 kg of joints, belly pork, chops and sausage meat. Rather laughably (or alarmingly, perhaps) the commercial boys will regularly inject water and preservatives up to around 11%, returning their yield to almost 100% and our pig training guy told us that he has known of cases where carcass weight actually exceeded 'live' weight!

More Pork.

None of that nonsense for us, we don't want our pork chops to shrink in the grill or our bacon to leave grey wet sludge in the frying pan! Anyway, in the event we got an impressive 129 kg of meat from the two girls (plus the liver, heart and heads), 64.8 kg each and the Butcher and I had to carry 7 heavy boxes of meat out to the car. It quickly became obvious that I might struggle to fit all this in the space we have available in the 2 tall freezers and 2 fridge/freezers.

Will it fit in the freezers? Pirate the cat
is sniffing around. 

I just about made it, trying to sort it into categories all the while, weighing sample packs and then scoring how many such packs were going away. Liz had asked the butcher to cut the big shoulders into more manageable sized joints, so we got back from our 2 pigs, 22 shoulder joints at about 1.7 kg each, 14 leg joints at 1.79 kg and so on. We got 48 (!) packs of (3) chops at about 0.8 kg, 11 slabs of belly and 3 big bags of sausage meat. I just about got it all into the freezers, slotting the final chop packs away in all sorts of nooks and crannies and evicting Liz's bag of chicken stock-bones to a fridge along with the heads.

There is nowhere left for the lamb for the moment, so I have held off sending them on their final journey. We need to move some of this largesse on to friends and family, eat some, salt down some of the bellies for bacon and turn the heads into brawn to make some space. It would be silly to buy a 5th freezer, now, wouldn't it. Nobody needs 5 freezers, surely. Next year will will have to un-synchronise the 'harvests' of pigs and lambs.