'Oveja' está en el Congelador

A fine looking carcass

'Oveja' está en el congelador ('Oveja' (The ewe) is in the freezer). One good up-beat story tonight and, I'm sad to relate, a couple of less happy ones. First up, after the mixed feelings of slaughter-day and taking our bought-in ewe lamb (Oveja) on her last journey to town, a week later we get the happy job of seeing the carcass butchered up and bringing home the product.

Ignatius splits the carcass

We have a lot of time for the guys down there in Castlerea (Joe the Slaughterman and Ignatius G (Victualler). It is lovely to watch them work and we chat away. Do we want the legs as halves? Do we want the full shoulder or gigot-chops? Do we want the chops as 'racks' and how many chops to a rack?

Labelled for the freezer after cat inspection

I love the old chopping block in that shop - a massive lump of wood on a robust looking stand of darker wood. The block is actually made as a parquet-floor style bundle of smaller blocks, surrounded by a rim of thick planks and strapped at each corner with thick wrought-iron 90º pieces.

We got one rack back as chops so that we
could give a couple to a neighbour.  We
"tidied up" the rest in house.

By now it is shaped into big sweeping curves where they have chopped out big 'valleys' over time and left ridges, then obviously spun it round 180º at one stage and turned it over to use the other side. (I should have grabbed a photo, shouldn't I?). I asked them how long a block like that would last. Ignatius told me that 'this one' was 35 years old. The lads have had the shop about 40 years at this stage and there is an equally venerable block out 'back' which they got when they first bought the shop and had it 'done up'. Lovely.

A lovely "pie" to go with those chops. Leeks and cream cheese
sauce.

The meat is now home, labelled and stashed in the freezer. This was only one lamb so we both doubt the store will see the year out but all being well the first 2018 babies might be born in January, so by June/July we might be able to restock. That's if Pedro (our new ram) continues to behave himself.

The 'late' Prada from my post on 19th Aug
2016

My first "less happy" story involves the sad loss of our good friends, Sue and Rob's gorgeous St Bernard dog, 'Prada'. Sorry for your loss, S+R, we know how close you were to that lovely, soft old girl and how much she will be missed. Our commiserations.

Red sky in the morning? It rained all day.

These massive dogs do not tend to live very long because (Sue tells me) the heart was never really bred to cope with the size of the dog. S+R have always had St Bernards but have never managed to 'keep' one beyond about 5 years. Prada was 7/8 so the longest lived St-B they had ever had and they were always amazed by her. Rest in Peace, you gentle giant. We will miss you too.

The last of that lovely cream cheese went with bagels
and (properly) smoked salmon.

Finally another loss and this one I need to do on that 'no names no pack drill' basis which I do when I do not have the blessing of the main players. This one is the sad loss of the biological mother of a little girl who is very dear to us. Our deepest sympathies. Those concerned will know who I am talking about here. Sorry for your loss.

Rob took this lovely pic of Prada just
enjoying the company of their Grandson
as he fished. Happy days. 

That is probably enough for this post. Look after yourselves

The Solstice and Barbara

The 'last quarter' moon visible on Solstice morning. 

I honestly think that these days, the Solstice means more to me than the highly commercialised booze, food and present buying fest of Christmas. We try to get into the 'magic', we do the tree, the lights, the gifts, the fancy food and the drink but I can't honestly say I come out of the other end with any new sense of optimism or any conviction that things will be different on the 26th to how they were on the 24th.

Jetting off on the same morning

Nope. Now that I spend so much time out of doors and out in the weather, the solstice is the one which grabs my attention because it marks the time when we change from the rather depressing shortening of days and long dark evenings to the days getting longer at last. In my head we start the climb out of winter into spring, to warmth and sunshine.

Deefer is quite happy with the sleeping arrangements

Don't worry. I have not suddenly gone all Druid on you or pagan spiritualism; it is a purely gardener/farmer thing. I am fascinated by how this works. I know, of course that the day length is practically stationary around now and the 'change' from decrease to increase is infinitesimal, measured in seconds. The daylength graph is similar to a sine wave curve and the solstice is right at the bottom of the curve, where it runs almost horizontal (or at the top, likewise for the Summer solstice). The rate of change accelerates till the Equinox (March 21st) when, if memory serves, each day is 3 full minutes longer than 'yesterday' - a big enough change that you can 'feel it' and you know that in a week Sunday will be roughly 20 minutes longer than last Sunday.

The one-headed, 32 clawed tree wrecker. 

So I have had my solstice and I am mentally now in an up-turn, all be it I know that it is a huge long haul through March and April before we see any real warmth and we dry out a bit from this wet, wet, wet. In fairness again, this winter has done amazingly well for rainless- and windless-ness. It feels as if we have had no real rain through from mid-October, all through November and through December up until the aforementioned solstice when it all went a bit 'Pete Tong'.

Storm Barbara weather warnings

Solstice day (21st) saw the weather warnings for our first named storm for 2 months, Storm Barbara. The B-name tells you how good the weather has been. Normally we'd expect a load of these storms through November and we'd be well into the G, H, I, J or K by Christmas. Barbara promised plenty of wind and rain but the eye was going to skirt up north of us and slam into Scotland.

A miserable morning as Storm Barbara hits.

We battened down the hatches, of course, with concrete blocks and ratchet straps on bee hives, hutches and chicken coops and all tall stuff like ladders laid flat on the ground. We got the blow of wind through today as promised, from 0600 to 1800 but the only damage we suffered was when one of our new jackdaw-pots went airborne and landed in Liz's rose garden out front.

This year's 'turkey' is this 5 kg Aberdeen Angus rib roast

Of course, Solstice or not, Christmas still comes and we get involved and have a good time. This year we have 'Steak Lady' staying which is always a brilliant time. We also, famously, have no turkey as Brer Fox helpfully removed all three of our nearly grown turkey poults a couple of weeks back. Rather than try to sub in somebody else's turkey we decided on a complete change from 'tradition'; Liz nipped off to our belovéd local traditional butcher Ignatius G (who 'does' our lambs) and ordered a big ol' beef rib roast. "How big will you be needing it?" asked Mr G. "It's for 3" said Liz and Mr G started to indicate "about this thick then" holding thumb and forefinger only a couple of inches apart. "Oooh No", said Liz, "I need 3 ribs - we have 3 dogs too!"

All manner of Christmas goodies - these are dillisk (seaweed)
and cheese biscuits. 

I collected it today and a more magnificent chunk of beef I don't think I have seen. It is local Aberdeen Angus and weighed almost 5 kg. It will do us proud. It was very reasonable in price too and Liz, checking out UK prices worked out that it would have set us back around £80 in Kent. We are looking forward to it.

That'll do me for this time. Guest now in place so I shouldn't really be rattling stuff into the PC and ignoring my hosting duties. You all have a great Christmas now and I will talk to you again on Tuesday when it's all over.

Nollaig shona dhuit!

Of Kittens, Lambs, Streaky Bacon and Bins

When I went "to press" on the last post we had one kitten and just the one picture of same, taken by Liz on the phone-cam. I also noted that we had decided to take pity on the one lonely sibling-kitten left behind and not yet found a home. We figured (and were proved right) that the little mite(s) would settle in much faster if they had each other to play with than if we had to teach the baby to love Soldier or Blue and vice versa.

'Little Chip' 

Back to the vet for us, then, on the Saturday morning as soon as we were allowed, to collect the 2nd kitten, which proved to be a female (the receptionist assured us but we will definitely get Charlotte to double check next time she is here). She is named 'Little Chip' after the 2nd brand of marmalade, this one an Irish one which Liz knows of old. The boy is, of course "Chivers". Unlike Chivers, Chip has both eyes clear of infection and seems to be in the pink of health. Chivers is recovering after his antibiotic eye-drops.

With great timing, we had the perfect place for these kittens to 'land' - our Sitting Room is not due any sleeping  humans for a while and now housed the incubator with its dozen Marans eggs, so the door was locked to stop doggie and feline interference. We put the dog-crate in there with a cushion and blanket, the cat litter tray and feed/water/milk bowls and the kits had 24 hours in the crate while they got used to house sounds and smells, before we opened the crate-door.

They now have access to the whole room and, being cats in a new environment, they have promptly vanished into and under the put-me-up bed. They emerge when they want to play, feed or use the facilities (the cat litter tray is still in the crate). We have declared the crate a safe zone for them - if they go in there then we do not touch them - and we are making frequent visits in there and letting them get used to us and our comings and goings. They come to us and we then are 'allowed' to pick them up and cuddle them. Chivers is 24 hours ahead on this 'taming' and will sit happily on your lap purring madly while you pet him around the head, neck and shoulders. Chip still tends to wriggle and try to escape - Gerrrofff!

Ivory and Ebony loaded in the trailer awaiting their last journey

Meanwhile, our two ram lambs, Ebony and Ivory came up to their 4 months birthday and, though they were still not as big as lambs we have sent to the butcher in the past, they might have started 'bothering' their female cousins or our adult ewes. This is not a part of the job either of us enjoy but it is a necessary evil. These guys had to go on their final journey to our man Ignatius G in Castlerea Main Street.

Half 'cooked', the dozen Marans eggs in the incubator.

The way we do this is by gathering all 8 sheep into the cattle race where we can grab the two we want and steer them into the trailer. Easy? Well, not this time apparently. The boys are young, fit and strong and took some catching. At one point I mis-grabbed Ivory and ended up doing a failed version of a rugby tackle, landing with a real crunch on my right knee. 2 nice abrasions even through the trousers and some good bruising, I shouldn't wonder. I am hobbling about like an aul' wan and unable to do any jobs which involve kneeling. We got the lads into the trailer and away to our butcher/slaughterman, Ignatius G so that today I had to nip down there to collect the offal - kidneys, hearts, livers and a lung (for the haggis). The main carcasses hang for a week in G's cold store, before we nip down next Monday to see them cut up, collect them and possibly pass Steak Lady's one to her.

Streaky bacon - dry cured Berkshire bellies.

The pork bellies I had salted down and then air dried came ready today, so I was able to de-rind the bellies and then slice the bacon up into 250 g packs of good streaky bacon. We have a cousin visiting at present, so we were able to try out the rashers for a nice breakfast which went down well with all customers. The cousin (Keith) commented that it was the "proper smell of Sunday" he could remember from childhood.

For a while, we thought we were being converted to a pay-by-weight system on the wheelie bins. These have up to now been just a standard charge for each 6 months (€175) but a law has been passed which would make the waste companies charge in a more complicated way. You would think the companies would be keen to write to their customers, to warn us and explain this change but no. In a rather shambolic advisory campaign we finally got first notification about a week before the change was due AND it comes in the form of a strange cartoon-ish "The good, the bad and the ugly" sheet of A4 from which you'd be hard pressed to tell how much you will be charged.

Earlies

I think the €175 fixed charge has been replaced by a €102  'service charge' with blue bin recycling free but black bin (land fill) charged at €0.22c per kg of "lift". The good/bad/ugly sheet then tells us that if you keep the landfill to below 16kg per (fortnightly) "lift" you are "good" - I take that to mean my total bill for the 6 months might be less than I am paying now, bad is 25kg (about par) and ugly is 34 kg (pay a lot more than now).

Yellow loosestrife

I would reckon that our landfill bin is always so empty that sometimes I don't even bother taking it down to the gate, so I should be OK but we will not be lobbing any more 8 kg dead turkey cock bodies in there! To add to the confusion, inevitably we were just about to go live when there was such an uproar in the Dáil (Parliament) that the Dept got cold feet and are rumoured to have suspended the go-live for now. Naturally, we have heard nothing from the waste company again on this, so I will put my bins out on Monday completely in the dark as to how I am paying. I have paid their suggested 'pre-emptive' charge, so I am covered for 6 more months plus/minus any weight adjustments.

Starsky and Hutch

Jars from the rebuild house 'treasure' haul.

If I may, I will briefly catch up on a couple of stories from previous posts. The 'rebuild' house yielded up a couple more bits of treasure before moving to "completely cleared out" status, with Liz briefly sweeping the floors clear just in time to see her efforts come to naught in a shower of jackdaw nests, rubble, clinker and soot as the middle chimney got cleared out downwards. These treasures were a couple of nice little glass vases which can be used for table decoration or some such, and a government pamphlet from year 2001 concerning voting in the referendum on (among other things) stopping Capital Punishment.

Lasagne style composting - this calf muck gets alternated with
weeds and grass cuttings

I had not realised that Ireland still legally had the Death Penalty until the 90s, although it had last been used in 1954 when the State asked our own UK hangman (Albert Pierrepoint) to come over and do the job on a rapist/murderer. After that the Death Penalty could still be handed down for crimes such as killing a Guard (policeman) but it was always commuted to 'Life'. In the 90s it was removed from statute and in this 2001 Referendum the Constitution was changed to outlaw it as well as to ratify two Euro-treaties (Nice and Rome). There. Every day is a school day.

Em-J's book.

My other catch-up concerns our Irish nieces, the older of whom, Em-J, we noted in a recent post getting good results in her Leaving Cert. She is also starring in another way. I will quickly say that I know very little of this subject and would fail badly in any test of knowledge of the current sub-culture of Japanese style 'graphic novels' (comics to we older ones) in the "Animé" genre. Em-J loves them and reads them avidly as well as using her considerable skill and talent as a cartoonist to produce her own pictures in the style. This drive led her to get accepted onto a course up in Dublin where all the budding writers and would-be illustrators got to help in the making of a proper, published book, "Demons in Disguise".

Our first outdoor spuds in this slow, chilly season. These are
variety Orla

This being a proper book is now published and is subject to a proper launch up in Dublin, to which, naturally, all the contributors have been invited. Em-J is going up there tonight 'en famille' with proud Auntie Liz in support as one of the drivers. She will be bringing the little ones home to Silverwood at a sensible 'school night' hour and then stay overnight a couple of nights to catch up on the family gossip. Also to congratulate the other niece, J-M who is following hot on the heels of big sister, with some good results in her Junior Cert (equivalent to 'O' levels, roughly) published yesterday and getting herself onto national television (RTE) news, no less. It's all happening for those girls. Their Dad is sure they must get their brains from their Mum!

Starsky style knitted jacket. 

As she was Silverwood-bound, Liz decided she also had a chance to see Mrs S and to produce a nice, though 40 year late, surprise. Readers who are as old as us may recall American cop thriller series, Starsky and Hutch, from the 70s and may remember that Starsky was often seen wearing chunky knitted patterned jackets with big roll collars. Back then they became a fashion item you could often see in shops and Liz tells me that Mrs S has always regreted that she "never got her Starsky jacket". So when Liz saw a pattern for one on line and had a supply of the necessary chunky-knit wool, she realised she could rattle one up fairly quickly.

Gladioli doing well.

This turned out to be true up to a point. Knitting up chunky knit is quite fast because of the size of the wool, so Liz zoomed up the back panel, cracked off the sleeves, pockets and front panels. There was a little hiatus as she picked up all the hundreds of stitches up one front edge, round the collar and back down, so that she could knit the "button band" (no buttons) outwards at 90º to the front panels. Then came sewing all the bits together which is Liz's least favourite bit but with Em-J's book launch now looming, time was running out and things were getting a bit pressured, that is to say heated. We are thinking of getting some of those labels for these garments which say things like "Hand knitted with pride by ...etc" but ours are going to read "Hand knitted without too much swearing by....". Anyway, as I type this at half eight on Thursday evening the garment is complete and has been delivered. Mrs S is delighted to have finally "got her Starsky jacket", a bit of an early Christmas present. They are all at the book launch, so maybe she is even wearing it.

Apple variety "Irish Peach"

Meanwhile, back at the 'ranch' we have been enjoying a bit of an Indian Summer. The weather came good on the 4th of September and is due to fall off a cliff tomorrow (11th) so maybe at 7 days long it is more of a Summer-een but it has been lovely to get out into the garden properly. I have done a mountain of weeding and harvested some first outdoor spuds. These were variety 'Orla' which struggled so through the chill wet July and August that they never really put on any tops. They never reached a foot high and didn't flower, so when they started to do autumn fade I first feared blight and then just worried that there would be nothing underground. There was, in fact, no blight and they have done an amazing weight of good sized spuds which cook beautifully in the skin-bursting 'floury' Irish style that just asks for a lash of butter to be melted into them as they are served.

Czar plums pecked to destruction by crows or magpies.

Less succesful have been my plums - a tree loaded with lovely Czar. This was my most successful tree and I had watched with mounting excitement as the fruit enlarged and started to ripen but today, while the fruit was still way too sour and hard for us to enjoy, the bountiful crop (20-30 fruits) is pecked about and stolen by the crows or magpies. I even found one carried to a handy fence post to be pecked to pieces. Some fruits were on the ground where the slugs were now finishing off the robbery. I have around 6 fruits left on the tree and I can't see the maggies suddenly going off plums and letting me keep those, can you? Annoyingly this same tree did a lovely crop 2 years ago and not a one magpie stole any. Perhaps they have learned this like the old bluetits used to do with tin-foil bottle tops on the doorstep.

Twins Thelma and Louise grazing with youngster Dylan
looking hopefully at the cameraman. 

Finally, our little March-born lamb twins, Thelma and Louise have now reached an age and size where they must go on their final journey, so they are booked in to our friend and butcher-man, Ignatius G Victualler for next week. With them out of the way I am a bit happier about getting our tup round to service the grown up ladies. I did not want anybody too young to get hurt or to get involved in that, though Ignatius tells me that they get a surprising number of ewe lambs coming through their place themselves in-lamb where they have been got at by a brother or 'cousin'. We are hoping that our boy 'Rambo' will complete his mission around the end of this month, which we hope will give us all three ewes (Polly. Lily and Myfanwy) in lamb through the winter and due end of February or into March. Fervent prayers are being offered up.

Smallholder Buys Shop Eggs! Shock!

The shame of it! Shop bought eggs. 

Yes, all the girls seem to be in moult or sulking through the short length days and misty mornings and we are currently down to one or zero eggs from the 9 hens (plus guinea fowl) each day. We are just about supplying John Deere Bob with his half dozen but today, when Liz needed 5 for an extra gloopy chocolate fudge cake for some visitors we had to submit to the inevitable and buy half a dozen like 'normal' people do, in an actual shop. We have not bought eggs since our first batch of Sussex Ponte hens came into lay yonks ago.

The solid clean chap formerly known as skanky emaciated
stray with bits missing, Pirate the cat.  

We are not alone it seems. Anne, I know is also a bit quiet at the moment and friend Dawn was telling me this week that she had also had to buy half a dozen for the first time in years. Ah well. Don't get too excited, though, Lidl. You do not have a new income stream. Your free range eggs were OK but not a patch on our own for freshness or for the rich full yellow colour of the yolks. We will be going back to ours as soon as the girls decide that spring is round the corner.

Sorting the lamb meat out. Roughly 104 kg from the 4 lambs

Monday 17th saw us down at lamb butcher, Ignatius G (Victualler) of Castlerea Main Street, to collect our lambs and watch them being butchered up. They have been hanging in his cold store 'relaxing' for 7 days. We love Ig-G; he is an absolute joy to do business with. A well padded (but huge and strong) traditional looking butcher with a happy, smiley face, he is definitely a 'front of house' type bloke, bantering with the customers in his butcher's apron. His No.2, Joe, is maybe a bit quieter and seems to have his days for the banter but sometimes seems to prefer the quiet of the back room and his vicious-looking band saw.

Bagged for the freezer

That day was an out-front day and we had a great laugh with the two of them as they prepared our order to Liz's specification; we needed one of the lambs split between Mrs Silverwood and Steak Lady but also some parts of the order done as a million chops, while others needed to be in racks of ribs, some big joints but some half-leg or half shoulder. The guys don't mind, you can have it as simple or as complicated as you like. They have even bagged each individual portion for us before now, as they went along, printing labels on the 'till/weigher' for us describing the cuts (lamb chops, gigot chops, half shoulder etc). We get the distinct impression that they appreciate anyone who knows about meat and respects their work and their business.

Local grown!

While we are on meat, we have been delighted to find that sometimes now we can do a Sunday roast or a main meal and see that everything on the plate has come from this holding. On Sunday we had the first leg joint from the pigs and spotted that the meat, potatoes, sprouts, turnip and even the apple sauce was from here. Our apple harvest was a bit of a flop but the few we got we guarded jealously. Liz made the (single) Bramley and one of the James Grieves into apple sauce back in September, freezing it to be kept for the occasion of our first pork Sunday roast. Our only 'oops' of that meal was that Liz, without thinking, 'nicked' one of the rabbits' cheap carrots; we have carrots in the ground but I'd not brought any in that day. All delicious and succulent, laced with that added pride of having grown it ourselves.

Leg roast. Excellent.

We are very pleased, in particular, with the flavour of the Tamworth pigs and this leg cut was even a bit less fatty than the shoulder. Liz was able to make very good crackling with the skin still on the joint; for the shoulder she had stripped the skin off and blasted that separately.

We have sneaked through our little hiatus of freezer space. Sparks was down today to collect his lamb, he took away a bit of pork too and tomorrow Liz is off down to the Silverwoods' with theirs and Steak Lady's plus the pork for those 'customers'. By that time we should be able to freeze the 'overflow' which we have put into the 'fridge' parts of those fridge-freezers for safe keeping and we will not have needed to buy either the 5th freezer or to borrow the generously offered freezer space at Dawn's. A narrow squeak but we got away with it. Next year, as I said, we will be sure to de-synchronise the lamb and pork harvests a bit better.

Pirate.

Finally just a quick update on the stray cat, Pirate. You can see from my top picture that he is now quite a solid (OK fat!) chap but his body is now beautifully cleaned up and cleared of all the scar tissue, scabby stuff between the fur and places where he had been gnawing on itchy skin. Also nicks and cuts inflicted by, we presume, barbed wire, brambles or dogs and cats chasing him off. Only his face is still a bit 'mashed', his nose always seems to be a bit red and scuffed, or dried up and scabby and his eye(s) are generally a bit weepy looking. He is a very affectionate young boy and loves to be picked up and fussed (though not carried about, curiously, he gets very fidgety if he thinks you are "taking him somewhere"). He has pretty much taken over the Utility Room and owns it to the exclusion of our other cat Blue. He has the freezers in there pushing out heat and a radiator. He has an old cat bed lined with one of my old fleecy jackets and he is brought regular food - at least a tin a day plus the odd sliver of ice cream when I go out there to help myself. We see him come out to pee or poo somewhere in the yard before nipping back 'indoors'. He seems as happy as Larry and is definitely improved in health out of all recognition from the poor emaciated, cut about, battered and bruised little mite who first showed up driven to steal our cats' food by hunger, bravely coming in through the open kitchen window braving the wrath of our dogs, cats and, for all he knew, us. Fallen on his feet, has Pirate.

The 'Ramones' Final Gig

George Junior with his swollen neck. 

The "poorly goose" of my last post (George Junior) did not make it, but passed away quietly in standard goose sleeping position (beak under wing) in a box of hay and tucked under a blanket. We found him on the 2nd morning, so just 48 hours from first spotting that he might have a problem. Frustratingly, we have no idea what went wrong or what killed him. He had that swollen neck or crop but that seemed to be mainly full of air - when I gently massaged it at the bottom end the bulge moved up into his neck like playing with a part-inflated balloon.

Oven ready version - 2.2 kg

Finding him dead yesterday morning I hung him up head-down in the shed to relax into an easier 'shape' to pluck him and over the next couple of hours quite a lot of clear liquid (water?) drained down out of his mouth, so that by the time I plucked him the swelling was gone. The crop and gut cut open told us nothing - just some part digested food as you'd expect, small wads of 'chewed' grass, some grain. No obvious blocked places or torsion, but all of that could have relaxed away due to the head-down hanging. Ah well, some you win..... We decided to eat only the carcass (2.2 kg) and to bin the 'offal' we'd normally keep (gizzard, liver and heart). He was only a young lad so he is not really filled out enough to look like a proper oven-ready goose and does not have the usual thick layers of sub-cutaneous fat. The other 5 geese seem fine to us, behaving and eating normally. We remain completely in the dark as to what 'took' this fellow. Unusually, my on-line support (the poultry discussion groups) were also disappointingly silent on the subject.

What no sheep?

The open gate pictured, and the empty field tell the tale of this year's store lamb quartet having gone on their final journey, off with a one-way ticket for their appointment with Ignatius G (Victualler) in Castlerea Main Street. I did all the 'shock horror' pictures last year and the year before of hanging carcasses and of Liz dealing with the 'crop', so I will spare you that this year. These 4 were named 'The Ramones' after the punk-band by a friend (a pun on the fact that they were all, allegedly, going to be male (Ram lambs)) though in fact one was a ewe. The real Ramones (the band) had a song called "I don't want to be buried in the Pet Cemetery". Don't worry, you guys, that is no part of the plan.

The trailer is left open while the
chooks pick it clean of spilled food

They were easily the simplest and most trouble free batch we have had. Nobody escaped, nobody got their head stuck in the fence, they were all dead easy to bucket-train and then, in the 'practise runs' and today for real, they obediently followed me from field to cattle race and thence into the trailer. We had them loaded, literally, from field to ramp-shut in under 3 minutes. Yes, of course it feels like a betrayal as reward for their good behaviour but it does confirm that they are not scared or distressed at all by the loading and transportation. Trusting to the end, poor lambs, which in our case is when we encourage them out of the trailer and into one of the clean, straw-strewn holding pens at Ignatius's lairage while we chat to the happy butcher-man about his recent holiday in Canada and the birth of his newest Grand-daughter, Blaithín* (also in Canada).

Christmas Cake ingredients get an overnight soak
in apple juice

These lambs were two Texel x Suffolk Down and two Texel x 'mule' (the mule being a cross between a mountainy sheep and a lowland sheep). They may also well be our farewell to doing business with sheep-man Kenny, as we are moving now into in-lamb ewes and keeping sheep year round, rather than just buying Kenny's store lambs in Summer to 'finish' them in November or December. We've done it the 'Kenny' way for three years and 12 lambs and he deserves our thanks. It has been a good grounding in what was to be a new species for us. We feel ready now to get involved in all that shearing, foot trimming and dosing for liver fluke that 'proper' shepherds have to do.

Follow the yellow brick road to the spot marked 'X'

All around this sheep-work we have continued the sneaky 'drift' of the young Buff Orps' new house, down the cattle race and into the yard. We move the house a couple of feet each day and the chickens seem to be untroubled by the fact that their house each evening is in a slightly different place. We are both reminded of my mother's (Pud Lady's) wartime anecdote. Living at the start of the Blitz in Bromley-by-Bow on the River Thames, she and her 'big sister' were evacuated as children several times down to Somerset. Every time the Blitz eased and they could come 'home' they had actually moved house because their previous house had been bombed out in the intervening period. By the time we boys came along, Pud Lady had a framed map of the evacuation village on the Living Room wall as a momento, but amusingly the framing job had been done by 'cropping' a bigger map to remove the huge first S and last ET of the county name, so I grew up thinking Mum had been evacuated to a place called 'OMERS', The framed map is still there in the Hastings house.

Blue looks balefully at the metal duck

Finally, as cats do, Blue has adopted a new favourite sleeping place, on top of our Living Room dresser. This, of course, involves evicting any inconvenient "junk" he finds there (trophies, plaster kingfishers, a posh 'Moet' insulated sleeve for your champagne and egg boxes - this after riffling through the stack of open 'nested' boxes like a professional card-sharp). In this picture he has cleared himself a good space but doesn't look too happy about the metal duck ornament eye-ing him up from stage right.

*Another good Irish name for the British readers, Blaithín is pronounced 'Bloh-heen', the 'Bloh' having a short vowel like in the word 'Blo(ck)'. It translates as 'Little Flower'.... ahhhh!