Sick Note

Culled out male duck. Sorry, Laura.
this was Obelix

Hi. Your blogger has been knocked sideways by the biggest illness he has ever experienced since the move to Ireland, and in long memory. A chest infection. So hard do I cling to  healthy vitality and try to avoid any contact with doctors, nurses and hospitals that one of the problems we had to overcome when we went trying to make appointments of collect prescription drugs from the local pharmacies was that nobody has any record of me or any history in their files.

The elder flower bank.

This disease struck fast and furious. On the Saturday I'd been happily helping a friend in the village muck out some bullocks for 3 hours, healthy and vital. We'd finished that job, stopped for tea and biscuits and I'd made my way home. I had a slight feeling that I might have overdone it, a slight tightness of breath, a need to sit down in my easy chair for more tea. But nothing serious. I'd agreed with the guy to come down and finish it tomorrow (Sunday).

An elder flower head.

As Saturday evening progressed, it got a whole lot less funny. Any walk of more than 30-50 yards had me needing to stop for a breather,lean on a fence or sit on a garden chair, gasping and panting hard while my body came up to a normal level of oxygen and my breathing slowed back to normal. Clearly all was not well. Time to go and sign on with the local Clinic. Time to get the big-boy pants or brave-soldier outfit on.

Home grown lettuce.

Elizabeth was off to Day 1 of her 'Hard Landscaping' module and we had a lamb to capture, load into the trailer and then haul to slaughter/butchery in town, so we had to re-hash the schedule and who'd have the car. We got up early, loaded the lamb, then I ran Elizabeth in to Balla-D, returning to hitch up the trailer, whizzed the lamb in to Gannon's and finally was able to do something about the illness.

Rambling Rector fighting back after the
recent windstorm

Mixed feelings about the rest of the day (round till 7 pm, as it happened). I hate that loss of control but on the up side, I was very pleasantly surprised by standard of care and all those hours of very professional, reassuring, warming and calm TLC as I was processed by the reception, triage and then the real doctoring and then finally spat out the other end with my treatment in my hand.

Sligo Hospital is on top of a mountain.

To cut a long story short, 'my' doctor was not at the clinic but the very competent nurse did my work up including an ECG. Because I was not showing any normal chest infection symptoms (sore throat, liquid in lungs, 'productive' coughing. She then had a chat with the doctor and referred me to Sligo Hospital, 40 minutes away. Luckily this breathlessness does not kick in if you are sitting the driving seat. Had to smile when I arrived, though. The hospital is on a mountain and the car parks are all in the foot hills. If you aren't showing symptoms by the time you arrive, you certainly are by the time you have climbed up to A+E reception.

Amoxicillin for what ails you,

To continue with this short story, the hospital team could also not find any liquid on lungs etc but they did find infection trace chemicals in my blood work, so I was sent off with a hard-core antibiotic (amoxicillin) and just made it back to my car as the 4 hours I'd bought ran out. That evening all the expected hell broke loose and my infection exploded into the normal coughing, phlegm and unpleasantness. I've had 2 nights of that but then some good day-time sleeping. I batted away the 2nd half of the mucking out and Elizabeth has stepped in to live-stock feeding and open up/lock up rounds leaving me unemployed and able to spend time getting better.

Em-J makes 20 Happy Birthday to You.

That is surely enough for one, rather miserable blog post but just now a chance to raise the tone and finish on a high note. Huge happy birthday to our oldest Irish niece, long term friend of the blog and frequent narrow-boat holidayer. Emily Jane, who made 20 years old yesterday. She was celebrated by this rather lovely photo-montage  put up on Facebook by her Mum. Mrs Silverwood.

Ignatius G Victualler

This then is the second and final post which should be avoided by anyone who thinks the detail around slaughter and butchery of the late lambs is "too much information". If you don't want to know about such things, look away now. Normal service and happy animal stories will resume with the next post.

"Ignatius Gannon (Victualler); Beef Mutton and Lamb as in Season. None but the best quality stocked". So says his paperwork and we can vouch for the fact that Ignatius G is an excellent butcher, a small local business in Castlerea thriving and surviving despite being almost opposite the SuperValu Supermarket. He is a tall, strong bloke with brawny arms, grey hair, a white shop-coat well smeared with the expected gore and a ready smile and jokey wit. He was also very good to us 'newbies', helped us a lot through the process and answered all my myriad questions as we went along. His prices also compare very favourably with the Supermarket prices, so that, in this exercise, we have used his as our estimate of the carcass's worth even though it would have looked even better at SuperValu rates.

Readers will know that we have already had back the 'offal' last Monday (hearts, livers and kidneys) but the main carcasses have to hang for a week, so we were back today to collect the main event and 'supervise' the cutting up - we had to choose, for example, whether we wanted shoulder joints or the much more popular (locally) gigot chops. We did. You then have to choose how big to leave the 'shoulders' - how far up the rib cage do you want the 'chopping' (for shoulder chops) to come before you stay stop, and keep the rest of the shoulder intact.

Ignatius and his 'oppo' and slaughterman of 34 years, Joe set to work sawing and cleavering and in this case they agreed to bag it up as they went along as if it was meat for sale, so that we could have all the bits labelled and we could know the price per kilo of the bits (from €9/kilo for breast meat and neck, through €11 for leg, €12 for cutlets, €13.50 for shoulder and up to €17/kilo for loin chops; this comparing to €21/kilo we have seen in Supervalu. The labels also showed the final price of the bag, so for example, a shoulder might be €32.83, 'half legs' up to about €20 and bags of 4 loin chops around €7. The output from one animal was then loaded into a tough white dustbin liner so that we could work out some numbers per animal. They charge, incidentally, €30 per animal for the slaughter and butchery though we gave them a bit of a tip too for being so brilliant.

So, having completed our other shopping we headed home with the little Fiat very well loaded down with meat. We excluded all the animals from the living room and sorted all this booty out on the Dining Room table. We were able to tap all the numbers into a spreadsheet (I can hear anyone who knows me muttering "Typical!" at this point. From this we know that for example....

1) Our three girls had carcass weights of between 17 and 18.2 kg respectively
2) The total weight of meat (excluding offal) was 52.9 kg
3) The carcasses would have cost us €213, €218 and €227 over the counter, a total of €659.24
4) Our most expensive cut is a 2.56 kg shoulder at €34.56
5) A 6 foot tall, €400 freezer will just about fit three carcasses of this size (which was a relief).

In terms of finances and 'did we make a profit' the following figures might be interesting. The sheep originally, back in September, cost €80 each. They cost €44 in supplementary feed (the grass was free as we have not yet had to worry about cultivation or fertilizer!), we paid Kenny €20 diesel for haulage to the butcher and paid €100 for the slaughter and butchery, total inputs €404.

The meat was worth €659.24 as we only used Ignatius's prices (we could have quoted Supermarket prices and we could almost have said they were organic - Heaven KNOWS how much organic lamb is worth - our grass has had no chemicals applied and these ladies had no growth promoters or other unnecessary drugs, only our bought in feed was not organic, and we cannot answer for the first 5 months of their lives. We are estimating €9.75 for the 'offal' so our outputs are €668.99, so effectively we made a profit of €264.99 which makes a nice contribution to the €600 fence we had to erect around the paddock. Mentally we were depreciating this over ten years but at this rate it's more like 3 years!. Our own man hours are not charged as we had so much fun doing this. It's been a blast and a lovely bit of learning to be small holders. Yes, we had to do the sad slaughter bit at the end, but that comes with the territory and we coped OK; we know how much love, respect, care, good food and shelter had gone into these animals and we chose our butcher with care and you can't say that if you buy stuff you've not reared and kept yourself.

Thanks to everyone who had a hand in this, especially our sheep mentor, Kenny O'C (who pronounced our results as "mighty"), to our small-holdering mentors, Anne and Simon (who found us the butcher and reassured us that we were getting good growth rates) and to Ignatius and Joe, the heroes of this particular post.

So, what's for supper then? That'll be chicken and chips because we had some to use up!