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.

(Officially) Off the Road

Well, the year rolled round and the belovéd 2CV finally ran out of tax, so we had to make our unwillingness to battle against the 'machine', official. We want the car to stay registered in this country, so we had to submit a "Statutory Off Road Declaration" promising that we will not use, park or stray at all on the public highway. This stands for 12 months after which time you have to re-new it.

Nectaroscordum.

My hope beyond hope is that the rules around classic/vintage cars will change and exempt the car from the NCT, specifically on the emissions bit which I repeatedly failed. The cut-off is currently fixed at 1980 registrations (mine's 1986). The UK recently changed to a rolling '30 years old' so that, yes folks, even the Morris Marina and Austin Allegro are now "classics" (yep, square steering wheel and all!). Till then the 2CV is an untaxed farm vehicle used for hauling trailers full of tree branches about within the small holding but not allowed on the road.

Pirate the Cat. Sorry about the rubbish picture. 

We MAY have acquired a new cat. We are being visited by a starving stray who is not in the best of health. We have not yet been able to get a hold of this cat and have a good look, but he/she seems to be very manky around the ears, may have a sunken, useless eye and is definitely very thin and undernourished. I am not going to expand on where these cats come from and the animal abuse and neglect by some folk locally; this is neither the forum nor the method. This one though was born locally and is now haunting the area in search of food. Liz  hates to think of the poor mite starving and has started putting food down for him. His one eye and his stealing of our own cat's food (we wondered why the cats here were "suddenly eating their bowls of food right down to the last scrap") got him the name "Pirate".

First 2014 produce - broad beans and radishes.

We now put our own cat bowls outside, topped up with more meat out of the tin, at about 9 pm and sure enough, he slinks in and polishes it all off. Sometimes the dogs are awake and they detect him and bark. Other times he is a stealthy and secret as can be, and he gets away with it. Our plan is to feed him up so he is strong enough to fight off some of "what ails him" and possibly get him tame enough to accept being handled, when we will be able to get the vet, Aoife, to have a good look round him.

George Junior at 4 weeks, looking a bit more goose shaped.

Maybe one day he will join our existing 'pride'. He can be no more than 6 months old. He did not get a lot of numbers in the feline lottery of life. We know that one of his siblings was hit by a car in the lane and that 4 more may have been trapped in mink traps and shot by a farmer. It is not a barrel of laughs being an stray cat in this part of the world. The poor picture is because he is so nervous at the moment that he scoots as soon as we appear, so the pic was taken through the (closed) kitchen window.

The keet gang, hatch plus 8-9 days. A bit of fresh air.

The keets continue to thrive. At day 7, it was so warm in the spare room, that we took them "off heat"; i.e. we turned off the IR lamp and then with day temperatures up in the 17-19 degree range we decided to try them out of doors, out in the sunshine on our front lawn on some genuine grass. They do OK. They tend to patrol around the run a as a close-knit group of 11 birds, steering clear of patrolling cats and visiting the food bowl as a Rugby scrum.

Monkey flower (Mimulus luteus) in the pond.

Who-ever finds the best bit of shredded lettuce first then zooms off with it pursued by the others, so we have the amusing sight of 11 keets zooming about the place in a wing-flapping charge. There are plenty of other bits of lettuce in the bowl, but the one that your 'mate' has got is way more attractive! We have a nice chunk of 'waste ground' between the Primrose Path and the East Field where we can build these guys a run 30 feet long by about 6' by 6'. They should enjoy 'zooming' around that. Tonight we are promised a warm night, so we have actually put them to be in the 'bedroom' bit of the rabbit run outside, with a bit of plywood blocking up the opening. We reckon then will be warm, dry and cosy enough in there in their 'huddle' and not need to be indoors any more.

The pigs? They are well settled now and we have found a food that they love and use as a treat - apple! They have got used to us and our routine. They come piling out of the ark and up to the fence when I approach, calling "Pig Hoo-ey!" (see PG Wodehouse for details), giving my two-tone whistle and tapping my plastic beaker (= food scoop) on the top of a post. They love the pig nuts, and the apple cut into 8 segments (like a Terry's chocolate orange)
and (lately) some chunks of tomato. I was amazed by the delicacy of their nibbling and chewing.

Brought up on all the old clichés of snouts in the trough etc, I was expecting them to hoover up food with a noise like a waste-disposal. Not these delicate ladies. They carefully select a segment of apple and then nibble small chunks out of it, chewing each piece rather squelchily like a child who has been told to chew it all 40 times before they swallow. Takes them AGES to eat an apple. We have been feeding them in an old cat litter tray but now it seems that they have taken to squabbling over the food. One 'claims' the food and stands over and in it, eating their share and defending the rest of the food with the rest of their body, manouvring their flanks to shoo the other girl off, till the other nips round to the other side and head-butts them in the midriff to get back in. We have now bought them a bowl each and that seems to have sorted that out. It is hard to believe that we have only had them a week. They have grown so much - It would not be so easy to tuck one under each arm now for a repeat of last Thursday's post picture!

Foxgloves.

The only other live-stock news is that Squawk, our remaining Marans hen seems to have moved in with the other girls. The Marans ladies had had their own house since they arrived but the sister 'Bubble' expired of old age (as far as we could tell) last week and she has now given up the solitary life and joined the bulk of the hens in the concrete out-building. This is good - it frees up the wooden house; we wish the Hubbard poults would do the same.

Meanwhile, another story which I cannot go into any detail on, so I shouldn't even be mentioning it here, but here is a pic of Deefer celebrating a medical 'all-clear' with a glass of Prosecco. Life goes on.

Keeping in Touch

SB Cambria; Picture by Susan Martin

Naturally. 99% of our time these days is taken up with the 'new life', the farm, the livestock, the new place and our new friends and acquaintances. Every now and then, though, our 'old life' gets a look in and we are staying in touch with some of our old Kentish interests and contacts. One of the biggest ones for me in those days, as you'll know from reading this blog, was the restoration of the Thames Sailing Barge S.B.Cambria. During the 3 and a half year restoration I was heavily involved as a working volunteer but also described all the adventures by writing the blog on their website which started as a quite modest affair managed by a small family firm based in the Kent town of Sandwich.

Well, now the restoration is complete and the barge relaunched and back on the water operating as a proper company on a charity basis. The website was moved from the Sandwich team to a bigger provider company called 'Blue Ant' based in Faversham and at the same time, I was asked to take over the management of the site content as well as continuing to write the blog and, more recently, Liz and I have also been asked to take over the production and writing of the 3-times-a-year Newsletter. The website

( http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/ )

is quite a big and full one with many pages which are quite time-sensitive; there is a calendar, and there are pages entitled 'recent events' or 'future plans' all of which go out of date if you are not in there fairly frequently re-writing them and you need to keep posting new pictures so that the site stays fresh to any 'surfer' coming back for another look. I've put in a good few hours lately re-writing chunks of this, updating pictures and writing blog posts. Liz and I have also spent the time needed in producing the January 2014 Newsletter which will be published soon and I will post a link here to that. Obviously all the real work is happening 500 miles away in Kent, so this has to be done at a distance but in these days of the internet, digital pictures and e-mail this makes little difference except that I am heavily reliant on the locals to take the pictures and feed me the stories. It keeps me out of mischief.

Not starving with Liz away. Lamb chops and Cajun roast veg

Welcome back to Liz who has been away for the week ministering to the poorly Mrs Silverwood and wrangling children on school runs, taxis to Karate and baton twirling. She has been supervising them though homework and cooking fridges full of future foods to keep the family going while Mrs S, now home from hospital and mixing interesting cocktails of three drugs with long names, continues to recover. Liz is exhausted, she says, and takes her hat off to all the 'real' Mums who do this kind of thing as a full time job, not just for the one week. On the Saturday , Steak Lady (and Mr SL) rode in like the cavalry to relieve Liz and unloaded from their car, catering quantities of the type of high class 'ready meals' that the Portmarnock folk sometimes use for dinner parties when they do not want to cook, huge trays of top-of-the-range lasagna, chicken curry, cottage pie, stuffing them into Mrs S's fridge till it cried "Enough!". There was even a chocolate cake for us - Thanks Steak Lady! The relief effort work there was done and, after one more round of taxi-ing to karate and baton twirling, Liz could drive home.

Assembling the flat pack hive.

Of course, I miss her being around but I keep myself pretty busy coping with the 'farm' on my Jack Jones and there is always plenty of food stacked up in our own fridge and freezer and I am a pretty good cook, so I cope fairly well. My speciality at present is roasted veg seasoned with Cajun seasoning - I use our own, huge, sweet parsnips, onions and (shop) tomatoes and butternut squash, as well as sometimes including our own Mira spuds roasted alongside the veg. In the case above, there were also our own sprouts and lamb cutlets. Delicious.

Clara climbs up the ramp from yard to cattle race.

I also fired up the poor, neglected 2CV and took her for a quick blat a few times round the house, through the yard and up through the cattle race just to make her feel a bit loved, to get the oil circulating, some fresh petrol into the carb, the brakes freed up and wiped clean of rust and the suspension moving about. She is actually off the road at the moment and will be put on a Statutory Off-Road Notice (SORN) in May, a month before her current tax expires. The tax was only €99 (it goes by engine size here) but it will be nice not to have to pay the insurance. The latter always annoyed me - it seems that in Ireland you cannot insure a car that is more than 15 years old, for more than 3rd Party, not even fire and theft. If I damaged her or she caught fire or was stolen I would just be taking a 100% loss on the chin. She's not worth a great deal, but with an NCT would probably get you €1000. In the UK you could at least get a fully comp deal on a pre-agreed value (the national 2CV club would do an estimate for the insurers) and a limited mileage (I only ever did 2-3000 miles per year). I will be happy to not have to pay our Irish insurer for that one.

Egg glut

The geese and chickens are now cranking out record amounts of eggs each day; sometimes I have had 2 goose and 8 chicken eggs. Even one of the Marans girls has come back into lay (Bless 'em, they have got to be 6 years old at this stage!) That's a lot more eggs than I either can eat or palm off on neighbours when I am here on my own, so Liz returned to something of a glut, a dozen in the 'posh' box plus 5 goose eggs and a good 9 chicken eggs in the overflow bowl. That called for a blast of baking to use some up, so the table is now groaning with home made lemon curd (lovely and sharp, the way we like it, made with un-waxed, organic lemons), home made mayonnaise, blackberry 'clafoutis' (posh tart), sponge cake and Liz's famed 'chilli, cheese and bacon biscuits'. We also foisted some eggs on Carolyn (K-Dub is back from his motorbiking Bavarian Forest 'Elefant' adventure and it is little H's 2nd birthday soon, so she's baking too) so the glut is looking a lot less glut-like now.

Fancy a stroll down the Lane, Henry? Why not, Min?

Meanwhile, the Guineas seem to have temporarily given up on their wanderings down the tarmac lane (the picture here was taken while I rounded them up and shoo'd them back into the drive one more time) but only because Henry has managed to hurt his right leg and is limping. Poultry tend to be famous for either being fully fit, or dead, with only very quick 'sick' intervals between. Each work-a-day bird is also usually only worth a few Euro. Hence few poultry keepers call the vet to their hobby birds and most vets, anyway, have little experience of fowl. We tend to try to isolate them, keep them quiet, ensure they have food and water and hope for the best. They either fall off the perch or perk up, problem solved either way. We cannot see any obvious cause on Henry, so we think he has pulled a muscle higher up his leg, or bruised himself, maybe in the hip, knee or 'ankle' joint.

Recent damp has put green algae on our Kentish
fallow deer antlers. But look at that blue sky!

Guinea fowl also tend to be very strongly pair-bonded, always scurrying about on foot as a pair. If they ever get separated then they call anxiously to one another and this can be quite loud. Henry's injury has slowed him up a bit, so Min takes off at the usual sprint and poor H is left behind. There is a lot of noisy calling till they can be re-united. But he does get about, hopping along favouring the poorly leg in a new characteristic bounding gait. We fancy that each day he seems to be slightly better; we hope this isn't just wishful thinking. He is not, anyway, getting any worse, so we live in hope that he will recover and go back to aggressively running at all the hens to drive them off and secure the food for his 'Min'. The thought occurs that he may have got injured by trying this on with one of our roosters and been taught a lesson by them.

But, some days are definitely 2-yolk days and Saturday was one of them, with Liz having a problem free 2 hour run up the roads and motorway from the Silverwood's to here, home in time for 'wine o'clock'. It is good to have her back. This place works so much better with 2 of us knocking it into shape and enjoying the fruits (and veg's!) of our labours. Thank you Mrs S for allowing her to come home. Get well soon and enjoy all that 'sugo', cock-a-leekie soup, chicken curry, lasagna and cottage pie.

Trailing Home (Tail Between her Legs)

There she comes, then, trailing home with her tail between her legs, poor old Clara Bow, 2 weeks overdue for her NCT re-test and her owner's wallet €280 lighter. We called by the garage today having heard nothing, to see if she was finished, to find that they had just finished putting her back together and cleaning her up before they phoned me. Not brilliant service this time but I do sympathise. They had taken her in to do some easy tweaks on the carburettor which weren't going to cost much and would be done by garage owner Keiran who'd taken over the task from son Aaron. They knew I wanted the car back for the 14th and knew not to spend too much on her.

2CV carburettor (pale grey, centre of picture)

In the event both K and A jazzed off to the USA to mechanic on a Kart race (in which their other son, Andy, was driving for Ireland) having first posted the carb off (without asking me) to a specialist in Dublin. At this point it all went a bit astray. The carb needed €280 worth of work and was no way going to be back for the 14th. Hey ho, I asked them to just re-assemble the car and I'd either drive or have it towed home, end of job, end of hobby, car officially booked off road on a SORN notice. Unbeknownst to me, the specialist guy had already fixed the carb.

I wasn't happy, but these are old, unfamiliar cars and the guys left on site were doing their honest best. They were very apologetic and offered to charge me only what the carb guy had charged them, no labour on their part and no VAT. It would have been unfair to hurt the Dublin guy so I bit the bullet and paid up thinking, philosophically, that at least it will be the final spend on the car. I drove home enjoying the feel of the repaired mixture and smiling a wry smile - I was probably driving a perfectly good car which might well breeze an NCT but, No, we have made our decision and this baby gets to sit in the car port, SORN'd and getting used only within the 'farm'. Maybe the law will change and the statutory age for 'classics' exempt from NCTs will hop forward from its current 1980 date; cars have to be 33 years old here to be exempt, mine is only a youngster at 27 years old.

Christmas Pud

But enough of 2CVs for the moment. We have progress on the sheep front at last! Sheep Mentor Kenny is almost fixed from his broken collar bone and is able to drive his enormous 4 x 4 if he takes it carefully. He texts me out of the blue to say he is coming to see if our lambs are ready. I round them up using food bait and he gets a chance to grab some thighs and press down on some spines checking for the chunky muscle blocks of Beltex sired lambs and the right amount of fat along the spine, covering the tops of the ribs. He pronounces himself happy; They are 'Finished' he declares and can go to slaughter. He will be OK doing the haulage, he assures us. Book them in.

Hollyhocks still in flower on 27th November

Our job now is to contact the small slaughterhouse -stroke-butcher who we use, Ignatius G in Castlerea. This proves easier said than done, as he is either engaged on the phone all afternoon, or he is so busy he has taken the thing off the hook. We are in town tomorrow, though, so we can drop in and make arrangements face to face. Kenny quickly threw another couple of complications my way, but that's Kenny. "See if you can get carcass weights," he asked "by breed and sex" This is just for his own interest, but it should be easy enough. We have, in the group of 5, 2 rams and 3 ewes. All are sired by his Beltex ram, but there are 3 breeds of 'Mum', one out of a Texel, 2 out of Suffolk Down ewes and 2 out of Galway ewes. I had to note down breed and sex against their ear tag numbers, so when I fed them tonight and their noses were safely in the trough, I was sneaking around tickling ears till I could see the ear tag codes and then looking under the tail of each for dangly bits. They all carried on eating but they were a bit fidgetty at all this weird invasion of their supper time! Kenny's other 'complication' was that he has a hospital appointment in Galway at 13:00 on the Monday, so we need to be in, sheep delivered nice and early.

And finally, Andy and the Kart race? Apparently they were doing OK and enjoying themselves but in the big final race "some Mexican guy" punted Andy up the back end on a corner and knocked him off the track. Andy's OK, but the kart was wrecked, so no trophies this year.

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Mademoiselle (left) and Clara Bow (right).

As I write this, the minute hand on my watch is chugging gently through 15:35 pm when I should have been anxiously handing my 2CV in to the NCT testing station in Carrick on Shannon for its 4th run up the testing lane 'sausage machine', its carburettor serviced and pouring a perfect mixture of petrol and air onto the spark plugs, its exhaust emissions compliant and the tester man fanning himself on my signed and stamped police form allowing my car to carry the registration it carries.

A 2CV camp at Preston, near Canterbury in 2010

Instead I am sitting typing this. The car languishes in the garage in Balla D, the carburettor sent off to a specialist despite my request that the garage do nothing if they could not guarantee to get my car back to me for today and the 2 guys at the garage (Father and Son) who are the only ones who seem to know anything about "these old cars" are in America playing at Kart Racing, mechanicking for the Ireland team in some international Karting race meeting.

J-M (left) and Em-J in Mademoiselle

This point, 2 tests and 2 re-tests down, plus a goodly amount of money spent on fixes I had already set in my mind as the end of the road for my 2CV-ownership hobby. It's been a great ride and an enjoyable period, over ten years as 'officially mine' and three years before that when it was registered to Liz (long story involving £2 sterling and 5 David Austin roses!). We have some great fun with the car as well as some misadventures, been to 2CV club camps all over the place including Kelso Castle and we've taken her to France a couple of times too. As I said though, always a hobby vehicle rather than a day to day 'proper' car and funded as such. It was always a cheap sustainable hobby when I was in Kent because I could call on my ace fixer, 2CV Llew who, for a small fee could always get it through MOTs, gearbox changes, body-part swaps and so on.

Ireland though, is a different kettle of fish. Nobody owns 2CVs here so there are no Llews to call upon. My local garage have done very well but the NCT is a much stricter test than the MOT and all parts have to be sourced from the UK. So we brought the car over with us intending to keep it running as long as we realistically could but now its time is up. When the carb comes back from the specialist, the garage will refit it to the car and I will drive it back here, park it up and officially take it off the road on a SORN notice. I am sad but resigned. A bit relieved too, if I'm honest and pleased that the stress of all this battling with garages and anxiously taking it for NCTs is over. A weight lifted.

So, as of about now, when the test would have finished, I am the owner of an NCT failure 2CV which may soon be perfectly repaired and able to sweep through an NCT (No! Don't go there! That way madness lies!) and, as it happens, half a 1961, 425 cc, 6 volt electrics 2CV known as Mademoiselle d'Armentieres which lives in Kent, so I can't get at that one either. I am not sure what the future holds. The rules around cars being 'vintage' or old enough to be exempt from NCT have currently frozen on "cars registered on or before 1980" (they are not rolling annually). I can drive it within the 'farm', of course and could even teach the nieces to drive on it, or I could put it up on good old 'Donedeal' and try to sell it. We'll see. Currently I am contemplating cracking open the Prosecco I bought on a "Win or Lose, have a Booze" basis and getting used to being someone who used to have a 2CV. I apologise for borrowing TS Eliot's much over-used final line for my header - his was a serious poem about the post 2nd WW world, not some classic car owning hobby. Look on the bright side. I nearly went down Auden's "Stop all the clocks... prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone" road.

Rest in Peace, 'Clara' for the moment. You were an excellent and respected friend. I will miss being able to drive you about.

The Slough of Despond

Poppy curled up with Rolo

Unusually for me and for this blog, a post of unremitting misery and gloom. Those who turn to this blog for its up-beat cheerful outlook on life and optimism, look away now. I just feel 'meh' and fed up. The reasons for this seem so pathetic and unimportant compared to many friends who I know have proper, grown up reasons to be a bit down, but that just makes it seem even more self indulgent and silly. Liz is away and it has done nothing but rain since she left. I can't really complain about either but both are adding to the mood. I feel like one of my wet hens hunkered down under the car port roof waiting for the sun to come back out.

Towser claims the back of the sofa

The rain is currently that heavy type made up of big, blobby, splatty drops which quickly soak everything and create big puddles. My water butts (even the 1000 litre pallet-sized ones) are long since filled so the water is just overflowing back down the diverters into the gullies but, as I said, we can honestly not complain as we have had such an unusually brilliant year so far, well peppered with droughts and sunny spells. A wet week in October is hardly cause for claims of unreasonable behaviour by Met Éireann but it does pin you down rather when most of what you'd like to do is outdoor work. My knee pads work very well for keeping my knees up out of the damp soil when I'm weeding, but can't cope with actual puddles, and climbing aluminium ladders to cut side branches off spruce trees in the wet is probably not wise.

Deefer looks a bit grubby after a wet walk.

Liz is away currently with Diamond. The girls were going to Poros Island in Greece to attend a funeral Memorial Service of an ancient and venerable friend called Nicoletta who (with Bro in Law Andreas) ran a taverna up in some lemon groves just across the sound in (I think) Galatas. This was for all the years Diamond used to visit in her younger days, and then as Nicoletta grew old and infirm, Diamond would visit anyway though the taverna was long shut, just as an old friend of the family, taking Liz along in recent years when Liz started accompanying Diamond to the islands.

Well, old Nicoletta has now passed on and in Greece they bury the dead within 24 hours but then have a special service and event 30 days or so later. (See what I mean about 'grown up reasons to be down?). The girls were flying out to this and had bought the flights, planning to meet up and fly together from Heathrow to Athens. Well some who know Diamond may also know that she is not at all well herself (the gang joke that you should never play "Medical Top-Trumps" with her; it would not go well for you!) and in the event she was not well enough to travel plus new husband, John got his dates for a long awaited hip operation right that weekend too, so the girls just wrote off the Greek leg of their journey and decided to stay in Kent, with Liz house keeping for John and Diamond. There again, a perfectly good grown up reason for Liz to be away, and I should not be mooping around here feeling all bereft.

Plenty of food

The sorry tale of the 2CV also carries on. She was due her 2nd full NCT test on Saturday, having failed the last one (1st re-test) only on exhaust emissions. We had bought carburettor parts and our man in the garage (Aaron, who looks about 12 but seems to run the place!) had worked his magic with mixture screws and the gas analyser. "It's well within tolerances" he assured me, so I was fairly confident even though this is a whole new test, so the guys could potentially find new stuff to fail me on. Off to the NCT centre at Carrick then, for my 10:50 appointment with their 'production line' of pokes, prods, wiggles and hydraulic floor bouncing.

I was bitterly disappointed to fail AGAIN, first on the emissions again (the CO level was 0.704% instead of the allowed maximum of 0.450%) but also now on a new one. My 'VIN' (Vehicle Identification Number) plate (equivalent to the 'chassis number' on a modern car) is fixed to the bulk-head / firewall and not to the chassis. It always has been and I hear from the 2CV forums on the internet that they have been all over the place through the (60+ year) history of the car and my car is, anyway, a dog's breakfast of bits from other cars. But it was good enough for the Irish registration office when we first moved over, and has passed many NCT tests (and re-tests) since. However, this gentleman 'KNEW DIFFERENT' and failed me on it. I have to take a form he gave me to the local police station and get them to stamp and sign it to agree that this car, with this, registration plate and this VIN number on the bulkhead is OK on the Irish roads. That and take the car back into the garage for another tweak of the carb plus book another retest for another €28. Only 2 minor issues with that. First Aaron is in the USA for a month playing mechanic to the Irish Kart team, so I have to use another lad, named Keiran who "is pretty sure he can fix it" and secondly the police stations round here seem to be be manned by only one Guard with one car, so when they whizz out on call the station is all locked up and gone away. Trying to arrive at one when it is occupied by an actual Guard seems to be a bit of a lottery.

Ah well, the above clouded tale of woe had its own silver lining to mollify me. My run to Carrick is 35 minutes down beautiful country lanes in bright sunshine (that lunchtime); perfect 2CV country where the words 'bowling along' are perfectly apposite and a 2CV driver would find it hard not to be wearing a huge grin. As I said at the top of this post, I am feeling just 'meh' and a bit bluesy rather than truly depressed and down. I have the 'farm', the animals, plenty of food, coal and wood to burn and, as I look out the window as I finish typing this, it might even be brightening up. Blog posting as therapy! Thank you for listening to my self indulgent burblings. Let he who has never felt a bit like this cast the first stone.

A Full Moon and a Mad 24 Hours

Every now and then we have a mad bad 24 hours to rival the circus around a Royal Birth. Welcome to the world, new Royal sprog - hope you can cope with it; it's a bloomin' mad house on occasions. We had our own happy event(s) here too. My day started at about 6 with a hullaballoo from the Marans, loud enough to have me up, quickly donning dressing gown and slippers and heading down to investigate.. So much happened though, that I am going to hop-skip through it in magazine style without too much detail, or we'll be here for pages!

The Marans, I think, were just shouting through to the rooster in the other house but going out there I could see 6 baby bunnies all over the orchard. I had done it again - placing the run neatly over a dint in the ground which gave them an easy, pre-dug duck-under the woodwork and a night of happy free ranging. 3 quickly sprinted back to the dent and dived back into their run and I caught 2 more by hand. The 6th escapee got wise by then and headed for the car port where he took up residence under the water tank and we named him Steve McQueen. We'd worry about him later.

The geese decided they were not coming out to play today and dithered, brainlessly, in their house giving me ten minutes of whistling and encouraging them, tossing them a bit of rolled barley till I got fed up and went round the back to shoo them out.

Main event today was a visit from Sparks, Mrs Sparks and Cotcho-Small (6) who we'd thought were staying over night. We had to whizz the 2CV into the garage for its NCT work and do a quick shop in which Liz managed to explode 2 big fizzy water bottles inside the car. On a day like today this hardly even made the back pages. I also needed more sticky tape to repair a new hole in the poly tunnel, torn, presumably by the same cat (Blue?) as last time.

For a bit of fun we'd made up a Job List for Cotcho-Small (C-S) which we'd deliberately written in a jokey confusing way. "Smelly Goose Poo Soup 1", "Smelly Goose Poo Soup 2", "Catch Steve McQueen", "Make Snot" and so on. As we went through the day he was to discover what these were. The 'Poo Soups' were cleaning out goose baths, Steve McQ was, of course, the rabbit, and Make Snot was helping Liz in the kitchen pounding garlic in the pestle and mortar which, if anyone has done this, will know what "pound the garlic to snot" means. C-S is like any other intelligent, fit, energetic 6 year old boy let loose on a 'farm'. He's Go Go Go! all day and wears us out but he is great gas and will spend hours peering under a water tank thinking he can tempt a baby bunny out by yelling Steve! at it and chucking lettuce in.

We had also now seen ducklings hatched under Broody Betty and needed to lift her off the nest to count ducklings and remove empty shells. We had 5 plus a hatched-but-dead one and 4 eggs left. C-S loved this bit and being able to handle tiny baby ducklings, some of which were yellow, others dark-fluff and with curious head-crests. I will get some better pics of these soon - I did not have time on the hatch day.

While that was all going on I took a phone call from our Sheep Man, Kenny asking could we take 3 store lambs today, a month earlier than we thought we were getting them. He'd be here at 17:30, he said. As is generally the case with Kenny, we waited till 17:45 and then he rang saying he'd been delayed and would now be here at 18:30. We needed to feed the visitors as they had to get away back to Dublin by 19:00.

Meanwhile, Mentor Anne arrived with Simon, Simon clutching a tub of chick crumb and the egg candler. No, they said, they did not have any sheep in the van (!). Liz meanwhile went onto the internet chat areas and asked did anyone have any ideas for fun names for 3 sheepy ladies and got a storm of brilliant ones including "Kebab, Moussaka and Biryani", "Blodwen, Bronwen and Branwen", "Una, Agnes and Baby", "PETA, Pauline and Mary", "Hopeless, Feckless and Pointless". The 'Baby' one pointed out the potential for a future filled with "No-one puts Baby in a Korma" jokes. Simon and I took C-S off to candle the eggs and were delighted to see live, wriggling babies inside the shells, but concerned as to why they had not started to 'pip' along with their same-age 'brothers and sisters'. Anne is just delighted that yet another batch of her call ducks are showing this amazingly high (90-100%) fertility rate. It rarely happens.

With Anne and Simon fed tea and cake and done and dusted, we could all go in to eat some delicious belly-pork and salad, with half an eye on the front gate lest Kenny arrived. He did, when we were about 3/4 belly-full. We abandoned supper to go wrangle sheep, got them all safely into the field and did all the Ministry 'movement' paperwork. It turned out that one of them was a ram lamb this time, so they have become "Larry, Curley and Moe" (The 3 Stooges; yes, we KNOW the stooges were all boys, but Curl(e)y and Mo(e) are kind of girls names too).

So, the guests all left and it all went deliciously quiet. Steve McQueen was still at large but everyone had survived. And so to bed planning a lovely relaxed Tuesday with no dramas to upset the day. A bit alarming then at 06:30 to go out and straightway hear from the baa-ing that all was not as it should be in the sheep. They sounded too far off to be in our field and too spread out to all be in the same place. There was a lot of excited mooing from the grazing rent cattle. Oh, as they say, My God.

There is a dip in the ground in the NW corner where the fence stretches taut across but 12 inches off the ground. I'd been meaning to stuff the gap with black thorn but had no idea that lambs could 'commando' under this on their knees. They can, and one of them had escaped through to Vendor-Anna's land. He/she was then baa-ing in separation anxiety and and had brought the playful, inquisitive baby calves running to investigate, followed by their anxious Mums and the Bull, Felix. Now I had 20 cattle chasing my frightened lamb about and 2 upset lambs in the field, missing him/her. I hoped the escapee would race back to his siblings, back under the fence and shot off to get some clothes on. Not a bit of it; the two followed the one, so I now had three escaped lambs being chased round 20 acres by the cattle. One bit of good news - Blue the cat decided to play-hunt the escaped rabbit and ran him to ground in the orchard grass where I could easily grab him and restore him to his run and his 11 cousins and siblings.

Ah well, to cut a long story a bit short I was not about to risk going into the bull field alone, so I phoned Mike the Cows who, Bless him, even though he had a full day himself and 'not a clue about sheep' (his words) helped me round them up (while fending off the cattle) and shepherd them back through the gap, which is now firmly stuffed with sheep wire, wood, blackthorn and all sorts. The sheep are sitting in our field chewing the cud and panting a bit from their exertions. I am hoping that my mad 24 (well, 26) hours is now over. I have calmly brought Liz her 'tay' at the normal time of 08:30 and told her my early morning story. I think I need a lie down!

The End of the (2CV) Road?

We can't claim to be a best seller here but we chug away gently at our standard 20-30 views per post but just by dint of posting so many stories over the 6 years we have been in existence, and have managed to accumulate over 50,000 page views. I am happy with that. I am glad that my regulars keep looking in to see what we are about and that they are, presumably, a bit entertained, or why would they?

The heat wave continued for a few more showings, through Thursday and Friday, but we noticed on Friday night that the breeze had swung round to the North and had strengthened, giving us a beautifully cool night Friday night and a misty, cloudy Saturday morning. Our friend Mentor Anne hates the heat and goes into what she describes as 'hibernation' staying indoors, but even she was able to emerge on the Saturday to enjoy the cool. We were all off to a 'new' Farmers' Market they have discovered in Boyle, a small town in the very north of Co. Roscommon which has a famed butcher's van doing organic and welfare chicken and pork (Peppered pork chops 'to die for' says Anne) as well as plant stalls, herb sellers, a fish monger, bakers and other traders. We fancied some mackerel to go with our home grown gooseberries. Well, as it happened both the mackerel and the pork chops were sold out; you have to get there early or the good stuff all goes. No matter. We grabbed some (organic) chicken livers which Liz will convert into paté, some lovely prawns for supper tonight and some thin beef steaks for a future meal.

We stopped at a nice little coffee shop for a cuppa before going our separate ways. We were concerned to get the prawns into refrigeration before they got a chance to do us any mischief. By lunchtime the weather had heated up again and the cloud and mist had cleared. We think that this is the likely shape of days this week, with no more rain in the fore see able. What a change from 2012 when we seemed to be permanently washed out and prey to crop failures due to the wet. I have now ridged up all my vegetable area and look like having to water stuff! You don't do watering in the West of Ireland, surely?

The time has come round again when the belovéd 2CV needs her NCT test (= MOT) and here the story went to pot a bit. Not good news. She is sound on all the difficult bits we fixed last time (suspension, steering and other heavy metal) but failed on a range of daft, lighter weight stuff all of which, had I still got easy access to my 2CV-fixer man, 2CV Llew in Kent, would not bother me in the least.

The exhaust emissions are slightly too high which, if you know what you are doing around the 2 adjustment screws on the carburettor (idle and mixture) and have access to a gas-analyzer, is a 5-minute job. The rear fog light is out - either a bulb or an earth. There is corrosion on the bottom of a door (a seam-weld) and the boot floor and on one wing; the sort of thing Llew buzzes a wire brush over and then makes good in an hour or so. But without Llew I am at the mercy of our (brilliant, I have to say) local garage, so we are off to get a quote on Monday but realistically, when I have done only 112 miles in the car since the last NCT we are both a bit 50/50 about whether we can justify it. Clara has the tow-hitch which has been useful, but we could probably get a tow hitch for the FIAT if needs be.

No matter, we will worry about making that decision when we have the quote. Whatever happens we are going to hang on to the mortal remains because even as an NCT failure the car has a value and is rare enough that someone might want to invest or, failing that, would make a superb chicken house. Meanwhile she is still 'legal' till the NCT runs out on Wednesday, so her swan song may be our trip to Castlerea to buy one more pallet sized water tank, this one to supply the sheep drinker, fed from the down pipes on the east end of the house. Watch this space for updates on that one.

Finally, our swallows seem to have nearly finished their nest right up in the ridge of our Tígín, well out of the reach of the cats. Sensible swallows.