Crab Feast

Up tails all?

Three days of solid wind and wet, squally rain are just "normal" Irish weather while all wait to see if the next 'named' storm (Callum, formerly Leslie in the USA. All our best storms are American hand-me-downs) comes in this direction. It is being described as a "ferocious looking beast" and is due, if it does arrive, on Thursday. Another one making me glad we replaced that tarpaulin roof on the chicken house but also raising a wry smile; earlier in the weekend there was talk of an Indian Summer. It all seems to have gone a bit quiet in that direction.

Auntie Mary enjoys her tea.

Auntie Mary, sister to the late Theo, gave the family cause for concern over the last month(s) by getting very ill. Mary is our retired Nun, living now in the Sisters' Retirement Home up by Dublin after a life spent doing 10-year tours of duty missionary-ing in Africa. Well, I am delighted to say that she was moved into a more intensive care part of the building and got some improved medical attention and is now well recovered and is described as "good as new", "flying", "doing wonders" and "out of bed". She has also enjoyed her 90th Birthday, so well done Mary.

Advert for furniture restoration classes on the Village Website

Meanwhile, closer to home and enjoying a restoration to good health (Did you see what I did there?), is some of our tired old furniture. A few weeks back, the Village 'Hall' (Centre) started evening classes in furniture restoration. Students were asked to bring along a small piece of their own furniture which was looking tired, so that the instructor could start to show them tools, techniques and safety stuff as well as showing them how to pull these pieces apart carefully.

Our 'Darby and Joan' chairs by the pond.

Elizabeth took along a small bedside drawers unit and has thoroughly enjoyed it. She has taken a gazillion photos and written reams of notes. Then this week, she upped the ante by moving her attention to one of our two (well, 'my') favourite upholstered chairs. These are old style sit-up-and-beg things, very narrow with no big wide padded 'wings'.

A nice and unusual find in the shopping
- frozen crab!

We actually acquired them when previous owner of our Faversham house left them behind in a stack of junk in one of the many garden sheds. Back then (25 years?) they had lovely tooled leather backs which had seen better days. We had a chum who did a bit of upholstery 'do them up' with dark blue fabric and I have loved them ever since. Maybe it is the 'too well loved' current appearance of them that has drawn Mrs C's focus.

She took one of them into the class last week minus its seat-cushion and spent the evening prizing away the fabric layers, pulling out pins and staples with the mini-crowbar, easing off webbing and beading strips, lifting out the wadding and the hessian and rougher fabrics which supply hidden strength. All these goodies were stashed careful for use as templates on a shopping trip. The instructor and she were also able, with the chair stripped of upholstery, to fix a slight rearward lean on the frame (this heavy bas***d flopping into it too many times?) by removing some brackets, straightening the legs, gluing the joints and re-fixing the brackets.

Before it all got messy.

Off today shopping then, armed with her parcel of templates and samples, to the good fabric shop in Roscommon Town ("Finishing Touches"?) who had everything she needed and plenty of it reduced in price including a lovely burgundy coloured fabric, enough for both chairs and a separate seat cushion for each. There is a great bundle of wadding for a soft seat, webbing straps, beading 'ribbon', new hessian and the rough cloth which I do not know the name of. It is spoiled I will be!

Deconstruction.

Then in a nice surprise shopping discovery, Elizabeth came across frozen (cooked) brown crabs for only a fiver each. We love our crab here but have not been able to find any since we moved over. Only one meal, maybe, but with the weather outside being so miserable that the photographer is pinned down inside feeling uninspired, you get half a dozen pictures of it. Hope you don't mind.

That's more like it.

Half the fun of crab and lobster is all that cracking open claw bits and prizing out the meat with your skewer, so our way to serve is to pre-prep all the body-meat plus the tiny stuff from the legs and upper limbs. That gets variously en-saladed or mixed with mayo and served back in the empty shell, and you get the big claw bits (cracked but not open) on the side to play with. The food prep area in the kitchen looks like a road accident for a while but is easy enough tidied and the hens love picking the bits of shell over on the compost heap. At those low prices, the shopping dept also snatched up a bottle of Prosecco to go with, nicely chilled. It was a lovely meal.  A delightful and rare crab feast.

Hen and Two.

White foxgloves - seed from Anne and Simon.

I was only talking in the last post about work days and all the really good, decent people I had the pleasure of working alongside. So, sad sad news today to learn that one of them, a great friend and team member, Steve Flatt has passed away in a hospice in Kent after a short illness. RIP Steve, taken too soon. Thoughts and sympathies to his wife Jean and the family and to all his friends and anyone who knew him. He will be sadly missed. He and Jean were also the breeders of our eldest bitch, Deefer whose name titles this blog, so we have a nice living memory of the guy and a link back to those better times.

This whole mass of flowers from an original single cheapo
bulb bought from a Supermarket as a pack of three. All three
are now doing this well seperately in our raised bed .

If you have stayed abreast of this blog you will have heard of the exploits of "Hen with One Chick". Well, H+1 has now been trumped by the broody from under the elderberry bush, who now holds the name "Hen with Two". She is still sleeping under the elderberry but is out every day parading her two tiny chicks, one an orange colour that points to a possible Buff Orp pure-bred, one a paler chick which suggests a hybrid Sussex Ponte or Hubbard. Dad will still be a Buff as those are the only roosters currently operating on the holding.

New mum, "Hen and Two",

She seems to be doing a fine job of protecting them and showing them round, finding them food and even leading them into the melée of hens in the yard. I am sneaking out extra rations to them - I wait till they are seperated from the bulk of the flock and slip them a jam-jar lid loaded with finely chopped hard-boiled egg, chick crumb and a bit of hen-grub to keep mum interested. She straight away starts the low clucking which signals a food-find to the babies and they are all over it like a rash. If any other adult hens discover them at the feeding (even 'Hen with One') then mum starts a wide-wing display and drives them off till her little ones have filled their crops. If a rain shower threatens she quickly rounds them up under her skirts to keep them dry till the rain has done. We have hopes that she will be as good as H+1.

Parsnip seedlings.

Meanwhile, the geese have given up on the broodying game and gone back to grazing in the orchard. We are not sad that they hatched nothing this year. I had been stealing the eggs all spring so that they had nothing to go broody on - we even passed some on to Anne as she wanted to hatch a few and they have done OK. We hoped they would not go broody but eventually one did, so we let her have the benefit of the doubt with just 2 eggs. Her sisters subsequently added 4 more but for what ever reason nothing came of this.

Dublin Bay does well against our Kitchen Garden wall.

A third broody has now claimed a nest, this another Buff Orpington hen (it seems that Buffs are doing the broody thing this season all on their own, 3 out of the four so far - no contributions from Marans, Sussex Ponte, mini-Buffs or Hubbards). She has gone broody in the former rabbit 'Maternity Unit' which is actually in the hen house, so I have had to lock her in in the mornings to stop everyone else trying to lay eggs in that nest, She is such a gentle soul that she does not fight them off, but meekly hops down and wanders around clucking disconsolately till they have finished and let her back on. This way she gets a bit of peace (and a stable number of known-start eggs to sit on).

A good stand of Autumn Bliss raspberries. This type are cut
right back down to ground level in February, so all this is new
growth this year.

In the garden a good range of flowers are in full bloom and the veg, after a bit of a slow May, is starting to pick up the pace. The Summer fruiting raspberries did not enjoy the poor spring weather and are looking a bit frazzled and tired-of-leaf, but the flowers have had bees on them so we still might get a crop. More hopeful are the Autumn Fruiting canes which are getting nice and tall and starting to bud up at the top. We are also about to start cropping artichokes, though we seem to have lots of small chokes this year rather than fewer. bigger ones. We will have to make portions up out of a few - normally one choke suffices one person for their 'five a day'.

Lemons and elderflower heads for the brews.

It is finally the elderflower season. It seemed a long time coming on this very late season, where even the hawthorn did not start till 19th May. Liz has been out there cutting a million flower heads and shopping for cheap deals on sugar and lemons. She has had requests for the elderflower cordial, a great favourite of the teenage Silverwoods, but will also be making quite a lot of the elderflower "fizz" - the recipes call it 'champagne', but we make no such high-brow claims.

Elderflower cordial

It is light and very quaffable, and if you can get the 'fizz' just right, it is a bit like a Prosecco. You have to judge when the bucket ferment is almost over and then rack it off. We save the screw-top wine bottles through spring time. The wine is then stood with the tops screwed lightly shut but you need to check it on days 1, 2 and maybe 3, just by opening a few bottles very gently to listen for a gentle "pssst!". Too much and you daren't screw the tops down for good or you get at best bottles going off like fire extinguishers at the table and at worst, exploding. Too little and you have missed the boat and produced a rather thin, very young, flat wine. In the middle and you have a gently sparkling wine which does not fizz up any sediment from the bottom of the bottle and is a gorgeous refreshing drink chilled from the fridge. Sláinte!

Nice little light job for a hot evening. Just spread that
3 and a half tonne of gravel, could you?

Finally, we had our gravel delivered. We'd phoned a number supplied by our friend Mark at the garden centre and I thought the voice sounded familiar. It was only when I started to give the guy directions and said we were in TK Min's old house that he recognised my voice and said "..and didn't I come and shoot your foxes?" and I realised it was our handy man-with-gun driving the lorry. Small world.

Mapp and Lucia

I named my first dog 'Megan', my current boy-dog 'Towser' and our Rooster 'William' but usually it is Liz who names the animals as they arrive here. She seems to have an inexhaustible fund of names based on fictional characters, characters from films and names from funny radio shows. Our 2013 sheep were Constance, Dora and Florence, named for Lord Emsworth's sisters from PG Wodehouse. Last year's first three sheep were Larry, Curly and Mo, the geese were Goosey, Goocie and Gander and the Guinea Fowl are Henry and Min (from the Goon Show).

Bramble jelly from the freezer blackberries.

The pigs we are likely to buy this year are still open to debate but Liz rather fancies 'Mapp and Lucia'. Liz is much wider read and has seen and heard more films and radio shows than me, and these two names were new ones on me - another gaping hole in my education! I felt I needed to at least know who Mapp and Lucia were before I could realistically name our first pigs for them, so Liz nipped to our extensive library and pulled a paperback from the shelves, "The Complete Mapp and Lucia (Part1)", written in the 20's and 30's by one E.F. (Fred) Benson. If you know these characters you will know that they are not pleasant at all! The books are very nicely and cleverly and amusingly written, but Miss Mapp and Mrs (Lucia) Lucas are just awful people.

Kir Royale, Feigh style; Prosecco and home made Cassis

Lucia is the self-crowned Queen of her village and seeks to control and lord it over all social events and who gets invited to what, like a nasty child in the playground. She is nosy, pretentious, manipulative, devious, cunning and such a snob. Mapp, living in a fictional version of Rye in Sussex is just plain nosy and seeks to know exactly what everyone is up to, who is seeing who, what all her friends are about to wear to parties so that she can out-manouvre them, engineers herself into being the focus of all the juicy gossip and dumps horribly on anyone who she imagines has crossed her. Ideal role models, then, for our two impressionable, baby piggies!

Nice marketing idea, Heart shaped Coeur de Neufchatel.

Valentine's Day arrives and we are nearly 'kiboshed' on our plans to create a special romantic meal by an extended series of power cuts born, we guess out of the recent wind storm damage and snow in the skirts of Storm 'Ruby'. Our land-line phone chirrups in its 'You have lost power' way at around 01:00 but I ignore it thinking they normally only last a few hours. It is still out in the morning and we phone around and find that Carolyn is calling it in. Power comes on mid morning while I'm out at neighbour Una's but only for ten minutes. It is lashing rain and blizzarding snow but we are delighted to be visited by an ESB Networks guy in Hi-Viz clothing who wants to look at the power lines that run to the north of our property, He (in a van) is joined by 2 other lads and 2 more vehicles, who scurry around working heroically in the bad conditions. We get power back at midday for 2 hours, then again properly at 4 pm. The Valentine's Day meal is saved and we know we are really very fortunate. There are people out there, especially around Galway and the south and east coast counties who have been without power for days, we only had 13 hours; the freezers stayed frozen and our candlelit supper was by choice.

Home made ice cream made with home made lemon curd.

Meanwhile 2 pieces of news concerning boys called Henry. Henry the Guinea fowl had injured his leg somehow but after a few days of decided limping and looking sorry for himself, suddenly recovered and is now back to full strength and a full compliment of working legs. Our other Henry is 2 years old today (Happy Birthday little fella) and son of Carolyn of the Miniature horses. We are invited down to the house for the party, where an army of friends and relatives have gathered while he is having his mid day nap. He wakes up as bemused and dozy as anyone who is fresh out of bed and copes very well with his house being suddenly full of people plying him with presents and party food. He gets into his stride as the present opening gets into full swing - he's mad for anything car shaped, he loves a big petrol pump to go with his sit-in pedal car, but the winner on the day is definitely a junior-sized but fully equipped drum kit with stool, bass drum with pedal, snare drums and even a cymbal. He is soon whacking 7 bells out of all this lot and doting rels are videoing him on their smart-phones. Brilliant! When we last heard all the grown ups were retired, exhausted and Henry was still going strong. He should sleep well tonight, bless him!

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 Pond is Finished!

The biggest news by far from this camp over this bright, warm, windless Bank Holiday, is that we have finished the pond! We got stuck in well today trimming and burying the edges of the rubber sheet, determined to create a variety of types of bank. A long stretch of the 'south' side is down to grass, so we simply lifted a wedge of turf with the fattest edge 'inland' and laid the rubber over a soil 'lip' at roughly water level.

We hope (and we have found on previous ponds) that the thick inner edge gives enough hydraulic connection to the surrounding soil to stop the turf drying out - we want grass growing right to the edge and dangling over into the water to give cover for and access to newts, frogs and invertebrates. At the 'west' end we have a shelf for our marginal plants (purple loosestrife, king-cup etc) and the grass margin is behind this.

Coming round by the 'Darby and Joan' chairs, we change to a line of boulders, many taken from the old 'Albert' cairn you may recall - the pile of boulders dug out of our floor during the house build, and stacked at the end of the front terrace. These stones run round the the 'north' side where we have made a flat-stone gently sloping beach to give easy access to young goslings. In the middle of this, Liz also created a small 'rock pool' which had turned out to be ideal for a special and surprising reason; more of which later.

At the end of this beach we made a headland onto which we carefully put the biggest rock that came out of the pond - the one which broke my first shovel. This is surrounded by smaller stones and is either called 'Howth Head' after the one in Dublin. or the "Hen and Chickens". Beyond that and coming back to the east end are a row of stones which are deliberately slightly lower, with their bases in water and the pond liner rising up behind them to get the right level. Again, this is all about hidey-holes for creepie-crawlies and amphibians.

The whole thing is about 10 m long and 6 m wide and is 22 inches deep at the deepest point. We love it and the geese have adopted it as a favourite place and I have been able to get some nice pictures. We were amazed to find that with this much space to play in the geese's splashing about includes some swimming under water like a penguin! Who knew that they could? They duck their heads and shoulders under then zoom along completely submerged for about 3-4 feet before bobbing to the surface! Liz has this on video. I have not yet been able to capture it on 'still' but I will.

It was during one of these sessions that the goslings discovered that they could keep to the 'rock pool' where it was a lot less wavy. The grown-ups were creating quite a 'chop' in the water and had us re-thinking where it might be wise to try to site water lilies and so on.

So, tonight we are feeling very pleased with ourselves and decided to have a celebratory meal. We had a deep, oven backed 'tortilla' made with goose and hen eggs plus potato and diced chicken. Chilled Prosecco served as our celebration.

Nice pond!

Nearly There

Our final weekend at this current address and the pressure is on, despite the stupifying heat to clear the debris of the house move from the premises so that new owners, Bev and Craig, can move in to a nice, tidy, cleaned house. Mum attacks the kitchen, clearing all the cupboards and sorting the food and old ingredients into keep-and-take-with-her-to-Diamond's, give away to the neighbours, feed to the birds, and chuck. We don't like to waste food but there are, inevitably, bags of Iranian raisins at the back of that cupboard, or packets of semolina in the bottom of the tub labelled Chinese Ingredients, which have gone past sell by.

Dad's job is the loft, with its load of old University books and its boxes of pre-digital 'Truprint' photograph packets (remember those?). Dad has been as trigger happy for at least 40 years as he is now and, pre-digital this involved reels of 36-picture films which you'd send off to Truprint and get back with the glossy postcard sized pictures and the strips of negatives cut into fours. If you were lucky, says Dad, maybe half a dozen of your 36 would be use-able in photo albums. The rest, left in their packets, accumulated in shoe boxes, hopefully clearly labelled as "Bovington Tank Museum 1981, film 2 of 3" or some such, and found their way into the loft.

You were always going to do something with them and never did. Well, Mum and Dad have finally decided that what they're going to do with them is landfill, so they joined the old bread makers, lost shoes, Open University Law books, transparent push-chair covers, ancient PCs and Billy Joel LPs in the back of Dad's car on the way to the tip. Normally, Dad would stand at the loft hatch, Mum at the bottom of the ladder and everything would get passed down, potentially spilling out of dusty boxes and landing on Mum's head but not this time.

They found, fortuitously that at some point in the last years, they'd bought a wad of tough, transparent plastic sacks. Each lot, box or what ever, could be neck-tied into one of these bags and dropped through the hatch onto the landing where it would not burst, especially if it was landing on the stuff already dropped, and this way everything was 'got down' and 'brought down the stairs' to the car without anyone getting damaged. Dad is then (shock! horror!) able to hoover the completely cleared loft floor, a feat not possible for the intervening 17 years!

Also on the Saturday, the new owners wanted to move some of their stuff into the house, it being the weekend and them not being available to hire vans etc on the real day, which is Monday. We had three visits from them through the day (one in the middle of Doctor Who, which is never going to work as a method of making frineds with Mum and Dad!), each with the same hire van but each with different accompanying helpers. First up is Craig's mate in a big Shogun, and his Dad in an ordinary car, 2nd comes Bev's parents who are happy to sit in the garden talking to Mum and we dogs while Dad introduces Bev and Craig to the neighbours either side.

So by the end of Saturday, as the troops eat their fish and chips and drink Prosecco (the latter kept cool by leaving it dunked in the pond) sitting on the borrowed folding chairs or a 'blanket on the ground', watching Doctor Who, steamed through the internet, the screen propped up on an upturned wicker basket, a pedal-bin and a baguette cutting board, they are both knackered from the day's efforts but feeling like they are getting there. Loft and kitchen are cleared, rubbish is got rid of, most of Bev and Craig's stuff is in the living room. Only really the shed to go and some titivating. Then we're outta here.

Movin' on
Deefs