Joyeux Noël, Wren-girls and Ducklings

Messin' with the guests (1). Left to right here, Liz, Augustin,
Mum/Marion (top) and Clara

Best behaviour for the cameras obviously.

When I left you last time we were on the 'ground-rush' phase of Christmas prep, mixing stuffing, glazing ham, trussing turkey, doing last minute shops and counting down the hours to the arrival of our French guests, only one of whom we had ever met. Augustin, of course, called AB while he was here (September) but whose name I can now confidently pronounce as "August-an". That now seems like a lifetime ago.

We have enjoyed one of our best Christmasses of recent years, we all got on like a house on fire and had the break full of happy, jokey banter and chat, sometimes in full French with Liz working hard to dig up all the old vocab' and grammar of her fluent 'au-pair-in-Toulouse' days and massively impressing the Parisians (I am winging it!), sometimes with me stumbling along in 'schoolboy' mode making them laugh (The English are so charming with their mistakes) and sometimes with the visitors equally keen to practice their English. 'They' were AB, his Mum (Marion) and his younger sister, Clara. 

My most noticeable charming mistake was probably mis-remembering ' (table) knife' as 'canif' This had AB and Clara almost wetting themselves as they dreamed up movie scenes while setting out the 'family silver'. A 'canif' is in fact a gang -criminal weapon - a flick knife or a stiletto. They had visions of no-one having a knife to hand and having to whip deadly daggers out of their socks to stab the turkey.

Oeufs de Noël?

The turned out to be the perfect guests. They were dead easy to keep entertained, they loved the food and were hugely impressed by Liz's cooking and well intrigued by the idea of a Christmas pud and later the cake, neither of which they would have been familiar with. Especially they were entertained by the idea of putting the silver thru'pences in the pud and then having the diners choose left or right at the serving so that they could not cheat, gain a thru'pence and thereby become rich... well OK. Clara found the only coin, so she will be the only rich one.

We know AB, of course, and his dreams of travel. Mum (Marion) turns out to be both a former classical singer, now singing teacher, and to be involved in some way with the medical drug/substance abuse support that was Liz's line in Kent. She was quite taken with my voice and wondered if she could do anything with it as a singing teacher. Everyone is different, she says, and your voice is strong and basso-profundo. Clara has picked up 'Grandma Pierette's' DNA (she of the 'Beouf carrottes' recipe AB fed to us in September - see earlier post).

Cutting the Christmas Cake.

Grandma P worked as a nuclear physics scientist in the Marie Curie Institute (we think) and Clara has a real dream of getting in to astro-physics. It was a clear sky on the night of 25th, so we were able to show her our beautiful, unpolluted sky star-field. the "Night of a Million Stars" as we call it. Being from Paris, hazy skies and light-pollution none of them had ever seen anything like it.

AB is a mad keen Chelsea fan. Liz knitted him this CFC hat. 

Marion also fell in love with the livestock and the idea of 'farming' (she was even, at one stage, talking of selling up in Paris and moving to Ireland) and was particularly taken with the new female Guinea Fowl and their 'Buckwheat buckwheat' repetitive calling. I think that was what woke her up, not the 'Cock-a-doodle-doo' of the roosters. We ended up having quite a laugh combining the language hic-cups, the singing lessons and the 'buckwheat' calls into a tongue-in-cheek song-writing session where we tried to include all the in-jokes in the song lyric. ...there goes Elizabet'.... with a cigarette (buck wheat buck wheat)... and it was very funny (buck wheat)... when Clara found the money (buck wheat etc). Ah well. Maybe you had to be there.

Good French people arrive bearing gifts - this massive array of
good trad, strong cheeses, wine, chocs, tea and coffee

All good things must come to an end, though, and our guests were due to head back to Dublin for an explore of the James Joyce sites this morning, the 26th, a Bank Holiday of course. AB had 'found' a bus from Castlerea leaving at 09:00, the only one of the day, he said. We had a rather early alarm call to get everyone through tea and coffee and into the car by 08:30. Liz had done them a 'picnic' of left overs to save everyone having to cram a breakfast.

Possibly the best 'hang' we have ever done.
Succulent and delicious.

But the bus never arrived; AB had mis-read the Internet and found a train that only runs tomorrow. Liz saved the day, going back in on the end of a phone and found our guests a bus from Balla-D at 10:30, so a quick hurried car-shuttle got them to their transport and we did not have to creep back indoors praying that Liz had not stripped the beds. We have since heard from them that they safely made the bus. 

That ham, sliced. Our own pig, of course

That was us, then, back on our lonesome and it now 'Wren Day' or 'St Stephens's Day'.... Boxing Day in the UK. We were determined to have a relaxing time and not achieve too much. There was a bit of pottering but we were both so full of food, that we have not really looked at any food till now - half past 6 at night! The fridge and many other places are stuffed with food - most of the ham is still with us and over half of that beautiful turkey.

All organised. There are lists on the fridge. 

We did not even broach the gifts of fancy cheese, chocs or wine that the guests arrived with. Neither did we 'open' the 'Parma' style ham. There was a menu list, of course, magnetted to the fridge but we were so well fed by the main meal, that the supper just faded like Scotch mist and never got 'deployed' to the table. We all managed a single slice of cake but then collapsed back into our food coma. There was one more customer - a near neighbour - whom we did a 'Meals on Wheels' dinner for but the 'cupboard' is by no means bare yet.

One job we did have to attend to is to give poor crippled, sick-bay hen 'Doris' a good old clean up round the feet. She was badly beaten up by our November 2016 fox and has not been able to walk well since but we felt sorry for her and did not have the heart to cull her out. She has laid a few eggs and comes out of the 'bedroom' part of her run to talk to her number #1 fan, Herme the rooster or to hoover up proffered food but we daren't let her out as she would not be able for the weighty and enthusiastic attentions of a cockerel.

Duckling visible under our broody on the 26th

The only other story today is a good-news tale of our very late-season broody hen, Connie. Friends of the Blog will know that we slipped 5 duck eggs under her back in late November, 'aiming' to have her hatch them while the French visitors were here. 5 other eggs we set in an incubator scored zero. The broody went all through the 24th and 25th with no action, and off went our visitors this morning, unrewarded. The ducklings (les canetons) were not co-operating. No sooner were the French off the premises though, than Connie ejected 2-3 half shells from the nest, empty, dry and hatched out. We lifted her (grumbling) to check and can see at least one healthy duckling. The guests missed the birth by hours.

Finally a fine Irish tradition of which I have spoken previously - Wren Day, when (on the 26th) gangs of local lads in 'Mummers' costumes would parade a captive wren (or a fake one) around the village, calling at houses and extracting treats or money with 'menaces' or they might kill the wren. This all to pay for their knees-up, of course. It was a tradition which died out in the 50s but which now is being revived like 'Trick or Treat' at Hallowe'en. We were happy to be 'mugged' today by a couple of young lasses leppin' in and out of Dad's VW Golf to go door knocking, armed with penny whistles and quite some skill in playing them.

It has been a cracking Christmas, the guests were superb and would be welcome back at any time.

A 50-Pound Pull

Nothing to do with us - just a superb Birthday Cake picture
posted to Twitter, made for a lad called Jake who is 6. I'm not
100% comfortable with encouraging the love of chainsaws
by 6-year olds but they probably have it under control. 

Rain, rain and more rain. It has not stopped all day. Everything is dripping including the coat I wore to walk the dogs at lunchtime (dog towels for them and a complete change of clothes and a shower for me!). Everywhere depressed has puddles and everywhere else the ground under foot has that sloppy, spongy first half inch. Deep joy. The ducks, ducklings and geese are, of course, loving it while all the other birds are happy to cower indoors in the various sheds, car-port and the wood store. It drains away fast enough as soon as it stops raining but it's a nuisance while it is so wet.

We have re-started archery after our February 'recess'. No, not some political 'holiday', but the owners of our hall/venue ("The Hub" in Castlerea) take the whole complex back for 3 weeks while the town's Am-Drams stage an elaborate musical and make a pot of money. This year it is the famous show "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and the players need 2 weeks to construct the set and rehearse on the proper stage and then a week to perform it.

Fly true you arrows

We got the venue back in time for our 19th Feb session. The session included dragging all the gear (big target butts, straw roundels etc) back out of the hidey hole we had put it in for the 'Scoundrels'. That may have contributed but, Boy! how I ached across the chest and shoulders that night. It is quite vigorous stuff, this archery and my bow is a '50-pound' draw.

I got one in the right place, anyway!
Centre-bull, 10 points!

With your right arm (in my case) extended out straight holding the bow, you then pull the string back to level with your mouth with a force of 50 lbs. We lash off 3 arrows at each of 12 targets per round and 2 rounds in the 2 hours. It's not breathlessly exhausting in any kind of 'aerobic' way but it warms up all those muscle blocks and tones you up really well - you know you've been there and over the weeks you build up some power. I shouldn't have been surprised that I went so 'rusty' on the three weeks off but I did and I was. Ah well, back to it now weekly to get all that tone back.

If you are impressed by the 50 lb draw thing, then don't be too in awe. Back in Medieval times everyone in the village would have been obliged to practise their archery every Sunday and the elite long-bow men who did such a good job at, e.g. Agincourt would have been pulling 120 lbs+ (historians think up towards 200 lbs) - those guys had a range (all be it not hugely accurate) getting up towards a mile and would have 2 more arrows in the air by the time the first hail of arrows was falling on the enemy ranks. Archaeologists have found skeletal remains on some of these battle sites where the chests and shoulders of the men seemed all deformed and non-symmetrical. Archers, of course, doing it every week of their lives since they were about 6 years old and developing a frame to cope with the massive forces. Makes our 50 lb pull and lashing arrows 60 feet down a Badminton hall seem quite puny!

A nice change yesterday in the supper menu as Liz took us back to her youth and the time spent in France, doing au-pair to a size-able family down by Toulouse. "I just fancied a bit of boiled fowl" she opined and re-created a trad French 'Pot-au-Feu' supper from one of our frozen Hubbard birds. This would have been standard family filling food belovéd of the thrifty housewife and I could see why. In brief it is a single-pot, chicken 'stew' where the whole carcass, intact, gets slow-cooked in stock and veg for several hours. It would have been some tough old rooster back in the day and all they could afford. You serve it, though, as a three course meal. First comes the 'soup' - the stock eaten as a soup with a chunk of crusty bread and cheese floated in it to mop up the delicious 'grease'. This would have used up the last of that day's bread, bread being bought fresh daily in those parts. Next you would get a plate full of the vegetables and finally the meat would be brought to the table so that you could (easily) pull off a thigh or what ever and a dollop of home-made mayonnaise. Three very satisfying courses from one pot and one chicken. Bon appetite!

My only other news concerns a social visit to our small holdering friends, Sue and Rob. My plan was just to meet up, catch up on the gossip, admire their new-born goat kids and maybe scrounge a cup of coffee and a slice of fruit cake. S+R had other ideas. Sue seems to have a decent sized incubator running right round the year so always has "too many" chickens and geese. At the moment, there are a gazillion roosters running about the place so she tried to ply me with one but Friends of the Blog will know that we have our own issues with roosters just now so I had to decline. Not to be denied, she then tempted me with some nice young poults who (if they are female) will make splendid replacements for our fox-losses. I came home with 6. She also gave me half a dozen unfertilized duck eggs in exchange for fertilized ones not yet laid by our birds (yes, for the incubator, of course!). Thanks so much for those, Sue and Rob and for the rest of the hospitality and farm-tour. You are salt of the earth.

(Wild) Goose Chase

Talk about innocents abroad. There we were Christmas Eve chatting to the Vendor, Anna L, about this and that when she said "What you should do... what we used to do when I was so high (she indicated a 5-year-old's height with her hand) was to keep a few geese, one for Christmas Day, one for New Years and the rest for selling or giving away. As is our way we fell to discussing this after Anna had gone and agreed that it might be a fun idea and (as is also our way) dived into the books, especially our 'bible', the Haynes Smallholding Manual by Liz Shankland. Her chapter on geese starts off by describing geese in general and indicates that Chinese (variety) geese can be aggressive and 'boisterous' but then, in the section on Choosing Breeds, starts with the variety 'Pilgrim'. Geese come in 3 groups - the 'light', the 'medium' and the big heavyweights like saggy-bellied Toulouse and Embden. Pilgrim are in the light category, which suits us and, according to Liz S, "if Chinese geese are the rogues of the species, Pilgrims are the angels, much prized for their gentle temperament etc". At no point does Liz S say that they are rare, almost unheard of in Ireland, Show pure-breds and that they cost an arm and a leg. 

Our next move, then, was to start searching the internet for local suppliers and breeders. Maybe warning bells should have started to ring when there were none. My poultry-forum website started to suggest breeders and suppliers in the UK (East Anglia, Frome in Somerset etc) and bird couriers - guys who make a living ferrying poultry and waterfowl between the two countries. I ended up on emails and the phone to a few of these people and it started to look like we'd chosen a particularly expensive hobby here and an especially expensive variety of goose. These birds, it was being suggested, might be up to £100 a pop and we wanted a gander and maybe three geese. Further, the couriering from the east of England to the West of Ireland might be €60 per "crate" of 2 birds, so we were suddenly looking at £500+ just to get the birds here. There were, we were told, other varieties of light geese which might be cheaper, such as Pomeranian, Roman and Steinbacher, but none of these sounded like they'd be "cheap" as such.

It won't surprise you to know we have now retreated from this position and put Pilgrim geese back into 'if we win the Lottery' status (gonna be tricky as we don't actually do the Lottery) and we will be proceeding, more than likely, with some common or garden white domestic farm geese which we will buy young in the Late Spring when goslings start to be available. We Hope.