Back In The Kitchen

K-Dub on the big Kango

This week saw K-Dub and myself swinging back into action after our respective Christmas breaks and in his case a call up to the big smoke to do some 'proper' work (as in 'paid' work). "What's the story, Bud?" (or just the Dublin slang "Story, Bud?") is how he announces himself on the phone and we are straight into discussing what, when, how on any jobs. This week it was the decision to finally go for the break through, smashing out the wall at the end of the existing kitchen so that the two spaces become one room with a little 'waist' in the middle where we will leave stub-walls to form a 5' wide 'arch'.

The hole is started but K-Dub has to make running repairs to
 the big Kango.  

You can imagine that our announcement that we were going to smash a huge hole in the end of the kitchen, caused a certain amount of anxiety within the 'main stake-holder'. Visions of rubble, dust and plaster fragments everywhere. What she hadn't realised but was also concerning K-Dub, is that the rumble set up by the massive Kango-hammer sets anything on shelves vibrating and moving gently towards the front of the shelves before leaping to its doom like a gang of lemmings.

Mad hour, then, clearing all the kitchen vulnerables into multiple shopping bags which are now stacked all around the corners of the Dining Room. Liz need not have worried, though. We are good, house-trained builders and we do not create mess inside your house. This kitchen has the internal walls lined with stud walling insulated with foam blocks and plastered over that. The Feb 1012 blog at  http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/02/bathroom-floor.html gives you some idea - in one pic you are looking up at the bathroom floor / kitchen ceiling. We knew that we could chop out all the external wall (concrete, rocks, masonry)  and the window frame without actually breaking into the kitchen. We just had to screw a board a cross the window inside, so as not to leave a huge 2'+ square hole.

A board covers the hole where the window
was. This is the only change you see from
'indoors' for now.

Six or seven hours later after lots of noise, rubble, dust and shovelling, we have our hole, roughly 5' wide. We have thereby created a weakness in the upstairs (bathroom) wall which we need to fix by slotting in a couple of 6' x 4" concrete lintels at the top of our hole, and we have exposed the wooden joists of the bathroom floor, so those guys need a 'stringer' of 6 x 2 and a joist-hanger from this to each old joist-end. We reinstate the shower pipes which are mainly just 'push-in' hand-tight connections and we can safely leave the job for the few days over the weekend. Nothing will fall down and we can still use the shower. We are now also ready to get the 'Sparks' in for some electrical first fix.

Liz's tray-bake version of haggis using our own lamb bits. 

The main other event affecting the week was Burns Night which regular readers will know we like to celebrate. We think we are in a minority here; we know of no other people locally who do a Burns Night and our comments on social media meet with blank incomprehension and dead silence. I have never seen haggis for sale locally. That does not worry us as Liz makes her own haggis using bits from our own lambs (breast-meat etc. plus we keep a lung back from one of the carcasses specifically for this purpose.)

This year we could not do the meal on the correct date (25th) as we had a meeting in the village, so we moved it to tonight (Fri 27th). It was, as ever, delicious and the haggis, 'neeps' and tatties with onion gravy was nicely rounded off by a gooseberry cranachan (whipped cream, oats etc) and accompanied by a wee dram of whiskey. It should have been Scottish, of course but the nearest I could get in the local supermarket was Bushmills, which is from County Antrim. Close enough.

Our village's indoor handball court. 

Finally, there is the '365' thing now only 4 days away from finishing. My nipping around everywhere has made me something of an unofficial photographer for the village, certainly among Liz's circle. This brings me an occasional 'commission' - the most recent was to be sent down to the local hand-ball court. Coming from Sussex, hand-ball would be a sport I had had absolutely nothing to do with and first 'met' as a series of strange abandoned outdoor courts  in Irish villages.

Looking down onto the court, through the
perspex wall from the top of the 'stand'. 

These sit in their respective villages as just 3 walls around a rectangle which is roughly 20' by 40' and the walls are roughly 20 feet high. We have never seen an outdoor one still in use. But in the local village we are rather special in having a modern, fully indoor one and an active thriving club. Ours has a perspex wall at the top end which protects spectators but allows them to watch the action from a ramp of stairs and at the top of this 'stand' is a kitchen and bar area.

That's all I know and those are the photo's I have fired into the Village Development Co. I have never seen anyone playing the game, have little idea what this involves and am completely ignorant of the rules. I guess it is a little like squash but with a bigger ball and no  racquets.

Towser at speed.

"Book Learning"

Book Learning. Grand as far as it goes. We are madly trying to absorb as much information as we can on the 2014 projects - bees and pigs - and have read our little socks off on books, magazines, websites and leaflets. We have talked to as many people as we could persuade to give us advice and we have, as you know, joined a 'club' and been to one bee-based meeting. We probably 'know' way more than it is healthy to know for 2 people neither of whom has ever opened a beehive and lifted out a bee frame to examine the contents, or been closer to bees than idly spotting them on the garden flowers ("Oooh! I think THAT one is a honey bee!") or had anything to do with pigs other than helping to run 2 porkers down the ramp from trailer to slaughterhouse (about 5 seconds!).

You can't beat a turf fire for visual effect.

No. We are now hungry for hands-on, practical experience and 'monkey-do' learning. We want the bee training sessions to start, and especially the apiary based practical ones. I want to try myself out in the middle of a wary, loud-humming, cloud of potential stinging insects to know that I can be as cool, calm, relaxed, gentle and slow moving as I am with rabbits, sheep, geese and chickens. I want to know that I can be sufficiently careful that I do not risk 'rolling' bees between the close spaced bee frames (which annoys them) or squashing any between hive sections when reassembling the boxes. I want to know that I can move among pigs and bond with them, come to understand them without being nervous of them - they are big, strong and heavy, potentially dangerous animals when full grown, which need treating with respect. I expect I will be OK on both counts; I generally am. We are currently looking out for a pig rearing/keeping course aimed at small holders. Tipperary in April looks favourite so far.

Meanwhile, one of our favourite annual celebrations came around, Burns Night, our chance to eat haggis with a clear conscience and, this time, to have some guests to supper, Carolyn and Charlotte of the mini-horses, plus K-Dub and little Henry (2 in February). Being lamb-rearers, of course, this is not some kind of commercial, mass produced haggis boiled in a plastic (or gut if you're lucky) sleeve. It is the home made version constructed by Liz from our own lamb products; this year some breast meat, heart, liver and 'lights', plus, of course, oatmeal, onion and spices. 'Lights' for the uninitiated, is lung tissue; we managed to persuade butcher Ignatius G that we really did want a lung (just one) to try out just this recipe. Liz bakes the whole in a casserole dish.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face..... haggis.

For a starter we diverged a bit away from Scottish fare with a favourite salad - leaves, pomegranate bits, goats cheese, pickled sweet red peppers and toasted pinenuts. The haggis came, of course, with neeps and tatties and an onion gravy. Dessert was a bit 'fusion food'. Liz crossed cranachan with pavlova (why not?) and came up with a pavlova with a meringue base, a good layer of cream, then blackberry coulis and berries, topped with toasted rolled oats.

Cranachan x Pavlova

We have, inevitably, a mountain of this food left over even though everybody bar Henry piled in with gusto and did it justice. H was a little excited at his first evening visit to 'Matt and Dizzy's' house and was not in the mood for settling down to eat this unfamiliar food but he was still a pleasure to entertain and he enjoyed himself. "Dizzy" (sorry, I mean Liz) has since been on the internet talking to chums who also have left over haggis and mashed spuds, and someone has come up with the very promising idea of haggis and potato 'pasties' which have GOT to be worth a try. We have very little 'neep' left so some of our lovely fresh sprouts may get thinly sliced and added to the pastie filling.

We had lit the fires at both ends of the house, so we had a lovely turf fire going in the living room as well as the range in the dining room. We do not usually have real turf in the house as we'd only use it on the open fire, which we don't light very often; it does not go very well in the range. However, I had taken some eggs round to neighbour Una and she was trying to pay me money for them. I asked instead if I might have some of the lovely long dry turfs she has in her shed; they look very picturesque in the log basket and would burn nicely on our fire for our guests when we adjourned through to the comfortable chairs. We didn't go very late. The visitors were mindful of the need to get little Henry to bed by 9:30-ish but, more importantly, K-Dub was due a very early (04:30) start as he's off to the Bavaria mountains on a motor bike, to be part of the annual "Elephant Rally", camping.

http://www.bvdm.de/index.php?id=47&lang=3

Rooster 'Mr Buff' shelters in the goose house. 

We take our hats off to you, buddy, rather you than me. The weather is not looking particularly promising, it is snowy and windy in Bavaria at present, but he has a good ex-military tent and a sleeping bag which is good to minus 30 degrees C and, anyway, hey! He's a ruffty tuffty biker. I used to enjoy my 2CV camps but they were generally in the summer and I had the car around me when I was driving to and from. K-Dub is on a bike in just his leathers and helmet through the night to Dublin, then all across Wales and England to the Channel Tunnel, then all across mainland Europe to his snowy forest 'home' and all his biker mates. Safe journey, K-Dub. Look after yourself.

Henry and Min Re-United

In a recent post I might have worried you by finishing with a story that one of Henry or Min had gone AWOL at 'bed time' and we'd been out hunting with torches. Well, next morning  the pair were happily and noisily reunited. The missing bird had run for cover into the collection of bikes, cement mixer and other junk in the goose end of that building and kept his/her head down and kept quiet. That explains why the other bird was so contented to be up on the perch alone and also stayed quiet - he/she was presumably well aware of where the hidden bird was keeping quiet. In the morning they just had to each find their separate way to the yard and give each other a load of telling off. Not so silly after all.

Haggis mixture

In the kitchen we wind steadily on towards Christmas and even beyond. Liz converts a huge quantity of lamb "trimmings" (bits like the breast meat which the butcher would normally cut away and discard) and offal (including this year the lung which we specifically asked Ignatius to keep for us for this purpose), into home made haggis mixture. We love our haggis in this family and last year Liz found a recipe where you bake the mix in a baking tray instead of stuffing it into a piece of gut or sheep's stomach, or some kind of plastic 'cover' and it was easily the best haggis we had ever eaten. This probably because it was made with real ingredients instead of 'commercial' heaven knows what, so it is bagless haggis for us in 2014 too.

Hubbard hen at 19 weeks

Our two remaining 'Hubbard' chickens have amazed us over the last month by filling out from the rangey, gangly, big-legged adolescent shaped birds of October, to squared off, filled out, solid chicken-shaped birds now. They are 19 weeks old at this stage so they are approaching the standard 'Point of Lay' age where you'd normally buy them if you wanted them as laying birds, but these ladies are of a fast growing meat breed which the commercial boys would normally be 'finishing' at 100 days or so. Mentor Anne is keeping 2 of hers round to a fully mature age and is going to try a bit of breeding with a La Bresse rooster.

White Hubbard hen

Ours are still here for looser and more "happy chance" reasons. We had gone through a phase of 'harvesting' them, especially the roosters which were getting troublesome, and were finding them dead easy to catch because of their habit of gathering round my feet as I scooped feed from the feed bins, especially if it was raining outside. With just 2 to go, I wanted to 'do' these on the same day so that neither would be left lonely. I never got that chance and then the weather dried up and they stopped doing the under-foot thing. Also, we now had 4 birds in the freezer and needed the space for the lambs, so these two got a stay of execution and are still with us. A living larder, maybe, or perhaps we will see how they do as egg laying birds.

We've now done the run down to Silverwoods, so the lamb is all distributed to its final users. The Silverwoods have pronounced it excellent and, being as loopy as we are, found this lovely piece of lamb based 'tat' during their recent holiday in Bulgaria and thought of us. Fine, elegant tableware, I think you will agree, fit to grace the most elegant Christmas table. We have no idea why the lambs depicted are cuddling tiny teddy bears. Our lambs never had them. Perhaps it is an animal welfare thing?

Castlerea prize draw sign

We finally came to the point here where there was no longer any escaping a job which I'd been putting off and rather dreading, that of slaughtering the young geese for the Christmas table. These geese are now 6 months old and full adult size. Well, we girded our loins and got on with the job this morning with Liz, for her first time, actually getting involved and in (watching) at the kill. It went well, better than I had feared, and the boys (we are sure both these are ganders) met their end quickly, cleanly and with as much respect and as little distress as we like to ensure and they are now hanging in the Tígín awaiting the plucking and dressing job tomorrow. The relief is immense - we are now pretty much through the autumn slaughtering 'campaign' which we appreciate we have to do but cannot claim to enjoy.

There is just the one more goose to 'go', but this is our current parent bird 'Gander', he of the genetic wry-tail abnormality which he is sadly too able to pass on to his sons and daughters, so the plan is to swap him out with an unrelated gander called George who currently lives down the lane with Carolyn of the mini-horses. We get George and we deliver Gander to them but we are currently not sure whether we need to deliver him alive or whether he will be collected and despatched by K-Dub.

Finally today, we loved this Prize Draw sign seen in Castlerea (picture above) where 1st Prize is a Charolais heifer. She looks a lovely big girl from the pictures we have seen and is worth about €1000. You have the option of taking her home if you win, or immediately selling her at the Mart and going home with your money. We were laughing about what we'd do if suddenly presented with a strapping young female beef-cow. We'd have to give it to John Deere Bob to look after. We are not set up for cows' we don't even have a cattle herd number.

New Doors

Saturday sees the arrival of this big yellow builder's van, a pile of tools and some stacks of wood. This all signifies that our friend, local-living but Dublin born and bred carpenter (who we will call for the purposes of this blog...) K-Dub has turned up to replace all 5 doors and door frames in the outbuildings, 2 on the Tígín, 2 on the yard side of the chicken and goose houses (formerly milking shed and calf house) and one on the back of the chicken house.

K-Dub is a brilliant Carpenter and builder whose normal work is houses and sites in Dublin but who has built for his own entertainment and practise, a working, street legal, ride-able wooden motor bike. He is geared up like our own 'Sparks' with plenty of toys including the familiar 'Paslode' nail gun, an elabourate portable bench-saw and a multi-function circular saw called a 'skill saw'. These doors are going to be SOLID, not like our own stable-door efforts made from tongue and groove which has proved to be the very devil for expanding and jamming in the damp and shrinking in the dry.

These doors are faced with one inch grooved decking timber and framed with 4 by 2 timbers for the horizontal 'ribs' and diagonal bracing. The old rotted, wood-worm riddled frames have all been ripped out and replaced with whatever size of wood worked, and here K-Dub had that same fun and games that we had on the build of the main house; the walls are hard blue sandstone randomly mixed in with not particularly hard concrete. Getting frame fixings to 'stick' was a case of trying to hit the sandstone rather than the mortar with the drill, but when you do hit stone your fixing is as solid as the proverbial rock. He also coped well with that old problem of none of these doors being exact rectangles and very few of the corners being right angles, lintels horizontal or walls plumb.

K-Dub did the whole job in a day from ripping out the old, through building the doors from planks on site, to fitting. He re-instated a horse shoe we had over the door to the chicken house, made the chickens a new pop-hole through the door and even knocked me up a fairly sophisticated window frame for the Tígín window (see 2nd picture for the tired old one which has now joined the scrap pile.)

I took this picture of the goslings at 3 weeks of age (Saturday) so that I could proudly show them off on Facebook and here but, sadly, Pride comes before a fall, and I have to report another tragedy. My 'grown up' dog, Deefer (the name on this blog), caught and killed one of them today, so fast that neither of us really know what happened. Back in Faversham in Kent we had both our dogs, Megan and Haggis completely trustworthy and able to stroll among the chickens without attacking or killing any and I was dreaming that I might get Deefer and eventually the pups, to this stage. No end of people have warned me that "you can never trust a terrier" and today I have to say, I believe them. I'd had Deefer off the lead SUPERVISED and able to walk among the horses, chickens, the young chicks and the gander.

Today I trusted her to come with me into the fields around for a walk and we returned to the garden without problem. She went off to gaze at rabbits while I headed for the poly tunnel to talk to Liz, who was weeding. There was suddenly goose mayhem outside, honking, splashing in the water, no end of noise. I ran out to see Deefer chasing through the goose family, shouted at her and stopped her, grabbed her and collared her to the house but I could see over my shoulder only 5 goslings on the big pond. Liz found the sad little corpse of a gosling on the grass. We can only assume that Deefer ran from her rabbits towards me, set all the geese off and then lost the run of herself so that instinct took over and she snapped at this poor bird as she went by. It's what terriers do. Once more I find me kicking myself.

Ah well, we are down to 5 goslings but this has spurred us on to completing a job we had been putting off. We love to see the geese and goslings on the big pond but that was never intended as a goose-pond. It is a wildlife pond. Liz had also been pushing for the geese to be contained rather than completely free range so that the damage they do to garden plants is reduced. So today the geese got herded into the orchard AND I dug the 5 foot diameter pond in the bottom corner of the orchard where there was already a handy, saucer-shaped dent and (also handily) we have on off-cut of the butyl rubber to fit. So the geese can graze the orchard where they have almost a 30 m square to graze (i.e. 900 square meters), they have the split-barrel pond, the enamel bath and now this new pond to play in, the rabbits and baby bunnies for company AND they are safe from escaping dogs. The dogs are all back on leads in the garden till geese are safely shut up at night.

Deefer was shouted at, at the time and then left to sweat it indoors for half an hour but has now been forgiven and is back among us. I have abandoned my dream that she will ever be as bird-friendly as Megan and Haggis, but we can cope with that. My final picture shows that we have, at last, some strawberries from the poly-tunnel plants, and very nice they were too, if in a limited way. These are 'maiden' plants which were very small at planting and , anyway, a bit held up by our not having completed the poly-tunnel till later than planned. The plants are now a decent size and we hope for good things from them in times to come.

Hummus, Neeps and Tatties?

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill, and on and on

You will, I hope, recognise the above as Robbie Burns's famous "Ode to a Haggis" beloved of carving-knife wielding head-of-the-table blokes on Burns Night, 25th January. We love our Burns Nights in this family and we love the haggis, neeps and tatties that come with, the onion gravy, the whisky and the Scotland-related desserts. This started for me back in the 70's when the College used to do them as a formal dinner, black tie, academic gowns, Top Table and all that. Ever since then we have managed to find haggis available in shops and supermarkets, always leading up to the Night itself and often all the year round. 

Big shock then, when we realised we have moved to a place where nobody celebrates Burns Night and nobody has seen or eaten haggis, though a few have heard of it and 'seen something about it on the telly'. We looked in three different supermarkets (Tesco, Aldi and Lidl) and some butcher's shops on the day we went down to buy the geese, to no avail. We have since heard that these shops might have been selling it around Dublin (Mrs Sparks even helpfully told us that Tesco in Newry had it - that is 3 and a half hours drive away!) and Aldi might have had some on Thursday 24th but that was no good to us. 

Our last hope on Goose Day was SuperValu in Castlerea where Liz had a brief surge of hope when keen young butchery counter man leapt to her aid. "Of Course!" he said and led her to a nice full chill cabinet stuffed with .....Hummus! He was crestfallen when she explained that, No, she meant 'Haggis - the stuff Scots people eat?' We don't have many Scots here, he told us. Amazingly he was more hopeful at Liz's half-joke that he might be able to sell her a sheep's stomach. "Over the road!", he said - in 'that' butcher, but you'll have to go on Monday; That's the day he does his slaughtering. 'That' butcher is, of course, our old chum Ignatius G Victualler, slaughterer of our own three sheep. 

Never mind, we thought, we'll just have to make our own. How hard can it be? Surely it's just rough old bits of lamb (of which we have plenty), oatmeal and a few spices and pepper. Liz quickly surfed up a recipe from the BBC website. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/haggis_66072

This looked very manageable and had the option of baking it in a casserole dish rather than trying to source a sheep stomach or "ox bung" (Don't ask - it's a bit of lower gut). We have an amusing family expression for the non-lean-meat bits of lamb, offal etc, the "gribbly bits". Now, there's an excuse for a 2CV picture, the expression was invented during a trip across Northern France in our then-freshly restored old 1961 car where it quickly translated in to 'les pièces gribbloises' because we were teasing an endlessly-indecisive friend who didn't want anything 'gribbly' off the restaurant menu. 

Gribbly bits we have, of course, having recently had our lambs slaughtered. Not the 'lights' (lungs) listed in the recipe maybe but we have heart, liver and plenty of the really cheap cut 'breast' and other off cuts which the butchers would normally discard but which we asked him to bag up. For the next set of lambs we will see if we can save the lungs and stomach too, with Burns Night in mind. Oatmeal and the other ingredients are easily available, so Liz was on, in creative mode on the Thursday, and also decided we needed whisky (no 'E' in Whisky  for this - Scotch for Burns Night) and a dessert called 'cranachan'; a mixture of whipped double cream, honey, whisky, raspberries and toasted flaked oats. The raspberries led us way away from our normal principles of locally-sourced and 'sustainable' eating - they were from Morocco and cost the equivalent of €16 per kg. Oops.

Well, we got there. The BBC method, adapted by Liz, worked superbly and the haggis was, we both agree, the nicest we have ever tasted. Being non-commercial it had way less pepper and being home made by us using known gribbly bits it was ten times more meaty than any tartan-packed, mass produced version. Of course we do mashed spuds to suit our own taste (skins on, plenty of butter, pepper and full-cream milk) and also neeps (steam and mash, nothing added) plus a lovely onion gravy. We were stuffed to the gills but still managed some rather generously proportioned cranachan and a wee dram to wash it down. 

It made for a very enjoyable and pleasant Burns Night and, for an added 'sharing' socially, we had set up a silly 'On Line Burns Night' on social networking website 'Facebook' which had gathered up lots of like-minded relatives, friends and former colleagues who were comparing recipes and planning detail leading up to the evening and then comparing successes afterwards. We 'shared' all the fun with oldest cousin Win, Challock Forest living friend Rona D, Kent-based Diamond and Mazy, ex-colleagues Cath and Shane, Sparks and Mrs Sparks and many more. It was quite an occasion.

I hope you had a good one.

Tsipouro! Yammas!

Mum returned from Greece with a small amount of a drink which was new to Dad, it being the local fire-water, "Tsipouro". Absolutely clear in colour this is 'pomace brandy', pomace being "the solid remains of grapes, after pressing for juice. It contains the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems of the fruit". It is around 47% proof, so not quite as lethal as good old Irish over-proof Poitín (Potcheen) and, it will not surprise you to know, was first produced by some Greek Orthodox Monks (weren't all these dodgy spirits?) up a mountain. According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsipouro  ) " Depending on the time of year, tsipouro is used either as refreshment or as a hot beverage, and depending on the time of day, it replaces the drinking of coffee or wine. Tsipouro and tsikoudia, as with all alcoholic beverages in Greece, always seem to coincide with various social gatherings, as their consumption had a festive and symposium-like quality.

It is usually served in shot glasses, very cold, often with meze, walnuts, almonds, raisins, feta cheese, olives, or accompanying halva or other desserts in restaurants.

In 2006, Greece filed a request to recognise tsipouro as a PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) product.

We say 'Yammas' (Cheers) to that!

Much to everyone's amazement, I reach my 6th Birthday (on Monday 17th), and so, too, do my sister, Ellie, back in Faversham, and my Brother Archie, back in Maidstone. The word is that I have matured into a very sensible, capable, well balanced dog and a good 'Auntie' to the kindergarten. Cynics say that this is because I was always wishing I was a favourite only dog and I am happier that way so that I just had to contrive to remove Megan, Haggis and Coco from any position superior to, or threatening, mine and I'd be home and dry. All I have to do now is make sure Blue, Rolo, Towser, Poppy, assorted rabbits and poultry and any other arrivals stay subservient and I should remain well adjusted to the end of my natural puff. Yammas to that, too.

Mike-the-Cows's herd have now pretty much eaten off all the grass on Vendor Anna's land and on our bits so, yesterday, were moved off to give the grass a chance to recover and for them to get some grub on less grazed turf. Dad loves that the local farming mags talk about something called the 'rate of thrive' which is basically the rate at which cows put on weight in kg per day. These are beef animals so success is all about the weight of the carcase at slaughter. The farmer either buys them in at a known weight or breeds them himself, but then has to spend x amount of money on grazing or on concentrates per day, hoping that at the end the weight will have gone up sufficiently that they have made more in carcase value (weight) than he has spent getting them to that weight. I gather it can be a bit knife-edge at the moment with a poor Summer having given them poor grass growth and a lot of them having to eat into stored silage which was meant to see them through winter. Also, says Mike, with cows being worth anything from €700 up to and over €3000, you've only got to lose one to sickness or an accident and you may have no margin left this year at all. Mike seems to be doing OK, though he'd never admit that!

Yammas!

Deefer

Curmudgeonly Aunt Dog

It's Sunday July 22nd and life is currently all about bedding in the new pup and kittens with me, the “curmudgeonly Aunt dog” as I now seem to be called. We are getting there. Tomorrow is the big moment of truth day, when I get let off the lead to go kill small animals or not as takes my fancy. Not today. No, not a Monday. Mum will tell you... "Animals DIE on Mondays". It's a family superstition at this stage, with almost talismanic status. It was a bizarre day weather-wise, always cloudy and always just ever so slightly spitting in the wind but with a hooley of a breeze blowing through all day which was bizarrely warm like a Chinook or a Foehn or something. Mum and Dad are invited round to neighbour Una to pick her black currants. We are welcome to 'jam' them, she says, as she's done enough jam from the bushes and still has plenty growing. We likes Una!

23^rd

Light but persistent rain all day nearly had Dad giving up on plan A and mooping indoors, but decided that, blow it! He was not to be beaten. He will go do Plan A, he decides, get wet and grubby and THEN come back for shower and gorgeous home made soup - the remnant of the "most delicious lamb shanks in the history of the world" a few days back. I can vouch for the shanks having inherited most of the bones to either chew or bury where the pesky pup cannot find them.

Plan A was for Dad to nip round neighbour Una's (she of the blackcurrants) and chainsaw up for her a pile of old timber beams from her former hay barn. Sounds familiar? She is widow and no longer has chain-saw hefting bloke around so Dad is happy to oblige. He got wet but not a bother. You get so warm hefting the said saw (he says) that it's too sweaty inside his coat and hoodie, so he was working in ordinary cotton shirt and hoping his sweaty bod would dry the rain as soon as it landed. Sorry. Hope you're not all still eating your breakfast! Must have been minging!

Dad got an unexpected and warming buzz from realizing afterwards that he had been was sitting on a weather-worn chair, up at a battle-scarred table in a genuine Irish lady's farmhouse kitchen, being fed scones and jam and "a cup o' tay in yer hand", chatting about the weather and stuff. Not "brought there" by Mum but there, welcome and being hosted on my his own account because he’d just done her a neighbourly favour. He was feeling all 'accepted' and welcome. 

In 'train the dog not to kill small animals' we reach the planned final day of training and it does seem to be working. Although 'curmudgeonly Aunt' dog (me) is technically on the lead, in practise the lead is slack and I can go right up to the kittens and pup, lean over them, chase them about and (to a small extent) "play" with them as if I was off the lead. I have made no attempt to bite or damage kittens and seems, Dad says, indeed, to be playing mother-and-daughter games with them. At one point Mum and Dad think I may even have been 'protecting' one kit from the other as they were play-fighting. Rolo was in the small dog-bed and I squeezed in beside her facing out and batting off Blue. Bizarre (as well as exciting and optimism-inducing for tomorrow/today). Wish us luck. My only remaining vice and cause for concern (I am told) is the jealousy thing which comes out in snarling, growling and occasional snaps at pup when he approaches if I am on Dad’s lap. This is saved for the pup and does not apply to kittens. Luckily he (pup) speaks the same language and backs off. Wisdom in one so young! Mum and Dad tell everyone “We never did cure Deefer when it came to new-dog Coco” (or indeed, former matriarch dog Megan and patriarch dog Haggis) where I would try it on and generally get told to get lost.

Farewell to Haggis

Today we bring you the sad news that the old boy Haggis, has passed away, put to sleep by the vet, Aoife-Rhymes-with-Deefer. The old fella had become increasingly frail and confused as well as at times almost unable to walk. He was pretty much sleeping all day, getting up only to pee and, bless him had no accidents right up to the end. He had become very thin and gaunt and Mum and Dad decided that he was no longer enjoying life. He was 15 years and 9 months old, which is an excellent innings for a Westie and had enjoyed a full, very happy and healthy life.

He was around, of course, way before I was born and started this blog and even before Facebook started (Yes! Imagine that, you young readers - there used to be no facebook!). In those days he used to post his own stuff on various Yahoo Groups (not even sure if they still exist) and something called "Westie List" and then Westie-L. Some of his stuff is still 'out there' so I may copy some down to here for you or post links. Anyway, for now, just to let you know the story. I am sure many readers will want to remember him as we do, and will miss the old boy. Sleep now, H-Man. You were a very special dog; easily the nicest, calmest, best temperament dog anyone knew, faithful friend and companion to Mum, Dad and Megan, and then a bit of a Father figure and 'mentor' to Coco, Maxwell, Lily and even my good self. Rest in Peace, Haggis. Deefs

The Autumn of his Years

Haggis, at 15 and a half years old is definitely starting to show his age. He is a thinning, rather gaunt framed old chap now, slow and stiff, given to sleeping a lot and getting a bit confused over his where-abouts, especially as we keep moving between Silverwood, the caravan and now the new house. He is also rather weak and doddery, given to staggers at front or rear end (or both) so that he looks a bit drunk as he weaves his way about. Occasionally he gives us all a real scare, such as he did after the last weekend, going off his food across Sunday and Monday, being sick a few times (just yellow foamy emptiness) and seeming very very weak and depressed. Mum, Dad and Sparks all wondered whether this was it for him, not so much the Autumn of his years, more like December and even post-Christmas. On both Monday and Tuesday morning everyone woke and looked anxiously at poor Haggis stretched out on the caravan bed just to check he was still breathing, or lay there in the dark waiting for him to do one of his groans just so we'd know he was still with us. On one of the mornings (Tuesday?) Mum actually woke up, checked him and found him still weak and apparently unable to eat or poo and would have phoned Aoife-Rhymes-With-Deefer (the Vet) about making that hard decision, only it was too early to phone her. Then on Tuesday, Mum cooked some sloppy chicken soup for him and he took a couple of pieces of the chicken from Dad's hand. On Wednesday he took a few more and to everyone's relief managed a rather forced poo. On Thursday the house build project came to its close (this time round), Sparks departed, and Dad decided one of the first jobs was to give all us dogs a blooming good haircut. Haggis was first up, and treated gently by Dad out of resoect for his years and weakness, but cut him thoroughly anyway, rather horrified by the gaunt shape he had become under all the winter fur, a bit like an ancient bony Jersey cow with pronounced pelvic girdle, thin neck, sticky-up spine processes and ribs almost visible through his coat. BUT, something extra-ordinary happened. We don't know if it was the relief of being freed of all that fur, or just a timely co-incidence which would have happened anyway, but he was like a new man. He started eating properly again and (for him) striding about the place purposefully, walking to doors and scratching to be let out, 'demanding' sweeties when he came back in, eating all his breakfast and supper, nay, even queuing up and asking for them at the old times. It is like having the old H-Man back, all be it still a bit gaunt looking and a bit stiff of a morning. Good Man, H Like the creaky gate, you'll see us all out! Deefs

Catch Up

A post to catch up a few loose ends and share some recent photos. Yesterday we headed for Blessington in County Wicklow and the superb "Charles Camping" shop, a veritable Aladdin's cave of a place containing every sort of camping gear you could possibly want from big stuff like caravans, tents and awnings, down to the smallest widget. From our point of view a complete success in terms of finally finding the toilet (Ha ha - a "Royal Potti"!), a nice warm sleeping bag for Mum, a table for the caravan, toilet chemical (blue for the loo) and meths for the heater. Lively town too, featuring one main street where everybody parks on rows at 90 degrees to the traffic and many many small-business shops. Not a trace of large-chain card shops, magazine shops, pharmacies or any other chain shops.

Second a picture of the kitchen once it had been blitzed and decorated. The picture of Haggis is also 'blitzed and decorated' or at least shampoo'd a couple of times as only Mrs S knows how so that he's whiter and floofier than he has been for ages. She rinses the dog first using her kitchen sink shower attachment thingy, then jugs diluted shampoo on and massages up to a good lather all over including round the face, eyes, feet and parts. Then the dog gets rinsed before the full strength 'posh' shampoo comes out and we go round again. Finally we are towelled dry in the huge Liverpool FC bath-sheet towels and set to dry in front of the log fire. Inevitably this last stage is via lots of charging round the house rubbing ourselves dry on all available surfaces and other dogs.

Finall a quick shot of Harry the Tortoise inside his tank, having just been given a bag of pillow-pack salad which was left over from one of the meals

That's all for now.

Deefs