Hop Swags and Pig Clubs

Enjoying a gorgeous blue sky today. It's a bit crisp out and post-frost but I have the fire lit in the range here and all my jobs done, so a chance to put my feet up and enjoy a break chatting on here. I've gone all Kent and had a bit of fun paying homage to the Hop Festival we used to enjoy each September in Faversham.

Tops of beeches in our pig paddock starting to turn colour. 

The town would fill up with happy 'hoppers', Morris Dancers, musicians, booze outlets (mainly local brewer Shepherd Neame) and dozens of hopefuls selling swags of spent hop bines from carts and vans to people who wanted to wear them round their head like a crown, tie them round prams, cars, bikes or the dog or carry them off to loop as swags indoors. Well, this year, we have our own hops - the big plant at the top of the veg patch is now 5 years old and throws up huge long bines which scramble up through our growing willow 'tunnel'.

Fixed to the front of our wood store I still have that magnificent fallow-buck skull and antlers. This was a white-phase 7-8 year old "Master Buck" (King of the Rut) revealed to us by the Wildlife Ranger in our local Challock Forest. A spent force (thought the Ranger) after his 2 week spell in charge of the rutting stand with no access to food or water (lest some young pretender take advantage) he would have eventually been ousted, exhausted, to go and have a lie down and often, with fallows, that would have been his lot. I made a mental note of where he was (well hidden down in his ditch-grave) and left him 2 months or so to clean up a bit, then went back to nab the skull. That was 2005, before I started blogging so I'm afraid no link to a post. It seemed only fair to garland the lad with our hops.

These have suddenly started flowering in the 'woods'. I don't
recall planting them but we must have. Cyclamens, of course.

I vowed long ago to give you our story "warts and all", the things that worked well and the things that did not work so well. A little minor rant-een then on the subject of pigs and deciding to buy 3 this year which nearly resulted in a freezer-space problem and has sullied our relationship(s) with some contacts. For that latter reason, the story comes as a "no names, no pack drill" one in which I go nowhere near identifying anyone.

From little IRISH acorns gathered on Tara Hill, ancient seat of
Irish kings, do mighty Irish oaks (eventually) grow.

Readers may have heard of the concept of "Pig Clubs". This is where pig keepers like me have enough space for more pigs and may be surrounded by folk who would love the idea of pigs and would love to try them out but do not have the ground, money, herd number or perhaps the need for a whole pig at the end.

Back in the egg business after the Summer egg-drought.

The Pig Club is a small group of people who club together to buy the pig in the first place, arrange for the farmer to house it, then pay for feed and vet calls if needed, visit it and bond with it, bring their kids round to tickle its belly if they like, then share the costs of final haulage, slaughter and butchery. They then divvy up the meat how they like and everyone's a winner. Some pig club owners choose to make a little money for them selves out of this but some do it just for the love of the thing.

Friends of the Blog may know that up to this year we'd always 'done' just 2 pigs. Our freezer(s) could cope with that. We'd eat 1 and a half pigs through the year, and the other half would be off loaded on family. Remember we can not sell on the open market - we have none of the necessary licences or certificates (Food Hygiene, premises, facilities).

The Amelanchier is struggling this year to do flame-red autumn
leaves.

This year, back in February, when deciding how many piglets to order, I put out there on the Internet groups, that I'd be happy to do a Pig Club this year if anyone wanted to 'play'. I got plenty of good feedback and just one person sounding warning bells (make it all legal, contracts and what not, or you'll be left holding the baby, get sued for not delivering the promised meat, get into arguments about vet bills, blah blah. I should have taken more heed!). Enough positive noise anyway, to encourage me to order the 3rd piglet and start organising for clubbers to be able to be there at the breeder and choose their piglet, see him/her brought home, cuddle their new baby.

On line shopping. Our copy of the German dice-game Qwixx

Long story short, as soon as they needed to actually BE anywhere and cough up any money (or pig food etc) , my enthusiastic 'clubbers' faded like Scotch Mist  - too busy this weekend or abroad, breakdown on the lorry etc. Not a one of them actually showed up here or ever came to see their pig and I spent the best part of our pig-season nursing a nagging doubt that they never would, and we'd be left just "doing 3 pigs" and then trying to cope with 3 carcasses (about 210 kg of meat!). One clubber eventually volunteered that they "only really wanted sausages" and asked me to select them a part carcass and get the butcher to do the necessary after which extra cost they would show up (honest) with some money. Ummmm.... nope.

Nice looking shoulder joint.

Thank Heavens for family, then and our reputation for delicious pork. Several were happy to take a bit extra this year. Suffice to say that by NOT killing all the lambs this year (We have saved Babóg and Ebony for killing as 'hogget' next year) and by 'Parma'-ing 2 whole legs, we found enough freezer space and were not embarrassed by volume. A lesson learned, though.

No mousing opportunities left now the tunnel is clear.

We will definitely not be doing three pigs next year and any pig-clubbing we decide  to do had better be on a non-returnable deposit basis. It was worth a try and it was great fun to have the three, Bo, Luke and Daisy, but two's enough.

This, too, is enough for this post.Good Luck now.

Things that (don't) go Bump in the Night

Kato is un-impressed by my carving skills.

A quick (and short) post tonight as Hallowe'en night slips by almost un-noticed by the local Trick or Treaters. Or so it seems to us here, anyway. We have often only had one or two callers and on one occasion none at all. I think about 15 is our best score - across 4 families. Little armies of costumed un-dead usually safe inside Hi-Viz jackets and carted round by Mums or Aunties in big 4x4 vehicles. Some are let come up the drive by themselves, others come up shepherded by a parent.

They are invariably very well behaved, very polite and nervous and try to take only one or two chocs from our proffered tub. You have to insist and persuade them that it is OK to grab a hand-full. They look for re-assurance from Mum to check this is allowed. This is very different from the kids we got in Kent (UK) I remember, particularly in the Medway Towns where there was a real risk of running out of sweeties half way through the night.

As I type this it is 20 to 8 so it is probably all done (though, as I have said before, never say 'Never') and we have had a grand total of 3 kids in one family group. These were little ones we did not recognise but it now seems to be the local modus operandi that you, the householder, advertise your open-ness with a pumpkin Jack-o-Lantern lit up on your gate pier. If you don't want the visits, no pumpkins and everybody respects that.

Hi-tech cheese presses.

The only "Trick" mean-ness I have heard of is some 'egging' of house fronts in the village. My Honesty Box was empty (sold out again!) but we brought it in under the trees out of sight of the road as a precaution. Our neighbour(s) have in the past brought their small gang of 7-ish along but not this year, so I guess they are all feeling a bit grown up now and such childish pursuits are maybe not 'cool' any more. The Silverwoods are, from the blaze of pics in Facebook, still leading the charge down in Co Laois - there has been a fun-shoot at the archery and all the family seem to be carving the most excellent and intricate pumpkins.

Cheese just out of the moulds, waiting for their dry salt-cure

Ah well. What else is going on? The short answer is plenty but not a lot I can tell you about. The 'plenty' is one of those "someone else's story" things where I do not have the blessing of the key players to 'report' the story on the Internet. Sorry about that.

Home made wine. 

Other than that we are chugging along making bread, making cheese and starting into our home made wine, which is really nice and quite a revelation. We are now on GMT, of course, so all the bird lock-up and evening duties are now moved forward to 5 o'clock and the long dark evenings are upon us and I am back to being woken up by the dogs at around 7 a.m.

I think I'll leave it at that. Have a good Hallowe'en. Don't run over any little witches, ghosties or ghoulies. Or the Feast of Samhain, if you prefer.

Au Revoir, Mademoiselle?

The shell back on the chassis. Andy B on left, me seated.

Readers who have been with me for donkeys years may recall that back in the winter of 2007/8, I was one of 4 members of our 'local group' of the Citroën Club of GB who got involved in the complete nut and bolt rebuild* of an ancient, non-running 1961 2CV car. The car was found by the club on one of our camping convoy events which took in Dover Transport Museum and turned out to have been a twinning gift from the newly twinned town of La Chapelle d'Armentieres in Northern France, to their new twin, Birchington in Kent in 1989. It was all sign-written with heraldic crests from each town and the regions. Birchington gave them a red phone box, being suitably British and 'iconic' which has stood ever since, outside the town hall (Mairie).

'Rolling Chassis' in need of lots of work.

The car, in 1989, had been roughly assembled to look the part for photo shoots but below the surface the engine was dead, brakes not connected up and so on, so the car sat on a local garage forecourt for a few years but was then gifted to the museum to look after. Dover Transport Museum, though, is more interested in commercial stuff - old lorries, vans, trains etc, so as they filled up with stuff the car was relegated to a slot out on the grass in the rain, which is where we found it and took pity, so we made them an offer.

We called her Mademoiselle from Armentieres (like the WW1 song) just because the "Parlez Vous" song is the only thing most school boys know about La Chapelle d'Armentieres! We stripped that car down completely over the winter of 2007/8 and rebuilt it. I was writing this blog by then but was writing then as if from the viewpoint of Deefer (then a small pup) so some posts about the car appeared such as

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2008/02/madamoiselle.html

I wrote up the car rebuild with the usual millions of pictures on the National 2CV Club website and was quite proud of the work, but unfortunately the club fell out with their internet service provider and various crashes of the site made them move onto a completely new site, abandoning the old forum archives and blogs and I lost the lot. I tried any number of the former 'webmeisters' but could get no joy, so that good record of our mechanicking is gone, not even on the internet anywhere, because the server was shut down and cleaned up ready for the next customer. Hey ho. This blog is on blogger.com which seems to be made of sterner stuff.

Well we completed the car and all the time had been in contact with the town of La Chapelle who were coming up to the 20th Anniversary of the twinning and were going to do a massive celebration and carnival to mark the event (a 'do' that French towns seem to love more so than either UK towns or the Irish). They insisted that we bring the car; we did and got treated like celebrities for the weekend with the car on show by the Mairie and then one of 3 2CVs leading the Big Parade. It was a real treat. The car has been back several times on the anniversaries since, once with us but since then with our good friend Andy B, who was really the 'project manager' on the build.

Soon after the 2009 trip, 2 of the gang-of-four expressed a wish to pull out and use their money on other 2CV projects, so, with the car then worth about £2400, Andy and I chopped in £600 to each of them and from then on we have owned the car between the two of us (and it is now worth about £3100, we think). Well, now having moved to Ireland, I do not get a chance to drive the car or even see it and sit in the seats, so I have been wondering whether Andy might feel like 'buying' me out too - we are both still splitting the cost of housing it in the dry lock-up, insurance, MOT and repairs (it is exempt from tax). It is only actually about £100 a year total each. We have now done a deal where I stop paying my share and just slowly fade from view over how ever long it takes a rough ton a year to burn up my half of the value. It could be the longest 'au revoir' in history. I will enjoy, meantime, knowing "that there's a corner of a foreign 2CV that is for (almost) ever (mine)" (apologies to Rupert Brooke)

Meanwhile, we bloggers, like any other internet users are host to the usual motley crew of scammers and hackers, spammers and the like. Many of these arrive as fake attempts to 'comment' on your blog posts and most of us have the comment function set to make sure we get to see the comments before they go up onto the site. Blogger.com is very good at protecting you and parks them if various conditions are met and, in particular in my case, if they come from that famous spammer, (Mr) Anonymous. I have been amused recently by a pattern forming among these as if they may have all read the same guide on how to pull the wool over the eyes of the blogger - compliment him or her on the blog but be very general and non specific about content (do not mention the subject matter of the post!) and then suggest that he/she come and look at yours which is on this link here, guv. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately two other factors they have in common are very bad English (generally looking like badly translated English) and then bizarre names on the links - sites selling medical gear, sites offering to improve your sales on Amazon.com and even sites selling labrador puppies!

I give you the following examples (but with the links, obviously, severed as I do not want you getting into inadvertent spam-hell)

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and finally

"Advanced level course, you get to study joining emergency treatment, fitting utilization of Automated External Defibrillator (AED) when heart failure strikes at the ictimized individual and considerably more.But you can’t be so sure that there will be no such incident happen in your life. The AED pads that are applied to the victim's chest, while CPR is in progress, can also assess and determine the victim's heart (cardiac) rhythm"

* Not strictly true - we swapped in a complete spare engine and gearbox rather than strip that right down. 425 cc of silky smooth oozing power!

Your Ideal Trailer

Trailers? Not any subject I'd have been that interested in the 'old' working life, but regular readers will know that we brought one over with us, towed behind the 2CV. This was a generous offer from my Kentish 2CV-Fixer, 2CV-Llew whose real job before he semi-retired was building boat trailers, yacht-club slip-ways, school fire escapes and so on. He reckoned that we could use one around the farm and the 2CV always had a tow bar, it just needed the electrics wiring up. He charged only £250 - I now know how generous this was as this post will explain.

The 'Lottery Winner' ideal trailer from Nugent.

The trailer was brilliant and proved extremely useful for moving wood, scaffold boards, hay and straw, feed sacks as well as being used as a super-size wheel barrow on hedge trimming jobs. However, it is no good for moving livestock, so every time we needed to collect lambs or pigs or to deliver them on their final journey, we'd quickly be beholden to, and reliant upon someone else with a stock trailer. A stock trailer became one of the top items on our shopping list. We also lost the use of the 2CV and had to have a tow bar fitted to the Fiat.

Trailer converted by K-Dub. Grey primer here.

Stupidly, spoiled by Llew's price, I dreamed I might find a good second hand one for €4-500 or so and we started looking locally and on the internet, and even called by hopefully to a couple of nearby farm equipment dealers. Here, my illusions were firmly shattered - we picked up a glossy Nugent brochure and found the perfect trailer - small enough at 6' by 4' to tow behind the (small) Fiat, single axle, tall enough for sheep and pigs but no need for it to be tall enough for cattle and horses, a loading ramp at the rear rather than the slot-in guillotine back-board I had on the first trailer. Such trailers from Nugent START at €1100 as just the flat bed, headboard, draw bar and axle - useful items like sides, a ramp, a roof, spare wheel and so on are 'Optional extras' which rocket the cost up to €1600. We put the Nugent brochure back down - that trailer is now consigned to the 'when we win the lotto' list. Unfortunately the local farmers and trailer owners are well aware of these prices and know the value of their second hand trailers, so that 2nd hand ones we were finding were all up in the €500 to €1100 price range.

Very smart in a coat of 'Killila Bay' Blue gloss

Then we got lucky. I had volunteered to help our friends Charlotte and Carolyn down the road to move a big heap of horse muck and, it turns out, man-of-the-house K-Dub is not only a carpenter but also a dab hand with the welder. He also hates doing garden jobs and horse muck-moving, so volunteered that if I would do the muck, he'd adapt my existing trailer into a stock trailer. Done! He has built a removable top which telescopes into slots added to the trailer walls. He has replaced my dodgy floor with decking planks and has given me a loading ramp. That is removable too. The new 'top' is the same 6 by 4 size as the original trailer, so for a roof, I can use my original 'tilt' made for the trailer by a sail-maker friend of Llew's. I have the trailer back and very smart it looks. I have given the new bare metal a coat of primer and a coat of 'Killila Bay' blue gloss. I just need to find the two reflective triangles we are sure we have somewhere, and we are done.

Sitting in the sun podding broad beans. 

I have no idea how blue Killila Bay really is - it is only a an hour away on the North Mayo coast but we've never been. I was amused by the fact that the trailer also includes some design features from Carolyn of the 'Jelly Bean Designs', maker of Em-J's funky handbag. She suggested that the grooves on the decking boards run longways for ease of sweeping out the trailer floor, but cross-wise on the ramp for extra grip on little piggy feet. I wonder if she'd give me a 'Jelly Bean Designs' logo sticker for my trailer and start a whole new range outside of bags and Christmas decs?

Some cheap old dwarf lily bulbs doing brilliantly.

Meanwhile, back at base we are well into Summer and salad production. I have finally, after several abortive years where I failed to sow or had rows of crop wiped out by the wet or the chickens, got the measure of 'successional planting' for my radishes and lettuces, so Liz has great bowlfuls to go at when she needs them, be they mixed-leaf or an old 'Brown Envelope' variety "Little Leprechaun". I have had a good year on the autumn-planted broad beans and a couple of globe artichoke plants have now come through winter as HUGE fat plants which are starting to push out the chokes we love. We have pak-choi to use in salad or stir fry. The redcurrants are almost 'there'.

Phacelia tanecetifolia planted for the honey bees; so far
we've only seen the bumbles on it.

We've been busy too in the 'pretty' bits. We have finally weeded all across the big raised bed (by the car port) and have found loads of space to put in new stuff. All the roses are going like a storm, especially the pink 'The Lover' and the Red 'Dublin Bay' in the Kitchen Garden. The pigs are thriving - they grow so fast!. The 2 youngest goslings thrive too, starting to go all long-necked and goose shaped, while their big brother 'George Junior' is quickly turning into a half-scale grown-up goose as he starts to feather up. Not a sign of wry-tail, so that was presumably a gander- or in-breeding problem.

Redcurrants nearly ready.

The bees are very active, we see a lot of coming and going but we are steeling ourselves to NOT FUSS THEM. Apparently some keen new bee keepers can't keep away and break open their hive every other day 'just to check' and the bees spend all day 'repairing the damage', re-sealing the cracks with propolis, which is to no-one's benefit. The Two Marys were very firm telling us to leave them be and restrict ourselves to weekly inspections. We have decided to do ours on Monday evenings.

Ready when you are, bees. A 'super' (Honey store) box
full of new frames.

This weeks should be a fairly quick and non-disruptive one, anyway. We just need to crack the crown board off, see if the colony is running out of space, and (if so) add the new 'super' (Honey store box) and then re-assemble and retreat. Although we are through May/June and the main swarming season, a colony can still swarm if it runs out of space, so you are advised to keep an eye and generate the extra space if they look like they are bursting at the seams. You do this by adding 'supers' (normally 3-4 but can be as silly as 10!). It is the top supers you 'steal' later in the year when you want to harvest your honey. The bee colony will need 'only' 15-30 kg of honey to get through the winter - about 2 full 'supers'. Anything else you can theoretically take without having to provide supplementary food (sugar syrup or icing 'fondant') to help them through. I have started to see 'our bees' out in the lane, a km from here, when I am walking the dogs and surveying bumble bees. There is a box on the survey form for 'Apis mellifera' - the honey bee. Tick!

Guinea fowl egg

Finally, Min the widowed Guinea fowl has come back into lay running with the hens and occasionally surprises us with an egg in one of the hen nest boxes. Her keets are also thriving in their rabbit run on the front lawn and look very much the young Guinea Fowl now rather than fluffy chicks.

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.

Meet the new family

Seem to have fallen on my feet with this new family, but it's a bit of a learning curve (ach - hate those cliches).

Human Mum and Dad - nuff said. Mad keen Westie fans; have had them for years. Used to post on the Westie chat lists. Even up loaded some pictures in the old days. Probably if you type Megan and Haggis into either Yahoo or Google, You'll get a picture of my new housemates when they were a lot younger, with one of their own pups). If you're on the Westie lists you might recall from years back, the adventures of Captain H ' Aggis, and the Lady Megan. The adventures they had (so they say) with Westies from the Deep South, Hawaii, Colorado, Pennsylvania

The Lady Megan (Dowager Duchess of Kent). 10 years old. Like all the best dogs, knows her place in the family (running it). 10 years old now so slowing up, rather stand-off ish. Tends to look down her nose at the lunatic running around yapping antics of younger dogs. Most unseemly. Uncouth! Had pups of her own in her youth, 2 litters - the web-famed "Faversham Five" and then three more the next year. All, (as is the way of these things) wrenched from her arms at 8 weeks old, (although one only went to live next door). That's probably why she's welcomed me with open arms. Took an immediate shine - follows me around, nudges me with her nose till I roll over, then licks me like my Mum. I'm gonna like it here

Haggis - big brother. Bit of an anxious boy, at 9, was a bit concerned I'd usurp his position as Favourite Son (yeah... I know), so can be a curmudgeonly old git, and grumps at me with a loud "WAFF!" if I get too insistent, or bounce too close to him. Getting used to me though, after 3 days

Mississippi - brindled cat with half a tail. Kinda tolerates me but not too close. She'll get used to the idea. Spends most of her time growling at....

Felix - black and white cat like the one on the tin. Difficult to judge. Seems to not want to know but then goes through mad half hours of teasing me by sneaking in, nicking my toy and running off again. Just wait till I can do stairs as quick as him. I'm OK going up. Not so hot on coming down.

More later. Am trying to get a picture posted