Monthly Archives: August 2012

Which shall it be?

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We’ve had a Situation in the hen run.  It’s been developing for weeks but it finally came to a head a couple of days ago.  The problem is one which everybody who hatches out some darling little fluffy chicks will know well:  50% of them (give or take) will be hens – egg layers, cluckers, dawdlers.  And 50% will be cockerels – strutters, crowers, and (if necessary) fighters.

After a few trials and tribulations, we have ended up with 3 cockerels.  Wenceslas, who is a pacifist, and obsessive dustbather.  He never shows interest in the ladies, though the fact that most of this year’s chicks look exactly like him means that midnight bedroom creeping must go on.  Then there’s Pavlova, who was brought in as a stud cockerel when the hens kept laughing at Wenceslas.  Pavlova is a white pekin, magnificent, snowy-white (except for the muddy bits) and posturing.  He’s got an understanding with Wenceslas, and stands in one corner of the hen run waving his flags and yelling while Wenceslas is deep inside his favourite dustbath far away, presumably crooning love songs to his ladies under his breath.

And then (this is the interesting bit) there is Moomin.  He is a lavender pekin, and was given as a present with little blue Mymble, another pekin.  He arrived very young and was meant to be a little girl pekin.  Only he isn’t, he’s all Boy.  He ignores Wenceslas completely but has started to hang around Pavlova making abusive and personal remarks.  Pavlova tried rising above it, but when Moomin asked him for the 16th time who he thought he was looking at, Grandad, Pavlova couldn’t bear it any longer and went for the jugular.  Moomin put aside his virtual hoodie and Converse trainers and went right back at him, hammer and tongs.

So now everybody (except Wenceslas, who is keeping a low, low profile) is upset.  The hens are upset because they don’t like fighting.  With the possible exception of Dolly who seemed to be holding the chaps’ coats while they plugged each other and cheering them on – that girl will go far.  Pavlova and Moomin are separated and upset and are yelling obscenities at each other from their respective pens.  And I like the hens to be happy, and unhappy hens don’t lay eggs.

So when a friend mentioned that the livery yard she keeps her horse at are looking for a bantam cockerel to live there with 3 new wives and provide the stabled horses with something to look at, I got my bid in quick.  But which shall it be?  The jury is out, but I’ll have to make my mind up asp …

More scarecrows ..

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‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men go aft agley’ as they say (or would say if they were Robert Burns and feeling poetic).  So this morning when the sun made a rare and welcome appearance, I thought it would be nice to have a potter around the village on Slip.  It’s been extraordinarily wet, even for a Bank Holiday Weekend, and we haven’t been out much lately by mutual consent.

So I saddled him up, and we set off up the lane, so far so good.  Then we met our first scarecrow.  I’ve written previously about our annual village scarecrow competition, and what a mixed blessing the entrants are to those with sensitive horses (Slip).  Anyway, this first scarecrow was dressed as a fisherman and standing nonchalantly at the top of the lane and Slip decided it was undead and the whole village should be roused.

After a lot of huffing and puffing and snorting and stamping we managed to get past it and proceeded onto the next scarecrow which was an Olympic style gymnast doing the splits along the top of a dry stone wall.  At this stage Slip forgot his sensible quarter horse Dad and threw straight back to his beautiful but passionate Arabian Mum.  Tail in the air, eyeballs independently swivelling, ears so far forward they nearly met his nose.  It was all wonderfully exotic and exciting but it was nothing like the early morning amble I’d had in mind.

We got past the gymnast, and then the rower scarecrow, and then the podium with 3 scarecrows on it (this year’s batch of scarecrows has a strong Olympic theme) but Slip’s undoing was the scarecrow beach volleyball player.  I was just thinking what a remarkable amount of straw had been stuffed into a very small swimsuit when Slip had jumped straight across the road and we were unexpectedly palpitating in the drainage ditch.

That was the end of my attempt at a peaceful ride.  We tiptoed home by the quietest lane in the district (just one dalek scarecrow, which Slip went past in 10 foot leaps).  And we decided between ourselves that from now until the end of the competition we will ride only on the distant and lonely hills and steer well clear of the village.  Because, as Slip was trying to tell me all morning, it has been taken over by aliens and it really isn’t safe.

Semi-holiday week inc Book

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This week is a semi-holiday week.  The plan was to base ourselves in beautiful rural surroundings (here) while taking the opportunity to explore locally, chill out and invite friends over for BBQs while still being available for our livestock.  It’s sort of happening, though there is slightly more rain and less sun dappled relaxation opportunities than I envisaged.  Here is a quick round up of what’s going on:

Book.  I’ve just received the advance copy and, casting modesty to the four winds (not easy for a nicely brought up rurally based Brit), I’m THRILLED with it!  Looks nice, feels nice, smells nice, also available in ebooks.  You get the idea.  When the time comes that it hits the book sellers (17 Sept, also Mikey’s birthday – yay!) and any of you might invest in a copy I’d just love to know what you think of it.  Especially if you like it!

Horses/sheep.  All as fat as butter, but that doesn’t stop them yearning over the fence for the lush grass the other side.  Yesterday Harry yearned so much that the fence he was yearning over gave up the unequal struggle and collapsed.  Harry ploughed through the shattered remains and stuffed himself on mega grass.  The sheep followed in their own particular brand of stiff-legged 4-pronged jumps.  Slip, a Good Boy, stayed the other side of the fence and bellowed for help.  We heard Slip (brass bands aren’t in it when Slip is in full voice), grabbed Harry and the sheep and rigged up a temporary fence.  Now we’ve got to return with fencing posts, hammers etc and do a proper job, because Harry is built like a buffalo and wants back in, and the sheep are egging him on.

Geese.  Dreadful.  They got onto the road a yesterday and chased the postman.  I’ve put a large notice on the gate reminding everybody that if it’s not kept shut, we won’t receive any more mail.

Hens.  Fab.   Wenceslas’ girls are particularly pretty, a mass of frilly feathers and very friendly.

Village.  Empty.  As if all the inhabitants have been beamed up by aliens.  Actually, most of them are in Greece.

Swallows.  Hundreds of them up above the stables, making noisy travel plans.  I find it most unsettling and wish I was heading for the sun too.  Ah well, I hope wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, you’re having a lovely week and have a great weekend.

A designer hen dream fades ..

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I have a very glamorous, very urban friend (yes, I know it sounds unlikely but we’ve known each other for years and I’m very fond of her).  Anyway, Deb decided that she wanted to keep hens.  She’d read some lifestyle magazines that showed beautiful people drifting through orchards with hens watching them admiringly, and she fancied the idea of strolling out into her dew-spangled garden in the early morning and collecting some organic eggs.

Knowing her, I advised strongly against it and said I’d give her organic eggs from my gang.  But it was no good: Deb had dreamed the dream and wanted the reality.  So she ordered a designer henhouse complete with everything.  Faint but pursuing I suggested that she might like a couple of fancy bantams to put in her new henhouse – they may not lay much but they look great and I could have chosen her some placid ones.  But no, the henhouse included two hens, and those were the ones she was going to have.  She hadn’t yet met them but they would be called Lavinia and Hebe.  And it was all going to be simply perfect.

Some men came and built the designer henhouse in her garden, a matter of clipping together plastic panels, drinking tea, and presenting her with a travelling box containing two hens.  And there the problems started.  Deb opened the box and Lavinia and Hebe leaped out and raced into the furthest depths of the garden, with screams and feather-shedding.  The men caught them and stuffed them into the designer hen house, drank more tea and left hurriedly.  They could see trouble ahead.

Lavinia and Hebe turned out to be an ill-assorted pair of stubby brown toughs who loathed each other on sight.  When they had finished attacking each other, they each went to impress their personality on the designer henhouse.  Lavinia raked out the nesting material with strong, scaly legs while Hebe dug untidy holes through the gaps in the predator-proof mesh on the floor of the run.  They laid eggs in random places as the mood took them, most of which were impossible to reach from the henhouse door.  And then Deb discovered that hens do messes.  And the slide-out easy-clean tray in the henhouse was just the start of it.  Lavinia and Hebe seemed to be on a dirty protest, and spattered the place.  And every time Deb wanted to drift out in a flowing lace smock and play with her hens, it was raining.

She asked me over for coffee and advice.  When I arrived, Lavinia and Hebe were stalking around the run occasionally launching hammer-like pecks at each other from muddy beaks.  Some unloved eggs were lying about.  The pristine plastic of their house was beginning to look a bit seedy.  In fact the whole thing was, as Deb said, simply gross.

So I spent yesterday dismantling the designer house and run while Deb went to a spa to recover.  I’ve brought it home and I am thrilled with it.  And Lavinia and Hebe have gone to a new non-designer home in a friend’s farmyard.  The resident cockerel is a lovely big Brahma called George.  I wish him luck – he’s going to have his work cut out with that pair of scary mamas.

The scarecrows are coming!

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The village has just entered a trying time in its annual cycle for anybody who has a sensitive horse and attempts to ride it around the lanes (me, for example).  Slip is a fab horse and I love him, but he is the most sensitive thing I have ever met.  All summer he has been noticing and horrifying himself with puddle dragons, and shadow dragons, and the seldom met but deeply ferocious leaf dragons (it’s the way they look at you).

So he doesn’t need any help to make the most mundane and ordinary amble around the lanes into a highly exciting, sweaty-palmed, nerve-jangling adventure.  If you watched the Olympic dressage and saw the bit where the horses did the piaffe (I think it’s called the piaffe – the knees in the air, jogging on the spot with attitude one) that’s Slip when he’s noticed the previously unknown pot-hole dragon, and it’s about to pounce.

So it’s with modified rapture that I noticed the annual scarecrow competition getting under way extra early (goodie!)  Every year the village has a scarecrow competition, proceeds to local charities, and it’s good fun.  We’re entering one ourselves.  But the trouble is that they are really scary to Slip – not dragon-in-a-puddle scary but GRACIOUS HEAVENS HAVE YOU SEEN THAT??? LET’S FLEE THE COUNTRY NOW!!! scary.

Our villagers are nothing if not imaginative when it comes to designing what they hope will be the winning entry.  We get very few boring old bird frighteners.  Our scarecrows climb up ladders, lean out of windows and (regrettably) we even had one mooning over a wall last year (it’s amazing what you can do with a couple of melons).  And Slip is terrified by every single one of them.  The competition doesn’t take place until mid-September, so I’m usually safe till late August.  But this year, guess what?  We came around a corner, all unknowing, and there was the first scarecrow in situ.  And it was a cyclist.  But it wasn’t moving.  Because it was a scarecrow.  And Slip went AAAAARRRGGGHHH!

I got him past it eventually.  But I know, and Slip knows, that it’s the first of many.  So either (a) I’ve got to give him a holiday in his field until late September.  Or (b) go out and face them, man-to-man.  Horse-to-scarecrow.  It’s going to be (b).  I’m getting psyched up already, “come on Slip, scarecrows are our friends”.  Yeah right, if you see a bright orange horse in North Wiltshire over the next month, and it’s travelling at the speed of light, that’ll be Slip, post-scarecrow.  I just hope I’ll be there too, still clinging on!

Olympic fever hits the village!

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Olympic fever has finally hit our village.  It all started when Mr Addington put a very small Union flag in the plant pot that he has placed on his verge to defend it from the rampant tractors that roar around our lanes.  The flag really was very small, and placed at exact right angles to the plant pot, but it was Mr Addington’s equivalent of a marching brass band playing ‘Chariots of Fire’ complete with majorettes twirling the Olympic colours.

Next up was Julia, the hedge fund manager, who went to visit the Velodrome, watched Victoria Pendleton power to a gold medal and was inspired.  And if you are Julia, being inspired means going shopping.  So nobody was really surprised when she appeared in the village cruising along on a wafer-thin road bike, complete with lycra and a space-age cycling  helmet.  The problem was that her new cycling shoes were firmly clipped into her pedals and for the first few days she couldn’t stop.  “I can’t stop!” she’d wail as she was borne past the onlookers outside the village Post Office.  “I can’t stop!” she’d scream as she pedalled firmly past people she really wanted to stop and chat to.  Presumably she must have stopped when she got home, but she wasn’t much fun to be with until she discovered how to twist her shoes out of their prisons on the pedal.

She hasn’t got it right yet.  Frank and me were chatting in the lane this morning and Julia appeared on the horizon, peddling vigorously.  She cruised to an elegant halt alongside us, failed to disengage her foot and toppled sideways onto one of the steep banks that line our lanes.  Only her pride was hurt, but I don’t think the cycling craze will last far beyond the current Olympics.  We retrieved her from the long grass and sent her on her way.  “All the gear and no idea,” grumbled Frank.  “She’ll be over again at the next pothole, see if she doesn’t!”

Frank is a grump at the moment because he missed the only decent weather for making hay we’ve had this year, visiting his wife’s relations.  Now he’ll have to buy some in from Maurice the farmer, and Maurice will gloat.

Maurice is having his own private mini-Olympics at the moment.  I was walking the dogs past his farmyard a couple of days ago, and watched him heaving a heavy trailer up onto his tractor’s towing bar.  After a couple of false starts he got it in place and leaped to his feet, arms upstretched:  “YES IT’S A GOLD!!  HE’S DONE IT!!” he yelled.  Then he saw me and got all bashful.

Long may the Olympics reign, it’s doing us all around here a power of good!

Whippet getting closer …

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I went to meet Sweep today, the future mother of my whippet puppy.  She is silky, sleek and inclined to be embarrassed.  She admitted, bashfully, that yes she’d been to see Leo (potential daddy whippet) and yes he was seriously gorgeous, golly yes he really, really, was.  Really, really, spiffing, actually.  He was stripey and with a long sort of nose that said something special to her.  And you should have seeeen his lovely crinkly ears!

Then she added that the puppies (more blushes) would be due at the end of September, and broke off for a short gambol around the lawn.  I chatted to her owners about boring stuff like pedigrees (none) and prices (reasonable).  They asked, and you never count eggs before they are hatched so this is all hypothetical, what would be my preferred whippet colour if there’s a choice and would I prefer a boy or girl?  And I answered that what I would like most of all is the whippet puppy that decides it wants to be my whippet puppy.  Because whippets are a bit like that – they choose their person, and once chosen they don’t shift much.

Then Sweep returned from her quick wall-of-death act around the garden and, after thought, came and sat next to me on the sofa and asked me a few questions of her own.  Would I be lovely to her little girl/boy (yes); had I had a whippet before and did I understand about whippets (yes); and did I have other dogs and things to be friends for a little whippet (yes, two Labradors and an unlimited number of Things).

It was a good point, because a whippet is as different to a Rottweiler or a Jack Russell terrier as (using an Olympic theme) a gymnast is different to a shot putter or a sprinter.  All lovely, but different.  Whippets have tissue-thin coats, beautiful to stroke but hopeless in deep prickly undergrowth that a spaniel would hardly notice.  They are dogs of the armchair and the bed and definitely not dogs you would leave in an outdoor kennel.  Whippets bow and curtsy and run in circles when they are playing.  Labs crash into each other and then roar with laughter.  My Labs are jolly dogs, friendly and extrovert.  Whippets tend to take their time getting to know people, and prefer a Special Someone.

I’ve been longing for a whippet ever since my last one, Thistle, died at a great age.  And now it’s all up to Sweep but I’m soooooo excited!

A fun morning on the smallholding

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Our main field usually contains the following:  Slip (horse) mild-mannered but sensitive; Harry (horse) equine sofa in build and temperament; Lupin, Foxy, Coco, Brazil (sheep) plus random lambs.  Yesterday morning, very early, I looked out to discover that it contained an unknown Highland mare and foal and absolutely nothing else.

I raced out to the field at about the same time that the sheep reappeared in a tight flock, going like the clappers back through a gap between my field and our neighbours’, where no gap was meant to be.  In the distance but unseen I could hear Slip having nervous hysterics.  This was not how I had intended to start my day.

I rapidly discovered that the gate to the next door field had been pushed over (I suspect Harry rubbing his tail against the bars, he’s a big chap and the gate probably couldn’t take the strain), and every equine within sight had decided to change fields.  Then they all got very excited, and as I didn’t want an Incident I quickly pulled the gate upright and tied it shut.

After a texting conversation with my neighbour I learned that the mare and foal (Morag and Mabel) had just arrived from Scotland, and that my neighbour was at a show all day so couldn’t help.  Morag was having the best morning of her life, and now zoomed over to interview my sheep, who did a starburst and disappeared at speed to all points of the compass.  Meanwhile Slip continued to bellow from a distant field – he likes the idea of going somewhere new, but actually in his heart he is a home-boy.  Then my geese heard the sounds of stress and destruction and sailed in under the fence to improve the shining hour by chasing any sheep or horse that came near them.

At this point it started to rain heavily.  I’ll spare you more details, but I went next door, caught Harry who was doing his sofa-impression in the middle of the field then caught Slip who was quivering in a corner, and led them back by the road.  I managed to trap the sheep in another of my fields and shut the gate before they could all rocket out again, and I took the gate down so that Morag and Mabel could go back into their own field.  And I managed to tempt my honking, flapping geese back into their orchard with some corn.  And it took me the entire morning.  And, to cut a long story short, this is why I didn’t blog yesterday!

Lock up your lupins #2

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I’ve long been an admirer of our local bush telegraph – the speed and precision with which hot news is disseminated throughout the village, and I’ve written about it before.  So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I ambled into the village shop and met Mr Addington with his outraged expression firmly in place.

“Scandalous!” he said, “I was appalled to hear about What Has Happened!”  I really didn’t know what he was on about, and stood there looking clueless.  “Your Lupin,” said Anna the postmistress helpfully.  “We’re all really shocked.  It was such a beautiful pink one, too.”  Then a dear old man whose name I don’t know joined in:  “Us reckons ‘a was Frank nicked that,” he said.  “Frank likes lupins.”

Well goodness me.  I was shaken but not stirred by the theft of my biggest lupin on Sunday night (see previous blog).  It was sad to see my flower bed with a gaping hole in the middle of it, but when you come down to it – it was only a lupin.  And now it seemed that the entire village had been chewing the hideous crime over ever since, and naming names.

Which shows that if you like keeping yourself to yourself, and head below the parapet, and playing your cards close to your chest, you are better off not living in a small English village.  Or at least our one.  Because your every move, and thought, and deed will be generally known as soon as you’ve made, or thought, or done it.

As it happens, I like the local support.  So I agreed with Mr Addington that it was scandalous indeed, and that from now on we must all lock up our lupins.  And comforted Anna by saying that although I was momentarily surprised by the theft, I had got over it.  And now I know that the dear old man is called Rich, and has a long-term low-level war with Frank, and tends to blame everything on him from this summer’s rain to (for instance) local lupin theft.

The story has a happy ending.  I’ve bought an enormous new lupin from the local farmshop, price £6.50, and planted it in the big hole.  It looks very much at home there, and my fingers are crossed that by next year some passer-by will again warm my cockles by congratulating me on a ‘good show of flowers’ or some similar wild effusion.