Tag Archives: Julia

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!

Baylis doesn’t make cakes

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I was walking the dogs around the village yesterday when I overheard an exchange that I have been simply burning to share with you.  So here it is:

As we ambled along, I spotted Julia the hedge fund manager jogging along in front of me.  You may remember that Julia has been jogging around the village for several months now, sometimes in company with her personal trainer who springs along lithely next to her, nearly running on the spot as Julia pounds grimly along.  Sometimes she takes her dog along for company, and often the dog walks even though Julia is running, a sight worth seeing.  One of these days she will actually participate in a charity run and I am quite sure she will make an enormous amount of money for the charity of her choice.  But in the short term I held back when I came up behind her, as no runner actually enjoys being overtaken by a dog walker.

Coming towards us in the other direction was a lovely old villager called Baylis.  I have no idea whether this is his Christian name or surname, I’ve never quite liked to ask.  But he is a real old countryman and I love talking to him because he remembers long ago very clearly.  I have listened enthralled when he told me that he remembered 30 plough horses coming to drink at the village pond, and when houses called ‘The Old Smithy’ and ‘The Old Laundry’ really were respectively a working smithy and a laundry.

Anyway, as I lurked unobtrusively in the hinterland, Julia paused as she came abreast of Baylis.  She is an organiser to her fingertips and is currently organising a village party to which she wants as many people as possible to bring a cake.  Although Baylis is unlikely to have cooked anything in his life, having been looked after first by his wife and now by his daughter, Julia just couldn’t resist a teasing little question:  “Well Baylis, are you going to cook a sponge cake for the village party?”  Baylis paused thoughtfully, rested on his stick, and raised his wonderful old wrinkled countryman’s face to hers.  “Oi would sooner clean out moi neighbour’s cess pit with moi bare ‘ands,” he said.  “Much sooner.”

So that would be a no, then.  Julia blushed and stammered and the dogs and me slipped quietly through a gap in the hedge and returned home another way.

My village, in celebratory mode

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Well, that was quite a Jubilee weekend!  For once, the animals took second place to the village goings-on.  Mind you, the various livestock did their best to keep their profile high – there is an astounding bombshell coming your way from the hen run when I have time to write it, for instance –  but they couldn’t compete against the village Jubilee party.

This took place in Maurice’s farm, in a field recently vacated by his dairy herd (nice if you were wearing white strappy sandals and forgot in an excited moment to look where you were treading) and was a wonderfully celebratory occasion.  Costumes varied from the total red, white and blue look to the ‘I’ve just stepped off my tractor and my old dad wore these same braces on Coronation Day’ look.  Both were striking, in their own way.

All the food was provided by the villagers, and there was the usual dignified scramble to get at Rachael’s quiche (excellent) and avoid Mrs Addington’s Chestnut and Lentil Loaf (unbelievable).  Fab salads and puds, the latter of which had chocolate and cream featuring heavily, because the village knows what it likes.

Then of course, this being Britain and a Bank Holiday, it rained and rapidly got extremely cold.  Julia disappeared under several layers of cashmere poncho topped with Goretex and still managed to look elegant.  Frank, who was working a heavy tweed look, was more or less untouched by the downpour.  Water streamed off him as if he were a sea lion, and he assured me that he was as warm as an unsheared sheep inside his tweed cocoon.  He would have worn exactly the same outfit if it had been a blazing hot day, and would have been equally unaffected by the heat.  Marvellous fabric, tweed.  Or possibly marvellous people, old countrymen.  Or possibly both.

Despite the weather, a great time was had by all and the party continued until late under a canopy of umbrellas and sou’ westers.  Some of us had to leave for evening milking, or to feed animals or children, and returned later.  We felt damp, British, and patriotic, and admired the Queen and the Royal Party in their barge in the rain, more than words can say.  It was all very bonding, certainly as a village and seems to be the country too.  Huzzah!  But I wish it would stop raining now…

Foxy, neighbours and Chick

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Foxy had it (them) in her after all!  She waited until the sun was shining, the grass was lushly green and the cow parsley, may and horse chestnut flowers were at their zenith, and finally got down to it.  When I saw what was going on and came back up the lane at warp speed, she was busily giving birth against a backdrop of verdant rural loveliness. It was all very artistic, and she milked it for all it was worth (pretty black sheep produces gorgeous black twins in preferred medium of extreme Cotswold rural beauty).

I fussed around, once I realised what was happening, but quite honestly she didn’t need me at any stage.  Once she was finished I picked up the lambs (soggy but sweet) and she trundled after me into the lambing shed and is now comfortably back where she was before, lounging in extreme comfort and calling for dainty meals to tempt her appetite at regular intervals.  And ivy, lots of ivy.  She’s running me ragged, and I’ll let her out very soon if the weather keeps fine.

Her twins are both completely black, one boy and one girl.  Very friendly and sweet, and I’ve already wasted far too much time playing with them.

And now I can turn my attention back on matters outside the lambing shed.  Many of my neighbours have turned bright pink in the recent fine weather, quite a startling effect when you see them en masse in the village shop, like a particularly virulent sunset.  Julia is still running, and still going (not to put too fine a point on it) extremely slowly.  She’s started taking her dog with her on a lead when she runs, and quite often he walks as she runs, which tells you something.

Frank’s one man battle against cow parsley is reaching a crescendo, and he seems to spend every daylight hour whacking furiously at billowing banks of flowers – sometimes the lane is completely carpeted with the bodies of the fallen.  But no matter how many he cuts down, there are always more.  Thank goodness, I love cow parsley.

Chick is definitely a girl, which is great.  I’ll ask Mikey to put a photo of her on the blog.  Her feathers are completely curly, and I have got a dreadful feeling that I’m going to call her Frillz.  She should be called something pretty like Annabel but every time I look at her I think Frillz.  With a Z.  You’ll see what I mean when you see her photo.

Reappearance of villagers

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Two sunny days in a row and the villagers have reappeared, shuffling blinking into the sunlight.  There was no sign of them last week, when it rained without stopping and I began to think we had arrived back from our holiday straight into a disaster scenario (VILLAGE RAIDED BY ALIENS!  WHERE HAVE THE PEOPLE GONE?)  The road was empty, the fields were empty (THE ALIENS TOOK THE CATTLE AS WELL!) and even the village shop was empty (ALIEN ABDUCTION VERY BAD FOR BUSINESS SAYS VILLAGE SHOPKEEPER (AGE 62)).

Now here they all are again.  The dairy herd has been let out from the enormous barns in which they took shelter and are thinking easy thoughts and being black-and-white in the fields.   Julia has re-started her training programme to run the half marathon.  She said that she simply couldn’t run while it was raining because it was quite honestly yucky running through mud, and didn’t do her very expensive personalised trainers any good either.    On the plus side her trainers still look as good as new, on the minus side I have to say that her running speed has gone down a few mph and she could now be overtaken by a very small child peddling slowly on a tricycle.

Frank is out in the lanes doing what he does every Spring, and what I wish he didn’t do.  He takes a swishy stick and swats off the heads of every cow parsley plant he meets.  When I first arrived here I tried to make him stop, because I love seeing the lanes bordered by a frothing mass of cow parsley and Frank must regularly cut down thousands on his walks around the village.  But I’m a newcomer and he’s been doing it all his life (it’s hard to age a countryman like Frank, but I think we’re talking at least 65 years of dedicated cow parsley bashing) and he’s not going to stop it now.

There’s been a triumphant bellow of lawnmowers as everybody tries to attack the foliage before the rain starts again.  The triumphant bellow is usually followed by expensive mechanical choking noises as the lawnmowers get a mouthful of long wet grass, wind it around their inner bits and expire.  I’ve taken off the top layer of our lawn, but I had to keep on stopping for an enormous population of frogs who seem to have come in from the ponds and decided to live dangerously in the grass instead.

But at least people are around again, and are now ready to enjoy Summer.  That’s if we get one.

Weather watch

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Just been for a walk with the dogs around the village, and notice with interest the preparations my neighbours are making for the approach of the Siberian weather, which is being currently forecasted by people who should know.

Julia has filled her beautiful Cotswold garden with new garden furniture and two enormous sun umbrellas.  I don’t think she is taking the snow warnings seriously.  Frank is still tinkering with the home-made fuel he thinks will one day make his fortune.  It is entirely constructed (by his own secret recipe) from sheep droppings from his very own ewes, and the oily smoke curling out of his chimney shows that he is working day and night to perfect it before the Big Freeze happens.  His wife Phyllis is visiting her sister in Bournemouth at the moment, and I think this is a good thing.

Mr Addington spent the whole of March telling anybody who would listen that the fine weather wouldn’t last, mark his words.  When it did last and we had weeks of glorious sunshine he felt it as a personal insult on the part of the weather systems and the BBC, combined.  So now he has invested in a very ornate weather station, which he has installed in his garden to the fascination of all passers-by (me included).  It’s got a windmill thing to show how much wind there is (currently stationary), a bucket thing to show how much rain (currently empty) and some complicated systems for measuring the pressure.  Colin, who lives close to the Addington family home, assured me that the pressure machine is currently drawing a straight line which you can see clearly if you use binoculars and sort of squint.

So there we are.  I’m just having my usual dither as to what variety of rug to put on Slip.  The medium weight one makes him sweat, but it’s slightly too chilly for him to go out in just his fur.  I’ll opt for his light weight one and wait for the first flake to fall before I rush out with his heavy weight one.  And just having just spent an hour out in it, I’d call the current weather situation in North Wiltshire as ‘pleasant’.  Long may it continue!

Life moves on …

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First of all, I was so touched and appreciative of the kind comments from people who have read about Precious’ sad end in the jaws of a fox.  Thank you so much.  Normally I’m a glass half full sort of person, but I have to admit I trailed sadly around the place yesterday missing her exotically spotted feathers (white on grey), her loud uninhibited singing, the sight of her twinkling about on her little fat feet to catch flies.  After forensics, we’ve realised that the fox climbed up the apple tree and launched itself over the top of the hen run wire to get in, which shows initiative and drive.  Getting back out with a take-away for the cubs was more of an effort and the hen run wire needed urgent repairs, now done.

Hens don’t do mourning, they take life as it is.  They liked Precious (Wenceslas adored her) but hey!  what’s for breakfast?  I thought Wenceslas might pine, but he’s taking renewed interest in the girls instead which may mean more chicks this year.

Back in the human world, the village rallied to support me, each in his or her particular way.  Frank was bracing: “To my mind, they spotted things make a heck of a racket, and anyway if you don’t eat them what’s the point?”   Mr Addington was triumphantly himself: “If you’d electrocuted the hen run fence, it would never have happened.  Can’t think why you didn’t do it years ago.”   Lovely Anna, the village postmistress, thought she might know of somebody who could supply me with fertilised guinea fowl eggs.  And Julia screeched to a thankful halt in the middle of one of her training runs (she still runs at the same speed as somebody walking briskly) and said “how DREADFUL!  How REALLY, TRULY awful!  How TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY sad!” etc until I found that I was comforting her rather than vice-versa – Precious was a good age for a guinea fowl, it would have been a very quick end, the fox probably had family issues of its own etc etc.

So what with one thing and another, I’m getting over it and by now I really should be used to poultry losses – they are an intrinsic part of poultry ownership.  But I think I’ll follow up on Anna’s suggestion of some fertilised eggs – the place is strangely quiet without a guinea fowl yelling African chants from the top of the apple tree.

To bike or not to bike – that is the question

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I was given the most beautiful bike for Christmas (ebay, one careful owner).  It’s called a Tube Rider and is turquoise and pink.  I simply love it.  The thing is that I haven’t actually taken it out of the stable it lives in yet.  This is partly because the roads have been running with liquid mud since Christmas and I couldn’t bear to see that gleaming paintwork messed up.  But I have to admit that it is partly because we live at the bottom of two hills.  They are nothing to drive up:  whizz and you’ve done them.  Walking is fine too, for some reason.  But on a bike they become the Twin Mountains of Doom and you have to do at least one of them no matter where you are heading.

My last bike was an ancient mountain bike that was covered in battle scars and had only 3 working gears out of the 21 it was born with, and I used to invariably get off and push it up the hills.  My new bike has only 7 gears, but all of them work and so I will be able to pedal to the top.  Hooray.  Today I’ve got the morning off and have got several little jobs to do around the parish – deliver a thank you card and a box of chox to Rachael the church warden who looked after the animals while we were away last weekend; buy some essentials from Anna at the Post Office; invite myself (hopefully) to fresh coffee and homemade (by housekeeper) brownies with Julia.  This and that.  It is the perfect day to buckle on the new wicker basket and set off on my beautiful bike.  The roads have even dried out.

So why is it that even as I write I know that I will use any excuse not to do it?  It’s foggy, which isn’t ideal.  But this is a very quiet road – I can get off and hide in the hedge if necessary when a car comes by.  The roads are damp but not liquid.  It’s the hills, that’s what it is.  You don’t even get a run up, you are straight on to them.  So I’d arrive in Rachael’s cottage, Anna’s shop and Julia’s glorious old rectory bright red and out of breath, which is not a cool look.  On the other hand I’d have the moral high ground and wouldn’t feel quite so guilty about those brownies.  I’ll do it.  No I won’t.  Yes I will …

Step away from the birds!

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One of my friends said the other day that anybody who reads my blog would think that I lived in a hen run.  This is of course partly true, certainly feels entirely true sometimes.  And I get endless joy from watching the poultry goings-on, and writing about them.

But of course I also live in a village.  And the inhabitants are slowly and creakily coming to life now we have intermittent bursts of sunlight and the first faint heralding of Spring.  The human population still looks a bit pale and crumpled, but they are emerging determinedly from their homes after a winter of near hibernation.  I saw several this morning as I fed the sheep, and made a note of them to prove that I can see beyond the hen house.  There was Maurice the farmer on his truly enormous tractor, ploughing the next hill into purplish red furrows.  He was surrounded by a cloud burst of seagulls.  How can they know that there is ploughing going on in land-locked Wiltshire?  All the way from the sea?  Amazing.  Then Julia came thudding past, in training for the Bath Half Marathon, her trainer springing lithely alongside her.  When Julia started training she ran slower than walking.  Now she is running as fast as quick walking.  Knowing her determination, she will be zipping along like a hare by Half Marathon Day.  And Mr Addington strode by on his daily fault-finding walk, which he has recommenced now it’s March (I can talk freely here because he doesn’t have a computer let along read a blog).  He said “Have you seen the headlines in the paper?  I’m appalled!” cast a critical eye around the field and continued on his way.  It’s a ritual I’ve grown strangely fond of, after my initial alarm.

Finally, as I was about to fill the hay rack and depart, Frank came and leaned on the gate.  Frank thinks my ewes should have lambed by now, but as my flock is the opposite of commercial I have other plans.  Which is the nicest month for a lamb to be born in, and for me to spend long hours in the field shelter chatting to the ewes and waiting to be midwife?  May.  So that’s when the lambs will arrive.  Frank is a proper shepherd and is horrified by this fluffiness, so every time I see him he says “those lambs should be here by now, so they should.  They should indeed!” and continues with variations on the theme while the ewes bounce around me, very obviously nowhere near lambing.  So there we are.  There is human life around me.  But I still love to write about the hen run!