Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Stuck in the service department today. Free coffee and WiFi does not mitigate against the mind-numbing boredom. Every 10 minutes are punctuated by reassurances that they are just about done and the car will be ready. Finally after 6 hours this became true.  Even the Daily Mail becomes readable in time.

"Quiet desperation is the English Way"

Not as uneventful as we thought.

I thought that we had avoided any major damage from the winds. I was not right. Our neighbour lost four large trees (beech and birch) which fell crossing and blocking the road and taking our fence with it. He has cleared the road and at the weekend we will cut up the remaining.

Wind

The end of the festive season was marked by high winds. Gale and storm force winds raged though the night and unfortunately continued when folk were due to drive back home.

So far, every time we have travelled between Scotland and Wales the weather has done its best to make it difficult with either winds or snow and ice. Hopefully, as winter ends, we might start to have easier journeys both for ourselves and our visitors.

We seemed to be lucky and avoided any significant damage.The hen house did become al fresco accomodation for a period but it has been repaired in advance of our poultry coming home this week.

A few trees did come down in the woods and in the garden. However, this latter damage did help expand our growing wood store. The new saw is still working well and we will hopefully have a good supply of seasoned wood in a few years time. There seems to be quite a bit of arguament about covering wood to be seasoned I had decided that for the first cord I will try with stacking indoors and that following this we could try with an outdoor site. However, after reading this page I am going to have to move my nascent pile

The rain has largely precluded any further work in the vegetable garden but it is still early days. Fortuitously, in the delay I have uncovered two large compost heaps which are ready to be dug in

The first fortnight

We have survived our first fortnight. We have moved in, without furniture which remains in storage, and have started to find out how things work. The house is sited jnside its land and the fields are clearly going to require sheep, or some other ruminants, to help us keep them in control.


The views are better than I remembered them with good aspects over Cadair Idris.

There have been a number of urgent tasks. We have started to look at our land and size up sites for a vegetable garden. We have discovered that the soil is largely clay so it will require quite a bit of work. We will need to work in a lot of organic matter into raised beds.

The first steps in this reminded me how difficult clay is to dig and prompted the thought that we might consider pottery as an alternative.

Most of the manuals suggest that, with enough work, clay soils can be fertile but they generally do suggest it is a major undertaking. We will need to look at local sources of manure.

We have made the hen-house so that we can arrange the flittings of our hens.  This came as a flat pack system and was remarkably easy to put up and much cheaper than the ones in the stores.


The shock of the move for the hens might be lessened when they discover that we intend them to share their new home with a cockerel.

The next major task has been to secure fire and wood. It prove very easy to set up the stoves and these have been very effective at bumping out heat. However, the collecting of wood has been much harder. 

A new axe made the felling of some trees reasonably easy work but we spend two days cutting this into a third of a cord. This work was dreadfully strenuous and slow. We alternated between the bow saw and, in desparation, an axe. However, after a trip to the local store and the purchase of a new saw we discovered the importance of a sharped and clean blade. Now we were slicing through logs like butter. A bad workman may blame his tools but bad tools do make a crap workman.

Just weeding in the rain.

One of the jobs I least look forward to is weeding the drive; pulling out recalcitrant dandelions and other long-legged weeds is extremely irritating. You pull and pull but the roots stick in the ground and you are left with a handful of leaves for your effort. Usually I tried to make this less unpleasant by choosing a pleasant day and working while listening to the radio. However, the best day to tackle this is actually when it is raining or it has just rained. The weeds have less of a grip in the damp ground and give up the fight much more easily. Pulling is less effort and is rewarded by long trails of satisfying root after the tug. So waterproof headphones are the next investment.


Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I re-read this book on a whim and I am immensely glad that I did. I recall enjoying the book as a 15 year old boy but it is clear that most of it went over my head. I suppose expecting an adolescent male to see the horror in ready sex with pneumatic women was unlikely, and he was further not likely to recoil at the idea of easy access to mind altering drugs which gave free access to happiness. The true warnings, which have proven uncannily accurate, needed some tears and maturity to understand.


Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down by Nicey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very enjoyable and surprisingly informative. However, it fails to answer the question as to whether the biscuit is simply NICE or whether it hails from the South of France.




The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is surprising how little that this book has dated in the two generations since it was released. The dangers of planned obsolescence remain as important as when he coined the term. We are now all too painfully aware of the risks of our excessive consumption on the finite resources of our planet and the consequences of the increased waste.

Many of the trends he predicted have proven to be correct and unfortunately the depressing effects on personality and culture seem to be taking place.


Maigret and the Idle Burglar by Georges Simenon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Maigret at his best. Humane and gentle and clearly on the side of the poor and suspicious of the intents of the rich. This is almost Maigret by Chandler, but still firmly set in a clearly recognizable Paris.





50 Big Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An ideal bathroom book. Short chapters just long enough for an average visit to the toilet. Basically superficial treatments of the major philosophical ideas but basically sound descriptions.

Tethered by Amy MacKinnon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I do not understand the extremely high ratings for this book. It was not that I found it a bad book but rather a rather mediocre book, neither one thing nor another - not really crime, not really supernatural thriller.


The plot seemed very predictable and I found some of the literary devices annoying, the bracketed characteristics of flowers added very little to the story and became rather annoying after a while.


There were passages which showed that the author can really write very well, but these were rather few and I was glad when the whole thing was tied up at the end, though this wasn't soon enough.


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Windy Meat

The garden has been quite productive over the past month or so. The best performers have been the potatoes, broad beans and onions. Therefore .. ..

this month I have been mainly eating beans, onions and potatoes.


This is not as bad as it sounds as they are the staples for many meals. A new recipe we found very edible was that below. This was so good that there are no photographs - as it did not hang around long enough.

Slice 2 onions, 1 lb of potatoes and one aubergine.
Crumble 4 oz of cheese. Dice 6 rashers of bacon
Use 2/3rds of this mixture in layers in a casserole.
Then lay a tin of topped tomatoes and some oregano on top.
Use the remaining 1/3rd of the mixture to make the top layers.

Bake for 1 hour at gas mark 4 then uncover for a further 20 minutes.








Robin Ince's Bad Book Club: One Man's Quest to Uncover the Books That Taste Forgot by Robin Ince

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is one of the funniest books I have ever read. At times embarassingly funny as it provoked laughter that was impossible to suppress - milk through the nose type of laughter



Excellent and also educational, providing a service by signposting books to avoid, well recommended



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A timely reminder ..

The riots and looting in our cities in England has been a timely reminder that I remain keen to leave the urban landscape and head to the country. It is difficult to watch what happened and fully appreciate the changes that are happening in our society. There seemed to be an outburst of greed and violence much greater then we had ever seen before. People seemed truly shameless, there seemed no self control or awareness of others.

I suppose we are reaping what we sowed; our years of tolerating and promoting avarice, indulgence, and ego- centric celebrity have caught up with us. We not only forgot the seven deadly sins but promoted them - lust, greed  and gluttony were clearly promoted in our mainstream media, sloth was not a sin on the welfare state, vainglory was a key part of our celebrity culture, and envy and wrath were well represented positively in our media. Nothing now is wrong, nothing should stand in the way of our consumption and woe betide any fool who stands between me and my plasma TV.

While we will all get angry and demand that people play for this we have to think what we can do to improve our culture. In addition to what the state does to reduce inequality we have to look at what we can do personally. Just as we won't tolerate racism in public we should start to criticise the crass and unethical. We should switch of 'Shameless' as it is no more than misguided pornography for the middle-class, mute out N.W.A. , 50 Cent and the rest as it glorifies violence, zap MTV and shopping channels with their incessant promotion of bling and consumption, stop 24 hour shopping, burn celebrity magazines instead of trees, laugh at the person that needs "me time", and the list goes on and on.

All of us need to reconsider how we think and feel, for those of us with kids it is infinitely more important.

Despondently yours ... ..





My Epileptic Lurcher by Des Dillon
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Dya like nugs. Daddymummy like nugs. Nugs doing no no things. Bitey bitey no no. Good writer use all words, biggy big words and wee totty words. Book writer no use all words. He no likey grammer and stuff. This are big bookybook and only short storywory. You not likey this review - then avoid this book  like the plague


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