23 September 2005
THERE SEEM to have been a lot of car crashes in my life lately. First I wrote off my friend Kira’s car while pootling down the narrow lanes. Someone else came round the corner and we smashed. Then Claire, who helps look after the kids, went careering through a National Trust gate and ended up with one wheel hanging over the edge of the coast path. Both crashes have led to vast expense and enormous hassle, and we’ve had only one car for the last week. The upside is that it’s made me reflect on the absurdity and awfulness of cars. Having no access to a car as Victoria needed the other one, I decided to walk the other day to our nearby town as we needed some milk powder for Henry. It’s about five miles away, and I pushed Henry in his three-wheeled buggy. I left the house at three pm and returned at six thirty, having rambled over the most beautiful hills, dales and bridlepaths, most of which I had never seen before. We met goats in the Valley of Rocks, got lost in the woods and came across two gingerbread cottages. I bumped into our local farmer-poet, John, and had a chat about Coleridge, who was wont to ramble in these parts. During the walk I fantasised about getting a horse and using it as a practical means of transport, not just as a luxurious diversion. With a horse, I considered, I could walk for hours with very little effort. I could ride to town, tie the horse up, do the shopping and ride home. You could probably get away with drunk horse-riding, where’s the danger if it’s just walking? I could go to the pub by horse and the horse would take me home. No petrol costs, no garage costs, no car crashes which cost you over a grand to fix, no road tax, no blimmin insurance, no parking tickets. I truly believe they could be the way forward.
SO I TOOK myself down to our local stables for a riding lesson. Now, I’ve been on a horse before, and even galloped once in Mexico by mistake when the horse I was on was chased by a dog along the beach. But I am very much a beginner. Walking on the horse seems fairly straightforward, just imagine you’e Mr D’Arcy, although trotting is less easy. “You’re doing exactly what I just told you not to do!” said my instructor, as I held the reins up high in front or me. The inside of my thighs still aches and the lesson was two days ago and I must have trotted for all of two minutes. Clearly there is a lot to learn. But I will persevere. And by extraordinary chance, we have been offered a horse for the winter. A nearby stables needs a home for it till March, so we’re going to share it with a friend who lives in the village. Step one towards freeing ourselves of the evil motor car.
AFTER THE crash with the National Trust gate, I rang up the local warden and offered to pay for the gate. He was delighted with the offer, and I am going to go and get the old gate. This is part of my campaign to not pay for timber, apart from logs which I would otherwise have to poach. I thought that I could perhaps saw the gate up and make shelves out of it, or something like that. I think I like the National Trust. Also last week, I bought a huge load of logs from them, as I did last year. The man was very pleasant and I started to realise just how much good the Trust has done for the country. It was founded around the turn of the century in the middle of a huge anti-industrial and back-to-the-land movement. The idea was to protect the countryside esentially from exploitation by money-makers, and they seem to have done a great job. Just imagine what might have happened to the countryside had they never existed.
I HAVE started to use my Adana printing press. As Gav had warned me, the process of setting type, lead letter by lead letter, is very fiddly and time-consuming. I spent half a day just preparing the word “Arthur” to print, and then realised the “r” was back to front. But then yesterday I had another go and I seem to have improved: I made some headed stationery with our address printed in green on A5 pieces of paper. I am still waiting for the ink rollers to turn up, so I used a child’s ink pad to ink the letters on the press. The hardest bit of the whole operation is locking up the type. You have to surround your little block of type with lengths of wood which hold the type firm in a metal frame called a chase. This keeps the letters in the correct position and also prevents them from falling out as you operate the machine. It’s a real palaver, in short, and you can very easily see why they died a death when the computer came out. On the other hand, it was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and the results are far more beautiful, quirky, original and satisfying than anything you’d get on a laser printer.
14 September 2005
ON ONE HOT SUNNY DAY LAST WEEK, I went for a walk through the green lanes, up to the cliffs, along the coast path and through the wood. The two cats Milly and Mandy came with me on this walk. This is a strange habit of theirs. Although they pretend to be aloof and independent, you will suddenly notice that they are following you everywhere, like dogs, even to the cliffs. When you say to them, “I thought cats were supposed to be independent,” they look away, as if to say, “we just happened to be here. A mere coincidence, that’s all.” The three of us picked a big basket of blackberries in the lane, topped up with a few elderberries from the trees that grow around the house. Blackberries apparently freeze well so we should really make the most of September’s huge harvest. Up on the field by the coast path, we found four or five perfect parasol mushrooms, which I put in my basket. Mushrooms and blackberries for dinner. Milly by this stage had vanished, perhaps she’d gone back home.
On the coast path the whortleberry grows. This is a sort of bilberry which is native to Exmoor. In the olden days, the villagers used to come out with a special comb to pick the tiny berries. I scrabbled around with my fingers in at least twenty whortleberry plants but managed to find only one single whortleberry, which I ate and which was completely tasteless. I suppose it was too small to get a sense of the flavour. Where have all the whortleberries gone? I can’t work out whether I have missed the whortleberry harvest or whether it is still to come.
Further round the coast we came across a startled fawn standing right in the middle of the path. Mandy and I stood still to watch the little bambi-like thing. It ran forwards, ran backwards and ran sideways, then stopped and stared, wondering where to go. When I eventually moved forward towards it, it did one of those amazing little leaps into the air and shot round the corner.
A little further round the path, where it turns into oak wood, Mandy decided she had gone far enough and wanted to go back. I tried to explain that we were on a circular path and so in fact we were on our way home. I walked ahead and she simply sat where she was, mewing piteously. Eventually I felt sorry for her and went back to pick her up, but she kept scampering away, so I got fed up and told her she could find her own way home.
That evening there was no sign of either cat, and I began to fear for them, shivering under a gorse bush and not knowing how to get home. Everyone else was away so I was alone. I ate some of the parasol mushrooms fried in bacon fat, dried the rest, and held a little impromptu solo beer tasting session. I have recently been sent a crate of 24 Harveys ales as a thank you for giving a talk to the Headstrong Club in Lewes, home of Harveys. I tried the Tom Paine and the Armada Ale before moving on to Chimay, the one brewed by Belgian monks, and the Fuller’s new St George’s Ale. By my side I had the excellent 300 Beers To Try Before You Die by Roger Protz, so spent the evening going, “hmm, blackberry fruits on the palate, hmmm hints of apple, hmmm spicey finish, hmmm intensely hoppy” while getting completely hammered.
The cats came back the next day at about lunchtime, the clever things.
YESTERDAY the weather was good so after lunch, even though I really wanted a nap, I loaded up the wheelbarrow with hammer, nails and saw and went up to the vegetable patch in order to build a second compost bin alongside the first with a couple of old pallets. All afternoon I banged away, dismantling the pallets and then hammering in each plank in turn to make walls for the compost bin. I even improved the system for holding panels in at the front, and so now we have two giant wooden compost bins built at a cost of nought pounds. I am still not managing, though, to get the compost heated up. I turned the existing pile over with the fork and it certainly looks pretty well-rotted — bar the nappies — but it has taken months and months, and according to Lawrence D Hills in How To Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables, compost should break down in a few weeks, and the heap should get so hot that it steams and is too hot to touch. Apparently urine, grass cuttings or a stake down the middle are the answer. Clearly I am doing something wrong, and perhaps you can’t just fling household waste in a pile and hope for the best. I’m going to have to get one of those composting books, unless any readers have some tips. Truly, it is hard learning how to be peasant from scratch.
We salute our brothers and sisters in Germany:
Read all about it in the Independent
Today we release a new range of Idler t-shirts, designed by skateboarding genius Ged Wells.
Visit the Idler shop to have a look.
You’ll also be pleased to know that we have dropped the price by 25% and all t-shirts now cost just �15.
Sunday 4 September 2005
IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME since the last Country Diary. Please forgive me; I’ve been so lazy. August as a month seems particularly unsuited to any kind of labour, and we’ve just been bobbing along here, having lots of people to stay and not really doing much beyond drinking, talking, eating, sitting on the beach and putting children to bed. And the vegetable patch hasn’t demanded much work; it has just been pouring forth its produce. Firstly the peas have been a sensation; eaten raw from their pods, if caught at the right moment, ie before they get too big, are as sweet as Dairy Milk, and what’s more, kids enjoying eating them. Nature’s M&Ms, as my friend Marcel would say. The pink fir apple potatoes were fantastic although I was disappointed by the low yield. Perhaps they were planted too close together. The two courgette plants have kept up a steady supply, and they are really quite beautiful things, with those huge yellow flowers. Maybe I will grow them in the front garden next year. We’ve had quite a few carrots, although they’ve been picked by children while still small. Still, kids picking and then eating their ow carrots? You can’t really complain. Apart from rocket which grows like a weed and seems to be slug-proof, we’ve had very few lettuces. I finally got round to sowing a few three weeks ago, and have just come back from a few days away. The lovely tiny lettuce plants which I pondered with some satisfaction before I left have completely disappeared, leaving no trace and leaving me wondering whether I dreamt their presence in the first place.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE enough brussells sprouts,” is one of John Seymour’s pieces of wisdom, and I have really gone for sprouts this year. All the brassicas are doing well. The cabbages are now gone, and I have started to space out the kale, broccoli and sprouts plants. Some are over two feet tall already. My problem has been this: one of my books told me to move the young brassica plants into land vacated by early peas, but the peas didn’t vacate the land I time, leaving the brassica plants to grow too big to move. I moved them anyway, trying to lift them with as much soil as I possibly could. After a few days of wilting, they seem to have picked up again and now half the patch is covered in brassicas. This of course makes a nonsense of the idea that you can dig in the autumn, uless I am getting something very wrong. How can you dig when the groud is full of plants? Oh, the leeks, by the way, are doing fantastically. There are 38 of them out there, and although some visitors have warned me that they are planted too close together, they seem to be thriving.
THE HEDGEROWS are bursting with blackberries, thousands of blackberries, and like Flopsy and Mopsy in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, we have been eating them for tea, just raw with cream. Yum.
THERE’S BEEN NO SIGN of Mr Badger lately. We have since heard that he might be a young weak badger who has been ejected from the sett by the other badgers. That’s why he’s looking for food around domestic houses. Maybe he is just a lazy badger, who cannot be bothered to hunt food and so is using his wits to find easy nibbles.
I HAVE ORDERED a hand printing press and hope to start producing my own little leaflets and tiny books before too long. I am hoping it’s the kind of craft I will enjoy. I have to admit that the carpentry tools have lain idle for the last few months, after my early triumphs with the table, the shelves and the toy plane. Maybe it’s just not me? I sincerely hope this printing business will be me. What worries me is that supposedly you have to be quite well organised, as there will be thousands of tiny pieces of type to be kept in order. Being chaotic and disorderly by nature this aspect of the hobby gives me a slight sense of dread. We shall see. Anyway, I have found a man with a set-up to sell, an Adana Eight Five, as it is known, and I am planning to meet him in a nearby petrol station car park as he is by fantastic coincidence holidaying in Cornwall so he will be driving quite near us.
The Oasis single has just gone to number one. I offer this fact without any comment, other than it’s surely good news for idlers. What do you think?
Let us know in the new forum.
"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."