The Idler

The Men From QI Come To Exmoor, Friday 16 November

I’m pleased to announce that John Lloyd and John Mitchinson of TV’s QI are coming down to our village hall to give a talk.

John Lloyd is QI’s producer and he also produced Blackadder, Spitting Image and Not The Nine O’Clock News. John Mitchinson is QI’s Director of Information and he co-wrote the half-million-selling QI Book of General Ignorance and the newly released QI Book Of Animal Ignorance.

The talk takes place at Hannington Hall, in Martinhoe, which is located off the A39 by Woody Bay in North Devon. The date is Friday 16 November. Doors open at 7.30pm and tickets cost £5 each.

Click here to buy your tickets or go to Waterstones in Barnstaple or Pure Retail Therapy in Lynton.

TOM HODGKINSON

A Country Diary: 59

30 October 2007

DISASTER WITH THE pigs. Over half term we went away for a week to visit relatives, and we left the pigs in the charge of our neighbours. When we returned there was a rather stern note on the kitchen table from one neighbour telling us that the pigs had undermined the foundations of the other neighbour’s garden, he was not pleased about it and she would now hand responsiblity back to us. I took round a bottle of wine and apologised. The other neighbour told me that there would be a cost as he would need to repair his wall. It seems that he and a friend had been in the pig pen moving a fence in an effort to try to stop the pigs from causing further damage. Strange, we thought, that these things happen whenever you go away. The last time we left the pigs in the care of a housesitter, they escaped from their pen. Well, Bernard had the answer. Bernard is the Rayburn man and comes from an old Devon family. His dad used to keep pigs. And by chance, Bernard had been fixing our Rayburn here during the pig panic, as he called it. He said it was a simple case of the pigs being hungry. If they had been well stuffed, they would not have bothered uprooting the wall, in their search for worms to eat. He was right: I inspected their living quarters and they’d eaten every last scrap of their bedding straw, meaning they must have been absolutely famished, Well, I have now put up an electric fence along one side of the enclosure. You just run the wire a few inches off the ground to prevent the pigs sticking their mighty noses under it. I don’t think there was any real danger of them undermining the neighour’s garden any more, but at least he can see that I am considering his wishes. And there are only two weeks to go to slaughter, so it’s time to start stuffing their piggy faces with grub. By the way, did I mention that we have named them, Gnasher and Rasher?

THE COCKEREL had also disappeared on our return. As had the last remaining rabbit, Felicity. The back yard is now an even lonelier place than when we left it. No chickens, no rabbits. I wonder if the predators can somehow sense when the owners are away? Next time, we’re going to get a housesitter and not impose on the neighbours. What makes it all the worse is that one of the neighbours is vegetarian. Otherwise we would have been able to give her a lot of pig products by way of thanks and apology.

THE DEATHS on the farm have led us to consider bringing in a dog. One neighbour advised that a dog might act as a deterrent to the fox, and I’ve always rather fancied a lurcher. In fact, lurchers are the only dog I really like. All other dogs seem pathetic and whingey to me. But the noble lurcher, as long as we trained him to keep away form the cows, might be a useful addition to the menagerie and a good companion. And a dog might encourage us to get out a bit more: sometimes days pass and I barely leave the house, which is crazy as we’re surrounded by some of the msot beautiful landscape in the country.

IN THE GARDEN I mulched one of the beds with a nice thick lay of old straw from the henhouse. I remember reading in Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution that he maintains the fertility of his fields simply with straw covered with a little poultry manure. We picked the last of the purple beans. The cabbages are growing, but very slowly. There are a few sprout-like objects appearing on the Brussells sprouts plants. Overall the thing still looks a mess and I resolve at least to smarten up the pathways this winter. I also resolve to make the veg patch far more productive next year. I am told that the answer is slug pellets.

ENDS

A Country Diary: 58

THERE’S BEEN more death on the farm. The fox came back and took all the hens, leaving only the young cockerel, who now wanders around lone and forlorn, with only pigs, a rabbit and the cats for company. Often I see him hanging around by the gate to the pigs’ enclosure, as if chatting to the pigs. he has started to practice cock-a-doodle-dooing, and hasn’t yet quite got the hang, but his squawky attempts are touching to hear. We suspect also that one of the rabbits has disappeared, Lizzie Molly Flower Fast Bunny. She’s not been seen for over a week, and I remember seeing a buzzard hanging around about a week ago. It was sitting on the wire but flew off when I approached. I imagine it was deliberately hunting poor Lizzie. This leaves the remaining bunny, Felicity, without company, although yesterday I did see a local wild rabbit sitting in the middle of the yard. Maybe he had come a-wooing? So the back yard, which used to be so lively in the early evenings, when all the animals would come out and sit around with each other, is now bereft. It is a very hard thing to lose all those animals. Not only because you had come slightyl attached to them, but also because somehow the deaths make you feel like you have failed as a smallholder. Certainly, the systematic chicken removal made me want to bring back hunting. What’s wrong with hunting? We need to keep these dastardly foxes away from our food sources. At school in the ukulele class, I asked the kids foradvice. “Get yourself a shotgun licence,” suggested one ten-year-old. Good advice, I thought. I quite fancy a shotgun. Now I have proved to be successful at killing mice with an air rifle (yes, I know they were in a barrel, but still) I feel like an upgrade might be in order.

THE PIGS have presented no real problem. In fact, as animals go, they couldn’t be easier. They just need feeding and watering twice a day. The difficulty is the amount of food to give them. Certainly they have had a varied diet: nettles, the tops of roots, cabbage leaves, pig nuts, rolled barley, maltings from the brewery, all our scraps, plums, acorns, large quantities of apples (there are so many apples around right now, at the homes of friends that it makes me wonder why we ever buy them). But they always seem extremely hungry when we feed then. And do they perhaps look just the teeniest, tiniest bit scrawny? Perhaps that’s just their way. They’ve got about a month to go, so perhaps now is the time to start really piling it on, to get that nice layer of fat.

THE TOMATOES have been a disaster, as usual. I don’t know why I bother. I spent the whole summer watering them, feeding them, training them, tying them to their poles. And now they reward me with a handful of small green tomatoes per plant. I brought them in to ripen, on a piece of string tied in front of the kitchen window, but they seemed instead just to rot. So we gave them to the pigs. Never again. Not unless I have a greenhouse. Or maybe some outdoor ones in the veg patch that will look after themselves.

ELSEWHERE I would say the following: leeks good, very good. Some are ready to eat. The parsnips look healthy and I will start digging them up in a couple of weeks time. I have ten Brussells sprouts plants on the go. They are looking vigorous but perhaps not very tall. But then perhaps they have another couple of months to go. Little sprouts are beginning to form. Strawberries: never again. I’m going to dig them up and plant them wild around the treehouse and just forget about them. They occupy all that space all year and then when they do start producing, they are all stolen or hollowed out by pesky creatures.The French climbing beans were all right and so were the courgettes. In fact, there are still courgettes coming from the plants. Dead easy. I’ve just sowed a load of lettuce so maybe that will work. I put a window frame on legs over the patch as a kind of cloche. The chard, which is dotted around the place, is growing fine and there are patches of rocket here and there. The horseradish looks huge. There are four broccoli plants which look very miserable follwing severe caterpillar attack, but I hope they’ll make it. The nasturtiums are still in flower and producing hundreds of seeds, so I will leave those to self-seed next year. Nasturtiums are a delight: the easiest thing in the world. I’ve been spreading horse manure, chicken manure and straw over the beds. Maybe with another good mulch in spring, this will be enough to maintain the fertility. The apsargus patch looks very miserable indeed: four spindly wisps have survived and there is no sign of the other six crowns I planted earlier in the year. Time now to make a seed order and get those broad beans into the ground. My other plan is to go much bigger on herbs and keep more herbs in the front garden, particularly parsley. You would have thought she’d have been quite pleased with the endless supply of marjoram, mint, fennel, sage, camomile and chives but no, that’s not enough, she wants more, more, more. Women, never happy, eh?

Idler Party, Wednesday 17 October

Please come to a party to celebrate the launch of Idler 40: Carnal Knowledge.

The party takes place at the Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, London N6, and doors open at 8pm.

Live on stage for your entertainment, we present:

MIK ARTISTIK’S EGO TRIP

LUKE WRIGHT

and

THE IDLER UKULELE BAND

So that’s this Wednesday, 8pm, at the Boogaloo. We’ll see you there.