A Country Diary 83
MAY HAS come at last, the merry month of May, and I have bought a copy of Thomas Tusser’s One Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, first published in the 16th century. Tusser himself was rather a comical and even sad character.
A Country Diary 81
Problems with Wood
OVER THE LAST two months, we have been mainly concerned with keeping warm. Now that we have two wood-burning stoves, writes Tom Hodgkinson, the amount of work for me in wood-chopping and preparation has nearly doubled.
The major problem has been the wood supply. The wood I bought this time last year had all [...]
Country Diary 81
ONE MORNING IN MID OCTOBER, I DECIDED THAT I could save a fortune by brewing my own beer. Right now I am spending anything from £1.20 to £2 per bottle of fine ale, and it’s all adding up to a considerable outlay. So I took myself off to the local homebrew shop. I was looking [...]
Country Diary 80
IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN, not much is happening apart from nasturtiums. There are nasturtiums everywhere: yellow, red and orange. Such a fantastic flower. Very easy to grow, nice to look at and delicious to eat. The pods can be pickled in jam jars for a caper substitute. And at a time when there is little [...]
Country Diary 79
IT‘S BEEN A LONG COLD miserable summer. We took a three week road trip around the UK, putting on events at festivals, visiting friends and family and staying for a week on a fruit farm in Norfolk. On arrival home in mid-August, the weather stayed bad. The problem with going away is that the veg [...]
A Country Diary 78
2 July 2008
THE CROWS HAVE been irritating me. The sound they make is deeply unpleasant, a kind of mocking croaking, as if they are laughing at you. They attack smaller birds and do damage to the vegetable patch. So I have been trying to shoot them. But they are crafty: there they all are, in [...]
A Country Diary 77
THE ALAN METHOD for successful chicken keeping has been a great success. Since moving the feed bins out of the henhouse, and locking them in till one o’clock, and disturbing any other stray nests, we have been averaging six eggs a day. Arthur is already salivating at the extra income this could give him. If [...]
A Country Diary 76
WE CAME HOME the other day to find that Milly the cat had brought home a little wild bunny. Presumably she intended to kill it and eat, but when we arrived, she was doing a bit of laid back torturing and tormenting prior to moving in for the kill. The bunny was perfectly alive. It [...]
A Country Diary 75
I’VE JUST read a diary entry I wrote for 15th March, but never posted. It makes for rather depressing reading: “Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Children and wives wreck everything… the pony is just an expense and a hassle, and now we’ve got this new puppy. Do the children look after it and feed [...]
Country Diary 74: Regular Sex and Freedom
THIS MORNING I ate a triumphant breakfast: toast from home-baked bread, bacon from home-killed and home-cured pig, and egg from our own hens. Needless to say, the taste was far superior to anything you could buy in the supermarket, and the fact that all the products were from our own home gave the meal an [...]
Not One Single Egg
A Country Diary 74
13 March 2008
ALL IS NOT well with the chickens. First two of them lay down and died. We think they might have suffered from the cold. Then, after four or five days, they simply stopped laying. That’s right: thirteen hens and not one single egg. It’s the same every day. We lock [...]
Country Diary 73: New Chickens, New Era
27 February 2008
LAST WEEK we brought home fifteen chickens. We want to get serious about egg production. Victoria had gone to get them from a big organic farm, for only one pound each. Organic they may have been, but elegant they were not, and rarely have you seen such a raggle-taggle band of scrawny brown [...]
Country Diary 72: Breaking the Law
WELL, you try and do something good and you only get hassle. Yesterday morning we had a knock at the door from our local environmental health officer. He had come round to tell us that according to a law that was brought in two years ago, what we had done with our pigs—that is to [...]
A Country Diary 71: A Vandal in the Veg Patch
Monday 7 January 2008
OF ALL THE animals we’ve had here, by far the most useless, costly, time-consuming, toilsome and stressful has been the pony. What an absurd indulgence. We have to rent its field, feed it, give it hay, take it in and out every day. It wears expensive coats and needs a visit from [...]
Country Diary 69: The Pigs Are Dead
THE PIGS ARE DEAD. The night before killing day, Sunday, Victoria and I sat with our John Seymour and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall books and read about blood puddings, offal, quartering heads, brawn, chorizo, scalding the skin, butchering, salting and all the rest of it and found the whole thing mightily daunting. Because we haven’t got a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A Country Diary: 57
SOME DAYS ARE GOOD, some days are bad. Sunday was a bad one. Well, the evening was, anyway. First Victoria and I had been arguing about cleaning. I suggested that maybe she’d like to clean up her pony’s shit from the yard occasionally and she screamed that she did her best and if I didn’t [...]
Country Diary 55, 11 September 2007
WELL, IT’S been three long months since the last instalment, during which time I have done very little work, been to four festivals, drunk a huge amount of beer and wine, and watched weeds completely cover the vegetable patch. One weekend we left the pigs in the care of Divorcing Dad. During their time in [...]
A Country Diary: 54
I SHOT A RAT yesterday. Just to see it die. No, what really happened was that a rat got stuck in the pig feed bin. Victoria found it. It was leaping up in the air, but couldn’t get quite high enough to escape from the bin, and so kept slipping down the plastic sides. Great, [...]
"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."