The Idler

A Country Diary: 17

The Idler’s Editor, Tom Hodgkinson, has retired to a Devon farmhouse. Here’s the seventeenth part of his diary.

RETURNING HOME after three weeks in Cornwall, we find various disasters. Nature had been following its own course while we’d been away. The vegetable patch, about whose success I have been crowing to anyone who would listen, had been damaged by storm and slug, those formidable enemies of the gardener. My runner bean canes had been blown over, crushing the peas next to them. And then, the slugs. Slugs I had been blas?� about formerly. You could say I had been smug about slugs. Earlier this year, inspecting my lettuces, my mentor Alan said: “These are lovely. Don’t you have any slugs?” To which I breezily replied: “No. We don’t have a problem with slugs.” Well, we do now. They are giant brown things with a sort of orange glow on the underside, a bit like one of those inner-city chariots beloved of young male hip-hop fans. The sodden pea and runner beans plants, crushed by the wind, had provided a happy munching ground for these bloated pests. And my lettuces had all completely vanished. Meanwhile, little luck on the brassica front. The curly kale plants have been munched to sticks by something or other. And it’s the same with my eight cauliflower plants, which I carefully transplanted from the seed bed before going on holiday. Only two or three look like they have any chance of surviving. After the gloriously effort-free harvests of the summer, it appears, unfortunately, that I’m going to have to pay a bit more attention to my vegetables. Put some work into it.

THE POTATO patch held an unpleasant surprise, too. Some of the tubers down there, when we dug them up yesterday, were horrifying. Some had lost their insides completely so only a sort of hard shell remained. Others were full of holes. And the worst affected by whatever this was broke open like a toasted marshmallow: a hard case filled with sticky glutinous white stuff. It made my stomach churn and I wonder what the cause was. Had I left the potatoes in the ground for too long? Should I have dug them all up a month ago?

FURTHER DEVASTATION on the chicken front. On our return, there was not a single chicken to be seen. I searched around in the farmer’s barn and eventually found one, the ugly scraggy black one. Our lovely speckled hens have simply vanished. Again, I feel that maybe more effort was required with these bantams. Clearly we are going to have to start again when it comes to poultry.

THE FINAL DISASTER was the boiler and laundry cupboard. The first sign that something was amiss came when I tried to open the wooden doors and discovered they were jammed shut. I found a hammer and eventually bashed them open. When I did this, I was assailed by an overpowering smell of mould. The walls and ceiling were covered in blue spots, as was much of the laundry. Upon further inspection I found that the pipe leading into the boiler was extremely damp. Then I found that the lagging around the boiler was soaking wet and dripping, like a sponge. The water had leaked from the pipe and boiler and out on to the kitchen floor, where it had soaked the rug. My friend Roger was staying for the weekend and thankfully is of a more practical bent than me. We realised we had to stop this leak before bed time as it was getting worse. So we left buckets to collect the drips and Roger found the tap to turn the supply off. I called the landlord and he said I’d better turn off the Rayburn, too. Leaving us with no water, not hot water and no heating in the kitchen. Till the plumber comes.

THEN I WENT into the pub to cheer myself up and enjoy a beer only to find that one of the cats had pissed on the floor in there. Then I checked the Amazon ranking of my book, hoping for an ego boost, only to find that it had plummeted from 60 to 3,951. I went to bed feeling miserable.