The Idler

Country Diary: 11

The Idler’s Editor, Tom Hodgkinson, has retired to a Devon Farmhouse to write a book. Here’s the eleventh part of his diary.

I AM SWIMMING in shit. First there is the toddler shit, the early morning nappy change. I suppose that’s acceptable. Then there is the cat shit. The foul beasts, despite being thrown out of the house, and despite not having the excuse of being kittens, creep back inside and piss and shit. I found a turd under my desk last week. And the pantry still has the faint tang of cat piss, the most disgusting smell ever created by man or beast. As I mopped up another transgression the other day, I felt close to gagging (by the way, thanks very much to the reader who suggested using biological washing liquid on piss-stained bits of carpet and lino. It has both deodorized and prevented).

At least the presence of the cats has kept the mice away, so we don’t have to deal with mouseshit. But of course there is the chicken shit. They produce an enormous quantity of amazingly huge poos. I shovel it all up in piles of hay and put them on our compost heap. OK. I suppose we’re getting used to this.
But. There is a new kind of shit in the new neighbourhood. It’s the worst of all: dog shit. Our new neighbours, fantastic in other ways, are the owners of three dogs and these charmless scavengers seem to have claimed our yard as their territory, scaring our cats and chickens, eating their food, ripping open our dustbins and leaving stinking dog turds in the chicken barn and across the cobbles where the children play. After ripping open the bins, they snuffle into dirty nappies, meaning I have to revisit poos from four days earlier.

The final shit is cowshit. Step outside the house and you are very likely to step in a pile of steaming cow manure, left over from when we had one hundred of them roaming round the house for a few days.
So it is that by eight in the morning I might have come into close contact with five different kinds of shit. If we go ahead and buy a pig, which is one of our plans in our attempts to get pre-1750, that will be a sixth kind of shit, pigshit. All we need is to get some pigeons, and then if ever I was beaten up, it could truly be said that I had had seven shades of shit beaten out of me.

THE GOOD THING about getting a pig, Victoria said the other day, is that a pig is NOT for life. Yes, I replied. A pig IS just for Christmas. The custom was to raise your pig from spring to autumn and then slaughter it at Michelmas in November, meaning you had a larder full of meat for the winter.

THE CHICKENS HAVE confused us greatly over the last few weeks. First the baby one vanished. There was no evidence: no feathers or blood which might have suggested that the culprit was a fox (by the way: I was reading Fantastic Mr. Fox to Arthur the other day. He said “The fox is naughty. He’s not fantastic!” which I suppose demonstrates that he has picked up a rural sensibility already). Then a second chicken disappeared. There were no eggs to be found. We gave it up for lost, putting its death down to the same mysterious predator as the first one. Perhaps a mink, suggested our neighbour? Two weeks later, I caught sight of the missing chicken, the brown one, wandering alone in the cow field. It seemed to have been looking after itself; every night, the other three would return to their barn to roost, but no brown chicken. Then we started to find eggs in weird places: four in a hole in the wall, four in the wood barn, and finally a fantastic haul of twelve in the rubbish barn. Perhaps Brown One was trying to raise a family somewhere, but we ate them. I don’t know. Anyway, now it’s back with the other three.

WHEN CHOPPING WOOD yesterday, as the chickens pecked around in the yard, I heard a strange high pitched yelp. I looked around, saw nothing and returned to my labours. Perhaps I had heard a child yelping inside the house. Then I heard the noise again. “Hoo!” it went. I looked around once more. Then I discovered the source: it was the cockerel. And it was SNEEZING! Could chicken flu have already hit North Devon from China? And are we all going to die?

ON A BRIGHTER NOTE, the snowdrops are out, and we have even had a solitary primrose. I don’t know much about flora, but isn’t that quite early? Unfortunately, our love for nature has led to a neighbourly dispute. The four of us were picking a few snowdrops in the lane when one of our neighbours, let’s call her Little Miss Fussy (she’s the one who cried when we had a heavy metal band in the barn), emerged from her house, which overlooks the spot where we were gathering. “Can you stop doing that, please,” she said. “You do know it’s illegal to pick wild flowers, don’t you?” We sneered and she went back inside. Well. All right, I know it may be forbidden to pick wild flowers, but really. A few snowdrops for the kitchen table is hardly going to destroy the country’s plant life, is it? And in any case, shouldn’t she mind her own bloody business? Apparently, you get one of these fussy people in every small village. Does that ring true with readers’ experiences?