The Idler

A Country Diary: 51

THE WOOD-BURNING stove has been ripping through the logs in this cold weather. This speed of burning has led to me to reconsider our fuel system. In the past I have bought huge £100 loads from the local National Trust house, but over the last six months they have not been offering this service. Having had some bad experiences with log merchants, I was wary of calling them again. So I settled on buying forty of those orange nets of logs from the local nursery, probably the most damn fool costly way of getting fuel. We ran out of these very quickly indeed and so I started scouting around to see what was burnable on the property. Last year I had cut down a few ash branches so I sawed those up with the hand saw into wood-burner sized logs. This was surprisingly easy work. I would say that half an hour’s sawing made enough logs for two or three days. Now, my neighbour never buys any logs at all: she goes down into the woods with her chainsaw. I decided to follow in her footsteps, and while driving through the wood with Henry I stopped a few times and picked up stray and rotten branches. Back home, we sawed up these branches and so created a couple of days of free wood. Looking around at the hedges, there are loads of nice big fat branches growing out of them. Yesterday I sawed off a nice branch which I will leave in the woodshed for a few months.

THERE’S PROBABLY more stuff that we could get for free, were we prepared to put in a little more effort. For example, I regularly see a troupe of pheasants walking across the pony’s field. Perhaps I should be shooting them? After all, now I can pluck, gut and roast them then this would seem to be a sensible idea. We should also be catching rabbits with dogs. And we often talk about keeping pigs. And what about fishing in the bay?

THE TREEHOUSE has been rather under-used. Arthur seems to prefer the computer and if I jauntily ask him: “do you want to go to the treehouse?” he replies, “no thank you” in a deadpan tone and returns to staring at the screen. I think he’d be happier if the treehouse had a broadband connection. I do worry about computers and the young. Maybe the computer games aren’t exactly harmful, but they surely stop them from doing more satisfying things. This morning, for example, a fuse had blown and therefore none of the downstairs plugs worked. So Arthur came down and tried to log on to FutrureQuest or whatever it is, and couldn’t. When we came downstairs half an hour later, he had written a letter to his friend Purdey, put it in an envelope with a couple of Pokemon cards, and sealed and addressed it. How his parents shone with pride. By the way, here is Arthur’s website, created with the help of Neil Scott, the Idler’s webmaster, who came to stay a couple of weeks ago: http://www.609pop.blogspot.com.

OUTDOORS the snowdrops have appeared, always a wondrous moment, giving new hope that the winter may actually come to an end before too long. Like bluebells, snowdrops have little bell-shaped flowers that look down at the ground. This has led to the observation that they are bells for the spring, alerting us to the arrival of the new season. I wonder, though, what the biological reason could be for the downward-looking flower? I notice also that another winter flower, the hellebore, also looks down. Out of my three hellebores, one has grown very well and has loads of flowers. The other two are barely poking out of the ground. Robert Burton says that hellebores are an antidote to melancholy but I wonder how you would make them into a mixture? Must get the Culpepper out.

06.02.07