The Idler

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 added savour. I finished with some toast and marmalade. The marmalade, I grant you, did not come from our home. But it was made by the school bus driver’s wife and was given as a present, in return for the blood pudding we gave them last year, so I think it still counts as part of the cottage economy. In fact, some societies place gift exchange at the centre of their economy. This kind of thing could get addictive: maybe we should be making our own butter? We tried some home-made butter from Wales recently and it was outstandingly delicious. If we made our own butter, we could get one of those little wooden butter stamps, like they talk about in DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Each household had a distinctive stamp, an acorn or somesuch.

THE HENS are still not really laying: the egg I had for breakast was a lone offering which I found under the Rayburn oil tank yesterday. However, the creatures are looking more perky and confident than when they arrived, and the feathers are growing back. I suppose it must take a while to adjust to freedom and regular sex after the chaste confinement of their previous home. The white bunny, Blossom, now lives in the hen house and seems very happy there, and each day becomes increasingly agile and more difficult to catch. Poppy the puppy is learning how to retrieve. As she is a black labrador, we have a special gun dog training book. Really, it’s all about conditioning. You tell her she’s good all the time, give it treats for doing things you want it to do, like retrieving or chasing you, and ignore it when it does things you don’t want it to do, like jumping up, by turning away and folding your arms. The advice seems excellent. I only wish we’d had this book when the children were small. It might have saved a lot of trouble.

I’VE PUT IN A couple of hours on the vegetable patch, and it’s improving already. My plan is to ditch the horrible black plastic and make new paths. My idea is to put down strips of old carpet or lino over the mud between the beds, cover them with sand and then arrange flat stones in the sand. I thought that would look rather splendid. I planted forty potatoes in a bed covered with horse manure and straw, Also a load of shallots, garlic and some parsnip seedlings that Alan gave me. One one half of a bed I broadcast a packet of turnip seeds. I also dug up a clump of chard plants, separated them and planted them out. Now I need to sow some lettuce seeds indoors in trays, and make a large seedbed and sow cabbages and kale. I might give up on broccoli this year. I’m undecided as yet as far as Brussells sprouts go. Certainly I am not going to bother with tomatoes. They really are best left to the experts. The work-to-tomato ratio last year was crazy.

THANK GOD the weather has started to improve. We always find the first half of March a depressing time of year. It’s been so long since you had any good weather and the fun of Christmas is far off. I started to entertain gloomy thoughts about our situation, and fantasised about being very rich and living in Mexico, and how much easier life would be if only we had unlimited cash, and how we needed sun. But that phase of deluded thinking and self-pity only lasted a few days. Actually, I think I was kicked out of it by going to see a gig in Barnstaple. Sally and I went to see Asian Dub Foundation, suppported by a groups called Imperial Leisure, in an excellent new venue called The Factory. It was good to see some radical hip hop in North Devon. Another pleasure lately has been Island by Aldous Huxley, which describes a sort of modern utopia, and is packed with all sorts of inspiring ideas for living. The culture fuses the best of Western science with the best of Eastern mysticism but is supremely practical at the same time.

ENDS