Matt, Alex and I were in Devon at the weekend, with Chas's birthday on Sunday and lots of fun. We made beech leaf gin while we were there, picking lots of young bright green beech leaves from the hedge at the front of the house and stuffing them into three bottles of gin with some sugar, one bottle for each of our households. Now we just have to shake them up everyday for the next two weeks, then store in a dark place and shake once a week for six weeks. Apparently it tastes fresh and summery and it's bright green!
We also took a trip to the local dump where there's a recycling centre to root around for useful stuff. The place is subdivided into various sections for different categories of material, like a whole area full of sinks, and another for pots and pans, with more delicate stuff for sale in a shop. Alex picked up a big saucepan, a scary golliwog doll and a couple of glasses, all for £1.
Even better than the dump, we went to a massive car boot sale near Exeter on Sunday morning. This was a huge sprawling thing, with loads of junk to sift through. We picked up a car horn for me and Matt to take to The World Can't Wait demo, a copy of The Sims 2, some spoons and a saucepan. There was also this area where they just had lots of boxes all over the floor, presumably from a house clearance, with people frantically picking through them like a flock of gypsy gannets. It was a wonderful sight. You paid £1 for a bin liner, then you could rummage through all these boxes, grabbing whatever you wanted to take. We got lots of wine glasses and cocktail glasses and some nice clay plant pots. We got back to the house afterwards and drank champagne for Chas's birthday. He got lots of practical presents, like a fence wire tightener, which made his eyes light up, believe it or not, as well as the traditional marzipan.
Other highlights of the weekend included an alpaca birth, and feeding an orphaned cria. Matt took a video of me and Al doing this, with bonus knowledgeable commentary on looking after orphaned cria from Al.
Matt and I took the train down to Devon this weekend, both to have my second birthday celebration with the family and to make sloe gin. What began as a simple sloe picking expedition on the farm soon turned into a mammoth sloe picking, rosehip picking, elderberry picking and haw berry picking session. We got some marrows and beetroot from the garden, and we also went to the pick-your-own and picked loads of raspberries and strawberries.
Armed with this formidable array of nature's bounty, we made fifteen jars of raspberry jam, six jars of sloe jelly, fourteen jars of marrow and apple chutney and seven bottles of sloe gin, though they won't be ready for another three months. Matt and Rachel kept spurring each other on, finding new delights in her comprehensive little book of pickles, jams and preserves. We didn't have time to start on the haw jelly, rosehip cordial or elderberry syrup, but Rachel might well do some of that in the next few days!
On Saturday evening, we went out for an expensive, glorious birthday dinner at the Mason's Arms in Knowstone. We had some stonking red wine!
Today, I also made some beetroot soup for lunch, and Rachel fried a few courgette flowers in beery batter. I love courgette flowers - you never get to have them unless you grow your own courgettes.
We got back to London just now, lugging lots of lovely jars and bottles with us. Hurrah!
There was an article in last Thursday's Metro featuring an exceptionally ugly alpaca as a "page three stunner". We decided to write back on behalf of Rachel to defend the beauty of alpacas and Matt drafted a letter which he sent in on Friday, along with a picture of a cute little cria, which they printed today!
We spent three days of the Easter Bank Holiday Weekend in Devon, eating much chocolate and having fun. After drinking champagne and cider rather early in the day on Saturday, we all went for a long walk down the valley below the house, enjoying the warmer weather and working off our drunkenness. It's lovely to be well and truly out of the winter.
Heather and Henry came to the house in Devon to stay for a day. We played with the chimenea, cooking lots of kebabs, some grilled, some smoked by hanging them in the neck of the chimenea.
A weekend of D&D in Devon with Al, Josh, Ad and Hen. The Vanderhoofts have penetrated the Underdark and breached the fallen drow city of Maerimydra. Exciting times as they battle through a hack-and-slash, overrun, demon-infested city to stop the evil drow priestess from corrupting the Weave!
Matt and I went to Devon on Friday to start preparing with the family for the Almighty Pagan Wonder that is to be the Beltane Party. We had a marvellous time, as ever, though the weather was rather rainy in the South West. The chickens were frantically laying so we ate lots of eggs and brought lots back to London too. The alpacas seemed to be well. We also had birth and death in close succession, with Millie the sheep having two lambs on Friday, but then unexpectedly dying on Saturday night, leaving two orphans. Rachel was quite upset about Millie - it reminds us of the perils of naming one's animals. It's amazing how much less traumatic it is to lose a number, rather than a name, cliché though that is. Millie is such a great name for a sheep - how could we not be attached to her?
On Sunday morning, I gave the lambs their first bottle feeds, something that used to be my traditional task around the house when I was younger. It always takes them a few times of trying before they take to bottles, so you have to force their mouth open and move the teat around till they suck. It reminded me of what a pleasant task it is hand rearing lambs. They are such plaintive, cute little creatures.
Both the orphans are females, so I presume we'll be keeping one to breed from again in future years, and kill the other for the freezer. Holding and feeding the lambs crystallised some of my thoughts on meat eating. I think whatever your stance on vegetarianism, industrial farming and meat eating, it brings peace to your mind to rear some animals yourself. For me it really simplifies everything. It's reasonable for humans to breed and rear domesticated livestock but these animals have the right to live naturally, in accordance with their nature. They should be able to move freely and eat natural food. Once you have reared sheep or pigs, and squared your affection for them with the fact that they have been brought into this world by humans to serve our needs, and been prepared if not to kill them yourself then at least to take them to the abbatoir - then the practices of industrial farming appear as obscene as they should, in contrast to the joys of eating ethically sourced meat.
The contact with the reality of bringing up and killing an animal closes that gap between you and the meat that is such a source of doubt and defensiveness when buying industrially farmed meat shrink wrapped in supermarkets.
Just got back from a couple of days in Devon, where I was adopting Josh's old computer as he upgrades to some kind of multi-gigahertzed, ninja graphics card, pulsating beast of a PC, picking sloe berries to make sloe gin, and tidying out mine and Alex's bedroom in advance of the next house move. The weather was lovely and sunny the first day, then violently windy and rainy on the second. Everything had a lovely crisp cold autumn feel to it. Rachel fed us with a gorgeous meal of watercress soup, then swordfish and roasted carrots, and then raspberry crumble for pudding on Tuesday night. It was all very homely.
Meanwhile, Matt met Anna and Glyn on Tuesday evening and they made a very impressive looking pumpkin. Check it out!
Came down to the Mid Devon Show again this year! Matt and Alex came too. This year, it was bright and sunny, unlike last year where we all nearly drowned in mud. Chas was hosting an alpaca show and so was very busy organising that. We met our new neighbour in Devon there, who had a stall. He makes this rather fine goats cheese, and is completely mad. Weird sticking out teeth, thin hair, and a stooped over scary smiley manner. Bit like Gollum, but without the preciousssss. Very nice though. We brought back lots of goats cheese.
I got up at some point in the afternoon on Monday and flitted off to Devon for a couple of days. Rachel and Chas showed me the new house. It's really nice, sitting at the top of a steep hill, which should please the alpacas, and with particularly pretty fields around it. The grass is a good shade of faintly bluey green. The house itself is a little bungalow, but they are extending it to build two more big rooms. There's lots of barns and farm space, and one big barn is being turned into an office for Chas and Rachel. It's all very promising. They'll probably be moving in around christmas, though the alpacas will be moving there much sooner.
Alice is very well. She's become a very energetic farm dog and seems to have shed the last of her toy dog heritage, bouncing about around the alpacas and looking comically tiny next to them.
I'm back in London again after ten days in Devon with the family. It's been rather marvellous. Matt and I headed down on christmas eve, and we all had our biggest present overload year ever! Everyone had thoughtfully found things for everyone else, and we all drank champagne as we tore off bits of wrapping paper and exclaimed at how shiny everything was. We ate an enormous lunch, and then had goose on boxing day, and then Rachel made all kinds of nice stocks, rillettes and soups.
A couple of days later, Adam, Kayla and Henry came to stay, and me, Alex, Adam, Josh and Henry played some heavy Dungeons and Dragons. The adventurers descended into the Monastery of the Old Order, where the marilith (six-armed demon) that they had freed from her 900 year imprisonment had descended through the nine levels of the dungeon battling the black dragon living on the lowermost level and releasing all kinds of disruptive extraplanar creatures into the dungeon ecology. They were sorely tested, and at one point Josh's Dwarven character was slain by an angry young white dragon. The others rescued the body and found a glowing green statue that had the ability to regenerate him to life, though he wound up with much of his skin regrowing as chitin as a result.
At new year, we had a fantastic party. Adam and Henry's parents came along, as well as various notables like Abbie, Kate, Charles, Miranda and Steve. Alex's friends Dan and Matt also found their way down into the wilds of Devon, and Rachel invited Jeffrey who designs her magazine and his family. We all started drinking cava at about four o clock. By around seven, we were all hopelessly pissed, and had to resort to non-alcoholic drinks and other such strategies to avoid passing out by midnight. It was unashamedly drunken, and featured various classic moments, such as Josh letting off a few fireworks Matt and I had given him for christmas around nine o clock, dancing to the power of the blue Weezer album and worshipping the god of American alternative rock, dancing to the inspired Beatles version of Twist and Shout, with my mother turning it up so loud the speakers blew, torrential rain and wind around midnight which made it impossible to even open the door witout being blown back across the room and slammed against the wall like some kind of X-Man character, thus rendering a second waves of fireworks impractical, and of course a loud and emotional rendition of Auld Lang Syne. By three in the morning, Colin was making so-called Joshua Gins with the remaining spirits and mixers, causing already drunk people to become unnecessarily drunker. It was all great fun.
Everyone gradually departed over the next few days, and on Friday, Matt and I had a go with Rachel's new pasta rolling machine and made pasta, which we ate with garlic and chilli and oil. Josh and Matt tried out Rachel's new metal detector as well, and dug up the back garden discovering two copper coins from the reign of Thatcher, c 1986, the front half of a toy lorry, an old bullet, some metal squeezy paint tubes and various bits of wire.
We also all played a lot of table tennis on Josh's new exciting outdoor table tennis table.
We met up with Michal, Matt and Daniel in the morning and sat around smoking before passing out for a few hours. We awoke, that is Alex, Matt, Michal and I, to catch an early afternoon train from Paddington to Devon. Matt and I drank Stella as we rumbled towards Tiverton, while Michal and Alex slumbered in their seats. We took a taxi from the station, getting rather tragically lost on the way. Luckily the driver spotted a field of alpacas and we realised that was home!
Chas and Rachel and Josh got back a few hours later. Rachel had flown in from New York the night before, while Josh had been staying at Elaine's. We all ate chicken risotto and got extremely drunk. We also skinned up and Rachel and Chas had some spliff, which was a first. Chas had a bit too much and passed out on the table in a drunken, stoned stupor, while Rachel got the munchies and started enthusing about how nice buttered bread sandwiches are!
Al, Matt and I headed down to Devon on the train on Thursday evening, with little more than a bottle of cava and a big bag of D&D third edition manuals. It was a long weekend, with WOMAD at the Eden Project on Friday evening, which we went to with Rachel, Chas and Josh, followed by D&D all weekend with Adam and Henry. Kayla and Matt weren't very interested in the D&D, alas, so we couldn't do as full-on a weekend as we originally intended, but then, we were trying to learn new third edition rules and getting to grips with playing after a long break anyway. We still had time to set up some characters, a water genasi fighter called Elekon, a half-orc psion by the name of Gothog, a dwarven rapier-wielding rogue called Zebediah, and a dreadlocked human monk called Crab. An amusing but believable bunch as it turned out, and they got to rescue a mad lord's daughter, defeat an orc poisoning a town, kill a zombie minotaur against all the odds, and inadvertantly release an Abyssal demon, a marilith, from centuries long captivity.
We just got back to London last night, and today Matt and I went to the British Museum to the mind and memory exhibition and had a wander round the Sir John Soames museum too.
Last Friday, after Hugo's leaving drinks, I took the train to Devon to see the family and pick up some Dungeons & Dragons books. Had a marvellous time. On Saturday it was the Mid-Devon Show, a local show round Tiverton. We had a stand with three alpacas, and it rained heavily all day till the place was a mud bath. Very fun and rather wet. Most people were fairly sanguine about it, though some like the ferret racers didn't have a good day (ferrets hate the rain). On Sunday Rachel and I went through the Alpaca-UK website, working out which bits to keep and how to rearrange the menu system. I played interminable games of Risk with Kyle and Josh all afternoon, and in the evening we all had a rather lovely roast leg of lamb.
This morning, I got up at 4.50 to get the early train back to London. It was lovely being up at that time. Cold and chilly, very still and quiet, but with bright pink and gold dawn sunlight just starting to splash through the low white mists shrouding the fields.
Went to see Ray at Hearing Aids South West to get my telecoil setting activated on my hearing aids. I now have SIX settings! Normal, quiet, loud, telecoil, telecoil with normal sound too, and auto. The excitement. Tomorrow I'll be off to London again. Goodbye to peaceful clean air…
Very chilled out Sunday. Very warm and sunny. We sat out on the stone ledge at the back of the house and got gently caned, assembled a bench and played a little frisbee. After a dinner of roast lamb, Michal and Matt headed back to London on the train.
