23 October 2015

It’s the time of night when the land turns monochrome. Colour leached out by the setting sun flies up into the sky turning the clouds pink. Kookaburras laugh out into the evening, before the frogs take up the chorus, spreading their chirrups across the drowsy land.

There’s no night-time flurry of swallows returning to their nest tonight, no more cheeping little heads raised above the edge of the nest’s mud wall. But this year it’s because of success, not failure. Last year the swallows had a dismal record of baby-rearing. Two lots of eggs were laid and babies hatched, only for us to find naked fledglings dead or gasping on the ground under the nest after a few weeks of rearing. I don’t know if this year’s parents are better, or if there has been some radical reshaping of the nest under strict Health and Safety Guidelines, but I feel like sending this year’s parents an award for most improved.

Ugly baby heads appeared a few weeks ago, their wildly disproportionate beaks gaping. Last week fluffy babies perched above the nest. This morning there were two baby swallows sitting on the railing, staring at the big world. Their parents came swooping in after a while but they weren’t stopping to stuff titbits into their mouths – they were there to entice them off the rail and out into the yonder. One of the babies followed, returning after one circuit to struggle back onto the rail. Its sibling stretched one wing out and scratched underneath, displaying a certain virtuosity. It spread its wings and flapped but stayed where it was. Then the parents were back swooping and scooping up both babies into their flight. The four of them flew around the valley and returned, the babies to the rail, the parents right back in to the nest, flying out with the third baby following. Swoop, fly, swoop, back to the rail and then all five are in the air, dipping and turning, skimming out of sight and returning to the home rail. The next time they all take off they don’t return. I see them on the edge of the tank, two bigger bodies, three littler ones, then no more.

October 6 2015
Extracting honey is slow. One drip at a time, it falls through the sieve into the bucket below, wax building up on the sides. It’s as slow as the emergency room in a country hospital on a public holiday, where at 1pm the nurse says, ‘The doctor is just having a rest. I had to call him out very early this morning for a case of anaphylactic shock. He hasn’t had his breakfast yet.’ Which means that she has also been on duty since very early this morning. One of the other patients waiting with us says, ‘I’m just grateful that we’ve got a hospital’, and we agree. We might have to wait three hours for Martin to see someone about his very painful shingles, but at least he can see someone. The nurse bandages a young man’s foot and knee – injured yesterday while riding a motorbike and obviously left overnight in the hope that she’ll be right mate – deals deftly with a 6-year-old with a rash, and takes everyone’s blood pressure every hour. She offers cool drinks to those who are waiting, and dashes up and down the corridor, a sister of mercy dispensing painkillers to those in need.

But back to the honey. There are emails every day from our bee group telling of swarms that people want removed from their trees, patios, front fences, back walls – and one today in a wine barrel. It’s spring and the bees have woken up, they’ve smelt the nectar and they’ve started making honey. If we’re not careful our bees will be swarming like all the others, having filled up the frames in their hive and wanting somewhere else to store their rations. We have to get some of those full frames out of the hive and replace them with empty ones. Martin is simply not well enough, so I kit up, alone for the first time, trying to manoeuvre the smoker to calm the bees while simultaneously removing frames to inspect them. Trying to speed things up I head for the middle frames, and immediately find one that is full. I take it out and replace it with an empty frame. I remove another frame but the bees are getting cranky. They leave off crawling all over the frames to explode out of the hive and start bombing me. The smoker goes out and I’m left defenceless.

It’s disaster if you panic, so I walk quietly back up to the deck, open the smoker, battle with the tight lid and start it up again. Egg carton, pine needles, light it, let it get going, push the lid back down. Smoke threads serenely out through the nozzle, promising puffs of protection. The bees calm down a little, I inspect a few more frames then decide that … whatever that phrase is about something being better than valour, put the lid back on the hive and clamp it shut. I brush the remaining bees off the one heavy, full frame, and bear it into the kitchen where we strip off the cappings and slot it into the extractor. We already have two frames from the other hive, so the extractor is full and ready to go. Our first go with our brand new extractor! We turn the handle and soon there is honey gathering at the bottom. We flip the frames and turn the handle again. We open the tap at the bottom so the honey can run into a bucket, a thick glistening golden ribbon. Once it’s all in the bucket we remember that we were meant to strain it, and that’s when it runs so slowly, the wax collecting in the strainer, the honey drip dripping through. Slow as the emergency room in a country hospital on a public holiday.

22 September 2015
We were driving down Bucketts Way on Sunday, and we’d just passed the turn-off to The Glen Nature Reserve. I started telling Martin about the bushwalk I’d been on in the reserve on the previous day. We had walked into the reserve along one of its many tracks, crossing and recrossing a shallow creek, yellow rocks on its bed, sudden dark pools by the side of the path. There were tall bluegums with ferns at their feet, smooth blue-white bark contrasting with the deeply textured brown bark of (and here my enjoyment in recalling the day is somewhat tempered by my ignorance) other trees. Possibly turpentines. Tiny blue and purple violets were springing up in the path. Purple, again, in the sprawling hardenbergia and the shrubby pea thingy that was everywhere. Paper daisies, their flowers about to burst out of their buds. Another vine, with starry yellow flowers, and one with a red pea flower. Black fungus frilling on just one particular tree trunk. On the other side of the track, a native clematis, its white flowers frothing. Higher up the path, where the steep slope below us held pockets of rainforest, I recognised the big green droopy leaves of a native tamarind from the rainforest at our place.

But we weren’t there for the trees so much as the birds. It was a walk led by a local man whose passion has been birds for the last 20 years. To me it was a cacophony of tweets and trills with an occasional rustling in the bush. To him it was the grey shrike thrush (the GST), the brown gerygone (tiny nondescript brown bird, hopping agitatedly through the undergrowth), the yellow thornbill (one walker said, ‘I have yellow thornbills at my place’ to which our leader replied, ‘Do you also have brown thornbills and buff-rumped thornbills?’). We saw a Wonga pigeon up ahead on the track, viewed its remarkable size through the binoculars as it wandered amiably away. We heard spotted pardalotes, and looked at their beautiful markings in the bird book. I longed to see one, high up in the canopies, to see its Indian embroidery of dots and dashes covering its head and neck and wings. We looked for its nest in the crumbling bank beside us, seeing every niche as a possible home for this tiny lerp-eating bird. We heard the Lewin’s honeyeater (the bird I’d failed to identify in our garden some time ago, with a greenish body and a white crescent behind its ear), saw the grey fantail (popularly called ‘the crazy bird’ at our place for its darting, twisting, random-looking movements in the air). During the first, lower, part of the walk the whipbirds kept us company, the male making the first call, the female replying with the whip. They disappeared some time during the slog up the hill, but as we walked down from the trig point (520 metres above sea-level) they reappeared. At that point our leader stopped us and said, ‘What’s that one?’ and it was so familiar it took us a while to realise that we were hearing bellbirds for the first time in the walk.

I didn’t get as far as telling Martin about the satisfaction of identifying the Lewin’s honeyeater. As we drove around a shallow corner, where reeds grow by the side of the road, a pair of ducks flew out. Their heavy bodies struggled to gain height. I braked. Not soon enough. Before I closed my eyes (yes!) (momentarily) I saw the panicked eye of a duck up close – very close. I saw a plump duck body full of life and pumping, terrified energy. Then I heard a loud thud. I opened my eyes to crazy cracks all over the windscreen. Unable to pull over into the deep ditches by the side of the road I kept driving. In the rear view mirror, a small inert body lay forlorn on the road.

I have a friend who writes a food blog. Last week she wrote about pigeon soup. If anyone wants to adapt her recipe and use a duck instead, I can tell you where there’s a fairly fresh one ready for cooking.

Another country, another currency, another language. Not just words like ‘skookum’ (big, strong) but conversations like, ‘Do you call that a truck?’ Another landscape, another blackberry bush, another pie. This time the blackberries were picked from rambling bushes on the edge of a Canadian rainforest – pine, spruce, fir trees reaching high, creating deep dark mossy places below, arbutus trees twisting thin red trunks out of craggy rocks, maples spreading wide green canopies – and the pie was made and eaten in a log cabin on the side of a still, clear lake dotted with tiny islands, looking across to a forested hillside, a short motorboat ride from the lapping ocean. The loons call, mournful trilling, burbling back and forth. Kingfishers play tag, maintaining a scolding chhhk chhhk as they divebomb each other. Creeks have to be cleared of beaver dams to make way for spawning fish. 

We got to Canada from England via Iceland. The road from the airport to Reykjavik is through an 800-year-old lava flow, where lumps of weathered lava, covered with a blanket of mosses and lichens in yellows and greens, look as if the ground is still bubbling. Glimpses of clear blue sky give way to soft, wet fog that slowly covers the surrounding hills, hides the views of the sea at the end of each street, and starts to drip from the sky in icy rain. We go on a ‘Golden Circle’ tour that includes a visit to Thingvellir, site of the first Icelandic parliament; Gullfoss, a pounding waterfall falling from a glacier, thick and white behind distant black mountains; a hot springs area with steaming sulphurous pools, clouds of stinking mist that billow, and Geysir, the original geyser (which no longer gushes) and Strokkur, which does gush with sudden booming explosions, its pool pulsing like a giant’s pulse, filling the rock pool and falling back, the water becoming heavier, thicker, more forceful, more sanguine than normal water, then the push comes and the water fills with air, propelled upwards, in droplets and spitting spray. When I look up, the clouds look like someone has been knitting Icelandic patterns in the sky. 

We flew to Canada over Baffin Island. You know when you’re by the sea, on a big brown rock shelf, with little perfectly round potholes, and long jagged crevices, and large areas of sharp rock that suddenly fall away? It’s like that, but from on high, and without those little red jelly-like blobs that cling to the insides of the pools, or the sound of the sea booming into caverns below your feet. Dodging my head to get a better view through my window, beyond the plane’s engine, I try to make sense of the white dots that appear in the sea along the shore, then form lines and clumps like so much flotsam and jetsam. Please don’t let them be flotsam and jetsam. Now they are joined together below us and the sea is nearly covered in lacy white, then the white stretches off into the distance until we don’t know what is ice and what is cloud. A tip of dark brown land appears then a wide blue-green channel with small streaks breaking its flat surface. Small streaks like a motorboat’s wake in a place where there is no sign of humans or motorboats. Am I seeing small streaks of a whale’s wake? Then a river claws its way through this red brown land, a blue line plaiting through a wide yellow bed, equipped for gushing snowmelt. Then the clouds cover the land.

August 23 2015

Of all the weeds on the farm the blackberries at least have the redeeming feature of providing useful, delicious fruit. But for the last three years we’ve had such dry springs that they have barely flowered, so there has been very little fruit. This means that my eyes were alert to the clusters of beautifully black blackberries that we saw yesterday as we walked along the canal, here in Brittany. The Nantes-Brest canal, a massive engineering feat of the early 19th century, traversing north-west France with its succession of locks, provides a perfect walking track. The towpath is flat and wide, running between fields and the water, edged with overhanging trees, with the occasional picturesque lock-keeper’s cottage – stone walls, lace at the windows, apple trees in the garden. We walked beside the water, sheltering under our umbrellas against sudden bursts of rain, and picked a few blackberries on the way. They were ripe, plump and sweet, so when we got back to the cottage we went on the hunt for more. We didn’t have far to go. There were enough growing in the hedgerow fence to fill our containers.  Martin was volunteered to make a cake, his previous upside-down cake prowess making him the right person for the job. We had a recipe from last weekend’s (British) paper that looked perfect – Truro pudding, essentially a batter poured over fruit – and Nick offered to go and buy some self- raising flour. Nick’s knowledge of French, limited to saying thank you and asking for more ice-cream, did not make him the right person for the job, but he was game and returned triumphantly with a packet of flour that proclaimed ‘Pour toutes usages’. I pieced together the instructions on the packet to see if its ‘all uses’ included cakes, but it was the advertisement on the side for a different packet of flour labelled ‘Gateaux’ that finally persuaded me that I was holding a packet of plain flour. 

Happily, on this packet of flour was a most unusual recipe for pastry, so the cake idea was shelved in favour of a tart. Martin followed the recipe (in a saucepan heat 1 cup of water, 100 g butter and a pinch of salt; add 2 cups of flour and mix to form a paste) then let it cool slightly and lined a pie dish with it. He blind baked it for about 10 minutes then put the fruit in (the blackberries plus some apples we had also found growing wild, finely sliced) and sprinkled it with sugar. He made a small custard with egg and milk and poured it over, then cooked the pie for about half an hour. This pie was a masterpiece. The pastry was crumbly, the filling was bursting with the flavour of the blackberries, the tartness of the apple still showing through. But that pastry! So simple, so good. Sometimes the best things really are the ones you find by chance.  

5 August 2015
A friend stayed with us on Friday night. She arrived in the dark, driving cautiously along narrow gravel roads, aware of cows standing in the fields like rocks. After the tour of the house, where we point out its thermal efficiency, its water efficiency, its high ceilings and pretty tiles, we sat in front of the fire watching the deep orange embers form. We talked about difficult work colleagues. People are people she concluded, summing up an entire understanding of the inescapability of human frailty. People are people, I agreed, but some people are peopler than others.

In the morning she came out to the kitchen, startled by the light, the vistas, the beauty that she had woken up to. She loved the bare hill and the forested hills, she loved the siting of the house, facing the forest, poised on the corner of the valley. She loved the winter sun pouring in, heating the cement floor, bringing all those theories of thermal efficiency to life.

After she left I went to feed the chooks. I was a bit late and the bossy one was cranky, strutting, head high. As I was tipping the kitchen scraps onto the ground I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that she had risen up, wings spread wide, ready to attack me. I turned and, balletically, kicked out towards her. As I swung I felt a stillness around me. The butcher bird, above us in the dying tree, threw each pure, perfect, formed note of its song out into the clear, crisp morning air. The toe of my boot met the chook’s exposed chest. She retired to the corner of the pen, cluckily indignant, offended. People might be people, but chooks are chooks.

18 July 2015
After writing my last post, about the attack of the café monster, I came across a stanza in the book I’m reading:
His loathsome head aloft he reared,
With hellish hate he roared,
His slavering lips with froth were smeared,
Vilely his curses poured.
How fitting, with a slight change of gender.

The book I’m reading is Independent People by Halldor Laxness, in preparation for a (two day) touristic stopover in Iceland between visits to family in England and friends in Canada at the end of August. Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, the only Icelandic person to do so to date. This book is so stupendously good that I’m slowing down now, not wanting to finish. When I’ve been reading it for a while, I look up and am surprised that I’m not snowed in, that I don’t live in the loft above the sheep in a dirty little croft with a fire that runs on smoky brush-sticks, that I don’t have to eat my porridge or my salted fish. I’m surprised that I’m not surrounded by the expanse of an Icelandic valley, with a stream that floods in summer and is buried beneath ice in winter.

We have had our first big frost, that kept the grass white until about 8 o’clock one morning, but it’s not house-covered-in-snow cold here. Yesterday we were watching bees in the broad bean flowers. They were having to work for the nectar, pushing down on the bottom section of the flower to make their way their way into the base. The flowers are light mauve, darkening in the middle to a deep purple. The brown bees push and scrabble at the bottom lip of the flower. Sun shines on the pale green leaves.

July 2 2015
Outside the air is freezing, so we’re not standing out there admiring the full moon or how close Venus and Jupiter are to each other. We’re inside with the curtains drawn to keep in the warmth of the fire. I’m feeling safe.

Driving up to the farm today Martin and I stopped at the café off the motorway, as we do every week. I sat at a table next to the windows that was catching a bit of afternoon sun. Outside, a woman and a bunch of children were eating through a range of bags, some from the Macdonalds, some from the café. As I sat down I saw a wind spring up and blow some of their bags and containers onto the ground. The woman turned and looked straight at me. I gave her an ‘oops, you may not have noticed some of your things have blown onto the ground’ smile and pointed at the ground. She gave me the finger.

Martin joined me at the table with the coffees and I told him about the woman and the finger. We looked out the window just as one of the children started picking up the rubbish and putting it in the bin. I couldn’t see the woman, but the kids were doing a great job out there. I returned to my coffee. Suddenly there was a face, inches from mine. The woman, snarling, ‘You stupid old c***. You presumptious c***. How dare you tell me what to do.’ And so on. I said, ‘Wow, you are rude’ which led to her repeating her attack then storming off, bumping into a chair which enraged her anew, causing her to turn back to me and attack again. Martin started to try to stop her, which drew her frenzy onto him. ‘I’m not talking to you!’ she screamed.

Eventually she was gone. The entire attention of the café was turned to us for a split second, then everyone turned away, pretending nothing had happened. One person said, ‘Someone forgot to take their tablets this morning’ which, although crude, was welcome support. The whole familiar café was suddenly unsafe, a place of harshness and brutality.

While the repetitive use of c*** was shocking – it’s a word I don’t use at all, because it seems to be no accident that the worst word in English refers to a distinctly female body part – it was the use of ‘old’ that really struck me. My hair is grey, and it needs a cut. I had dental surgery yesterday, so my face is pretty pale, and a little drawn. Was it my apparent age that let her express herself so furiously? She was maybe at the end of her 30s. She had three or four pre-teenage children with her, and a very overweight husband who I only noticed later, leading some of the children to the car. Was her attack a female version of young buck / old bull? Did she need to assert her (what’s the feminine version of ‘virility’? which is defined specifically as ‘having masculine vigour or strength’) feminine vigour by challenging an older woman?

I could say it was just one crazy person but it’s looking like a bit of a pattern. A few months ago I told a younger woman, who I know well, that she had done something thoughtless. She turned on me – also with a far stronger response than my initial comment warranted – and told me to ‘stop being a fool’ when I defended myself from her attack. She stopped short of the actual term, but ‘old’ and ‘fool’ go together, much like ‘horse’ and ‘carriage’.

I have been thinking about it. Getting old. Maybe those aches and pains aren’t just from too many hours at the computer, or too many hours weeding or mowing. Maybe they’re me, getting old. But does that make me vulnerable and deserving of attack?

I’ve been taking my mother – 94, competent and capable but with failing eyesight – around to retirement villages lately. It’s harder for her to get out these days and she needs more people around her. When I’m with her I’m glad that people take care of her, give her a seat, ask her if she’s ok walking up the stairs, tell her to watch out for cracks in the paving. But she is old, and she has special needs attached to having poor eyesight. These are not gratuitous reactions. My age is being seen as an opportunity for attack; hers evokes compassion.

28 May 2015

Even now, on the edge of winter, the farm is a place of sparkling joy. Sun streams through the windows, warming the concrete floor, hitting points of sparkle. It’s almost too warm, with the embers of last night’s fire still glowing.

Outside, the hardenbergia is covered in flower buds, ready to open into a sprawling carpet of purple. Bean seeds are starting to come up, the boofheads of the plant world, shoving their heavy leaf through to the light. Lettuce seeds, carrot seeds, kale seeds have sprouted, making their way through the soil with their distinctive leaves – round, fluffy and scalloped respectively. Our Christmas-present cima di rapa seeds have made good progress, forming nice rows of radish-like green leaf. Precious midyin berry seeds, that sprouted some weeks ago, are developing their second leaves, with promising signs of thriving. Even the guava seeds, little bullets that we took from that most delicious fruit, are swelling, tiny green bumps appearing on the surface of the soil.

On the other side of the world, in London, my daughter-in-law waits to give birth, my son by her side. I wish birth for her could be as simple as for the guava, with a seed that swells and bursts above the soil into leaves. I hope my son will be as good a companion as the woman who sat by me as I was waiting to give birth to him. We sat and counted the seconds through my contractions, neither of us knowing what we were doing – but what a result!