It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet….
Annathevet turned up last week on one of her many professional/coffee-with-a-friend visits to Swallowtail Hill. She speculated that it could prove extremely difficult explaining to her other friends what she got up to with me. She rehearsed a conversation out loud: “So what do you and your friend Sarah like to do? Go on spa breaks? Enjoy nights out without husbands in tow?” “No” she replied to no-one in particular, “I go round to Sarah’s and teach her how to empty her dog’s anal glands, she likes that kind of thing.”
She’s not wrong. Annathevet is not only a good friend and exceptional vet; she is cursed by the fact that she has to deal with me professionally on a regular basis. This means she has to let me ‘help’ her as she goes about her work here at the farm because I harbour secret fantasies of being her capable veterinary nurse. She is very patient with me – I can do all sorts of unsavoury medical procedures competently because of her training. She is also tolerant of my addiction to veterinary manuals and research papers on the internet – she even spells out the big words when she is making a diagnosis so that I can Google them correctly after she leaves. This works fine when she is looking after my chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, ducks, rabbits and cats. But not with the dogs. Because of course then, she has to cope with my high levels of neurosis and anxiety too.
On this particular visit she was at the farm to x-ray Dottie’s legs and determine the cause of a persistent limp. While she set up the x-ray machine I began panicking about the need to sedate Dottie but Annathevet calmly let me wear the protective lead overall (how exciting!) and kept reminding me to breathe while she was sorting out the dog – who of course was fine. After a cup of hot sweet tea for the shock I was fine too, and as a special treat I let her teach me how to empty Mabel’s anal glands – such fun!
Annathevet then casually commented that she’d spent much of the previous night in A&E. It transpired that on a house call two days previously the homeowner had asked if she could free a stray cat that was stuck behind their boiler. This kind of request isn’t unusual for Annathevet – her problem is that she’s too competent by half. If she turned up to treat your guinea pig and you said ‘while you’re here would you mind rewiring the house, upholstering the sofa, cooking a gourmet dinner and teaching the kids to speak Chinese?’ – She’d just get stuck in. Anyhow – I digress – in removing the stray cat (a feral Tom with giant cojones and an attitude to match) she sustained a major bite to her right arm which proceeded to swell up to Popeye proportions rendering her rather unwell with septicaemia. When Annathevet feels ‘off colour’ you take it seriously (this is a woman who I think just bit down on a leather strap while giving birth to her two children). So she took herself off to hospital (of course!) and demanded a massive dose of IV antibiotics – laughing off the Doctor’s suggestion that she should be admitted – and before you could say ‘catshavefilthymouths’ – she was straight back out on her rounds.
The poor girl has had quite a week. But don’t worry – I’m going to cheer her up. No we’re not going out for dinner. Nope, not a trip to the cinema either. I’m going to let her teach me how to artificially inseminate the pigs!
Annathevet is camera shy - so a pic of Dottie will have to suffice!
By Swallowtail Hill’s Chip Shop Chicks
Deep Fat Frying day is becoming almost as traditional as Christmas at Swallowtail Hill. The deep fat fryer is the one kitchen gadget that doesn’t get used very often a) because it would be exceptionally bad for our health and b) because I hate the job of cleaning it, but we allow the use of it on occasion – most often on New Year’s Day when hangovers permit the making of chips.
The physical craving for greasy carbs on this particular day is fortunate because one of our regular houseguests – Suzanne – likes nothing better than to fry stuff. In fact it’s debatable whether she actually comes to visit for the New Year celebrations at all – or whether it’s just for the opportunity to play at chip shops. I’m not kidding – this year BestFriendLisa joined in the frying and we dubbed the pair ‘The Chip Shop Chicks’ – I think they may have started writing a business plan for opening their own chippie, such is the happiness it brings them. It seems that the big attraction (and the part that causes most squabbling) is the chance to lift the frying basket when the food is ready and shake off the excess oil like a professional. They even took on chip-shop-alter-egos while frying – Stacey and Pauline. Worryingly, Suz commented that she quite likes the thought of having to wear one of those little hats with a hairnet on the back and a white overall (that solves next year’s Christmas gift).
Of course the rest of us just sit back and eat – this year it wasn’t just chips – over the course of several hours it was homemade scotch-eggs, crispy celeriac, and potato croquettes with cheese inside. Pauline and Stacey started to get a crazed look in their eyes going through the fridge to see what else they could roll in breadcrumbs and dunk in hot oil, so after a while we had to call an end to frying time before they got too over excited and we had to go to A&E with dangerously high cholesterol.
Obviously it goes without saying that on January 2nd we have to go on a detox diet as we have put on pounds / broken out in spots / reek of chip fat, but it makes for a fun start to the New Year! Maybe the Chip Shop Chicks should be allowed to open their first branch here at Swallowtail Hill during the summer so that our campers can at least eat chips if they can’t get their bbq campfires started?
Pauline (Suz) and Stacey (Lisa) aka The Chip Shop Chicks
Donkeys and the Law of Sheds
There are 53 animals at Swallowtail Hill, including the humans, and not including the bees. You can imagine the grocery bill. One of the humans – the female, as she is referred to in the pub – suffers from obsessive compulsive hoarding. Of animals. So in spite of the occasional tragedy, their numbers inexorably increase each year. It came as no surprise therefore when Sarah announced that she thought we should get a pair of donkeys.
I thought we’d got over this, and that Sarah was cured. I had successfully fought off the three year campaign to get horses. Llama’s made an appearance, but not for long. There was a moment of madness when she suggested Water Buffalo would be a good idea (“we could make our own mozzarella!”). And Alpacas reared their heads briefly until I pointed out how much they cost to buy, let alone feed. And people steal them. Now I know what the long animal conversation silence was about. She was gestating donkeys. Her pretext is that they would make lovely means of transport for our glampers. What’s more she had the idea that we could operate a donkey tuck shop – load the beasts with cakes, jams and chutneys, incense sticks, cuddly toys, and jewellery, then walk them down to the tents and Meadowkeepers like itinerant desert pedlars, and sell, sell, sell.
What she has not taken into account is the Swallowtail Hill Law of Sheds. This says that sheds fill up as soon as you build them. Even if you’ve got nothing to put in them, build one and almost immediately it will be full. We have 14 sheds, and two barns. All full. I am planning a 15th because I just know it will be needed for stuff we’re not even aware we need yet.
You may wonder what the connection is between donkeys and the Law of Sheds. Donkeys need a shed. So here we have an example of actually planning to get stuff before I’ve even built a shed to put it in. That’ll be shed 16 then. And guess who gets to build them all?
Meanwhile Christmas is almost here – warm, sunny weather, early signs of daffodils coming up, next year’s bracken pushing through the leaf mould! Enjoy yours.
By Mists, Mellow Fruitfulness and Weird Weather
We had a lot of mellow fruitfulness this Autumn at Swallowtail Hill, most of it now bottled as a consequence of an outbreak of frenzied mashing, pulping, boiling and straining. Spurred on by the success of selling her preserves to our glampers all summer, Sarah has gone into overdrive in readiness for 2012. The kitchen currently resembles a delicatessen – quince jelly, plum jam, several varieties of chutney, medlar thingy and other unidentifiable preserves. She also turned her attention to making crab apple wine, and cider. I helped – a bit – by working the apple press. I will also help by drinking them.
Now we have a lot of mists. And it’s still very warm outside. All this is very weird. The grass is still growing, leaves are still on the trees, there are even flowers shoving timidly through the soil. A friend of ours has primroses in his garden. So it’s no surprise that the papers report greenhouse gas levels way above even worst case scenario’s from a decade ago. If you live in the country, it is extremely easy to see climate change in action.
Our most recent contribution to sorting the problem out has been the installation of solar PV panels on our barn roof. Just as the government announced a radical cut in the feed-in tariff. That said, it’s really quite rewarding to look at the digital display racking up the watts pouring in through the roof, and whizzing back down the wire to the grid. (How that works, I simply cannot fathom. How can electricity go in two directions at once?). What’s alarming, of course, is that we’re generating any electricity at all in this way at the end of November.
So, if Swallowtail Hill becomes the sea-girt island we often speculate about rather sooner than expected, we shall at least have a year’s supply of vitamin C bottled up and ready to eat, and we can also get completely shit faced watching the sputtering of the lights fired by our very own electricity.
Location, Location, Location
We are at that time of year when we start obsessing about The Tortoise. Regular readers will laugh at this – knowing that we spend most of the year obsessing about the tortoise. Ok, you’ve got me there, however it is true to say that this time of year is particularly fraught with anxiety as we prepare him for hibernation.
Tonka
So what kind of a year has Tonka had? Well we finally found him a summer residence that he liked. You may recall that in 2010 Christopher and our good friend Graham built Tonka a state of the art tortoise house. We felt that this was what he wanted. We did a lot of research as to the most appropriate homes for tortoises and created a very spacious residence adjacent to the greenhouse. It was quiet, south facing, with a grassy area full of wild plants to graze, a small pond for wallowing, a glass covered corner to bask in (sort of a solarium), a wide entrance leading into a secluded part of the greenhouse where his heat lamp hung, and a dark cosy bedroom. He hated it. Instantly. We tried to get him to adjust to it. I even spent time sitting in it talking to him while he got used to his new surroundings. The therapy didn’t work; he still preferred living in our conservatory.
So this summer we tried again. We built something smaller, right outside our front door. Very square in shape, much less interesting, one bush to hide under, couple of stones to bask on, no inside area. It’s much noisier and busier – the dogs spend hours sticking their noses through the fence to sniff him and wonder what he might taste like and the postman says hello to him every morning. Tonka loves it. He took to it straightaway. Turns out it was all about the postcode. Tonka is like one of those annoying couples on Location, Location, Location who start out saying they want to live somewhere with five bedrooms halfway up a Welsh mountain and end up realising that their dream property is actually a former council flat in Haringey. However, one can’t stay cross at a tortoise for very long.
So Tonka has had a good summer and now it’s time to prepare for the big sleep. He had his last meal a week ago and is now into the necessary fast before hibernation (they can’t hibernate with any food still in their system – it can turn toxic and kill them). He’s been wormed, weighed, bathed and health checked. So by the beginning of December he’ll be ready. Obviously it would help if the weather played ball too – it’s difficult to convince Tonka that a three month snooze is a good idea when it’s still so mild. Once he’s bedded down for the winter Christopher and I will begin our winter game of ‘where shall we put the reptile tonight’ (stop sniggering – it isn’t THAT SORT of game) – the box with the tortoise in it has to be kept within a certain temperature range – not too hot or he’ll wake up, not too cold or he’ll die. We discovered last year that very few places in our house remain consistently within that temperature range. So his box will get moved about a great deal and houseguests over the festive period may find themselves sharing a room with him (we don’t charge extra for this).
So far we have managed to get to this stage in proceedings without a row. That’s me and Christopher, not me and the tortoise (although obviously Tonka and I did have words when he relocated from the greenhouse). This is mainly because Christopher is satisfied that Tonka is a now a happy tortoise. Past arguments were usually about Tonka’s state of mind and general well-being but now all of his needs have been addressed Christopher can relax safe in the knowledge that the tortoise is content. It is slowly becoming clear to me that I am now so far down the pecking order in our household that even the tortoise has greater status.
This is the story of a rural life, lived by Sarah and Christopher on their 40 acre Wealden farm, near Rye, which they share with assorted animals, wild flowers, trees, an eclectic array of locals and the odd visitor who thinks it's an idyll. Sometimes it is.
