Tatties, fleeces and toads
Manic is the only word that sums up the past week, so I've condensed this post into a mini 'photoblog'. As previously reported, the household numbers were reduced just before the weekend by the departure of the daughterly duo, who headed off to keep order amongst visiting foreign language students in Cambridge. Before they departed we took a photo of the three "ladies of the house" - or rather of our feet, because we noticed we all had pink footwear on! Two of us were dressed for a summer in Scotland: one of us (DaughterNo2) was not...
Incidentally, DaughterNo1 texted this afternoon to divulge that she had been up till 3 a.m. this morning supervising a teenage lad throwing up following closet excessive alcohol consumption. DaughterNo2 also reported having had to call paramedics following a similar incident! Seems the teens and alcohol problem isn't just a British one...
Monday brought an invitation from my parents (aka Supergran and Farmpa) to lunch with them at The Brig Farm restaurant near Bridge of Earn. Loads of yummy fresh produce, most of it locally sourced. Re-sult! As we munched lunch, we exchanged news, which included me showing Farmpa a photo of our beans, peas and potatoes which are now through the ground.
The pair of them immediately looked distinctly smug and revealed that the potatoes they are growing in their rockery (don't ask!) are way ahead of ours. That's when I played my potato-growing ace and showed them the photo of our first boiling of new potatoes, fresh from the polytunnel this week. Tah dah :-). And very tasty my tattie trump cards were too!
The polytunnel also yielded a few strawbs and a few spears of asparagus early in the week - though HunterGatherer rapped my knuckles for picking the latter. Apparently you're not supposed to harvest asparagus from June onwards (to let the plants regenerate for next season). Sad that, as there are another few spears already waving at me and I'm looking at them wistfully, but I dutifully haven't laid a finger on them.
Last night I harvested several stalks of rhubarb from the "fruit" section of the veggie patch. Something had gone wrong with the thicker stems - they were sort of spongy inside, as if the liquid had dried out. I don't know what was up with them - perhaps just a bit too old and shrivelled (know how they feel!). Still, I stewed the younger stalks in orange juice and honey, and added them to my porridge this morning. Not sure what that combo will do for my IBS, but hey, I enjoy living dangerously!
The rhubarb may have been slightly dodgy, but two of the gooseberry bushes are way beyond dodgy. They are decimated! Some rotten pests (HG thinks "sawfly"?) have dined in extremis on the leaves, so that all that's left behind are bare twiglets - with a sole gooseberry hinting tantatlisingly at what might have been. Any suggestions to avoid this next year on a postcard (or rather comment), please! It's soul destroying seeing the poor bushes like this and it happens every year.
The most important task achieved on the Sparrowholding this week was shearing. HunterGatherer girded his loins, embraced the backpain and set to work with his hand shears during a (very) rare break in the rain. He managed to get all the ewes shorn and wormed, and gave the 14 lambs their second jab to protect against clostridial diseases. Unfortunately most of the fleeces were only suitable for weed control in the garden, because HG had bedded the shed with woodchip in the winter to help keep the sheep dry. We did manage to rescue a couple of the brown fleeces, though, and I'm dispatching them to a lovely spinning lady whom I encountered on the Twittersphere.
These poor "naked ladies" were thoroughly unimpressed with their impromptu disrobing - especially as the rain is forecast to get worse. "Better soggy than maggoty," we told them. (They still looked unimpressed...)
There's been a lot of wildlife - in addition to the domestic animals - in evidence around the smallholding this week. Several swallows (or possibly housemartins?) have set up mudhome in our stable, keeping the poorly Shetland pony company. Here are the babies peeking out and saying "hi" from on high!
And last, but definitely not least, here's a lovely wee toad who leapt out of the middle of the raised strawberry bed while we were working in the polytunnel this evening (HG has planted a bed of spinach so large we may feed the whole of Kinross-shire with it). Mr Toad crawled away under one of the wooden supports that holds the raised bed in place - he couldn't get into our special terracotta toady des res, because it's been taken over by ants! We're fervently hoping that the distant thumping beat of T in the Park won't deter him from coming out later to continue his slug feast. He's got a lot of eating to do!
There were 22 in the bed and the little one said… “I’m going to sleep in the car!”
The Village Hall is ready to receive guests!
It has taken a full seven days to recover from last weekend’s belated 21st festivities, but I’m happy (and relieved!) to report that our lovely little village hall is still standing, HunterGatherer and I are also still standing, our wee hoosie is still standing, and DaughterNo.1 and her multifarious friends from home/school/uni/allotherpartsofherlife seem to have had a ball (although technically it was a Ceilidh, which is even more fun!). Job done – and only 20 months to go till DaughterNo2’s 21st ...
Dancing the night away Ceilidh-style
Ceilidhs have a great knack of appealing to all ages, and certainly the age range a week past Saturday went from the minuscule 4-year-old cousin to the “I’m nearly 80 you know” grandpa (aka Farmpa). As ever, phenomenal superwoman P – local caterer and organiser extraordinaire – was on top form: her lasagne was so delicious it made you want to apply for Italian citizenship, and her home-made chicken stroganoff would have done Count Pavel Stroganoff himself proud. The toe-tapping Tibbermore Band lifted the rafters of the hall with a succession of traditional Scottish reels and jigs, and the birthday girl herself even took to the stage at one point to lead them on her fiddle for the reel of the 51st.
DaughterNo1 with fiddle at the ready
We’d taken the precaution of recruiting a couple of Scottish Country dance gurus to come along, who coaxed and encouraged even the ‘virgin’ Scottish Country Dancers (from Oxford) on to the floor – and kept them there. Celebration Cake Station in Perth supplied the cake, complete with icing tartan sash, and their client service was exceptional. And last, but definitely not least, there were the guests: 70 odd (!) folk who drank and ate and laughed and danced all night, then stayed on stoically to help clear up at the end. Great nights are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, made of great people.
Thanks to Celebration Cake Station in Perth
Mmm, extra pud - Auntie G's pavlova...
Once the Ceilidh was over, the party continued back at our bursting-at-the-seams bungalow. Eventually, by 3.30 a.m., there were 22 teenage and twenty-something-year-old house guests strewn over every available floor space. This included the hallway immediately outside the kitchen, which meant that Yours Truly was effectively penned in the said kitchen. Figuring that neither the wooden floorboards underfoot nor the kitchen table would provide the necessary modicum of comfort, I retreated outside to the relative comfort of my wee Ford Fiesta, reclined the driver’s seat and proceeded to snatch a couple of precious hours’ sleep.
The dawn chorus woke me around 5 a.m., then FatCat (evidently unimpressed by the bodies lying around his familiar indoor sleeping haunts) jumped on the roof of the car at 6 a.m. and sat on the sunroof (can testify that it’s odd viewing the underbelly of a cat through a glass sunroof!), meowing his displeasure and demanding to come into the car. I remained unmoved by his remonstrations, until 7.30 a.m. when I roused myself sufficiently to drive back to the scene of the “night before” to make sure that there was nothing “unsuitable” left in or around the village hall and adjacent churchyard. The last thing I wanted to greet worshipers that Sunday morning was an inappropriate undergarment hoisted on the village flagpole...
My eagle proofreading eyes proved to be extremely useful in spotting rogue cigarette butts amongst the grass and gravel around the hall. Other than that, however, there were no signs in the tranquil little hamlet of the previous evening’s revelries, so I bolted back home to launch the mammoth bacon and sausage sarnie marathon. Half-asleep creatures began to emerge chrysalis-like from the cocoons of their sleeping bags, and eventually everyone was awake – though to say they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed would be a gross exaggeration, if not an unadulterated lie. Most to be pitied were the four folk who had to set off at 10 a.m. to participate in hockey matches. A definite case of not-quite-so ‘jolly’ hockeysticks for them!
DaughterNo2 (blue bib) is armed and dangerous - and hung over...
Bodies started disappearing from the Sparrow residence as early as Sunday lunchtime, and a week later, all that remains is DaughterNo1’s boyfriend who has secured an engineering internship in Perth and is renting a room from us for two months this summer. Meanwhile our daughterly duo have headed south to Cambridge to work for two months as house parents for groups of international teenage students in a language school.
Previous experience (DaughterNo1 worked there last summer) indicates that this task will not be without its challenges. Such as the time when elder daughter dear rang in desperation around midnight one evening to ask me to look up and text her the Russian word for “bedtime”, so her recalcitrant Russian charges could no longer pretend they didn’t know what she was telling them!
For DaughterNo2, the role of keeping an eagle eye on the extracurricular antics of a bevy of belligerent teenagers is akin to a “poacher turned gamekeeper”. It’s only a couple of years since she would have been the perpetrator in any shenanigans rather than the police(wo)man... Looks like the leopardess will have to change her spots for the summer J.
Packing, painting and party planning
June is galloping past at a fair lick, and C-day (Ceilidh Day) is fast approaching. HunterGatherer forayed into the deep south, complete with no. 2 daughter and a hired transit van to retrieve no.1 daughter with all her clobber plus most of son&heir’s clobber but not son&heir himself (his term not yet having finished). It was quickly evident to everyone involved that the combined mass of “stuff” accumulated by Sparrow Major and Sparrow Minor was never in a month of 36-hour Sundays going to fit back within the already bulging walls of the Sparrow residence.
Desperate situations call for desperate measures, so Yours Truly - who, as the four other members of the family were south of the Watford gap all weekend, had plenty of free time on her hands (ho ho!) – dashed to the local wood yard to purchase a new garden shed. And thank goodness I did, because by the time the bowels of the Transit van had been emptied, both Old Shed and New Shed were stuffed to the gunnels – not to mention every room in the house. Which, one shouldn’t forget, is a modest bungalow that is about to welcome some 20 house guests this weekend following daughter no.1’s 21st celebrations in the local village hall.
Fortunately, we are used to such invasions of youthful folk, as our close proximity to a certain major Rock FesTival has meant that for the past six or seven years, July has seen our garden become a make-shift extension of the festival campsite for up to 17 rock-weary revellers. So post-birthday party bacon butties for 20 in the wee sma’ hours of Sunday should not pose a problem. Just don’t, please, please, let it rain this weekend the way that it did last weekend. By 7 p.m. last Friday night, I was on the point of looking out lifejackets for our poor saturated lambs L. A similar downpour this coming weekend could mean some extremely soggy party-goers - and tents, and clothes, and muddy boots x 40... I think I shall ring Supergran and ask her to do one of her sundances. Between ourselves, Supergran rather fancies herself as a white witch, and to be honest, I’m so desperate for sunshine this weekend, I’ll give anything a go!
Arrangements for putting up somnambulant party guests after the event are proceeding apace. Most importantly, the painter has now completed the bathroom, hall and kitchen, thereby eliminating years of smoke and grime. Said smoke and grime had nothing to do with us, I hasten to add: we inherited it all when we – or, to be more accurate, the building society – bought the cottage 15 years ago.
Now the walls are magnificently nicotine-free and “all” that remains to be done is to put back in place the gazillions of things that had to be moved in order to let the unsuspecting painters, T and D, gain access. I suspect that poor T and his able assistant D had never ever in their careers had the pleasure (!) of working in quite such a chaotic abode – even though T has (and I quote) “been in the business 40 years, ye ken.” All three offspring had strictly prohibited me from allowing a particular section of the wall beside the kitchen door to be painted over. The reason for their kitchen wall protectionist policy is that the said wall is inscribed with their heights and their friends’ heights over the past 10 or so years. (Quote) “You cannot paint over them – they’re part of our family history”. So, Yours Truly found herself explaining to a frankly incredulous T and D that whilst they could weave their Dulux magic everywhere else in the kitchen, this bit of wall had to stay the original colour (see photo). As we’d opted for a slightly less yellow yellow this time round, it now looks faintly ridiculous. Still, at least the kids and their friends will be happy!
The growth chart in the kitchen - blue lines of masking tape are to remind painter not to paint over the names/dates/heights etc.
It has to be said that both student daughters have become distinctly badger-like in their habits this week. For anyone not quite sure what I mean by this analogy, I’m referring to a badger’s habit of digging out his set by means of simply kicking all the dirt out the ‘front door’ between his hind legs. The girls adopted an alarmingly similar domestic approach i.e. anything that they reckoned was no longer cool or of practical/sentimental value to them was simply booted into the hall. Suffice to say that the hall now resembles an extremely over-full charity shop while the sororial duo’s bedrooms are looking fantastic, thank you very much.
Talking of looking fantastic, I have a failure to report. My attempts to lose 2 stone in two weeks just don’t seem to have borne fruit for some reason (could be something to do with the two bags of M&S Percy Pigs – or the box of simply ‘out of this world’ summer fruit choccies that I discovered in the local Sainsbury’s while buying Farmpa his Father’s Day gift. Yes, it could have been either of those... So if, on Saturday evening, the only garment that I can slip sveltely into is one of HunterGatherer’s hessian potato bags, I have only myself to blame (as well as M&S and Sainsbury’s, of course!). Mark you, judging by the sign that appeared above the scales at our local gym this week, it would appear that my aspirations to lose weight rather pale into insignificance compared with those of another member. The sign (see photo below) reads: “No Nude Weighing”. Reckon someone obviously forgot they were on candid camera...
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