The Cottager's Reply

I heard this song on Radio 2 today and it really resonated with me. It's a song by Chris Wood based on a poem he wrote about second homes.

It begins (with some lovely folksy guitar accompaniment):

Five hundred thousand English pounds

for this old house and a piece of ground.

You and your wife you've always planned

to settle down in Cotswold land.

Well you best come in and you best sit down

it's such a long drive from London town.

Would you like some tea now while I tell

the reasons why I will not sell.

This stone-built house that you called "nice"

was gained at far too high a price

for me to gladly sign away

what others toiled for night and day...

I urge you to visit Chris Wood on MySpace and listen to the rest. There are some lovely lines (London town's four hours for me; in your f...f...f...four by f...f...f...four you'll do it in three...) and it really sums up the frustration and sadness of people watching their homes being swallowed up by well-heeled second home owners from the big smoke.

It illustrates too the heritage of a house and its land and the fact that the toil and suffering of those who lived there before is infused into the stone that the cottage is built from. It's an education, really, for second homeowners, should they wish to listen.

I suppose I really liked it because although I'm from rural Worcestershire and now live in Wales (in a stone cottage), my ancestry is Cotswold. My great grandfather is buried in the churchyard at Winchcombe and I feel a strong pull to that area.

I have this fantasy (and it's a bit of a family joke now, especially as to get a similar 22 acre smallholding to this one would cost £1.4 million) that one day I'll be rich enough to afford "to settle down in Cotswold land" but, having heard this song, I'm feeling guilty about that now!

Snowed in

We have our blanket of snow today and it is lovely. It is beautiful, crisp and deep, nearly up to the tops of my wellies and way above those of the girls. School is closed and Brian can't get to work so we have the only thing to do is to put on hats, gloves, fleeces and waterproofs and get out into the 'white stuff' for some wintry fun.

Mido loved it, zooming around on the virgin snow in wide, sweeping curves, grabbing mouthfuls of it and tossing it into the air.

I tested out the toboggan first. Most of our fields slope, but this one is the first we tried. The better one is in the distance over the hedge. That field is flat at the top and then really steep before levelling off a little. The perfect tobogganing field, but the snow was too deep and we did a lot of snow ploughing at first. The dog is chasing me enthusiastically. His idea of tobogganing is to chase you to the bottom and give you the kiss of life. Most unwelcome!

This is Bullseye, our sensitive little rescue pony. He had just made a pony 'snow angel' and was terrified of the way the snow creaked when his hooves squashed it.

Our green lane took on a whole new wintry hue.

On our way back to the house for a much-needed hot chocolate and caramel digestives and to empty all the snow out from our wellies.

Sniffles, snuffles and thank God for Calpol...

January seems to have been our month for the common cold. Poor R5 (pictured yesterday in a photograph set up and taken by H6) had a very snotty day, then a day of red and interesting rash, two days of complete exhaustion and then (yesterday) fierce earache.

Earache is something I well remember from my own childhood, except Calpol had not been invented in the early 1970s. I remember the awfulness of the pain and wanting to cry so much that, on one day I remember, Mum shut me into the living room on my own for my own safety while she went elsewhere and had a good scream about the injustice of a world which landed her with a small child with earache.

The medicine was fairly foul too. Mum used to take me to Dr Davies and I would sit on his knee, while he would say, before anything else was said: "Which ear?" It was usually the right one and I swear I still can't hear so well in that one now.

The medicine was yellow and gloopy and bitter and "lemon flavour" and was dosed with a big tube shaped spoon. I hated it and can also remember dangling off the banisters to avoid a dose of the foul liquid.

Calpol, on the other hand, is strawberry flavoured and smells sweet and sickly. R5 can be trusted to know when it is needed too. If you offer her Calpol at any other time, she won't have it. There has to be a certain level of pain. Yesterday the ear pain (and yes, it was the right one) was so severe that the Calpol paracetamol was only lasting for two of the four hours between doses. Calpol ibuprofen was therefore required in between times. This doubling up of dosing scares me, but it's on medical advice and was exactly what they did one time we took her to the surgery. In fact the medicine is the same one they gave us on prescription.

Two doses of each took us to the evening and then bedtime when she snored solidly for 12 hours, woke up and demanded to be taken to school. God bless Calpol.

Besotted

We are all besotted with these little chaps. They're only small, but have quite a story.

The one on the left is called Patchy. He started the whole saga, but the story really begins last summer when myself, H6 and R5 visited my friend who is a vet. She had recently taken delivery of three guinea pigs for her sons E4 and F2. They were adorable and we all had a cuddle. Of course the inevitable happened:

"Mummeeeeee. Pleeeeese can we have a guinea pig?"

Of course I took the admirable, quite justified and time-honoured course of action.

"Ask Daddy," I said.

They did. Daddy said (quite predictably):

"NO!"

Then he said: "Maybe next year," which H6 and R5 took to mean: "Yes!"

So plans were made to buy guinea pigs in summer 2009 and H6 and R5 began to look forward to it. But then... B46 (ha!) is a big fan of Freecycle. We had not long taken collection of three bantams from that source (First egg on Christmas Day! What cuties!) and he'd been watching a post about a male guinea pig that needed a home. The next thing I knew he shuffled in and confessed that he'd been chosen as the lucky recipient of said piggy. That was November.

"Where are we going to put it?" I shrieked.

"I'll make it a cage, it can go out in the cowshed," he said.

Wrong. This close to Christmas Grandad and Grandma pounced on the idea and bought a new cage from Petsathome for H6 and R5's Christmas present.

Right. We fetched the pig. He was small and perfectly formed and 110% cute.

"He can't go in the barn," said B46, looking soppy. So small, cute pig moved into his new cage on the wide shelf in our bedroom with a big box and a large bag in front of him.

"Shush!" we said.

"Wheek!" said Patchy.

How noisy is one small guinea pig munching a carrot in your bedroom at 11.45pm? Something akin to a battalion of Welsh guards practising their marching skills with iron shod boots. And he wheeked, and purred, and rattled the bars of the cage (and he whiffed too, but not much really). Astonishingly, despite standing right next to the cage (in its disguise) on many occasions and despite all the noise, H and R never noticed him.

A fortnight later B46 was on Freecycle again. This time it was a "female guinea pig" found wandering in Ceredigion. He applied. He got it. Oh dear. We didn't want babies. Guinea pig castration is not impossible, but anaesthetising them to do so is. We couldn't have a female, so we broke the bad news to the other Guinea Pig people, but with a PS: Please check it really is a girl. We even supplied a picture of the appropriate parts. An e-mail pinged back - a photograph of their guinea pig's parts. It was like taking part in some sort of online guinea pig porn picture swap. It was a boy.

'Lucky', as s/he is now known, had been found in the middle of a farm in the middle of nowhere by a Dutch woman who had never seen a guinea pig before. He's a Himalayan - a blond pig with sooty ears and nose. He's adorable. We carefully introduced him to Patchy and they are now big buddies.

The surprise was sprung on Christmas Day. Grandma wrapped the cage in lots of Christmas paper, while the piggies snuggled briefly in a cardboard box. H and R unwrapped the cage and were delighted with it, H explaining to Grandma, that it would be for the guinea pigs "we're getting in the summer."

"Ah ha!" we said. "Sit down and close your eyes."

The best Bond... so far

I had a little poll on my blog to see which James Bond we all prefer. Daniel Craig won by miles, giving me an excuse for a nice gratuitous non-festive picture. Nobody voted for Roger Moore, which says a great deal about those awful films where a flabby Bond pawed at nubile bikini-clad Bond girls. Nowadays Bond is the objectified one and is expected to be a little more buff while the Bond girls are intelligent, but still beautiful. Don't you just love the 21st century!

It's Christmas!

I had two 'rules' for the tree this year. 1. Only gold, white and clear decorations. 2. No tinsel. Hannah and Rosie did the decorating and a few non-rules things have sneaked on (like the red crackers), but I think they did a great job and they were very proud of it when they had finished.

One of the non-white/gold/clear decorations is this pretty angel which belongs to Hannah. But she's so gorgeous I allowed her to stay.

This is the nativity Hannah made at school a couple of years ago. It owes a great deal to egg boxes and toilet roll middles. Rosie made the angel on the far left and the other angel is a bamboo one they fell in love with in a shop in Solva when they were babies.

This is the dining room window tree - a goat willow branch planted in a pot with all our homemade decorations and a few fairies on board. Half of the lights are out (as usual!). I need a bumper pack of spare bulbs for this set.

Pony cakes

Okay. By popular demand (well, two people have asked!) here are my pony cakes, last year's and this year's. Not great works of art, admittedly, but made with love more than any particular artistic flair.

Technical notes. Both were made from an eight inch chocolate sponge cake. This year's had added ground almonds, because I felt like it (3 eggs, weigh eggs, same weight of each of very soft butter, caster sugar and self raising flour. Remove three tablespoonfuls of flour and replace with one tablespoon of cocoa powder and two tablespoons of ground almonds).

Last year's icing was ordinary chocolate butter icing, following the recipe on the icing sugar packet. This year's was Brian's chocolate spice cake icing, which is delicious. He had to make it because the recipe is top secret and I'm not allowed to have it. It can only be passed on to a bloodline C., so H6 and R5 will get the recipe one day. Huh.

The mane, carrots, apple etc are coloured marzipan, because we all love marzipan and hate sugar paste.

That's it really. The recipient was delighted. We all made absolute pigs of ourselves eating it (is there anything better than chocolate icing?) and we argued over who got the biggest carrot.

Will R5 want another pony cake for her 6th birthday? I have a horrible feeling that she will!