Oh, and there was this seagull, too
Today, we dug up all the potatoes — got a good haul, too — and braided the onions together to dry. The kitchen smells distinctly French.
Then I sat in the garden, reading a book and feeding bits of my lunch to the chickens. They’re partial to meat, god help us all. Suddenly Lucia — who still makes peeping noises like a baby chick, as a rule — let out two thumping great grown-up BE-GACKs.
Not twelve feet away was a great handsome fox, padding steadily toward us. I said something intelligent like, “whoa, dude — you’re a fox,” but he wasn’t impressed. Not until I got up and headed toward him did he turn and saunter away, waving that bushy red tail.
Funny she recognized the threat. The chooks don’t seem the least bothered by cats, including that feral lad who would happily take a swipe at them if I turned my back.
Anyway — have a good weekend, all. I leave you with this lovely sentiment, what Uncle B ran across while shopping online for new tires. Engrish is the ranguage of ruv.
The Kumho KH 31 is in the four fragrances orange blossom, rosemary, lavender and jasmine. The tyres are not well known to smell is one thing that is not only with a car and thicknesses much hp under the hood can specify, is the other thing. How about times with the opposite sex instead of roses, with beguiling smells of jasmine or orange on points. Let simply Kumho KH 31 and assemble a balance of fresh scent.
August 6, 2010 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 21
ZOMFG!!! I SAW A STOAT!!!!
In my own garden! In broad daylight! I was sitting in the shade reading a book with the chooks around me and out he popped from a gap in the hedge — not twenty feet away — with his back to me. Didn’t look around. Hopped a few feet in a leisurely way (for a stoat), paused and stood up again (which is when I saw the black tip of his tail that marked him a stoat, not a weasel). Slinkied to the end of the hedge and popped back in again.
I couldn’t have been more astonished if a tartan plaid unicorn had popped out of the hedge and farted “God Save the Queen.”
Explains why I haven’t seen a stoat in the field, anyhow — they’ve been using the hedgerows as a highway. And probably killing runnybabbits in there, too.
Hedgerows are used as field boundaries much more often than fencing in Britain. Or were — in the mid-20th, farmers began to dig them up so they could use modern farming techniques with huge agricultural machines.
Mistake. There’s a whole ecosystem dependent on hedgerows. Lots of little birds and creatures live in them and off them and use them to travel in relative safety from one habitat to another. There are now laws in place to protect hedges and encourage new planting.
Some hedges are ancient. Ours is certainly very old. One rule of thumb is to count the number of kinds of shrub — the more the older — though a hedge around a house is planted for show as much as keeping the tups out of the garden, and so would have always more variety than a purely utilitarian hedge.
Ours is like a firework display in slow motion, with one thing flowering and fruiting after another, from Spring to Fall. Blackberry bramble, honeysuckle, some sort of thorn (hawthorn or blackthorn — you know them by the burst of white flowers in May), elder, several kinds of roses. Spectacular. And alive with bird nests.
And down below, a network of dark tunnels the little animals use to get around. And the not so little animals — I’ve seen the cat dive in the very hole the stoat disappeared into. Must be many a dark murder done in them green corridors.
And now you know why the chickens don’t ‘free range’ unless one of us is watching them. Though if old Stoaty had popped out twenty feet closer and nabbed a chook, there’s not much I could do about it.
July 8, 2010 — 11:27 pm
Comments: 28
No better than she should be
Today we took Clan Badger to Smallhythe Place, an early 16th Century half-timbered house in, of all places, Small Hythe in Kent. Small Hythe was once an important port and shipbuilding center, until the sea hiked her skirts and skittered away. It is now miles and miles from the water (making the boat launch look rather silly).
A National Trust membership for two cost us £84 and we’re by-god going to get our money’s worth this year.
The house is in much the same Tudor style as Badger House, but maybe a hundred years older. That room farthest away in the photo was held in place by iron braces, and the floors were so outrageously wobbly and wonky that walking around the room made us all feel a bit ill, like one of those state fair funhouses.
From 1899 until her death in 1928, Smallhythe was home to Ellen Terry — the leading Shakespearean actress of her day. For which read: scenery-munching hambone.
She gave the house to the National Trust on her death, and it doubles as a museum of her life and acting memorabilia. Pretty cool stuff. She was the model for this iconic Sargent painting — the dress is upstairs in the Wonky Room.
Terry had three husbands, a series of lovers and a couple of illegitimate children (the son made eight bastards of his own; the daughter set herself up in the house next door to Smallhythe in a lesbian ménage à trois). Pretty good going for a woman of the High Victorian age.
Mother Badger seemed deeply perturbed by this information, although she mostly viewed it as a schedule management problem. “How did she have time?” she kept asking, shaking her head.
The gardens were lovely. And Uncle Badger was gratified to see they were laid out and planted up very similarly to our own — obviously aiming for a lush Tudor cottage garden effect.
But this sign was his favorite part. He refused to budge until he’d seen the odd stoat.
June 30, 2010 — 10:59 pm
Comments: 25
It’s like a flipping ZOO around here…
Hedgehog. Uncle B spotted him in the garden around midnight last night.
The gloves aren’t because they bite, nor even because of the spines. The danger with hedgies is apparently the fleas — they carry lots of not nice diseases.
I’ve never seen one in the wild before. There weren’t any in the section of London where we were. It’s bigger than I expected — the only ones I’ve ever seen were the pigmy ones people keep as pets.
Poor sweet little bugger just rolled up in a prickly ball and prayed for release.
And — finally! — EZnSF wins the Dead Pool! Art Linkletter is currently filming the premier episode of Beelzebub Says the Darnedest Things.
You know the drill, EZ — if you want the dicks, you have to cough up a snail mail address. If you don’t want the dicks, you are wise beyond your years. Whatever they are.
As per usual, the next installment of the Dead Pool begins Friday at 6pm GMT. What time is that where you are? How the hell should I know? What am I, your mother?
May 26, 2010 — 10:44 pm
Comments: 35
I should learn to knit, really
Wool. One of the side-effects of having sheep fields on three sides of us; bits of this stuff constantly drift surreally across the lawn.
You know, I’m looking out the skylight…it’s 9:30 and there’s still light in the sky. Uncle B recently read in a gardening book that in some parts of the UK (the Northernmost, one assumes) the hours of daylight are as short as seven in Winter and as long as seventeen in Summer.
I wonder if I’ll ever really get used to the rhythms here.
Anyhow, it has finally warmed up a little, so we’ve been out doing gardeny things. Hence posting lameness, as I unplug from the news/politics channel and plug into the weed/prune channel for a while.
I’ve decided to use my awesome plant-murdering powers for good.
May 18, 2010 — 9:21 pm
Comments: 19
ZOMG, they’re dropping them all over the yard!!!1!
Whoa. They turned a couple hundred pregnant ewes into the field behind the house over the weekend and let ’em go for it. I guess the farmer figured it was warm enough not to bother with the lambing shed (though there’s a cutting wind out there, poor little bastards).
Lambs are plopping out all OVER the place. Periodically, the farmer rounds up the mamas and behbehs and leaves behind the unripe ones.
All last night, we heard brand new lambs bleating. I got the biggest kick out of that — born into darkness, can you imagine their little faces when the sun came up?
April 12, 2010 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 28
Odds and ends
I’m going to give it a rest tonight — because, frankly, I just didn’t get my next hideous nightmarish caricature of Nancy Pelosi done in time.
See that thing in the corner? It appeared tonight out of nowhere while I was surfing the Zazzle forums. It is the forum equivalent of a giant, swinging tallywhacker.
I have arrived.
Okay, actually, it just means I’ve made at least a hundred bucks at least three months in a row. So I haven’t actually arrived, but I’ve certainly left the station! Thank you all for every grubby penny! Mwah!
Nature Roundup
Uncle B went out to check his greenhouse last night and came running back with his eyes as wide as tea saucers. He shone his flashlight across the ditch at the back garden, and there, not a dozen feet away, was a real, live badger!
The nearest sett we know of is a mile up, across a busy road, so we didn’t think they came this far. Badger ran off, but we spent the rest of the evening pitching stale bread into the field.
If the farmer catches us doing that, he’ll murdelate us.
Then this morning, I look out the kitchen window, and there’s a swan. So there’s that.
And I was just drifting off to my customary evening nap (the pace of life here really gets to me, y’know?) when I heard the quiet ticking of the deathwatch beetle in the corner. So they’re back this year, too.
I leave you with my favorite Zazzle shirt of all time. (No, it’s not mine. My one is here).
I totally want to own that thing.
March 24, 2010 — 11:08 pm
Comments: 21
I am so not shitting you
And by “not shitting you” I mean “nobody in this house is allowed to take a shit for the foreseeable future.”
This is our weather forecast as is, was and ever shall be. Have I mentioned the moat?
Okay, it’s not really a moat. We just call it that. It used to be part of a network of drainage ditches that served to control runoff from the farm and pasture lands around us. Now many of them are cutoff and stand alone. Filling with water.
Filling and filling and filling.
Our sewage empties into it. Only, we don’t have a boring old septic system. We have a complex, computer-controlled shit processing factory. And the water level is now within five inches of the outlet.
God knows what happens if the water overtops the outlet. I’m guessing the central computer sings “Bicycle Built for Two” while attempting to shut down our life support systems. Stay tuned!
TOMORROW COMES THE DEAD POOL. I’m going to set it up to auto-post at 6pm Zulu Time. That’s 1pm on the East Coast and 10am on the Left Coast. Remember, no matter who you had before, it all starts again fresh — you have to show up and pick again. Let’s see if we can’t bring BlueHost to its knees!
February 25, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 18
It was excellent, thanks!
Please join us in front of the virtual fire at Badger House for a…no, wait — keep the hell away from my whisky, you!
Yep, I got whisky. And books. And socks (no, exciting technical socks). And a woolly Mike Nesmith hat (Huh. I thought I looked fetching and not at all Muslim with my scarf wrapped around my head). And dominoes (does anybody remember how to play dominoes?).
And one of those neat little Flip USB video cameras. Except I haven’t figured out how to drive it yet, so I offer you this lame .gif animation instead.
What did Sandy Claws bring you?
December 25, 2009 — 4:58 pm
Comments: 59
Eating rodents, eating
The thing above is a harvest loaf. You find them in shops this time of year. Britons serve them at their…naked Gaia-invoking rituals, or whatever damn pagan thing they get up to at harvest time.
Anyhow, the traditional harvest loaf always has a little mouse baked into it.
Meanwhile, the Rat of Badger House has developed a taste for hand soap. Two new bars have vanished from the dish by the kitchen sink in the last week. And I mean vanished — not a trace. That’s got to be a major rodent, right there.
Then this gnawed lump appeared on the pantry shelf. Complete with gnawed wrapper, so it isn’t one of the missing kitchen bars.
I’ve switched to Pear’s (love that herb-y smell!) which seems to have put him off. So far.
What mystifies me is — no piles of waxy rat poops have turned up.
October 27, 2009 — 5:15 pm
Comments: 31