I wore gaiters to church!
Our parish did the Rogation walk yesterday. Not, technically, Rogation Sunday (that would be April 25), but this service is one of the many that wadded up Roman customs with pagan rituals, put a little Jesus sauce on it and called it a Christian festival…so punctilious observance seems unnecessary.
“Rogation” comes from the Latin rogare — to ask. In rural areas (like what we are) the priest asks a blessing on the fields and the animals. It’s also associated with the ancient custom of beating the bounds — a ritual in which all the boys were marched along the parish boundaries while the men threw them into ponds and briar patches and slammed their heads on boundary rocks and markers.
Hey, no Google Earth. It was the best way to ensure they never, ever, ever forgot the property line.
Sadly, we didn’t have any boys. We didn’t even walk the whole boundary line. We did lead a whole herd of bluehairs across a good few fields of sheep (also, unexpectedly, cows) and we blessed the bejesus out of the lot.
We recited the Benedicite Omnia Opera at them.
Yeah. It was one wand short of a Harry Potter.
May 9, 2011 — 8:11 pm
Comments: 19
In defense of the royals…
Nah, I’m not really into it. Don’t plan to watch tomorrow. Well, maybe the hilight reel.
But my Twitter stream is full of Yanqui sarcasm about the Royal Wedding and I have one invariable rule in life — find out what all the cool kids are doing, and do something else.
Truly, the Brits have an astonishing ability to pull off these huge aristocratic spectacles with military precision, mostly because they let the military handle them. It’s a holdover from the days of empire, I suppose.
Weddings, state funerals coronations…if you watch any of it tomorrow, think of the logistics of putting together all those soldiers and horses and antiquated whatnots and whoozits, and bringing it all off without a hitch.
I post this tonight in case it all goes horribly wrong tomorrow; you can show up back here to point and laugh.
It’s only fair.
April 28, 2011 — 9:59 pm
Comments: 30
Ghosteses
I spent the long weekend (when I wasn’t snoozing in the sun under a downy layer of chickens) weeding the borders around the house. When you live in a four hundred year old cottage, the job ain’t so bad.
I always — I mean always — dig up interesting bits of junk. And by “dig up” I mean, more often than not, find lying on the surface, thanks to that curious process by which earth acts like water, drawing objects down and lifting them up again. Fluid but glacially slow.
Today, I dug up part of a tiny pelvis and several long bones. I’ve either exhumed someone’s beloved cat or secret lovechild. Um, oops?
Also, several small lengths of clay pipestem. I find a lot of that. I’ve only found one bowl so far (pictured above) and it’s a very early one. The small bowl and wide angle between it and the stem puts it around 1600-ish, the internet tells me. Maybe the very first owner of this house was the smoker.
Found them by the place where the front door used to be. Imagine the master of the house knocking out his pipe on the threshold before coming in of an evening, and “oh, bugger” it breaks. So he throws it…four centuries into the future.
I find dozens of pottery chips. Makes me laugh. Blue and white could be anything from Delft, 1580 to Woolworths, 1976. Same with the mysterious lumps of rust; they could be anything, any time.
One of these days, I’ll dig up a coin. I know it. I don’t care what it is; I just want some lunch money from the past.
I often think the saddest thing about living in a house this old is how haunted it isn’t; how many people have lived whole lives inside these four walls and left no trace on them. All I have to know them by is little busted up bits of junk they threw out in the yard.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. A really depressing metaphor.
April 25, 2011 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 24
As a matter of fact, we ARE spring chickens
SQUEEEEE! (Also in color).
We took a long drive through the South Downs today (gas: $8.66/gallon US, e-yow) to Middle Farm and bought these two lovely birds.
Pekin bantams again. The one on the left is Victoria, a partridge, and the one on the right is Violet, a lavender.
Victoria was the given the name of Vita Sackville-West (two posts down) and Violet was her lover of many years. Though Vita and her husband were genuinely and deeply in love with each other (and he was into boys or llamas or little white dogs or something). Whatever — CHICKENS!
Tomorrow they will see sunshine and walk on grass for the very first time, and we will begin the long, ticklish business of introducing them to the flock, AKA the other two.
And thus my poultry inventory is complete.
April 20, 2011 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 22
My lawn, it is nothing like this
This Tudor gatehouse tower is almost all that’s left of a huge and ancient manor house named Sissinghurst, near Cranbrook in Kent. By the Twentieth Century, even this was a ruin. In 1930, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson bought it and much of the land around.
They were rich, aristocratic and sexually odd. Which is neither here nor there, I just thought I’d mention it; liven things up a bit.
Together they turned the grounds into one of the most popular gardens in the country. It’s a long way for us to go, but it’s our favorite National Trust site. It was too nice to stay home, so we drove out to it today.
Yep. We have reached the “walking around gardens” stage of our lives.
The garden is laid out in “rooms” — square, walled plots with a theme. The most famous is the White Garden, which is exactly what it sounds like and touched off a bit of a craze.
My favorite is the herb garden, I think. Because — herbs! I like herbs. Even if I have to pronounce the “h” here or nobody knows what I’m talking about.
Uncle B is reading the guidebook and says Vita Sackville-West opened the gardens once a year and liked them to be popular, but I imagine she’d be well and truly cheesed off at the lot of us hoi polloi eating icecreams and trudging around her nice lawns.
Somewhat embittered at her misfortune, was Vita. See, she was born here, in what is reputed to be the largest house in England. And as the only child of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville, she would have inherited the lot — had she been male.
Next time you board an airplane and struggle through First Class to reach your cramped seat at the back, look into the eyes the people up front in the comfy seats and be assured they’re thinking, “dammit — it’s not fair! Why don’t I have a private jet?”
April 18, 2011 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 11
Say, it’s been a while since I poked fun at the food
Oyster flavored potato chips. Hoo boy!
Not bad. Not all that oystery. But at £.79/40g (about $1.30 for a fun-sized bag), I probably won’t make a habit of them.
The chickens loved them.
Oh, and I tried my first barley water (the existence of which I only knew from that Mary Poppins song). It doesn’t really have a smell, so I don’t know what that was all about. The barley doesn’t contribute flavor either, that I can tell — just a slippery mouth feel. I got citrus flavored, so it was like thick, silky orange juice.
Do I like it? I’ll have a think about it.
Next up — Tizer and Vimto! Good weekend, everyone!
April 15, 2011 — 8:33 pm
Comments: 22
Hello, I’m new!
Be grateful my blog is in black and white; this little dude is not five minutes old and is still a bit messy. It’s coming to something when you can’t walk to the store without stuff giving birth in front of you.
Yes, it’s lambing time! That magical time of year when all the fields around are full of mamas and babies and I fob you off with cute lamb pictures because I’ve been lolling around in a lawnchair all day soaking up rays instead of sitting at the computer drawing pictures of politicians who piss me off.
I took this video over the weekend, standing in the back yard looking over the field. For some reason (possibly having to do with sheepdogs) the flock only comes to our end of the field at dusk, so the video is a little dark and blurry. These two are maybe three days old; they’ve only just learned they can hop — though “hop” doesn’t really do it justice. We call it a sproing.
These little dudes aren’t entirely in control of the sproing yet, but they LIKE it.
SQUEEEEE!
April 11, 2011 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 21
Saw the chicken pusher today…
Awwwww…dang it to poop! I made you a movie of the Chicken Man’s chickens, but Pinnacle Studio is barfing it up when I go to render it (I love Pinnacle Studio, but it sure goes on the rag a lot). Now I’m late, late, late and no time to fix it.
Here’s a quick recap.
Went to see our chicken guy today. He had many fine birds, but no bantams. He’ll have some bantams in a couple of weeks, though they’ll be a bit older than I’d like. He doesn’t know what colors; his bantam guy gets ratty when he asks and never gives him the right answer anyway. Sounds like Bantam Guy has issues.
Chicken Man is a heckuva guy, though, and is really trying to make a go of it, so we bought lots of other stuff. Shavings. Corn. A run for the new girls to keep Mapp and Lucia from killing them when they’re small and tempting.
I’m casting around on the chicken forums and looking at local bulletin boards. Lots of people raise these things.
On the way home, we stopped in a little antique shop and got talking with the owners. Chicken people. Turns out Antiques Dude used to be a zookeeper and one of his jobs was killing chickens to feed to the animals. He demonstrated the pull-and-twist method, but really prefers putting an air gun pellet in their heads.
So I learned something!
The End.
March 31, 2011 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 13
w00t! I caught the Easter Bunny!
Heard a commotion in the henhouse, and found this in the nest box. I reckon if your chicken passes a bunny, it’s an Easter miracle.
Pursuant to the daffodils of yesterday, I give you the natural calendar of Sussex:
Snowdrops first, February sometime. Then daffodils, March.
Then lambs (and bunnies) — the very first in March, most in April.
May. It’s my birthday and the whole place explodes in white — the hawthorn and blackthorn hedges, and the plum trees and apple trees. The elderflowers. All bloom snowy white.
Then begins the long Summer fête season. June, July, August. (I’m on the church fête committee this year. I hope you appreciate the hilarity). Crops from the gardens and the local fruit farms. The Perseid Meteor Showers.
Then September, November. Elderberries and blackberries. Harvest Festival. Uncle B’s birthday. The Sussex bonfire season begins.
Thanksgiving (okay, I snuck that one onto the Limey calendar). Christmas.
Then…ugh. The six, eight weeks of cold and gray between Christmas and snowdrops is mighty grim. Our anniversary in the middle doesn’t liven it up much.
Still, ten months of stuff to look forward to is a pretty good go. I don’t remember such regular seasonal markers back home. I hiked in all four seasons, so it’s not that I was completely oblivious to nature. I guess the cubicle ate so much of my time.
I’m one wimple short of a Medieval Book of Hours here.
March 30, 2011 — 9:18 pm
Comments: 33
Spring!
At long last, Spring. Everywhere we go, the roadsides and hillsides are splattered daffodils. Thousands of them in their several colors, all along the main roads and down tiny country lanes. It’s spectacular.
Thing is, these things don’t grow wild. They spread a bit on their own, but first someone has to plant them, way out along sheep fields in the back end of nowhere.
The government doesn’t do it. Somebody — really, a lot of somebodies, over a lot of years — dropped a few quid, bought a few bulbs and spent an afternoon digging holes. They did the math and worked out that, for a couple of hours and a couple of pounds, they could do something everyone (selves included) would enjoy year after year.
Multiply that by an army, and you’ll have some idea of the show the daffs put on.
The word “community” is much abused in our time. When lefties use it — and they use it a lot — they mostly mean a group of people who share a grievance and band together to demand redress from the government.
No, this is community — this gentle, anonymous gift.
March 29, 2011 — 10:45 pm
Comments: 23