Don't Have A Cow, Man!

Broccoli and spinach in our greenhouse

As I launch this latest missive into the great wide blogscape on Good Friday, the first day of the traditional Easter break, I harbour doubts that anyone will actually get round to reading it. You’ll all be too busy sat in logjams on the M25 whilst cramming yourselves senseless with chocolate ovoids. There’s barely any sense in wishing you all a Happy Easter since by the time someone bothers to read these words it will already have been and gone.

The Winner Takes It All

A few of us this past week got a little snooker tournament going. Blessed as Pilsdon is with a full-size snooker table, reassembled and a fresh baize put on it just last summer (my limbs ache with the memory of manhandling the huge square slate slabs across the yard), we thought we might as well put it to some use. Helpfully for me my snooker-loopy friend Adam had visited just the weekend before, naturally bringing his own cue, so I had had the benefit of being whooped recently by a far better player and consequently having my own game raised - in fact the last game we played it had been knife-edge the whole way through to the black. Which he potted with aplomb.

One Spin Around The Sun

One year. Four seasons. 12 months. 52 weeks. 365 days. 8760 hours. An awful lot of minutes. That’s how long ago I arrived at the Pilsdon Community as a live-in volunteer. Then I didn’t know how long my sojourn here would be, although barring any particularly outlandish behaviour on my part I could expect to stay for at least six months. Here I still find myself, a year older and perhaps a morsel wiser, with just one month before my agreed departure date.

If You Should Go Into The Woods Today

Last week the stroppiest of our three milking cows, Angelica, gave birth to a gorgeous dark brown calf named Hazel. They are kept together for the first few weeks. Whoever approaches to get a closer look is greeted by a warning moo as the mother steps forward to protect her cherished baby. And in the wee hours of Wednesday morning Hyacinth, the eldest, followed suit. Hers was a male calf which we prefer as they bulk up larger which, not to put too fine a point on it, means more meat for the freezers.  Female calves, should they happen to be a Jersey (which we never know in advance as the Jersey mothers are artificially inseminated with random semen), may be lucky enough to be selected as a future milker and hence live a long happy cow life, perhaps twelve years or more. This happened to Daffodil last year. Otherwise in two years or so they will have grown large enough for a trip to the slaughterhouse. 

Driving Me Wild

It’s finally happened. Sound the fanfare. Twenty years after passing my driving test, I’ve got around to buying a car. Until now it has never quite seemed the right moment. Once I’d obtained my license my dad recklessly allowed me to drive his car and was repaid with a broken headlight and dented bumper not long after. At university we all just walked or cycled; it was a rare student indeed who owned a car in those bygone days. A gap year included driving all around the UK on a kind of roadshow, but in someone else’s vehicle. Then I was lured to the capital with a job offer from a small British technology company called Psion and lived a happy car-free existence there for the ensuing fourteen years. London’s much maligned transport system served me well enough to put out of mind any thoughts of spending my hard-earned cash on a set of wheels. For the last year at Pilsdon I’ve had the use of a community car whenever I’ve needed one.