Ground Control to Major Tom

It was nearly dinner time. Sergey Ryazanskiy’s stomach growled in anticipation and he glanced briefly through the hatch opening to the mess module but none of the others had appeared yet. He had spent his day off reading a history of numismatics, exercising and composing a video message for his wife and three children back in Moscow, which he had just despatched. Their return message would probably be available when he awoke “tomorrow”. Two months of the mission had passed, four more to go before he could return to them. He smiled as he remembered his youngest son, Ivan, learning with frequent and spectacular crashes how to ride his first bike. By the time he returned Ivan would be effortlessly circling the yard, hooting with joy.

Sergey was itching to get back to work but rest periods were rigorously enforced. His tasks, alone amongst the six-man crew, centred around the prototype laser communications system OPALS which would one day replace the radio waves, packing far more information into that narrow red beam zero-ing in on a dish 240 miles below. His dream was to be at least a footnote in science history books as the man who proved that laser communications was not only possible but dramatically more effective than radio frequencies for long-distance communication across space. 

The International Space Station wheeled over the Earth, covering nearly five miles every second. At this speed it circumnavigated the globe in the time it took to play a game of football. The sun rose and set and rose again with remarkable alacrity. None of them noticed it any more. However, something made Sergey push off from the wall and drift across to the observation window to gaze down at the inky blackness below, clusters of yellow lights occasionally flashing past like weird deep-sea creatures. The lat-long monitor indicated they were travelling over south-west England at this moment. It was not a country he had been to, but one day he hoped to bring his family to see Buckingham Palace and Chelsea’s football ground. He stared downwards. Who was down there? Were they dreaming, or awake and on their way to work? What made them all carry on, living out their little lives as if each one mattered?

He could not know, but two men were standing below him, watching his spacecraft appear in their west and glide across the sky to the south-east, skirting past the gibbous moon. It was 6:18am. They held dung-forks in their hands, being interrupted from mucking out the winter quarters of the recently-milked three Jersey cows. For both of them it was the first time they had seen the Space Station. Its smooth procession across the sky, like a bright star that had been cut adrift from the firmament, captivated them. It had been up there for fifteen years but somehow they had missed it. Even now they only knew to look up because one of them had checked the NASA website the night before for its timetable.

Two minutes later the bright star vanished behind the roof of Pilsdon’s East Wing and they returned to the straw and the muck.  But somehow things seemed different. They had just witnessed a technological and diplomatic miracle. A laboratory the size of a football field pieced together in space by citizens of countries that just three decades before had been on opposing sides of a Cold War.  A brilliant emblem of scientific progress and international collaboration had passed overhead. One wheelbarrow was filled to the brim with cow dung, another was fetched.

Next week we are hoping to see another celestial body as Comet ISON swings round close to the sun, hopefully not disintegrating in the process. As it should be seen most clearly in the early morning, just before sunrise, depending on the milking rota I might well have my binoculars in one hand and a dung-fork in the other. 

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N.B. Sergey Ryazanskiy is really up there, right now. Find out about him and his crew-mates here.

Red Hot Dorset Peppers

I was standing on the pavement next to a Franciscan monk, watching the cars slip past on the eastern trunk road out of Dorchester. My gloved hand held one of two poles of a four foot wide banner, the other being supported by a woman in her forties who works for the town council's social services. The November sun hung low and bright across from us, its glare magnified by the windscreens of the car dealership opposite. Behind us was a petrol station owned by Shell, a company who has taken out an injunction against Greenpeace making it unlawful for any of their supporters to step onto a Shell forecourt. This included us, as we had gathered this morning under the auspices of Greenpeace to conduct a vigil for the 'Arctic 30', detained in Russia for daring to disrupt Gazprom's drilling operations in the Arctic Ocean. Check out the photos and videos here.

Perhaps because of the fine weather, a larger crowd than expected had turned out. Thirty-three of us lined the road on both sides, cheerily waving as passing drivers tooted their support. At least I assume it was support. 

The monk gave an impassioned speech direct to camera, telling whoever would listen that the Arctic 30 were being prayed for by name each day. I had actually met Brother Hugh previously as he belongs to a nearby Anglican Franciscan friary known as Hilfield which has close links with Pilsdon; last year he joined our cricket team for a couple of matches. Apparently he had been hoping to be arrested at today's vigil in empathy for the Greenpeace crew in Russia, but sadly we were all far too law-abiding. 

Coincidentally I was heading on to Hilfield Friary myself after the vigil to catch up with my friends Adam and Teresa who are volunteers there. They are both ex-Pilsdonites, in fact Adam was the warden when I arrived in the spring of 2012. It must be the only route out of Pilsdon for wardens, as the previous warden, Jonathan, also lives at Hilfield. I half-expected to open a cupboard door and find the skeletons of Pilsdon's three other wardens neatly stacked. 

I had been to Hilfield just once before to drop someone off in the early morning and stayed for breakfast, but found it impossible to introduce myself to anyone as they have a rule forbidding speech at breakfast-time. This would generally suit me fine as I prefer to limit my early-morning communication to a grunt or two, but on that occasion it didn't really help.  This visit was far more convivial, as we were allowed to chat over our lunch of jacket potatoes and re-constituted egg custard and Adam treated me to a tour around the 24-acre property, nestled as it is in a peaceful wooded valley. He is looking to become a university chaplain and would make a very good one, so let me know if you hear of any such vacancies and I'll pass it on.

The day ended more with a bang than a whimper as I went out on the tiles of Bridport to celebrate Mary's 30^th birthday in the traditional British manner - drinks and a curry. There's always one who insists on choosing the hottest dish on the menu, and as he was sat across from me I had the amusement of watching him struggle and sweat through his food whilst enjoying my sizzling tandoori chicken. His curry was packed full of a local Dorset pepper called Naga which apparently has won the accolade of being the hottest chilli in the world. So if you ever visit Dorset on holiday and fancy an Indian one night, consider yourself warned!

(Oh yes and I've been making some crab apple jelly as you can see from the pics)

28lb of crab apples, a smaller variety than the ones on my land

The jelly came out darker than previous batches but still tasty

I'm Pressing On

These weren't all of them

If someone asked you to visualise a third of a tonne of apples, could you do it? I certainly couldn’t. At least not until I began filling empty potato sacks with apples, standing on bathroom scales, subtracting my own weight to obtain the weight of the sack, then multiplying up the number of sacks we filled. Each sack weighed on average 20kg and by the end of several weeks of harvesting we had seventeen of them filled, plus three small crates. 20kg times 17 is 340kg, and since there are 1000kg in a tonne (last time I checked) we had just over a third of a tonne of the fruit, stored with care in an ex-chicken shed.

Monday the 11th of November arrived. Our two-day reservation at the apple-juicing facilities at Fivepenny Farm was finally beginning!  I had organised work crews of eager Pilsdonites for both days, and so at 9:30am five of us piled the bulging sacks into the back of our pick-up, crammed ourselves in with our packed lunches and rubber gloves, and set off on the twenty-minute journey along the narrow windy lanes of Marshwood Vale. 

We had been expecting to be working together with someone else who was bringing even more apples and splitting the juice proportionally, since the press could cope with an entire tonne of the spherical blighters. But plans change and she had to be in London instead so we had the whole press to ourselves. Thankfully a friend of hers was on hand to show us the ropes as none of us had ever done this before, certainly not on this scale. We were apple pressing virgins and a little nervous.

The press was housed in a beautiful two-storey A-frame thatched wooden building, built quite recently, that provides facilities for the processing of fruit, vegetables and meat for the smallholders in the area who can hire it out for a reasonable fee. The electric pulping machine was kept outside, perhaps because it made such a mess, preferring to hurl the pulp back out the top chute if it could rather than down into the holding bay below. Whilst Joey* gamely balanced on a chair and popped the apples into the thudding contraption with his face averted, Greg and I washed the apples and passed them up to him. Meanwhile Hilda and Yolanda were inside painstakingly cleaning over two hundred used 750ml bottles (there were no new ones available, but at least we got them at half price). 

Feeding the pulping machine

Pulp

A "cheese" being filled with pulp

A cheese half-filled

Wheeling the pulp holder inside, it was shovelled into a huge thick muslin cloth below the heavy duty press, which was then folded up into a big square, called a “cheese”. Juice was already beginning to leak out of it into the side channels and down through a funnel into a bucket, and we hadn’t even begun to press it. We had enough pulp to fill another cheese on top of the first, and then we heaved on the weighty square top piece, piled on a few blocks of wood where the four other cheeses could have gone, inserted a long steel rod into the gearing and began to turn it clockwise. There wasn’t space to turn it 360 degrees, after each quarter-turn the rod had to be taken out and reinserted back where it had been. Needless to say the last few pushes of the rod were two-man jobs, at full eye-popping strength.

Joey puts his back into it

The gushing sweet nectar was pumped into an intermediate tank, filtered through a tap into an open barrel, then pumped again up into another tank positioned ten feet above us. From there it was fed down through a tube into the bottling machine, an ingenious device which took four bottles at a time, automatically filling them on insertion and stopping when full. 

Bottling

Bottled

Once we had eighty brimming bottles the tops were placed loosely on top and each gingerly lowered into a large bath of hot water, heated by five gas hobs.  To achieve effective pasteurisation the juice had to reach 76 degrees Centigrade, taking about half an hour, and then whipped out, tops firmly screwed on, and laid to cool horizontally to ensure the lid was also pasteurised by the hot juice.  All in all, quite an operation!

Pasteurising

Filling the truck

By the second day we found ourselves in possession of 221 bottles of delicious pure apple juice with only three breakages (due to the heat of the water), so many that I had to make two terribly cautious journeys home with them, easing the pick-up gently over the potholes listening to the clinkety-clink behind me. But it was all worth it when we sat down to our supper that night with merry jugs of juice instead of tap water. The plan is to sell quite a lot of them at the Bridport Christmas market but the temptation will be to glug it all down before then. Bottoms up!

*All names are made up but references to actual persons and events are completely intentional

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers

We live in strange times. 

The heads of our security agencies are dragged before a government committee to explain why their snooping on all our communications goes far beyond what anyone had realised, including our elected representatives. 

Economics undergraduates realise that they are still being taught the same ultra-liberal free-market dogma that is continuing to drive us closer to global financial meltdown, and actually propose an alternative curriculum to cover other models that may stand a chance to get us out of the mess we’re in. 

In 450 cities around the world on November 5th, thousands of people with Guy Fawkes masks march under the banner of “Anonymous” to demonstrate against both economic injustice and the mass surveillance by our governments’ security services. Russell Brand joins in the London march and in an interview with Jeremy Paxman calls for a revolution to do away with our tawdry big-business-loving political system that seems to be failing us and our planet in so many ways, sparking a media storm.

And the world’s climate scientists gather together and produce the first part of their fifth report in 23 years which once again sets out in dry detail how humanity is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, and how this is going to make things very unpleasant for our grandchildren. Humanity shrugs its shoulders and carries on as it did before.

It all seems a bit unreal. Did the German leader really call the American president and harangue him for having her personal mobile tapped?  Did George Osborne really tell the Chinese that he would relax banking regulations to encourage them to move to London? Meanwhile dirty wars flare up or fester in forgotten parts of the world such as the Central African Republic, mostly ignored by the Western media.

At Pilsdon, life goes on in much the same way as before. The events of the wider world seldom intrude, and that’s how it should be. Here I can spend the day with my gardening gloves on, turning the compost, weeding the brassica patch or sowing spinach in the glasshouse, stopping occasionally for a cup of tea, a chat or a communal meal. 

The small everyday things fill our days. I forgot one of my milking duties, a very rare occurrence I assure you, and discovered that Bill (not his real name) had stepped in for me, doing the mucking out of the cow’s quarters without having time to put his wellies on. Later I harvested the last sweet peppers he had grown as we’d agreed, and then pulled up the plants which apparently he had not agreed. He had wanted to keep them alive till next year somehow. We turned the kitchen waste compost together. I think he’s forgiven me.

The weight of Jamie the cat is a topic of lively debate, as he is being fed now by Sara (another unreal name) since his regular feeder left a few months back. Some say he’s fatter than before, others that he’s skinnier. All agree that he is a lot less active now, spending his days sprawled at the busiest intersections of corridors, as old age set in.

The highlight of the week has to be the “Krispy Kreme”-style ring doughnuts made by our resident American couple, consumed with gusto by everyone on Bonfire Night as I and two other brave men lit the fireworks on the wet grass inside a paddock.  Many of these fireworks seemed to have a fear of heights and so discharged their obligations safely (or otherwise) on the ground, making it all somewhat less of the jaw-dropping spectacle people expected.  Still, the doughnuts were lip-smackingly excellent. 

Magic (And Less Than Magic) Moments

A few moments from the week just gone:

-  Four or five of us gather by the piano on Sunday to sing somewhat hesitantly the four part harmonies of a couple of Christmas carols. The local choirmaster, forgetting to change his clocks back, arrives an hour early for the evening church service and so happily joins in with us.

-  Looking up from digging over a patch of garden, I witness the birch and willow trees being lit golden by a sunshaft, stark against the heavy grey rainclouds behind. Later a rainbow forms an arch over them.

-  The much-heralded storm of St Jude rages past in the early hours of Monday morning but thankfully leaving very little damage in its wake. Our sandbag defences prove needless.

-  In one fell swoop I harvest the last of the prolific raspberries, which have since been turned to jam, then harvest the last of the even more prolific apples. The latter requiring a step-ladder and some very careful balancing amongst a thicket of gnarly branches and twigs.

-  Reversing the Citroen Berlingo into a ditch on the organic farm belonging to Pilsdon’s Chair of Trustees, I have to be towed out by her neighbour and his tractor.

-  I drive a minibus-load of people on a wet windy Wednesday night to Dorchester to catch a screening of Captain Phillips which garners a complete spectrum of opinions from the Pilsdonites: “too violent”, “not violent enough”, “too tense because I thought Tom Hanks would be killed”, “not tense because Tom Hanks could never be killed”, etc

-  Spending far too long peeling and chopping many beetroots of an unusual and beautiful yellow-orange variety, I then have to accept assistance from a kind soul to help me finish my roasted veg pasta bake in time for supper.

-  The fire alarm goes off at 6:20am dragging everyone out of bed except for those already milking the cows. Apparently it’s caused by someone having a shower in the wayfarer’s accommodation with the door open. Having snuggled back under the covers, the bells are set off again just long enough for me to drag myself out of bed a second time. And then they go silent.

-  Clover, one of our three beef cattle, is taken off early one morning to the abattoir. As she is led into the horsebox, another one, Boris, decides it’s time to make a break for it and clambers out of his pen using his trough as a step; he has to be rounded up and re-incarcerated. Although he doesn’t know it, he has another year left. Boris was born shortly before I arrived at Pilsdon in March 2012, I remember him as a calf being led around the farm on a leash like a large stubborn dog.

-  I wear my favourite Superdry shirt which until recently had a large rip across the back. Now it sports an even larger tartan square patch that covers half the back of the shirt, having been repaired by an occasional visitor who specialises in needlework, and naturally attracts comments from everyone. The overall consensus is that I am the vanguard of a new fashion in personalised Superdry clothing.

-  Dragging myself with excessive reluctance out of bed at 5:40am to milk Snowdrop and Angelica, and to give half of Snowdrop’s milk to her little black calf Jasmine who is kept separately; she sucks at the bucket’s teat with a force approaching violence and the milk vanishes in seconds. In three days time she will be weaned and only given solids (beef nuts).

-  Visiting Matt and Mary one evening I am introduced to their new mongrel puppy Sasha whose idea of a friendly welcome is repeatedly jumping up on her hind legs and landing her forelegs on my crotch. They say she’ll calm down in a couple of years (!)

All these and many more happenings, conversations, times by the fireside, times on the piano, times in the church, times on the internet, times asleep, glimpses of nature being even more stunningly glorious than usual, the commonplace, the dull, the tiring, the fun, all add up to make one single week at Pilsdon.  Yet they all race past so fast.