(What's The Story) Evening Glory

My first attempt at a man-bun, just as I hear that they are on their way out. 

The evening meal at Pilsdon begins at 7pm and is generally wolfed down in about fifteen minutes. There’s a certain formality to each mealtime. People do not slope in when they feel like it. We file in when the cowbell is rung, stand behind whichever chair we feel like, and wait for whoever is officiating to say a short prayer of thanks before sitting. Those on the two long tables have a bit of trouble at this point because the heavy wooden chairs are quite packed together there, requiring a certain amount of careful pausing to allow neighbours to pull in without trapping their fingers.

Also no one leaves the table before everyone has finished. Again, the one officiating will judge when this is and stand to thank the cooks for the meal (who always receive applause, although the warmth of the applause might vary depending on the food - usually the standard is very high). Any visitors or new residents are welcomed by name, any general service announcements are made (“where have the new mop heads got to?”, “bring baskets back to the laundry”, etc) then a “Go when you’re ready” dismisses everyone. Those feeling kind might go and help the cooks with the washing up, or make a cup of tea for them. Currently there’s often a post-wash-up chill-out in the Aga room to chat, laugh and drink tea.

Rachel* cleans the big glasshouse with an enormous water-spurting brush

And then, the evening is free. Some go back to their rooms. Others head to the TV room where smoking is allowed, or to the smoker’s hut, or to the Sports Hall to play snooker or table tennis. Still others might retire to the library to use the computer or read, or to the Common Room where the hearth is lit and someone (normally me) might be playing the piano. 

Just occasionally though there might be something more organised. Wednesday was a case in point, when a few of us decided to have a story-telling evening around the fire in the Common Room. This has never been attempted before, at least in my time at Pilsdon. The whole community was invited to attend if they wished, with or without a short story to tell. 

About twelve of us plus the two young kids Carl and Henrietta* gathered, candles were lit, a high-backed throne of a chair was designated the Storyteller’s Chair, and we began. The first story was read by the kid's mum, a fabulous Dr Seuss book called “Horton Hears a Who!”. I followed with a comic Japanese folk tale called Mangu that I had more or less memorised which had actions to keep the children, and hopefully some adults, entertained. After another short children’s story, they were taken off to bed by their mother. The stories continued. We had a very short and very old Turkish fable about the moon in a well. We had a longer German folk tale about two children getting lost on a mountain, narrated completely from memory and thankfully also translated into English. There was a real-life tale from Arnie’s own past about his struggle to defend his small urban farm from an army of rats. Albert read a hilarious excerpt from “The Good Solder Svejk”, a darkly comic Czech novel from the 1920s. A short thought-provoking poem from Rachel concluded the evening.

Gretel follows suit with a mop. I was holding the ladder

It was a delightful way to while away the night and as there are always more stories to be told, will no doubt be repeated soon enough. All it needs is someone to take the initiative. Living in a community makes it all the easier to organise as we’re all just here already - no travelling to get to anyone’s house, or finding babysitters, or clashes with other events. But I’d recommend it to anyone, just get some friends together, turn the lights low and entertain each other with tall tales into the small hours.

* names are all made up

The Birthday Boys

Patched jeans are pretty much de rigueur at Pilsdon

In a community of around 25 people such as at Pilsdon you might expect a birthday every fortnight on average. However there’s nothing very average about Pilsdon and birthdays often seem to come in clusters. This week for instance has clocked up three birthdays - Tuesday was Tarquin’s, yesterday was Fred’s and today is Charles’*. 

Pilsdon celebrates everyone’s birthday the same way. The night before, an announcement at dinner simply reminds everyone to come to Tea and Toast at 4:30pm the following day (Tea and Toast happens every day without fail), without mentioning any names or even that a birthday is about to happen. A card is left semi-hidden in the Aga room where people can scrawl their names and appropriate (or inappropriate) messages.

In the last two weeks we've made about 160 jars of marmalade from scratch.
It'll all get eaten.

On the day itself at 4:30pm the Common Room is fuller than usual and the two young ‘uns are hopping about in a frenzy of anticipation. The other difference, slightly more subtle, is there is less toast on offer than usual.  The birthday boy or girl is trying to act like this is any other Tea and Toast.  If it is winter-time, which it is, the fire is roaring in the hearth and dusk is gathering outside.

Then someone enters the room bearing a magnificent home-made cake with candles lit and the usual song is launched into by everyone. Often the cake has been carefully decorated to reflect some aspect of the recipient’s personality or lifestyle. Tarquin for example is known for his singing ability and his love of performance so his cake assumed the form of a speaker complete with microphone. When he cut into it, I pressed a button on my phone which was wirelessly linked to a real speaker hidden within the cake inside a small tin, causing the cake to burst into life and play an infectious samba tune. His jaw dropped. For a second or two even Tarquin was lost for words.

The cake is then divided up amongst everyone. Woody* our five-year-old makes sure he sits with Charles on what Charles has convinced him is the “Cake Chair”, which somehow entitles both of them to extra-large portions. He’s too busy eating his cake to figure out whether his portion actually is greater than other people’s.

Ice bubbles forming beautiful feathery fronds in a tray in the garden earlier in the week

Each cake is different, and each has an enormous amount of loving devotion to detail lavished upon it. Individuals are made to feel special by the thought that has been put into its creation. The type of cake will be their favourite too as they are asked beforehand what they would like it to be. Charles has asked for a Battenburg cake for this afternoon’s birthday celebration, which I will be unable to eat due to it having almonds in. However I spotted earlier today a piece of cake in the food store with my name on it (see the pic below!) so I don’t think I’m going to go without. Even the non-birthday’ed among us are thought about. Happy birthday indeed!

A cake with my name on it

* All names are made up

Muck The Knife

The winter sun rises

What exactly is the Pilsdon Community? Well, its website suggests that it offers “a refuge to people in crisis... a community that shares a common life of prayer, hospitality and work.” This does actually seem to sum up rather well what generally goes on here. However it occurs to me that the whole set-up could just as well be viewed as a labour-intensive manure-processing facility. Since we keep feeding the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens and ducks, they keep on producing dung (not forgetting a few by-products such as milk, meat and eggs). And the dung has to go somewhere.

Twice a day throughout the winter, whilst the four dairy cows, three beef cattle and three calves are kept inside to prevent the wet fields from being damaged by their hoofs, the cowsheds are “mucked out”, i.e manure is scraped off the floor and forked off the top of their straw bedding (no, cows cannot be toilet-trained and enjoy sitting in their own faeces.) This produces between four and six wheelbarrowfuls of manure/straw combo a day which are wheeled some distance and tipped next to a huge manure pile which another person (sometimes me) later carefully layers on top of the heap and stamps around on top to squish it down to make more room.

The garden is a bit muddy

The pigs are also mucked out daily and the chicken and duck sheds are occasionally emptied. The five ewes are currently indoors and need mucking out regularly. The bull who we hired for seven weeks naturally produced a lot of bulls*** but has now thankfully departed. Not only all this but halfway through winter (scheduled for later today in fact) all the straw bedding from all the cows’ quarters is entirely removed and replaced, causing a massive peak in poo/straw-production.

The big pile behind the North Barn was completed when we emptied out the bull’s quarters so now all the poo is heading down to a concreted area at the bottom of the vegetable garden. Unfortunately this is also where last year’s manure is stored. This has meant a concerted effort to make space by removing the year-old manure and spreading it on the soil of the vegetable garden. Not a small task, and in fact is what three or four of us have been doing on and off for the last six weeks, to some effect. 

The North Barn heap - you can't help but admire it

The area we cleared during the Poo Party

However we needed one big push to make enough room for the forthcoming deluge of ordure, and so on Tuesday morning we hosted a Poo Party, invited all and sundry from the community to join in. About ten of us got to work, two at the manure heap, two wheeling the heaped barrows precariously along muddy wooden planks into the centre of the beds, two on the planks with forks evenly spreading it, one hurriedly harvesting carrots and radishes that were in the way, and the rest digging over the soil in preparation. The sun shone benignly on us all. Quality banter was at an all-time high. After two hours it was pretty much all done. The joys of communal manual labour on an important yet mucky project, followed by the eleven o’clock bell for coffee. 

Any Way You Slice It

Much of my labour this week seems to have been cutting things up into smaller bits, whether it be turnips, trees or pigs.

It was my turn to make lunch on Wednesday, 32 mouths to feed. Normally cooks have free reign for lunches - anything as long as it’s vegetarian - but Wednesday lunch is always soup. I was determined to use the turnips from the garden. They had been sown by a turnip-loving volunteer who has since left and sadly he seems to have been the only one who actually likes them.  Nevertheless, they had been grown in our vegetable garden and they were not going to become pigfeed if I had anything to do with it. 

So after breakfast I was out in the bright day digging half of the golden spheres up from the soggy clay with a fork. Once I had snipped the tops off I was left with a trayful which turned out to weigh five and a half pounds. Then began a good hour of peeling them all including the little ones which are apt to ping out of your grasp across the kitchen, and dicing them all, resulting in four pounds of usable turnip. After frying them in a massive saucepan with diced potato and onion, adding sixteen pints of boiling stock and leftover veg from yesterday, letting it simmer for an hour, blending it up fine with the electric whizzer and adding cream, a very fine lunch was served up to several compliments and not a single turnip-related complaint.

The pigs have an outdoor pen near the chicken enclosure, and whilst living there a previous sow had killed the two young trees by ring-barking, i.e. gnawing the bark off all the way round at the base. One of them had fallen part-way over into the fence. As the only resident chainsaw operator it was my job to get rid of them. This meant felling the free-standing one, and sawing both of them up into chunks for firewood. The long twiggy branches Stephan* and I threw onto a nearby pile of debris for burning, the rest we stacked in a neat pile. Then it was onto the huge felled oak for further dismembering, involving me standing on it five feet up and sawing protruberances off below me. No wonder my limbs ache today.

Goodbye bull! He gives Farmer Arthur a friendly life-threatening nudge.

I drove the pick-up to the abattoir on Monday morning, reversed it up to a high-up door which slid open, out of which were thrown six half-pigs. Thankfully they were no longer alive. They had been split down the centre from head to tail, although the heads had been left whole and attached to one side. That morning was spent in Pilsdon’s butchery room under Farmer Arthur**’s tutelage, using an array of sharp knives, hacksaws and cleavers to convert the carcases into a variety of joints for the freezer. Each joint, whether leg, belly, shoulder or tenderloin, was bagged and weighed with the date, weight and type of joint scribbled on each bag. Chops were simply counted into a bag, ten each. Future cooks can then assess how many joints to use (normally one or two) to feed the hungry rabble for one meal.

So give me a power-saw, a hacksaw or a kitchen knife, and I’m your man for dicing and slicing.

* Not his real name.

** Also not his real name. But he has been a livestock farmer most of his long life.

Brand New Year

It’s hard not to feel a little smug awaking on New Year’s Day without even the glimmer of a hangover. Of course the flip side is that the previous evening’s events are all perfectly recorded in memory, but then without the intake of industrial quantities of alcohol it’s much more likely that these events will not include kissing your boss, vomiting down your trousers or posting lewd tweets. If you remember doing these things whilst stone-cold sober, I suggest making a number of appointments with medical and psychotherapeutic professionals.

No, the events of New Year’s Eve at Pilsdon Community are necessarily an alcohol-free affair but nonetheless it’s hard to imagine an evening more full of cheer and warmth. Crammed into the Common Room with its fire burning in the hearth, over-replete from a three course Mexican-themed home-made banquet, we simply had to shed our inhibitions without the aid of wine or ale as various people stood up and entertained in song, poetry, music, and quiz. My quiz team perhaps inadvisably named ourselves The Victors which of course immediately ruled us out from winning anything. As there didn’t appear to be a prize anyway, we weren’t too disconsolate when we lost rather badly.

A tree stump in Cumbria full of money. It doesn't grow on trees exactly, it grows inside them.

As always I found myself on the piano stool for the majority of the proceedings, a position I’m very happy to occupy, although at one point I found myself sharing it with two others as we attempted to perform a duet with three people which afforded ample opportunities for panto-style japes as we pushed each other off to get at the piano, and occasionally playing the keys with noses and toes. No limbs were broken thankfully and we got a few laughs too.

The night culminated with fireworks on the lawn outside, our display being slightly preceded and out-classed by the next-door neighbour’s display which of course Matt, our fireworks-master, claimed as ours. Hot ginger punch, sparklers, and hugs all round at the moment we all unilaterally declared midnight. Tarquin slipped over and cut his finger open in the excitement.

The legendary Fairy Steps in Cumbria

Scheduled the next day (today) is the traditional New Year’s Day Walk, accompanied as usual by the traditional cold lashing rain. Fourteen of us and a dog drove over to Lambert’s Castle, the site of an Iron Age fort a few miles away on the western ridge of Marshwood Vale, and stumbled around it as the terrible weather attempted to chip away our hearty cheeriness and replace it with a sullen sodden sulkiness. It failed, mainly because we cut short the planned six miles to a more manageable three. This also meant I’ve had time to write these witterings this afternoon! And we still have all our kudos points from going on a walk at all, which means that somehow we have earned the Indian curry that Matt is cooking up for us for later. Roll on 2016!