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!

A Christmas Carol

Rachel*'s birthday cake featuring a huge pile of manure, as one of her jobs is stacking it

Over the last four weeks the season of Advent has been scrupulously observed at Pilsdon. Inside the church appeared a holly-wreathed podium bearing five large candles, four of them red and arranged in a square with one white candle placed prominently in the centre. Back on 29th November, the first Sunday in Advent, young Carl* lit the first red candle at the evening service with a long taper and raised a smile from the congregation by accidentally blowing it out again as he blew out the taper. A second attempt was more successful. In each subsequent service throughout that week (there are three a day in the church) that candle was lit for the duration.

The following Sunday marked the beginning of the second week of Advent and so two candles began to be lit for each service. You can guess what happened on the Sundays of 13th and 20th December. In fact on 20th December not only were the four red candles lit, but also all the other candles in the large double-ringed chandeliers suspended above our heads along the length of the church.

A meal of beef brisket and roasted vegetables being prepared

That was the night of our carol service and the Broadoak choir filled the front space while the congregation, swollen far beyond normal numbers by visitors from the local area, were packed in on wooden chairs and on the straw bales at the sides. I was accompanying the choir on the electric piano, and four other members of the community had joined the choir for this occasion – we had spent the last five or six Wednesday evenings with them in their rehearsals. There were a mix of well-known carols that everyone sang, interspersed with choir-only set-pieces which sounded superb in the echoing chamber of the church. Afterwards everyone trouped up to the manor house for a supper of soup, sandwiches, stollen and mince pies. I made a valiant attempt at eating the whole of a nut-free Stollen loaf baked especially for me but ended up having to share it. Bah humbug.

The theme of Advent is all about expectation. Waiting and preparing for the moment of Christmas. Which apparently was not originally about having time off work, or tacky songs, or meeting up with family members, or buying gifts, or bringing pine trees indoors, or fat men in red and white suits, or multi-coloured flashing lights, or gorging on chocolate. Who knew?

I missed the lighting of the fifth candle as I travelled up to Lancaster to be with my folks over Christmas. But being at Pilsdon during the build-up to it has, as always, been a welcome escape from the grinding commercialism of the modern Christmas season that of course now starts way back in November. That’s not to say there were no Christmas decorations, lights or trees but these were not put in place until 19th December (much to the chagrin of a few who just love all that tinselly stuff.) Pilsdon Community opens its doors to anyone who wants to join them from Christmas Eve till the 29th, much as it does every weekend throughout the year, so I’m told the place is packed full of people at the moment. Offering hospitality and love to all – I’d say that’s more in the spirit of Christmas than the Boxing Day sales.

Lancaster's river Lune is high but not overflowing unlike in recent weeks

*names changed

Stall For (Christmas) Time

Our local town, Bridport, somehow manages to have two street market days a week - Wednesdays and Saturdays. Who knows how a small town can support that? I’m pretty sure some dedicated stall holders are the same at both, although I don’t get to see either very often. The weekly Wednesday shopping trip gets us in at 2pm by which time most of the stalls are being packed up, so we must content ourselves with the shops and cafes. And my day off each week doesn’t often fall on a Saturday.

Last Saturday however a number of us thrillingly got a chance not only to check out the market but actually participate in it. It was the day of Pilsdon’s annual market stall! It was the first time I’d been part of it. My main job : minibus driver. Although everyone else was either on the early or late shift, shuttling back and forth in cars, I had to be there from beginning (7:30am) to end (3pm) to transport the tables, gazebo, tinsel, chairs, signs, bunting, cloths, and all our produce. Plus a few people who managed to squeeze on.

Our new "bug hotel". So far one ladybird has checked in.

This year was our biggest yet in terms of sheer amounts of stuff to sell. There was just tonnes of it. The two tables held only a fraction, the rest being stored underneath. Lots of beautiful pottery, fired in Pilsdon’s kiln. Bottles of golden apple juice from our orchard. Hand-sewn(!) Christmas cards, hand-drawn and lino-printed gift tags, pottery angels for Christmas trees, the Pilsdon 2016 calendar. And then there was the food. The front table was piled high with brownies, fudge, stollen, challah bread, poppy-seed bread, cakes, truffle tortes and jars and jars of lemon curd, jams, jellies, chutneys and chilli oil. The tables creaked with the weight.

Everything was done proper, like. The designated brownie-seller wore an apron and disposable plastic gloves and used tongs. The brownies themselves were covered with a transparent plastic sheet, the better to prevent particles of dirt to alight upon them. Money was handled by someone else so as not to allow the grubbiness of coins in any way to mar the perfection of our confection.

The huge oak tree (see blogposts passim) that I am to saw up

Despite having got ourselves all ready and in position by 9am, people didn’t really come by in any numbers until about 11. To further attract attention to our fine stall, a motley threesome of musicians (myself included) played and sang Christmas carols for a time. It did actually seem to work. It was going to be just me on guitar and Rachel* on violin but she successfully press-ganged a reluctant Tarquin* into singing who very quickly rose to the occasion and was belting out pitch-perfect Joys to the World across Bridport. Tarquin acted and sang in London theatre productions prior to joining Pilsdon. It showed.

The approach to Bettiscombe church, a couple of miles west of Pilsdon

By 2:30pm the gusts of wind were blowing five-pound notes across the street with me in swift pursuit and threatening to take our gazebo with it, so we decided to call it a day and pack up. We had sold an awful lot. People had been very generous. One man had paid for a £9.50 pottery jar with two ten-pound-notes, telling us to keep the change. Many customers had heard of Pilsdon but didn’t know much about what we do, so they left better informed clutching the latest newsletter. To top it all, once the counting was completed we found we’d broken our revenue record with a grand total of £658.18. A thoroughly successful day out and a whole lot of fun to boot!

* names changed

Break That Fast

One of the remaining six pigs not taken to market last week

Breakfast is one of my favourite meals. My other two favourites are lunch and dinner. But if forced to rank them, breakfast might just make the top spot. There’s something about the very name, to be breaking a fast, self-imposed throughout the long night, which I find appealing. Provided I’m eating at a sensible time, i.e. after 8am, my appetite will have kicked in and I’ll be very ready for the first mouthful of Shreddies, accompanied of course by the initial slurp of hot tea.

It’s the comfort of the ritual probably. Breakfast should always consist of a bowl of cereal (an exception can be made if porridge is available) and one or two slices of toast bearing butter and marmalade. Not Flora. Not jam. Certainly not Marmite. And all the better if the marmalade is home-made. This morning I reached the point in the ceremony where marmalade should be spread on the buttered toast and to my horror I couldn’t find orange marmalade on any of the tables. The thin toast was rapidly cooling and if not eaten soon would become cold and unpleasant. There was a jar of shop-bought lemon-and-lime marmalade but I’d been put off this by someone remarking that it smelled like floor cleaner. (We have particularly fine-smelling floor cleaner liquids here, I suppose.) Thankfully Matt spotted on a neighbouring table a small and nearly empty jar of orange marmalade made by someone’s mother, which by a stroke of luck had just the right amount for my toast. Crisis averted.


We are fortunate enough to have yogurt-makers amongst us, who use the milk we get from the three Jerseys to create a delicious natural yogurt that appears each morning in a big metal pot, accompanied by a dish of prunes for plopping on top. Some pour yogurt on top of cereal, others take it neat. You get to see other people’s breakfast habits, not all of which are fathomable. Leonard* likes to prop his two slices of toast together in a tent formation until they’re cold before spreading anything on them. Freda* will not eat her toast and jam unless she’s covered it with a layer of salt.

The broad bean plants push their way out of the earth

On Mondays poached eggs are also available. Wednesdays there are sausages, beans, tomatoes and fried bread. But Saturdays are the most popular of all as people rarely seen before 9am emerge blinking for their weekly plate of bacon, eggs and tomatoes.

Unlike the other two meals which at Pilsdon seem to be an exercise in how quickly food can be shovelled from plate to gullet before dashing off for another cigarette (at least for the smokers amongst us), breakfast has a more leisurely air. It’s the only meal which people are not obliged to attend so it tends to attract only those who enjoy breakfast and intend to make the most of it. Some sit quietly munching, others chatter about anything and nothing. An exchange of “Morning!”s erupts each time someone walks in the room. People tend to drift off once finished, leaving different combinations of seated eaters from the beginning of the breakfast session who then spark up new conversations. Sometimes someone is left stranded on a table by themselves when people leave, and then move to join a more convivial table.

Weeding, digging over and spreading muck on this heavy clay bed took over a fortnight's hard labour

All this is very different from my old way of doing breakfast when I had to commute to work five days a week. This was normally eaten either alone or with a flatmate. I wouldn’t gobble it down but the sense of being required to launch myself at a certain time into the fray of London’s transport system would definitely diminish the enjoyment. Only at weekends would breakfast become again what it should be - a savoured morning edible ritual, preferably conducted out on the balcony in the sunshine. Here’s to the Most Important Meal of the Day!

The Kids Are Alright

A "bletted" medlar, about to made into a beautiful golden jelly

In my first few months at Pilsdon there were no children in the community. In fact the community was mostly middle-aged and male, with a few exceptions. Although this seemed OK at the time, when River was born in May that year (2012) the change was very noticeable. Tough men who rarely smiled began to put on goofy grins and waved across the room at him. At break-times in the Common Room there was a new centre of attention when conversations flagged, as River was placed in the middle and learned to crawl, walk and break toys.

Once again Pilsdon's parsnips have grown to enormous proportions

River and his parents have since departed but the community has been enriched with more little people as families have joined. Right now we have three of them. Carl (5) and Henrietta (3)* arrived last December from America bringing their parents who became community members, and immediately won everyone over by their utter lack of bashfulness. They both seemed very easily to adapt to having about twenty-five adults to play with. And Matt and Mary brought their firstborn Rowan into the world in February who is now able to crawl and bring himself up to standing position. In fact when I moved his legs alternately whilst he was held in an upright stance I managed to get him to walk, as he repeated the leg movement without assistance.


Henrietta had her 3rd birthday last Sunday. She is a girl who knows her own mind. When asked what she would like on top of her cake she said without hesitation that it must have a bird with a pancake in its mouth. No one is sure where this came from. I suspect it might stem from Pilsdon’s Shrove Tuesday games which include “Toss The Pancake over the Manor House”. Of course no pancake makes it further than about a third of the way up the roof so birds do get quite a feast. Whatever the provenance of her birthday wish, it was granted and we all admired the marzipan bird with a tiny pancake inserted into its beak, perched in a nest of Cadbury Fingers.

The posts and wire are going in for the old espalier apple trees to be re-trained against. 

Somehow having kids around allows the adults to be a little more carefree too. Some miniature water pistols turned up which Carl and Henrietta were playing with, on strict instructions not to fire them at people. They both obeyed but sadly the adults did not, as an after-supper wash-up descended into an all-out-water-warfare.

Carl is quite the dapper dresser. Quite often he turns up to meals wearing a shirt and tie, his own preference not his parents’. He’s on a one-boy-mission to smarten our collective dress sense. Only very infrequently does the community rise to the occasion, such as the Christmas or New Year’s Eve’s feasts, when shirts are dusted down and fingers try to remember how to tie ties. I shall miss the Christmas occasion as I’ll be up with my family in Lancaster, but will be back in time for the New Year’s Eve shenanigans. Already people are planning what acts to prepare for the party - songs, skits, musical numbers, games. I can’t reveal here what my plans are of course, everything must be a surprise on the night. If the last three are anything to go by, it's going to be an awful lot of fun. 

An old cedar has blown over on our neighbour's land taking some fence posts with it

* names changed