Lockdown Letter

One of Eddie's homeschooling activities this week was to write a letter. He will be heading into Year 4 in September, and the idea was to introduce himself to his new new teachers.

He carefully drafted the letter in his notebook, then borrowed my typewriter to type it up. He seems fascinated by the 'instant' nature of the typewriter, in comparison to the laboriousness of having to wait until the end of wordprocessing something to print it off and get the hard copy in your hands.It's an interesting perspective.

Anyway, here's the finished version.

Now, as an English teacher I'm very happy with the layout and paragraphing. Nice work there, on the whole.

I'm less excited by the unintentionally ironic misspelling of 'literacy' in identifying it as his favourite subject.

Then there is the gradual fading out of capital letters and punctuation (some of which can be blamed on the typewriter - it's a temperamental old thing) and the allergy to spaces between words at times.

But I can let those go. 

I'm more bothered by the fact the implicit suggestion that his mother is weird, he's being 'left behind' at school and that he has the onerous task of feeding the cat and dog, as though he lives in some form of Victorian workhouse. The idea that sleeping on a sofa is a particularly human characteristic that the dog has adopted is also a tad troublesome. 

For the record, the chicken run is now a peaceful, harmonious - it just took a few days for the pecking order to be established! (Blanche is in charge, in case you were wondering.)

Currently reading: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

New Adventures at Layalot Castle

Layalot Castle has been fully renovated since and security stepped up since we were unfortunately visited by Mr Fox back in March.

I have missed the antics of the hens, especially first thing in the morning, but it has been very difficult to track down a supply of new ones during lockdown. Apparently, everyone in Sussex decided that they wanted to keep chickens when the pandemic began, and there was something of a shortage. I had planned to go for chicks and raise them, but we couldn't get hold of any.

So back to rescues. We were hoping for six, but only three arrived: Blanche, Nessie - short for Lyonesse - and Lynette (to continue the Arthurian theme).

Eddie was a little disappointed that they wouldn't eat sweetcorn straight from his hand.

But, aside from being a little timid they seem quite happy so far -and in far better condition than rescues we have had in the past. They have plenty of feathers for one thing. Nessie laid an egg within ten minutes of moving in. But Blanche is the early front runner for ruling the roost. I found her eight feet up on top of our garden wall when I went to put them to bed.

And Gilby made for an excellent hen-whisperer when the girls had no idea how to get back into their coop.

As Sure as Eggs is Eggs

Gertie announced at breakfast that she had been studying reproduction at school.

Me choking on my cornflakes was taken as a sign to proceed.

"We were mostly looking at where the eggs come from and how they go through a system inside you."

At this point her younger brother decided to intervene.

"Eggs don't go through a system," Eddie explained dismissively. "They go through a duck."

I spluttered again. The cornflakes were not going down well this morning.

In other news, we have been doing this:

At least I can be safe in the knowledge that discussion of pelvic floor is a good few years off.



Currently reading: Teacher's Dead by Benjamin Zephaniah

A Tipping in the Scales of Us

I thought it would be many years hence that the roles between my children and I would reverse, as described  so powerfully by poets such as Seamus Heaney in Follower, or Owen Sheers in Farther; though I know that we move inexorably towards the 'tipping in the scales of us,/the intersection of our ages'.

But no. It seems that not only is my nine-year-old daughter now able to keep pace with me length for length whilst swimming, she is also emotionally astute and already prepared to take charge in a social situation.

Circumstances arose over the weekend which meant that, contrary to all principles, (and wishes) I found myself inside the doors of a well known purveyor of fried chicken. Somehow I had drawn the short straw: it transpires that at the same moment Hearth-Father was enjoying a complimentary beer as he waited for our takeaway curry.

Meanwhile, back in chicken-hell, the menu was a minefield to this vegetarian: uninitiated in the language of such an establishment.  What, for example, was 'Popcorn' chicken? Why on earth would one order a ghastly-sounding 'bucket' of it?

I ordered three children's meals glumly and stood back to wait for them. Fast food could not come fast enough on this occasion.

Gertie noticed my distress and tucked a comforting arm through mine. "Poor Mummy," she whispered. "You don't look very comfortable in here. Don't worry, it will all be over soon."



Currently reading: Number 11 by Jonathan Coe

Carry on Not Camping

Easter 2015 was the time that Hearth-Mother decided it would be a Good Thing to have a camping adventure in the garden.  The little people had been looking for a good excuse to set up their 'dens' and there would be space enough to pitch a proper tent close by. It might even be considered 'glamping' given the proximity and availability of electricity, heat and lighting. She reckoned without the chickens, the commuters on the A29, the three-year-old's tantrum, a snuffling retriever and a Chinook helicopter.

Two sets of our friends are camping this Easter, and reluctant to join in since our last outing two years ago when I had to be chipped from a block of ice in the middle of the night, I thought a garden expedition would be a happy compromise.

It took one evening to pitch the tent so that everything was ready for the following night. Youngest, Eddie, came home from nursery in the filthiest, blackest of exhausted tempers, and refused to wait for his campfire supper. He fell asleep in a stroppy huff on the sofa.  One down.  Not the holiday bliss I had imagined.

Three of the chickens had 'escaped' from and were careering round the garden doing what chickens do, which is mostly to poo everywhere.  Hearth-father thought it was time their wings were clipped again.  My less rational explanation was that the sight of a large purple canvas erection next to their coop was enough to send them on the run.

Kempton got over-excited and got in to the bin, so that as well as chicken excrement, our campsite was also now littered with a week's worth of decomposing rubbish.

We cooked beans and sausages on the campfire, followed by marshmallows. In a fit of guilt at all the fun we were having I decided to wake up Eddie to see if he wanted to join in.  Big mistake. The pre-supper tantrum was just a warm-up for the screaming and relentless sobbing all over the garden he had planned for the rest of the evening.

Just as we got all three sleeping (and overcame the difficulty of Eddie getting his bottom all the way into his sleeping bag) a pair of helicopters decided to circle low over the house with searchlights, so that we felt like we were in the middle of a James Bond film at the very least.

By the time we settled everyone again the roaring traffic of the A29 was just about to begin for the morning rush hour. (Or so it seemed!)  I was under this strange illusion that we lived in a rural area, but it transpires that our main road is more like the M1 first thing in the morning. The over-efficiency of the heater meant that the previous year's defrosting wasn't necessary; in fact we all woke up with a bit of a sweat on.  One that had absolutely no relation to the amount of red wine I felt it necessary to consume in order to sleep five in our four-man tent.

'Again, again!' said the kids in the morning, like demented Teletubbies.

But that nonsense is all over for another year, at least.

(Although I do, inadvertently, appear to have book a yurt for us all to stay in for the Hay Festival next month.  Whoops...)



Currently reading: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Sunshine After the Rain

Today the sun shines brilliantly. What a change from the dreary wet. And the chickens began laying eggs again. Is the worst over?





Eddie thinks that he sees a rainbow in every sky. Mostly this is just wishful thinking. "Mummy, I see a rainbow up the sky!" He points up, usually, at nothing but cloud; though I did take this photo from the classroom window the other day.


Noses seem to have been running since Christmas. And Gilby tells me that he has a very bad cough. When he coughs hard, apparently, he can taste 'sneeze' in his mouth. Ah, yes. That is quite a bad cough. I chose not to introduce him to the word 'phlegm'. Such an ugly word. Much prefer a good mouth-sneeze myself.





Currently reading: Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder

New Term, New Life

I have been somewhat neglectful of this blog of late: a combination of the start of a hectic new term and managing the fallout from the GCSE English debacle, with family illness and well, stuff: The general chaos of life, the universe and everything. But that general chaos has just increased exponentially.

We 'borrowed' a broody hen sitting on eggs from friends who really didn't want any more chickens - whilst we could do with a couple more; plus we thought the kids would like to see baby chicks growing up. We had a mild panic when we discovered that 'the black one' (our friends are not so keen on naming all their animals as we are, probably sensibly) was in fact sitting on fourteen eggs and not the four or five that they had thought. But somehow it all went according to plan: just two little babies were born about ten days ago - one black and one yellow, both monstrously cute. So all good.

But about three weeks ago, Arabella, our little black rabbit escaped. She was only in the garden and we kept catching glimpses of her, but we didn't catch her for a couple of nights. So today, I came home from work to Gertie enthusiastically telling me that Bella had two babies.

Well, I knew that was impossible as she lives all alone and always has done, but then I remembered those two wild nights out. In fact, Gertie was wrong. Bella hadn't had two babies. She'd had seven of them!

Half wild rabbit, anyone?

The Trials of Chicken-Keeping

We lost two of our chickens on Saturday, waking up in the morning to a vortex of dark feathers blowing around the garden: a sure sign that we had been visited by Mr Fox. Thankfully the evidence was nothing more grisly.

The children were delighted to see so many feathers (Gilby the naturalist has amassed a not-insignificant collection of feathers over his two-and-a-half-years on this earth). I didn't have the heart to explain why they were there, and have yet to make reference to the untimely demise of Gwinny and Nimue, a pair of black cochins who have been laying for about six months. They are survived by Cecily (a pretty Partridge Wyandotte bantam) who doesn't seem in the least bit bothered and is delighted to rule the roost once again.

We generally, though not exclusively, have 'Arthurian' named pets. Vivien (a Rhode Island Red stray rescued by Daddy) and Isolde (another Partridge Wyandotte), met a more dignified end last summer, dying 'peacefully' within a few days of each other.

This was in stark contrast to our first pair: Gertie (a Buff Orpington bantam) and Guinevere (our first Wyandotte). Guinevere came to a very sorry end when she was pecked to death by her 'friend' after just a few days. That was our not-so-happy introduction to smallholding, and a reminder of nature's cruelty. We took Guinevere back from whence she came (to a poultry farmer a few villages away) and swapped her for a pair of Wyandottes. One of whom is the still-surviving Cecily, but the other didn't make it through the first night, as 'something' (a stoat?) tunnelled beneath their little run and got her. We nearly didn't carry on after that.

But I do love the hens running round the garden and the eggs, of course, so we reinforced the run with concrete and chicken-wire beneath, and tried again. The black cochins were the best layers, but they unfortunately insisted on roosting in the trees above the henhouse rather than returning to the henhouse itself of an evening. There seemed to be nothing we could do about it, but we've learned our unhappy lesson and will ensure that any future birds are better trained.

RIP: Gwinny and Nimue