A trip to the cottage - nine magpies

I’m not a great fan of Magpies, I think I may have mentioned this before, but I do respect them. My relationship with them is long-term even though magpies, to my mind at least, are bleak creatures. Crows may be bigger and more complicatedly carrion, but magpies are everywhere and undaunted by terrain, habitat, or thundering juggernaughts. And of course, as everyone knows, they must be saluted when seen singly no matter what the circumstance.

The farmer who had the field where we used to keep Chester didn’t salute them. He really hated magpies and used to trap them in baited cages. Sometimes he’d catch three of four in a morning and dispatch them in the afternoon with his tractor’s wheels. He said he did it because the magpies killed young birds in their nest, which of course they do, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. It’s their nature, they can’t help it and I felt uncomfortable with the level of his crushing cruelty.

They are a bird full of contradiction, regarded as ill omens in most people’s minds. They may look black and white but if you manage to get close up to one they have feathers that shimmer like petrol in a puddle on a winter’s day. Their croak is harsh and brittle even though they look like they should sing with an up and down movement of the tail, like a wind-up bird in a musical box. They should be graceful; but there’s nothing graceful about the way they tear at a chunk of roadkill be the side of the road, arrogantly standing ground until the very last minute before flying away.

Despite all of this, they fascinate me and that is why when I saw nine on a telephone wire last weekend I took note to write about it here. A group of magpies is called a tiding, a gulp, a charm, a tittering, a parliament - I quite like a charm. A charm of nine magpies, of course it’s nine for a kiss in the nursery rhyme, although in the late 1700’s seeing nine magpies was associated with a trip to hell. So, a kiss or a trip to hell? Hard to choose really and one can lead to the other I seem to remember.

Anyway, after I saw the magpies I took a walk to where they were sitting and underneath the wire I found a few feathers and took them home as a charm. I hope that they don’t bring me bad luck.

A trip to the cottage - spiders...

I suppose I should start with the Spider, well it does seem a very good place to start.

We arrived at the cottage on Thursday evening just as night was falling and three full days ahead of us to do whatever we chose. At this time of year, mellow fruitfulness and all that, my first duty on arrival is to perform the bath check. This consists of turning on the light and checking the off-white bath for spiders; a task I am not at all bothered by, although I did once have to catch and set fourteen of the little lovelies free outside.

On this occasion there were only five and four of them were deceased, dead, and no longer with us. The remaining spider seemed in fine fettle and very much alive, rearing up on his back legs as if to say ‘come on then if you think you’re hard enough!’ Obviously I was. No spider, not even this gladiator with four kills to his name (I assumed), was ever going to get the better of me.

Now usually I pick them up in my cupped hands and transport to the back door and freedom. There have been times I’ve taken two or three at a time, jiggling my hands up and down in an attempt to stop them tickling me. Not this time though. This time I got a beer glass and a piece of paper – this was one huge spider.

It didn’t take long before he was safely inside my pint pot. I have to say that he didn’t seem pleased, so I quickly and carefully slipped a pound inside the glass for scale and took a couple of pictures. Then, after nervously retrieving my pound, I set him free by dropping him into the dark over the stable door knowing that (like Arnie) he’ll be back. Well, they don't call them house spiders for nothing.

Later that same evening we found another spider almost as big in the living room and again I had to fetch my beer glass. I must be losing my touch. Not Luna though who seemed to enjoy playing with her through the glass of my Old Speckled Hen pint pot.

A good place...

I’m always surprised when I wake up in a good mood but increasingly I’ve noticed that I do. I don’t know why this is, but I like it.

There was a time, and it lasted for quite a while, when I woke up in what can only be described as deep despair. There were days when I didn’t smile at all, days when I didn’t want to get out of bed, days when the thoughts that passed through my head were less than sunny. Of course this mood crept up on me slowly, like a night beast stalking its prey, a black dog maybe. Too much uncertainty, change, disillusionment, followed by a long period of not knowing who I was any more - and suddenly I was down deep and unable to get out again. I functioned but that was about it. Of course I realised at the time I was depressed, but I’m not one for doctors and prefer to deal with things myself.

Then slowly but surely I felt a little better each day. Again I don’t know why and it wasn’t a quick thing, but gradually it happened and I began to get a little perspective back. Waking up and wanting to get out of bed was such a good feeling, noticing that it was a sunny day a bit of a revelation and a relief.

I wouldn’t say that even now I’m the cheeriest person in the world all of the time and I still have days when I’m fed up. But then don’t we all? I do know that I don’t want to go back to where I was ever again and I try really hard not to let anything or anyone take me there. Self-protection is the name of the game these days and I manage it by chucking away the rubbish that some people try to deal me and focussing on the good things around and about me. It isn’t hard, but in many ways it is the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

So why am I telling you this? Well, if you are in that baddest of bad places I just wanted to say that there really is hope even though you won’t believe me. If you know someone who’s down I’d say to give them whatever help you can and try not to do anything to make things worse. The people that really didn’t help me were the ones that insisted on being destructive and selfish when they knew that I was in a fragile place. They won’t get the chance again.

I’m hoping that I never have that badness eat into me ever again and I’m constantly on the lookout for it. Of course, like my funny face stones in the picture I go through all sorts of emotions daily but generally there are more smiles than frowns, sadness, or looks of fear and I’m going to keep it that way regardless of what it takes.

Yes, I’m in a good place now.

Evidence of autumn...

Well it seems to have arrived right on cue. There was a real chill in the air this morning and that, along with crisp emptiness that makes the birds sound like a tinny recording of themselves when they sing, seemed to say ‘autumn is here’. I wouldn’t call it mellow fruitfulness though. It didn’t quite feel mellow and if there was fruit to be had I couldn’t see it. Maybe autumn wasn’t here after all, as they say ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’.

Evidence is what I needed, evidence of autumn.

Creeping out of the yard gate and into the deserted entry I wondered what I might find. Would autumn be everywhere as if someone had flipped the autumn switch overnight and plunged us into a world of mists and bonfire smoke? Of course I was hoping to find spiders. You know, the big hairy ones that are everywhere this time of year apparently, real monsters big enough to eat a chicken whole. But the only spider I saw was a tiny pinprick of a creature sitting in the middle of his dew free web. I couldn’t even find one of those orange autumnally bloated slugs that seem to appear just after the summer has left as if they had sucked up the last of the sun and were storing it in their gooey bodies to get them through the winter.

Yes, perhaps the report of summer’s death and the arrival of autumn had been grossly exaggerated.

It was then that I spotted what I was looking for. A little further along the alley tucked up against a neighbour's back wall was a neatly swept pile of leaves. Now these weren’t ordinary leaves, and they weren’t M and S leaves either, these were definitely autumnal leaves. It was their colour that gave them away.

Mind you nature can be tricky, and she makes some leaves red and brown all year around without the need for autumn. So to be sure I picked up a handful to check for the rustle factor. The leaves felt dry and crisp in my hand and when I scrunched them they made a very satisfying dry rustle. These were indeed the first leaves of autumn. I bent to scoop up another handful and as I did a huge brown arachnid, one of those fabled spiders I’d read about in the papers, leaped towards me and clung to my hand.

That was evidence enough for me. So gently flinging the huge thing off my hand (I am not afraid of spiders you understand) I beat a hasty retreat to my back gate and safety once more. I had found autumn. That pile of swept up leaves was just the harbinger of things to come. Watch now how quickly the leaves will turn.

Little rituals...

It’s the last day of summer, a time when once, all over the country, people would gather to recognise the change in the seasons and take part in rituals of one kind or another. Ritual is part of what makes us what we are and most of us, even if we don’t recognise it, take part in them.

I am without doubt a creature of habit, tied to my daily routines and bound by the small self-generated rituals that have become a necessity for my existence. I get up at pretty much the same time each day even though I don’t need to, my bathroom routine (which I won’t detail) seldom varies. My early morning is a pattern not quite set in stone - checking mails before coffee, then looking at Facebook and a blog or two before tackling the watering and the washing up. After that I make my lunchtime sandwich, and so my day progresses without radical deviation from my routine.

Strangely though, I am not a lover of formal rituals. I see them as binding habits implanted in us by outside influences in order to keep us quiet when really we want to break out and scream ''No more''. Religion, education, organisations of any kind rely on ritual to keep us within their accepted boundaries and then we go on to invent our own rituals which locks us tightly into a whole range of self imposed habit. Weddings and Christenings leave me cold with dismay, and even Bonfire night has lost its appeal now that I’ve grown older. Easter never was on my list, and a more ridiculous set of rituals I can’t imagine.

Yes, ritual, ultimately, is for the mindless although it seems to be the chosen behaviour of the sane.

Madmen on the other hand, true madmen (I’m not thinking OCD type behaviours) hardly ever adhere to ritual. Their lives are a series of random and unexpected events that rarely form patterns or are even repeated. Of course you might argue that serial murderers who follow the same pattern for each kill are mad. But are they if they can control and repeat a sequence of events time and time again? That seems to be the act of a sane person to me.

Maybe ritual is an attempt to control the madness, a magic spell to stop us from simply living an animalistic life driven by needs and temperature and breeding patterns. Even animals have rituals they must follow at times though. Maybe at a cellular level we are hot-wired with ritual and only those without it are truly free?

And if that is the case then I think that it must be grand to be a madman.

The wine making continues...

The wine making continues, am I repeating myself? If so it'll be the wine... Hic! 

Today, with a little time to fill, I re-racked my Elderflower, Honeysuckle, and Carrot and moved them on the clearing stage by adding finings. As usual the need to sterilise everything was a pain, but there is only one way to do this and of course it has its perks. The racking process involves siphoning the wine into a clean and sterilised demijohn and after that is done there is at least a glassful of wine left in the bottom. If you are careful, very careful, you can pour this into a glass and, although it is a bit cloudy, you can get the feel for how the wine is coming along.

So here it is, my verdict, although generally my wines would be well appreciated by the inmates of any prison in the country.

Elderflower: Dryish with a good elderflower taste, just a hint of sweetness but rich like honey; which is hardly surprising as I used honey in it. It has a warm, but light colour and seems to be pretty strong. It needs to mellow, but is passable or should that be pissable. It smells rather than has a bouquet but a few months more could sort that out.

Honeysuckle: A rich, deep colour, and quite flowery, but not in that German way. It is definitely on the dry side but needs to stand as there might be more sweetness to come. I didn’t really want to stop drinking this one, but again a few months will do it good. It smells of summer.

Carrot: If ever there was a dry wine this is it. It’s pale and light and I think that it may be deceptively potent. There is little taste of carrot, but there is a rich taste of the earth. It almost blew my head off and this one definitely needs some time to mature. It smells like Worzel Gummidge after a shower of rain.

So, all coming along well, in all three there is the distinct promise of flavour and there’s no doubt that the fermenting process has made plenty of alcohol. I was hoping for images of maiden aunts and vicars as I drunk it, but was instead temped to sing about the four and twenty virgins who came down from Inverness and that girl from Glamorgan. Yes, potent stuff and only after a single glass of the dregs of each.

I’ll leave them to mature (if I can) and let you know how it’s going when I bottle them up.

Meanwhile… I have a cherry wine to make.

The grumps...

 I’m a bit grumpy today, not at all like yesterday. Yesterday was ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’, shiver me timbers. I spent some of the day talking like a pirate – dubloons, groats, Davey Jone’s locker, and splice the mainbrace ye scurvy knaves – and the rest of it thinking about pirates. To be exact I spent most of the day thinking about a pirate cat who I dreamed up a few years ago and who I thought I might write a few stories about but never did.

In my imagination Kit the Pirate Cat sails on the good ship name to be definitely be decided, but I think that it is either ‘The Dolphin’ or ‘The Tuna Flake’. Kit spends his days chasing the pirate rats that live below deck. The chief rat (who is definitely called Black Jack) is huge and is always laying traps for Kit. The ship is manned by a mismatched pirate crew including a one-eyed, toothless, boson, named ‘Salty Socks’,  who get into all sorts of scrapes with rival pirates, mermaids, native islanders, terrible storms, etc. They are always getting into deep water and are a hapless bunch, doomed to failure, but Kit usually, in his catty way, saves the day and ends up being fed cream and fish by the motley crew who mainly love him.

The ship’s captain, who may be called ‘Captain Scampi’ or ‘Captain Crabstick’, doesn’t like Kit one bit and is always trying to get Kit to walk the plank, although he never seems to manage it…

And that is about as far as I’ve ever got. I quite like the idea of ‘Kit the Pirate Cat’ though.

Anyway, now that ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ is over perhaps I’ll have a go at a Kit tale or two.