Val had commented a few days ago that Naughty didn’t seem likely to live much longer. And now, just four months after Other Chicken died, the last of our original four has gone.

Actually, Val found her dead in the hen house yesterday morning. I tenderly and tearfully carried her body away, and buried her alongside Other Chicken in our animal cemetery.

I am not embarrassed to say that I was too upset yesterday to write about her demise. Naughty had always been my favourite chicken. She was the one who made me realise that chickens are not the rather ugly and unintelligent birds that I had believed. She showed me that chickens are fascinating individuals. Her exploits, after which she was named, continued to delight me and occasionally terrify Val. More surprisingly, she became an entertaining and rewarding companion. Her ‘conversation’ often proved more engaging than that of many people.

I am sure that there will be other chickens that I shall value highly. But for now, however absurd it may seem to anyone else, I mourn the irreplaceable loss of the splendid Naughty.

So let’s see. What can I write about without the assistance of any creative inspiration whatsoever? The lovely September weather? Nature’s Bounty and the plethora of plums and potatoes? The gorgeous cuddly bounciness of the happy, healthy and only surviving Barn Kitten? The glorious Joys of The Simple Life? Nah! Let’s talk about Death.

Death seems to be tip-toeing around the hedges and edges of the Blanchetière menagerie at the moment, debating which of our animal buddies to steal away next. Yesterday, Naughty Chicken (the last of the original Famous Four), was definitely Not Right. I could tell something was amiss when she failed to terrorize me at the garden table, as I partook of a mid-morning snack of salty fat. The chickens love crisps and always circle around (and on) my feet, burbling hopefully whenever the see me eating something from a shiny, rustly junk-food packet. And if I momentarily forget my deep-seated aversion to all things feathery, and actually sit down on a chair, Naughty Chicken instantly closes in, looming ominously through the comfortable boundary of my personal space. And as she prepares to launch her beady-eyed feathersomeness up on to the arm of my seat in a flurry of loathsome flappiness, her pre-flight posturing sends me stumbling hastily away to the chicken-free safety of the house.

But yesterday I found myself happily dropping crisp crumbs to the assembled poultry without feeling unduly harrassed. Naughty was absent from the flock. I looked around and noticed her, plonked pudding-like under the shade of the overgrown weedage that constitutes our front garden. She spent the day flomped and sleepy, not eating and barely moving. She looked just like Other Chicken had looked for the few days before she finally gave up the ghost. And when Naughty retired early to the hen house, and didn’t get up on to her usual roosting spot to sleep, I really thought we’d be finding another ex-chicken on the floor of the house this morning.

But, true to Naughty-Chicken-form, she has rallied, and today is well enough to dispatch arthropods, chase tigers (well, kittens) and intimidate feather-phobics. She lives to fright another day, and once again Death has toddled off into the bushes, empty-handed.

Two days ago, my money was on Old Max – our ancient and gradually-wasting-away Dog of Many Years. He was not able to stand up, let alone go outside of his own accord to use the big-outdoor toilet facilities. He was wheezing and coughing, and generally looking extremely sorry for himself, and yet still managing to be so stroppy that he could not easily be helped without fear of losing a finger or four. When he is like this, Max is my dog. He doesn’t appreciate being bothered and ministered-unto, but he will just about tolerate such intervention from me. Simon doesn’t like to get too physical with him, which is understandable given his unfortunate history of animal bites this year.

Next week I have another children-visiting trip to the UK planned, and Simon was sort of wondering how he would manage with a sick and grumpy Max while I am away. And, given that Max has good days and bad days, but that the bad days are coming around with greater frequency and greater badness, I wondered whether the time might have come to Do Something About It. I suggested to Simon that maybe we should call the vet to come and ‘faire piquer’ Max. He said, “Hmmmmm….. Let me reflect on it for a bit”.

Now, being the lucky person who has the pleasure of trying to hoist a floppy, stroppy and yet-still-surprisingly-heavy Max down the steep steps and outside for a wee in a sort of home-made sling, and the honour of cleaning his bum, legs and tail with baby-wipes when he collapses in his own poo, I have already done quite a lot of reflecting. And when Simon recently discovered the stiff, flat and very stinky body of one of the disappeared dead kittens in the barn, and I happily disposed of it in the bin rather than a specially dug grave, I realised that My Sentiment must be on holiday with My Muse. So wearing my practical head I started to plan Old Max’s demise, so that when Simon had Done Reflecting and reached The Only Sensible Conclusion, we could get on and do the deed in the most efficient manner.

But Max is a Stubborn Old Thing, with a greater understanding of human conversation than we give him credit for. And as we discussed the time and venue of his ‘passing’, and the preparatory digging of his grave, he listened quietly and carefully, and obviously decided that maybe he wasn’t ready to shuffle off his mortal coil just yet, thank you very much. The next morning, when I returned from walking the Young and Lively Hounds, and was mentally preparing to drag Max outside in a bundle of old sheet to empty his bladder, he totally surprised me by getting up of his own accord, tottering down the steps, and emptying both bowel and bladder whilst remaining upright, before managing to get back up the steps unaided to return smuggly to his waiting bed, where he promptly scoffed a whole bowlful of doggy breakfast.

Suddenly the word ‘deadline’ has taken on a new and very literal meaning. Simon and I have decided that, in the light of Max’s surprising remission, we will wait a bit longer before making The Call. But at the back of our minds is the knowledge that a relapse during my imminent absence would leave Simon with the hefty responsibility of having to Make The Call all on his own. Which basically means that any hint of an impending relapse between now and next Thursday will almost certainly result in the fairly swift Ending of Max.

So this a strange time. It leads to inevitable contemplations on the so-called sanctity of life, and of the egocentricity of keeping alive animals that have passed their sell-by date, simply because our ‘ownership’ of them makes them somehow special. In the natural world, Max would have died months ago, as soon as he was unable to get up and find food and water for himself. The holding on to Life, even when that life is full of pain and empty of pleasure is a Very Human Thing, and is, to be frank, just a little odd. Why is it better to wait? To wait for Max to get really ill, and uncomfortable, and to be really suffering, before we decide to put him out of his misery? He will inevitably die, and he will almost certainly die soon. So why are we waiting, just a little bit longer?

Answers on a (black-framed) postcard please….

In March, I had the rare but painful experience of being bitten by a llama.

In June, I was bitten by a tick, and yesterday that took me to the doctor once more, to receive a message that could have significant long-term implications.

I knew what was wrong with me before I went. A brief bit of internet research had made me realise that I’d better get to the doctor without further delay. The circular red rash spreading out from the site of the bite is apparently an unmistakable diagnostic clue. I sat with the doctor and described the tick bite, followed weeks later by the rash, and more recently the headaches and tiredness. One brief look at the red circle on the side of my chest, and he agreed with me. I have Lyme Disease.

The normally jovial doctor had become rather alarmingly serious. He congratulated me on my diagnosis and emphasised how important it was to begin treatment immediately. He told me of a friend of his who had become paralysed on one side after not receiving prompt treatment. We discussed the merits of different antibiotics as he revelled in the luxury of a patient who had researched his illness. Then, while filling in the medical certificate he asked whether I wanted an ‘arrêt de travail’ (sick note to stop work). Although this would have entitled me to a daily payment for “loss of earnings”, it seemed over the top. I didn’t want to get into thinking I had a really serious illness. After all, it’s only potentially really serious at this stage . . . .

So here I go with another chance to explore the astonishing bureaucracy of what is, apparently, the best health system in the world! Lyme Disease is recognised as a ‘Professional Illness’ for farmers. Hence all fees and charges will be met fully by the compulsory insurance scheme.  I’ve sent two copies of the medical certificate to the mutual insurer, along with three copies of the professional illness declaration. The local pharmacy has ordered in the very large quantity of antibiotics I have to take over the next 30 days. I now have to contact a nurse of my choice to come to take blood for testing. When I get the results of the blood tests I need to go back to the doctor so we can discuss the next stages of treatment.

It’s very relaxing, this rural life . . . . .

I think I shall now be keeping a more careful eye out for arthropods like this little chap.

Yeah… I’m not a whole lot of fun to be around at the moment. I may be “experiencing a depression”. Note that I do not say that “I am depressed”. I refuse to identify with this dull mood of disquietude that has decended on me like a brain-fogging layer of nimbostratus. Instead, I will observe it, tolerate it as quietly as I can, and wait for it to lift.

I know from experience that this feeling will pass. I also know there is not a lot I can do to hurry it along. I don’t know where it comes from and I don’t know why it goes when it does. But I know that one day I will wake up feeling different, and once again my mind will be fizzing and bubbling with the intoxicating brew of possibility that is Life. And I will be positively bursting with Things to Write About once more.

And on that uncharacteristically optimistic note, I will return to my weary wallow of self pity and insect bites, and leave you with the (slightly scary) promise that “I’ll be back”.

Well, sort of. It was actually very busy and not at all relaxing. I expect Val might write in more detail about the trip, but I shall content myself with reporting that I managed to see two new grandsons, one granddaughter, three children, two step-children (one of whom got married), two parents, and a selection of former colleagues. And drive 2500 kilometres. All in 8 days.

There’s not one element of all that that I would have wanted to miss. Nevertheless, I am so glad to be home.

Yes, home. I’ve realised that this is home. Not for ever, I’m sure – perhaps not even for many years – but for now this small farm, with all its limitations, is where my heart is.

This morning it was my turn to do the early tending to the animals. Dogs, pigs, chickens, dogs in that order.  Followed by making breakfast. And I loved it all. Best for me, though, were the cats, who threaded their independent way through the morning time-line.

There’s no telling with cats. I can’t even say for sure how many we now have living with us. Little Cat (the oldest one who was born after our arrival) seems to have moved on, maintaining a pattern that we raise cats and they leave us when they are adult. Their visits to the house become less frequent, and then they come by no more.

This could be really depressing, but one way or another, new cats arrive to replace them. The latest – and it seems the only survivor of the barn cat litter – is becoming much more friendly. He (yes, a male, which is very rare among the Blanchetière cats) was coaxed into stroking contact by the daughters of our visitors (thanks Amy and Ella). Now he is beginning to exhibit the ‘magnetic cat’ characteristics of the others – twining round my feet as I try to walk near him. He still sleeps in the barn, and is barely tolerated by the currently established 3 house cats, but I can see him joining our motley crew inside before long.

He hasn’t a name yet. Past experience has taught that early naming leads to more grief when followed by early death. As I haven’t managed to harden my heart to pet death, I’m cautious not to become too captivated . . . . but this one, whatever he is to be called, is creeping into my affections, and settling himself down comfortably.

To reach the Willow Field, where Pedro and Ana are living, or to get to the path under the hornbeam trees that provides an essential part of our ‘parkland walk’, it is necessary to cross the stream. On foot, this is no problem (especially since Val improvised some plank bridges). However, with the tractor, unless the weather has been dry for some time, there is a real danger of bogging down in a great depth of sogginess. Although the tractor does always get through, the muddy, rutty mess left behind is pretty horrendous.

The alternative route, avoiding a stream crossing, involves travelling several hundred metres along the little chemins which run alongside our land and some neighbouring fields. A bridge would provide an all-weather, direct alternative.

The trouble is that the valley in which the stream flows is too wide to make a simple little bridge possible. The land alongside the stream itself gets very soggy, and in June the whole area became flooded.

This meant that considerable earth moving was needed, to provide a raised bank joining the downhill track (behind and to the right of Rufus in this picture) to the other side of the stream.

This is a job for Takeuchi!

A lot of thought later — where is the earth to come from? how will the stream continue to flow through the bank of earth? where is the best place to put all the moved earth? — and a bit of judicious shopping at a builders’ merchant, and I was ready.

The stream has been tamed. Now all that is needed is some autumn sowing of grass to landscape the site. I’m actually looking forward to a period of rain to test it out!

]]> http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=4533 0 http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4500 http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4500#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:08:57 +0000 Val http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4500 Continue reading →]]> It’s a funny thing how putting the word ‘should’ before an action immediately turns it into something to be postponed. Indefinitely. The mere thought that ‘I really ought to… ‘ is sufficient to send my brain scurrying in the opposite direction, chasing whatever dubious, time-absorbing Rabbits of Distraction pop out of their holes to hop around enticingly on the horizons of my mind.

I really was going to write another post to follow Simon’s Takeuchi one. I really was going to make some smart-arsed-but charmingly-humorous comment about his ridiculous statement that skilled mini-diggering is a four-dimensional task. But somehow a little rabbit popped up and lured me ever deeper into the Warrens of Google, in search of an understanding of the Fourth Dimension. I am chasing it still. Trying to get a three-dimensional head around a concept so completely outside of its perceptual experience is not an Easy Thing. Some might even say that it is harder than operating a digger.

But ultimately, it is probably less useful. Being a Thinker rather than a Doer probably doesn’t make me well-suited to the farming life. Ho Hum. Who’d have thought it?

Despite his many years of employment in what was, ultimately, a Thinking sort of activity, I suspect that Simon is more naturally a Doer. Yes, he likes to research things. Yes, he likes to gather facts and store away information, like a squirrel preparing for the hungry day when one particular little acorn of information will come in very handy indeed. But when it comes down to it, he likes to Do Stuff. Put a tool in his hand, or a machine in his possession, and he is a Happy Bunny. He likes to mould and shape his environment to fit his needs. He doesn’t Go With the Flow. He makes the Flow go with him – or at least through the pipes that he has carefully placed so that the Flow will go where he wants it to go, and not run about willy nilly, doing the wayward things that Flows generally seem to enjoy.

Whatever the reason, it seems that this life suits Simon very well indeed. And the annoying irony of the thing is that it was my idea. It was me who wanted to live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and breed llamas and pigs, and be at one with the seasons. We came here in search of my bliss, and Simon very generously went along with my crazy idea, because (as I believe I may have previously mentioned) he must love me very much. We came in search of my bliss, and inadvertently Simon found his. I am searching still.

Simon has just oh-so-wisely pointed out that he suspects he could probably find his bliss in all sorts of places. That’s the Really Good Thing about being a Doer. It doesn’t matter where he is, or really even what he is doing. So long as he is Doing, (preferably with the aid of a combustion engine), he will be pretty happy.

And I guess that has to be a Really Good Thing for me too. Because it means I can keep right on Having Ideas, which is, after all, what I love doing best in the whole world. And it means that whenever I emerge from a few days, or weeks, or months of concentrated disquietude with the immortal words, “I’ve been thinking… “, I can be reasonably certain that Simon will not run screaming for the hills , but will instead happily hear me out, and rise to the challenge of putting my idea into action.

Perhaps I have found my bliss after all, but have simply been too busy thinking to notice.

Armed only with my trusty Takeuchi, and aided by my faithful surveyor/photographer/supervisor, I have transformed the far end of the vegetable garden. What was recently a sewage outflow pit is now the far more elegant-sounding “lit d’épandage”. Now literally translated this means a ‘spreading bed’. Of course, what it means is that the sewage outflow is spread under the covers of a bed of earth. Which may not sound terribly attractive, but ask yourself, where does your sewage go? At least ours is now filtered through very large distances of sandy soil before it reaches the stream . . . . .

To achieve this oh-so-desirable outcome required my first attempt at precision trench digging. I had decided that I should attempt to make our system close enough to the modern French “normes” (standards) to pass an official inspection by the charmingly named SPANC (Service Public d’Assainissement Non Collectif). If routine inspections in this area ever get going, as they are supposed to do before 2012, my lowly aim was that we should be awarded the standard of “non conforme, mais non polluant” (non-compliant, but not polluting). From the beginning of 2013 anyone selling a house with a septic tank will have to provide the buyer with an inspection certificate, and if we can’t reach my desired standard we shall probably have to install a whole new system.

I had decided to have two parallel drainage pipes, with the possibility of adding a third at a later stage. This meant that we had to have two 5m trenches, part filled with gravel, and interconnecting pipes and an inspection chamber (“You can see, Monsieur Inspecteur, all is flowing very freely”).

Actually, this is getting easier — though it still requires 100% concentration, and I still make mistakes.

I guess with more practice I shall get quicker!

But I am achieving the desired results, and trenches were dug in no time at all. What would have been a daunting task by hand was completed within a few hours. And no aggravation of the bad back caused by loading the gravel into our trailer.

[Show as slideshow]

Oh joy!

]]> http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=4501 5 http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4477 http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4477#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:12:48 +0000 Simon http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4477 Continue reading →]]> If you have read Val’s recent post, you’ll know that I have bought a mini-digger.

Of course, the term “mini” is relative. My newly beloved Takeuchi is certainly small compared to the giant monsters you see ripping up the ground at large industrial sites, but at a ton and a half it feels big enough when you drive it.

Although “drive” is not really the right word. I’ve never really appreciated the skill of the digger operator. I thought I was skilful when I learned how to drive heavy goods vehicles many years ago, but now I realise that was in a different league altogether.

The basic controls of a modern digger are two joy-sticks – one for the left hand, one for the right. Each joystick moves in two dimensions simultaneously – left/right and backward/forward. To dig a hole requires the coordinated movement of both hands, each moving smoothly in two dimensions — so it’s a four dimensional task.

It’s hard. To do it well is extremely hard. And on top of that, there are also foot controls and four additional levers for doing things like controlling engine speed, moving the tracks, and raising/lowering the bulldozer blade.

Many hours of practice will be needed.

Woohoo! This is so much better than a computer game.

Oh, you mean I should be doing a JOB?

Right then, let’s sort out the drainage system . . .

But basically, I have felt little inclination to write anything. Why is that?

A large part of it is that, as Val has said many times, and in many ways, time flies by.
This isn’t because our life here is one of unremitting labour!

It would be possible, if seeking to do the minimum, to average no more than two or three hours a day between us tending to the various animals and maintaining the land.

That could leave a huge amount of time for blogging. But, to be honest, I have not sat around bursting with creative urges to write. It’s not that I am overwhelmed with work, rather that I am absorbed by tasks. I have been spending my time on other things . . . . and as a result, I have done no blog posts recently.

I said to Val the other day that maybe I had had enough of blogging. This was a sort of verbal experiment: how did it feel to say that I might give up permanently? The answer is that it felt OK; that I realised that if I decided to stop it would not leave me feeling dissatisfied.

I really enjoy reading Val’s posts, and like having the blog archives as a sort of diary of our life here. Maybe it would be enough for me to let this be Val’s blog, and become just a reader.

However, raising the subject prompted me to consider whether there was anything I wanted to write about. And there is. So my blogging input is about to resume. For a while at least.

This is the post I meant to write before I got bogged down in the meaninglessness of existence. And just so that I can immediately get over the paralysing effect of having two weeks worth of stuff to catch up on, here is a quick list of things that have happened since my last (proper) post on 5 July:

Simon has got himself a mini-digger.
Simon has been up to London to visit the Queen. (Well actually to visit his pregnant daughter, but no one has written a nursery rhyme about that).
Simon has done digging.
Simon has done filling-back-in.
All drainage systems are go.
Simon’s back hurts.
Big Cat has gone.
The Bold Three are back (without Little Black).
Lonely Chicken has stopped being broody.
Lonely Chicken is moulting. Again.
It hasn’t hardly rained at all.
Max hasn’t died.
Oh, and did I mention… Simon has got himself a mini-digger.

It’s a funny thing. Now that I look at it, not as much has happened as I thought.

I guess the digging and related activities have taken quite a chunk of time. All those jobs that are prefaced with “I’m just going to….”, and are supposed to only take an hour or so, invariably end up filling most of the day. But the activities are so engaging, and the desire to get to the marvellous end-result so powerful, that, despite all rational intent to the contrary, we all too often find that we have somehow worked our sweaty and melanoma-inducing way through the hottest part of the day, and the shadows have grown long on the fruits of our labours.

Despite Simon’s recent assertion that he would blog no more, the degree of proud satisfaction he has accumulated as a result of his digger-related endeavours over the last week may, I think, prompt him to expound publicly on his new toy and the pleasures thereof, with accompanying pictures. Methinks he likes his digger very much. And oh, the plans he has for it! The bridges that will be built! The ponds that will be created! The endless diesel-powered joys of holing and piling and terracing and trenching that lie ahead! The earth will move indeed, and the world will be a better place, and everybody will be happy. Because SIMON HAS A DIGGER.

Meanwhile, back in the world of Nothing At All To Do With Digging, Life goes hotly and dryly on. Potatoes proliferate and courgettes escalate. Beans run and squash squashes. The cherry tree buzzes with guzzling bugs, and broom pods pop in the hedgerows. Armies of dragonflies helicopter in the green longness at the edges of the barely-a-stream, and guerilla frogs jump ship at the approach of cutting machinery.

Summer is here and the living isn’t particularly easy. There is too little water and too much heat. And, as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said,

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

It always happens when I leave something for a really long time. It seems like such a mammoth task to get back into it, that I keep putting it off a little longer… and a little longer… and a little longer… And my lack of motivation for blog-writing hasn’t been helped by Simon’s announcement that he thinks maybe he’s had enough of it now, and won’t be writing any more posts. And although he rarely writes posts these days anyway, the out-loud statement that he might just stop altogether instantly sent the hefty Demon of Perceived Responsibility hurtling across the room to slump slap-bang in the middle of my sagging shoulders, to smother my flickering willingness-to-be-arsed with a veritable blanket of shoulds and musts.

“I really should write something on the blog. I really must write something. Today. It’s been more than two weeks goddammit. Ooh…but what shall I write about? So much time has passed. So many possibilities. Where shall I start? Maybe I’ll just go and take the dogs for a walk/water the vegetables/plant the lettuces/wash the bed sheets/clean the bathroom/check my email/read this New Scientist article/take the dogs for another walk, while I think about it. Gosh, is it dinner time already! Where did the day go? Oh well. But I really MUST write something tomorrow….. ”

And so it goes. Minutes stretch into hours. Hours slide into days. Days blend into weeks. Weeks blur into months. Time steals our lives, carrying them away in its eternal swag bag of transience.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Oh Lordy Lord! Now I’ve gone and got all existential on y’all, and I STILL haven’t actually written about anything. I think perhaps I need to start again…..

But then again, who’s to say what “real” is, and what is real?

And who can explain how a blog post that was started with the intention of updating the Cat Log, has suddenly morphed into a philosophical musing on the nature of reality?

Never mind. Such is my world.

Now…. about the cats…..

The latest count is five. Yup, we are back to the five we ‘had’ before the Barn Cat Contingent materialised. We did briefly go up to ten again for a few days, when Mother Barn Cat returned, along with the Bold Three, to spend a few days eating a two-kilo sack of Whiskas and leaving the half-eaten bodies of dead rodents all around the barn, filling the fresh-hay-sweet air with the unmistakable stink of rotting corpse. But now they have all gone again. Including Little Black.

Which is a shame. During the few days when Little Black was all alone and lonely, I had made significant progress in overcoming his (yes I’m pretty sure he is a He) aversion to human contact. I started just putting my hand on his back, while he was busy scoffing a bowl of delicious meaty food (we have a few of the pouches of the expensive stuff which we keep for special occasions, when cat-tempting is required), and within a couple of days of frequent short sessions like this, I had him coming to me purring, and rolling on his back for me to rub his increasingly fat little belly.

Then Barn Cat returned, and showed a renewed interest in her abandoned child. She took to licking and grooming him in a way I had not seen her doing before. Perhaps she realised that he had the potential to survive after all. Perhaps he just smelt and tasted like meat. Whatever the reason, Little Black blossomed in the light of all this attention he was suddenly receiving. He was also delighted at the return of his frolicsome siblings, who once again played chasing games with him all around, and in, and out, and over the new stacks of hay in the upper barn. And while the Bold Three were still not bold with me, and ran away at any movement made toward touching them, Little Black showed off his bravery, and rubbed himself nonchalantly up against me whenever I went to fill the food bowl, whilst his furtive siblings looked on warily from a safe distance.

Over the next two days, Little Black grew braver and braver. Gradually he made it further and further down the barn stairs in pursuit of his energetic playmates, overcoming more of his fear, and the biggest barrier to his début excursion into the World of Outside.

Until suddenly he, and his siblings, and their mother were gone. Not a sign or sound of any of them for three days now. No food eaten from the bowl in the barn. No rustlings in the shadows. No scurryings in the hay. No miaow-miaow-miaow from Barn Cat wanting some dinner or attention. Just an empty, silent barn. (Silent that is, apart from the chitterings of the baby redstarts and swallows in their respective nests, and the scrabbling of the large and greedy field mice, who now come at night to feast on the uneaten cat food.)

It seems like Barn Cat, along with the Bold Three, came back to see how Little Black was getting on. And when it turned out that he was feeling much better, and stronger and braver thank you very much, they could set off on their journey to who-knows-where once again, this time taking him with them.

I am happy that he is back with his real family, doing proper cat-things in the Big Outside, as Nature intended. But I am sad that he is not with our family, doing pretend cat-things in the Small Inside, as I had – just for a little while – begun to think he might be.

Thank you Universe, for yet another lesson in non-attachment.

Bummer. Can’t go out between 11am and 9pm, and can’t do any physical work. Ha! Quel dommage. I’ll just have to sit inside in the cool (26C) and mess about on t’internet all day then.

Which is pretty much what I have been doing since around midday. In my defence I will add that I did a big, fat load of outside work between 6.30 and 12.00, including a very thorough attack with blunt shears on the nettles, brambles and spiky saplings that have infested the plum tree area next to the electric fence (that keeps Lenny from attacking the dogs when they are out cavorting ridiculously in their pen).

Meteo-France has also issued an orange warning about the possibility of exceptionally violent storms in this area, which inspired Simon to construct a bit of much needed vegetable scaffolding. I think my question about whether he had decided on a low-growing, rambling variety of tomato this year added to his motivation. Simon is of course either an Englishman or a Mad Dog. He somehow ended up doing his gardening during the early afternoon, flying recklessly in the face of all sensible advice (unlike clever, cool-as-a-really-quite-warm-cucumber me). But the tomatoes and the broad beans are now standing proudly to attention, supported by the most wondrous construction of carefully chosen hornbeam branches. It is very gratifying to have ready access to an endless supply of wood for all-sorts-of-purposes.

Anyway. That’s the sort of day it’s been. And my canicule-enforced confinement to the house has given me the opportunity to sort through our huge collection of photographs to make an album of a year’s worth of pictures of the hay field just across the lane, which is what greets my bleary eyes in the morning, when I take the dogs for their first walk of the day.

It may be simply a field and some trees, with some sky above it, but it is beautiful in so many ways….

This has been a busy week. We’ve got next winter’s hay in. Simon has sorted another blocked septic tank problem (for our friend Sue, whose sick hubby is in hospital), and mowed acres of very nettley land. I have mowed the rocks and pieces of wood that lurk in the very long weeds that grow in the ‘paths’ in the vegetable patch, and the dogs’ playground, and washed all the bedding. All in 30 degrees plus. So we decided to spend yesterday morning being tourists.

We went out early, before the sun was too, too hot, and drove to Herisson. Herisson is French for hedgehog. The town is a small and very pretty collection of old medieval buildings with impossible roofs. It has a ruined castle on its hilltop, and it sits in big sweeping loop of the Aumance river (whose source is just up the road from our house, and into which the stream on our land – and the filtered effluent from our septic tank – romantically flows).

We parked in the shade of the big trees next to the river and wandered about a bit. And this is what we saw….

Of all our animals, the chickens are the only ones ‘kept for food’, but in many ways they are more pet-like than most of our other animals. We take great pleasure in their company, as they pootle around our feet in the yard, bibbling and burbling conversationally. And, of all our animals, they are the only ones who consistently come when they are called.

The cats, on the other hand, are very possibly the least pet-like of the animals that inhabit the Blanchetière domain. I could not say with confidence how many cats we ‘have’. For the most part we don’t have cats – they have us. And they have us for just as long as it suits them, and not a moment longer.

Most recently, until the Barn Cat appeared, I would have probably said we had five cats. But of those five, only the youngest three (Min, Blue and Brown) consistently spend some part of every day inside the house. Big Cat passes by most days, and occasionally calls in for a snack, or perhaps, on a rare day, a little sleep. Little Cat tends to turn up on the doorstep at night, just when any inside cats are being evicted. I suspect she comes to see the other cats rather than us. But just when you think she is lost to you forever, she will come inside, plonk herself on your lap, and demand (by nibbling your fingers) to be stroked.

Then Barn Cat appeared, and shortly afterwards her four kittens became apparent. And Barn Cat would greet us like companions and treat us with fondness. She enjoyed the pleasure of us stroking her (so long as we didn’t pick her up) but she also, very clearly, kept us mainly for food. She was clearly not a pet of ours, and yet the line between her behaviour and that of ‘our’ cats, was a very thin line indeed.

Over the last few weeks, we have taken great pleasure in watching the development of her kittens. They have lived upstairs in our barn and eaten the food we have given them. With the exception of the blackest black kitten, they have bounced about in our yard, and slumbered in the sun on the logs in our wood pile, and slept each night in our hay, all under the almost constant watchful eye of their mother. They have all been sneezily and snottily ill, and mostly recovered (although still suffering the red-eye after-effects of conjunctivitis). And gradually they have become bolder in their explorations and wanderings, but no bolder at all in their willingness to be touched by people.

The night before last, while we sat outside in the hot evening air, planning how to rearrange the old hay in the barn in preparation for the delivery of the new hay yesterday, the kittens were wildly skittering around and about, chasing each other in and out of the chicken house, across the wood shed roof, and out into the overgrown track behind the chicken pen. Barn Cat watched them closely, and listened to our conversation.

Then, when Simon and all of our animals were asleep, and our cats were long gone into their nightly far-and-wide, moth-and-mouse-chasing escapades in the fields, I heard a loud miaowing at the front door. I opened it to find Barn Cat standing there with her three bold kittens around her ankles. I stroked her, and watched her kittens drinking water from the big bowl on the doorstep, and wondered briefly if she was wanting to come into the house. I opened the door a little wider and she edged away, her kittens instantly vanishing beneath the leafy shelter of the overgrowth along the front of the house. I said goodnight, and closed the door.

Yesterday morning, Simon went out to the barn early to move the old bales of hay, and make ready for our new delivery. Only the blackest black kitten was to be seen – still lurking in the dark upstairs of the barn, from whence it has not moved since birth. A little later, I went out to clear a space behind the barn doors, and found Barn Cat standing at the bottom of the stairs with a huge mouse in her mouth, calling to little Black, who paced up and down along the edge of the upper barn floor, miaowing pathetically. There was no sign at all of any of the other three kittens.

Barn Cat refused to take the mouse up to the kitten, and seemed instead to be trying her hardest to entice her recalcitrant child out of the high, safe dark, into the big bright world waiting to be explored outside. But the kitten would not come down. It looked over the edge, miaowing. It stood on the top step, miaowing. It stretched out one tentative paw, and pulled it back. It put one paw on the second step, and again pulled back. It wanted to come down to its mother and the tasty mouse. But, for some unknown reason, it simply couldn’t do it. Thinking that my presence might be making things worse, I went away and left Barn Cat to deal with her offspring as best she could.

Today there is still no sign of the Bold Three, nor of their mother. Little Black is still here, all alone, curled in amongst the fresh new hay, occasionally lifting its sad little snotty head to wail a long and plaintive miaow into the lonely, empty silence.

And I have begun the slow process of adoption, which starts with my sitting nearby on the top step of the barn, while Little Black eats nervously from a dish next to my ever-slightly-closer hand, and culminates, hopefully, in there being six cats who snooze on our sofas, and allow us to adore them, and who call us their own.

]]> http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=4377 1 http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4333 http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4333#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:04:05 +0000 Val http://www.llamadharma.com/blog/?p=4333 Continue reading →]]> Today is the seventh day of summer. Yup – a whole week of summer done and gone already. How many days are there in summer anyway? I suspect the only meaningful answer is ‘Not Enough’.

Today is also the fifth day of free-running drainage. The odious aroma awakened by our diggery-pokery that lingered in the bathroom, leaked into the kitchen, and gently wafted though the rest of the house, is at last beginning to subside. The disgusting pool of vile has also undergone an intriguing transformation, and continues to be a source of fascination and photo opportunity for certain sad people who clearly have nothing better to do with their time. (Yes, that would be me.)

The day following the Surge of Victory we noticed that, although the level of noxiousness in the pool was a little lower, the pool seemed to have self-lined with an impervious layer of tarry silt that covered and smoothed the contours of the ground over which the gush had flooded, and seemed to be preventing a timely soaking-away of the remaining shroud of grey.

Despite the fact that he had declared the day a weekend, Plumber Man could not resist a little further intervention with his spade, and he set about digging a short trench to provide the noxiousness with a bigger surface area through which to vanish.

Is it at times like this that I feel a little tug of envy. One of my favourite childhood activities was building sandcastles on the beach in my home town of Hastings. Well, not so much the building of the castles – more the construction of the moats that surrounded them. Glorious affairs, edged with curly, creamy pink and yellow shells and spanned by driftwood bridges, with a channel running to the rolling edge of the sea. The gentle ends of waves that unfolded on to the acres of flat sand like an ever-shifting bedspread would fill the moat with foamy brown joy that lived for a brief moment in the small world I had created, before melting inexorably away. An early introduction to the poignant pleasures of transience.

I digress. (Frequently).

What I mean to say is, despite the smell and the nastiness of the materials involved in our current shovelling shenanigans, there is still great pleasure to be had in the digging of pools and trenches, and the creating of cascades of flow that spill and tumble into runnels and puddles, to disappear silently into the unquenchable earth. There is also pleasure to be had in the watching-of-the-digging, but nothing can quite compare with the feeling of that tiny moment when the spade sinks into the last thin sliver of soil supporting the dam, to let loose the flood.

To be fair, Simon did notice the tinge of barely-constrained yearning that pervaded my restless watching-of-the-digging, and offer to let me do it. But after his courageous wielding of the drain rods the previous day, I felt it would be churlish to deny him the opportunity to thoroughly enjoy the fruits of his revolting endeavours. So he ceremoniously opened the flood gates, and we watched in fascination as the deluge poured into the perfectly judged trench, coming to rest about 2 cms from the brim, at the deepest point, and leaving a thin, smooth coating of black lava-like sludge over the floor and sides of the now empty pool.

Over the next couple of hours the liquid in the trench drained away, and each successive flushing through of the pipe washed out a little more of the vile blackness, so that it now also coats the bottom of the trench, but not so thickly as to prevent water draining through it. We have taken turns at watching the trench fill slowly as a shower-load of water and foam washes through, and have delighted in the brief replacement of the fading pong with a hint of fruity-smelling shampoo. And when there is no water in the trench, the hot sun dries the black sludge to the consistency of rubber, so that it is now cracking and peeling off the highest edges of the erstwhile pool of vile, in a way that makes me want to touch it. Almost.

Up at the top end of the pipe, the gross and stinky wetness that has lurked around the edges of the dug out septic tank has turned emerald green, and is now drying out nicely, so that Plumber Man will soon be able to mortar the lid back into place, and bury the whole sorry business beneath a muddy mantle of forgetfulness. But the mystery of the whereabouts of the major part of the overflow remains. The soil around the tank, away from the puddles where a dug space remained, is not particularly damp. And yet we know that vast quantities of water have been pouring out of the top of the tank for at least the last two months. When the inspection tank emptied of its shroud of grey, we discovered that the sink and shower discharge straight into the chamber, and thence the drainage pipe, by-passing the septic tank entirely. But since the drainage pipe has been blocked, the water from the shower has been flowing back up into the tank through its outflow. Had we run any water through the shower on the day the septic tank was emptied, we might have noticed that it was coming in through the wrong orifice. Oh well.

So two-months-worth of shower and sink and toilet water, all coming out the top of the tank! The little puddles around the edges simply don’t account for it. Where has it all been going? Well here is my theory (which I’m sure Plumber Man will declare “Makes No Sense” as soon as he reads it).

The floor in our cellar is sold rock. There is a natural channel running through the middle of it, which over the course of the last year has, on occasion, looked a little damp, but not significantly so. However, over the last month or so there has been a steady flow of water through this channel, running from the side nearest to where the septic tank is buried just outside, to exit through the wall into whatever lies beneath the adjoining barn. Simon drew my attention to it a few weeks back, saying that he had discovered a natural spring in the cellar, which he assumed was related to the raising of the water table caused by the excess of rain with which we have been blessed of late. The stream is indeed clear and odour-free, and could of course be an innocent result of extreme weather.

But I can’t help thinking that all that overflowing septic tank water must have gone somewhere. And doing what water does, it will have most likely gone down. Down through the filtering thickness of the ground to the impermeable bed of rock upon which the house of this wise man was built. My theory is that the apparently natural spring in our cellar is in no small part the result of the overflowingness happening above, not many meters away. Not that it matters. The cellar does not smell, and its wetness is of no significant consequence. It’s just that I would like to know. And, since the ceasing of the excessive rain has coincided with the ceasing of the overflowing, I guess it will be some time before I can put my hypothesis to the test. (Though come to think of it, I suppose I could leave the hose-pipe running into the gap down the side of the uncovered tank and see where the water ends up…..but, nah, that would be taking the spirit of scientific curiosity too far.)

Having basked in the joy of free-flowing effluent for the last five days, I suppose we should soon turn our minds to creating a more respectable means of ultimate drainage. A stinky big soak-way trench just isn’t the thing, apparently. I am quite taken with the notion of creating a small reed bed – a wild-life habitat tinkling with dragon and damsel flies, and croaking with princes under spells. But since the arrangement will only be ‘temporary’ (until we bite the bullet, and install a proper, super-duper, current-norm-meeting fosse toutes eaux), Plumber Man feels that a few lengths of pipe-with-holes-in, over a bit of gravelly stuff, should do the trick. He has no heart.

He deserves it. Yesterday he excelled himself in the gruelling and ultimately gross activity of unearthing and unbunging the long and pongy outflow pipe from the foul and overly-flowing septic tank. And I have to say, disgusting as the task was, it was at the same time both fascinating and satisfying.

On the previous day, when the rain had finally stopped and some tentative signs of ground-drying had begun, Simon decided that the time had come to unravel the many mysteries of the 70′s septic tank drainage system. He started digging on the opposite side from the inflow pipe, and within not many minutes he was back at the door calling me to join him in exciting discovery.

“Come here! You’ll want to see this.”

After numerous such beckonings over the last few months I now know better than to bother asking what it is that I will so obviously want to see. Simon likes to keep the suspense going as long as he can. So, obedient wifey that I am, I don my wellies (usually what he wants to show me involves walking into less-than-lovely places) and follow in Simon’s wake, buffeted by the barely-contained excitement radiating from him in ripples.

“There! Look at that!”

I can see why he is so excited. We had both expected that he would have to do much digging to find the blocked pipe which we knew must exit from the tank somewhere, but only about 40 cms down he had discovered the pipe and, after digging along its length for another 40 cms to plot its direction he had come upon a raised construction that turned out to be an inspection chamber. He lifted the lid proudly, as if unveiling a rare work of art, to display a tableau of motionless grey liquid, framed by black-gunk-encrusted concrete. Instantly the implication of this wondrous sight hit me. We actually had access to the inside of the pipe, without having to break into it.

Plumber Man scurried off eagerly to the Plumber Cave, returning moments later with his trusty set of drain rods – a tool that no self-respecting Plumber Man should be without. He poked the first rod through the shroud of stinky grey into the place that was supposed to be the empty end of a drain pipe. He met a little resistance, but not as much as he had expected, given the total non-drainingness of the would-be drain. He attached another rod and pushed further. And another. And another… until he had used all ten. Ten metres in, and still no blockage to unblock. This was a little dispiriting to say the least. Plumber Man wondered just how long the pipe might be, and just how far down it the real blockage lurked, and whether he would have to make yet another trip to the gloomy Planet of Les Briconautes, to obtain more rods.

Before resorting to such a dire course of action however, Plumber Man decided to explore the problem a little further. Convinced that the drain rods were progressing through the pipe in a straight line, he made a guess as to the direction the pipe took beneath the ground, and dug another hole ten metres from the first. To his initial delight, he discovered the pipe just half a spade’s width to the left of where he had started to dig. but then he realised that the pipe was still going straight on, heading off into the very depths of the freshly blooming vegetable patch, that he had so carefully and lovingly constructed and nurtured over the last three months.

The almost summery sky clouded over, as Plumber Man’s initial excitement subsided in the face of continued obstruction. Thinking that he may have to dig holes all through his precious vegetable beds to track the pipe’s progress, or break into the pipe after all, to install a new free-flowing section at a different angle, he decided to revert to his secret identity and spend the rest of the day as The Man Who Sits In Front of the Computer.

We began the next day with yet another discussion of sewage over breakfast, like you do.

“That pipe can’t just carry on like that, surely. It must split into drainage sections somewhere. It couldn’t just be a long solid pipe. That would make no sense.” The early morning air was heavy with Plumber Man’s bafflement. He suffers badly from a debilitating case of Chronic Logic Syndrome, that more than fifty years of treatment with Real Life has so far failed to alleviate.

Whenever the assertion that something ‘makes no sense’ is tossed into the conversation like this, I cannot help but think that the something in question is actually quite likely to be the case. Luckily, being a woman, I am blessed with a natural immunity to logic.

“Well I reckon it is, and I reckon if you keep digging holes at points along a straight line you’ll eventually find the end.” I considered for a few moments how to best work out exactly where this imaginary straight line might be. “I think we should use a piece of string”. I was a Brownie in the 60s – old habits die hard.

Unexpectedly convinced by the possible sense of my suggestion, or perhaps simply unwilling to face the task of breaking into the stinky pipe to fit a side shoot just yet, Plumber Man agreed. So as soon as our fasts were well and truly broken, Plumber Man and I headed out into the unsuspecting vegetable patch armed with a spade, a big round-thing of twine (bequeathed to us by previous owners of the house), and a hefty helping of optimism.

As I held the twine-holder above the centre line of the second dug hole, Plumber Man moved a few meters down the garden with the free end of the unravelling twine, lining it up with the imaginary line between the first two holes. He stopped just short of the first row of potato plants, which were waving their purple yellow-centred flowers in celebration of the arrival of summertime. I had never really noticed before just how pretty potato flowers are. While Plumber Man busied himself with some more digging, I contemplated the life-cycle of the potato, and realised how ignorant I was about the many and varied workings of nature. My wondrous musings were interrupted by yet another small yelp of excitement issuing from Plumber Man’s smiling lips. His digging had revealed the pipe in its continued march across the vegetable garden towards infinity. But once again, the initial surge of glee was quickly replaced by an ebb of indecision. Should we continue in our grail-like quest for the pipe’s end, and risk the ruination of the vegetable garden, or should Plumber Man get to work installing a new length of drainage pipe heading off away from the would-be constituents of our salad days into the adjacent llama field?

Plumber Man reconsidered the question of the non-sensible pipe’s possible length. “I guess the end might be in the middle of the potato patch” he grumped.

I had a feeling, based on nothing I could put my finger on, that it would be longer than that. I suddenly wished we had some divining rods, and mentally kicked myself for having spent Midsummer’s Day indoors writing moany blogs about the weather, when I could have been out and about on the Sabbat of Litha choosing my wand.

But with two sightings of the pipe about two and a half metres apart, it should be easy peasy to work out the trajectory of the pipe’s relentless journey through the underworld, and digging another couple of exploratory holes seemed a far more appealing proposition in the increasing heat of the day than digging a long deep trench for new pipework. So Plumber Man and the end of the string advanced to the furthest side of the potato patch and stopped in the gap between the potatoes and the courgettes, while I tried to work out how to hold the string over the centre of two consecutive holes, considerably more than a human arm’s length apart.

I placed the twine-holder on the ground next to the first of the two holes, so that the string emerged from it above the centre line of the pipe, and stood at the second hole trying to hold the string exactly above the centre line of the bit of the pipe that I could just about see hiding in the bottom of the muddy hole. The method was hardly precise, and I struggled for some minutes with the mysteries of parallax caused by binocular vision. Plumber Man was a pent-up coil of digging-waiting-to-happen. He was getting impatient.

“Just get it above the middle of the pipe!” he suggested rather unhelpfully.

“I’m trying to! But the middle keeps moving depending on how I look at it.” It reminded me of trying to shoot cardboard figures in the arcade games of my childhood. I decided to give up trying to work out by sight where the actual middle was, and to rely instead on a general sense of middleness. “There! That’ll do.”

Plumber Man pulled the string as straight as he could above the waving, grabbing hands of the potato plants and chose his next digging spot. He dug. He exclaimed. Who’d have thought it? Here was the pipe again, still marching on. We considered the situation. If the pipe extended for just another few meters it would clear the courgettes, and the leeks, and the runner beans and the gooseberry bushes, and find itself in the weed-free patch that had only just been cultivated ready for the next swathe of planting. Picking up the free end of the string, Plumber Man pulled it out yet further to locate the next digging venue. There was no stopping him now. The vegetables were nearly safe. The digging was getting easier. The end was very possibly in sight.

But suddenly the digging wasn’t getting easier. In fact it was getting harder. The spade was hitting solid rock. Only – hang on – it wasn’t solid rock. It was pieces of rock. Bloody great big slabs of rock. Arranged slabs of rock that had clearly been placed in the ground for a purpose. Energized by this new and curious discovery, Plumber Man summoned all of his superhero strength to toss aside the rock like – well, like bigs slabs of rock. After much levering and hefting and huffing and puffing, a Very Big Hole appeared, with a strange assortment of bricks and smaller pieces of rock at the top end. I adopted my Little Miss Archaeologist persona, and carefully worked the mud away from the brick construction with a trowel, to discover what appeared to be a tile pretending to be a lid. I levered up the tile… and dug a little more… and a Lo and Behold, Glory of Glories, there, revealed to the hardly-believing eyes of mankind, lay the End of The Pipe.

And lo, the End was black and dry, and the waters of life floweth not therein. And the End was filled with much impediment.

“I guess you’ll be wanting your drain rods again.” I said, already heading back to the barn to get them. “And your thick rubber gloves.” Plumber Man looked at the blackness at the End of The Pipe, and concurred. After a tentative poke with one rod, the thickness of the black impediment became apparent. There was no way of knowing how far up the pipe the thick blackness went. But one thing was for sure – if Plumber Man was successful in his mission to unblock the evil blockage, there would soon be one hell of a lot of bunged-up stinky wetness gushing out of that pipe in a veritable river of iniquity. He stood and he considered. He looked back up the garden towards the septic tank, and he thought about the amount of liquid that was seething in what should be the space between the top of the tank and the start of the outflow pipe, and the amount of liquid that could be lying dormant in the blocked pipe. And he started digging again.

After not many minutes, Plumber Man (aka Digger Man) had fashioned an Even Bigger Hole from the space already lying in wait at the End of The Pipe. When he was satisfied that it was Big Enough, he set to in earnest with the drain rods. He pushed and he pulled, and he pushed some more, and he pulled some more. A big gob of gloop oozed from the pipe like an evil tongue. But no water. Plumber Man walked back to the inspection chamber next to the tank, carrying the one last rod that he had yet to use. The one with a sort of plunger attachment on the end. He pushed it through the shroud of grey into the top of the pipe and plunged. He hurried back to the End of The Pipe. The tongue of slime was oozing a little more.

Plumber Man could sense victory within his grasp. He jumped down into The Even Bigger Hole and pushed and pulled some more with the rods. The ooze oozed faster and then…..WOOSH! Plumber Man leapt to safety in the knick of time as the the sleeping volcano of the Blanchetière sewage system erupted in a malevolent gush of fetid mire. Up at the inspection chamber, I watched in fascinated delight as the shroud of liquid grey surged noisily away down the pipe’s mouth. At the End of The Pipe, Plumber Man watched in horror as the deluge filled The Even Bigger Hole (which wasn’t quite big enough), and overflowed to run off in a thin stream of black, down the garden toward the field.

Eventually the flow turned to a trickle and the drama subsided. We stood back to silently contemplate the nature of the monster we had unleashed. There is still Much To Be Done before the War of the Waters can be declared over. But Plumber Man has triumphed in the Battle of The Blockage, and at least now we know all there is to know about the existing drainage set up.

And as everybody knows, Knowledge is Power.

That’s the trouble with this whole Cycle of the Seasons business. Either you’re in the shitty part of the year longing for the good bit to start, or you’re having the good bit ruined by the contemplation of the inevitable return of the shitty bit. Oh, and by the rain.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, Stubbs loves water. His inner puppy is actually a fish. Given the opportunity, he would spend every spare minute of every day (ie all the time that exists between sleeping and eating) snorkelling in muddy puddles and bounding sloshily up and down the full length of all our gushy tributaries to the Aumance River that is running very fat and deep and brown on the other side of the road, at the bottom of our lane. Even when he is sleeping, he is dreaming about the water. You can almost hear the splashing sounds between the snores.

Rufus is another kettle of fish entirely. Totally not a kettle of fish at all in fact. He does not like to get too wet, and he is not awfully keen on even walking through long grass that might be a bit damp. He will if he has to – to find his precious stick that Simon has naughtily lobbed into the middle of the longest, wettest grass, on purpose. But seriously, he would really rather not. And this is a weakness that Stubbs exploits relentlessly in his chasing games with Rufus. He knows that he can escape from the faster-running Rufus (whose inner puppy is a greyhound) simply by heading into the stream. And he knows that he can catch the faster-running Rufus whenever they approach a long-grassy barrier, into which the wimpy Rufus fears to tread. All in all, despite the rain, there is much entertainment to be had from the walking of the young canines about the saturated landscape these days – even at their preferred rising time of 5.45am.

Our llamas seem to have an ambivalent relationship with rain. When a heavy storm comes by, they will head, en masse, for the shelter of the trees. But if the rain is just that sort of constant wet presence that falls undramatically from a constant grey sky, they will simply lie down wherever they happen to be, and get stoically wet. Even those of our merry band who have free access to the wonderful comforts of a dry barn almost invariably choose to sit outside in the rain. Maybe our llamas are just a bit stupid. But I think the fact that they all chose to go inside when the weather was really cold and snowy suggests that they do have the capacity to make sensible decisions in relation to their own well-being. So I’m guessing that they don’t give a damn about being all damp and bedraggled so long as they are warm enough, underneath their sodden, pungent coats of sog. Maybe if they had access to mirrors things might change. Hmmm… I feel an interesting experiment coming on…

Our cats and chickens liketh not the rain, and will cosy up inside on the dampest of damp days. Wet days are always Five Cat Days – days in which we can expect to have all five of our house-friendly moggies taking up chair space in the living room for hours at a time. On sunny days they will vanish for most, if not all of the day. Except for Min, who is a House Cat par excellence. There simply aren’t enough cushions in the outside world to cater for her luxury-loving needs.

Pigs don’t like rain either. And they especially don’t like the fact that the lawn-mower stays inside on rainy days, because it means they don’t get their scrumptious lunch of green lush. So they hunker down inside their snug and musty sty, to doze and rumble in a congenial smog of warm pig-breath, emerging whenever I pass by, to gruntle their disgruntlement at the miserable wet weather, and snortle their disgust at the muddy dullness of the day’s dinner menu.

We’ve all had enough of the rain now. Time for Summer to begin. And apparently it will do very soon, so that by the end of this week I will be able to get back to (seasonally-appropriate) complaining about the heat, and the lack of shade for sitting in, and the flies, and the insect bites, and the fact that I have to keep refilling the animals’ water buckets, and creating muddy wallows for the poor pigs who really don’t like to be hot and dry. And the pigs will run up to the fence every time I walk by to gruntle their disgruntlement at the miserably hot weather, and snortle their disgust at the dusty dryness of the day’s dinner menu.

And, as always, I will be able to reply “I know just how you feel”. Sometimes I wonder if my inner child is a pig.

This approach suits my working style. I like tinkering around and, although I want to aim for perfection, I enjoy the process of inching towards it . . .

So, what do you think? Any comments or suggestions?