New Year’s Eve, 2010-11
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
As you can see, I’m dreadfully late with the family newsletter this year (or last year, now). So much has been going on of late, we haven’t even sent Christmas cards to most of you, so here - at Justin’s suggestion - are our season’s greetings for Chinese New Year. We look back on the old year with mixed feelings - it’s been such a roller-coaster…
January – Brrrrr! What a chilly one it was to see the new year in! Roger, Justin and the twins were busy gritting the lanes around the farm with used capybara litter, because everyone ran out of road grit after a week on the cold snap, and in any case the Council won’t ever do minor roads. We couldn’t get the beet up – it was all frozen to the ground. Filling the sprayer with horilko and trying to set the fields alight was not one of Uncle Igor’s better ideas.
February – You may remember that, the year before last when Cetchewayo was disappointed in not being chosen for the drummer in the TV commercial, he made a huge impasto silver, purple and (mostly) brown painting which Justin tells me is called ‘Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Is Shit’? Well now, after the takeover by Kraft Foods put so many out of work, the trade union ‘Unite’ bought it for their pension fund. And they have also asked for a copy to be sent to the factory in Poland where all the work is now being outsourced. With the title gouged into the deeper, browner bits in Polish so they will be sure to get the point.
March – Poor Humphrey had had to stand down in his constituency after the business claiming MP’s second home expenses on the moat maintenance and he tells me that, as if all this wasn’t enough, they are prosecuting him. He says he will be claiming Legal Aid.
April – I find Uncle Igor has put himself on Facebook. Even worse, he seems to have found some American woman from Kansas who wants to come over here and marry him. If we could only persuade him to go out there instead, I’m sure he’d fit in quite well, especially since he has taken to shooting at people he doesn’t like. We have had to persuade election canvassers from the Labour, UK Independence and British National Parties that Igor is wassailing the sugar-beet. In the end, we had to substitute blank cartridges when it went on for more than a week, and the notion of an Octave of Beet-Wassail seems somehow to lack credibility - even to Protestants.
May – What a terrible mess this election has been! Uncle Igor got really cross when he went to Horncastle to vote and was then told that he wasn’t allowed to - even though he’d been queueing for three-quarters of an hour. Apparently there weren’t enough ballot papers available, they didn’t order enough and they ran out at three in the afternoon. It’s hard to know exactly what happened afterward but I understand Uncle Igor led a group of similarly disaffected people into barricading themselves inside the polling station, refusing to leave or to release the poll officers, the two attendant policemen and the ballot boxes, until police reinforcements arrived. I did bail him out the following morning (as if the election result alone wasn’t bad enough to wake up to), and lectured him all the way home.
June - Igor pleaded Not Guilty of causing affray at Sleaford Magistrates’ Court. He got off with an Antisocial Behaviour Order. He must be the oldest person in Britain to have an ASBO. Igor is now convinced Britain is no longer a democracy, because (he keeps asking) how can wanting to vote be anti-social? I explained to him for the umpteenth time the difference between representative democracy and participative democracy is that the one is our cherished way of life that we fought a world war twice over for, while the other is what they do in France, and is illegal here.
July – As if Igor on Facebook weren’t enough, I find that Tamsin and Charles are both on the thing as well – and arguing with each other, and the dreadful American woman. Sooo relieved to find it’s all off between her and Igor now, though, because she’s a Protestant and Igor is quite insistent that she must be re-baptised as a Catholic (thank Heaven). I must try and set him up on one of those internet dating websites - I assume there’s one out there for Catholics, somewhere.
August – Monsignor Marini, the Papal Master of Ceremonies and his three assistants were here with Monsignor Summersgill, the Papal Visit Co-Ordinator, and Uncle Juan, to brief Tamsin on receiving her Order of Saint Gregory the Great. It turns out that there are not enough tickets for the beatification of Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, because they have worked out the numbers from weekly averages of those attending Mass – which is a bit like ordering only as many ballot papers as there were people who could be bothered to vote last time. Tamsin said she’d be just as happy with a tee-shirt with the Order printed on it and besides, there wasn’t much point since she’d regained her atheism again despite her refutation of Richard Dawkins, which she says she still stands by. That meant the redecorating was all for nothing, since His Holiness will not now be staying with us, and Tamsin will not be getting the Order. Tamsin was so argumentative about the whole thing it was easier for us all to settle down together and watch the Vatican censors’ preview of Harry Potter e i Doni della Morte, kindly brought over by Juan, with English subtitles, and which we all enjoyed no end. I expect most of you have also seen it by now.
September - Tamsin says she discovered, whilst working at the Max Planck Institute for a few days to research the chapter of her doctoral thesis entitled Die Strukturanalysen Hauptsätze der Thermodynamik In Anorganische Chemie, a large consignment of laboratory coats marked ‘XXL’ , but barely big enough to fit a small child. Poor girl, she was genuinely concerned that the Institute may be manufacturing Affenklonarbeiter (or Oompah-Loompahs, as Justin called them (until she hit him with a Heart Speaks Unto Heart commemorative paperweight we had to console ourselves with instead of the Order Of St Gregory). Igor missed the whole Papal visit entirely, I’m glad to say, having decided to canalize his romantic disappointment by working on his memoirs instead.
October – All about Tamsin again, I’m afraid: She wants to play Fives for Bolingbroke, but since the only schools who send players to Oxford and Cambridge are Winchester, Eton, Harrow and St Paul’s, and these are of course all boys’ schools, it effectively means girls cannot compete: Tamsin says this is wrong, a clear infringement of the European Convention on Human Rights, and even though both the college and the university would jump at the chance to win at something for a change, they won’t change the rules without a judicial review in the High Court of Appeal, with subsequent appeal (if there is a Cambridge majority on the bench) to the Supreme Court and (again, if Oxford alumni are outnumbered by Old Cantabrigian judges) a final appeal to the Strasbourg court of Justice, which of course is higher than the UK Supreme Court - so she has had to personate a male student again, just as she did to satisfy Bolingbroke’s medieval entry requirements. Well, it’s one thing to pay her tuition fees, but quite another to pay for the litigation with no guarantee of award of costs if successful. Accordingly, she has exchanged places with an undergrad. from St Paul’s, who is eligible but who speaks only Russian. She’s nearly on top of the irregular instrumental and prepositional declensions now, and says she’s doing fine on two hours’ sleep a night.
November – Splendid news! We’ve been invited to The Wedding next year! Roger is less than enthusiastic about the expense. Justin suggested selling Wilhelmina for spare parts on EBay but it seems she was listening and we haven’t seen her since. We’ve tried to tempt her out from any number of possible hiding-places by leaving bread-and-butter pudding out, and it does disappear, but we suspect Hermione and the capybaras tend to get to it first.
December – Poor Bunnykin! Sir Humphrey has been sentenced to eighteen months. Pending his appeal, the rather nice open prison they were going to put him in, was burned down to the ground by the inmates protesting about the quality of the accommodation. I can’t see what that achieves, apart from ensuring that what’s left afterward is in still worse repair and even more overcrowded. It was on the television news one night. That started Uncle Igor off on a rant about how luxurious modern prisons are compared to the huts he had to share in the Volunteer Overseas Workers’ Scheme. So then, Justin felt he had to remind Igor that he had been a war criminal, and then Igor countered by saying he had joined the First Galician Division for purely patriotic reasons and had never knowingly broken the Geneva Convention, and that there was nothing wrong with making real criminals build their own prisons and how, in any case, everyone too young to remember the War is far too soft for their own good. He got quite carried away and shouted that the hard times of the 1930s were coming back, and the only way for an individual or a nation to regain its self-respect is through self-sacrifice and discipline. I have an uneasy feeling Igor will be volunteering a contribution to Mr Cameron’s Big Society just as soon as he has designed the armbands. But on the bright side, thanks to the European Convention on Human Rights, Bunnykin will still be allowed to cast his vote at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. I have a feeling we’ll all be voting again this year, somehow.
Well, there it is, and January of 2011 gone already, too. Until last week, we were frozen up, back to gritting the lanes with used capybara litter because they’re always in the house this cold weather - despite the twins breaking the ice in the moat for them - and queueing up to use the bathroom, where the water isn’t quite so chilly. The Belchford Yule Bear has been seen out on the Wolds, on January 5th, or Christmas Day, Old Style. This is not the same as the Sedge Bear, which brings good luck, but is said to be the ghost of a polar bear intended as a gift to Edward 1 by the King of Norway, shipwrecked off Saltfleet. Then there’s the Stenigot Stone, which hasn’t moved in centuries since the druids planted it there, or St Paulinus turned someone into it, depending which version you believe. Or millennia, if you are among those who say it arrived in a glacier. The last time a farmer tried to move it, according to old Mr Benniworth, the Hundred Years’ War started. Well, now it has fallen over - or rather, it was pushed, when one of Mr Wragby’s beet lorries backed into it. Mr Benniworth recited this verse for me:
“When Belchford’s Bear be seen at Yule,
The times to come mote be full cruel.
“An if the Stenigot Stone shall move,
The century shall luckless prove.”
It’s the cheery Dunkirk spirit of people like Mr Benniworth who help keep the rest of us going, don’t you think? Here’s wishing you all the best we can make of the dark times ahead… Gung Hey Fat Choi, as the Chinese say!
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend...
...Soooo glad you could drop in to see how the family's doing. I hope to post up here all our news, pictures and - speaking of which - Cetchewayo's artwork. Do let me know what you think, and what you'd like to see here.
Best wishes to you all,
Anastasia Kirov-Renshaw.
Best wishes to you all,
Anastasia Kirov-Renshaw.
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Christmas Newsletter 2009
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
What a year it’s been for all of us! Money worries for everyone, so many poor folk struggling even to keep a roof over their heads. Christmas Day is, of course, for us, Rent Day. The lordship of the manor of Sotby confers an obligation in fee entail to present to the monarch, as represented by the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lincoln, by way of yearly rental on Christmas Day, a brace of red-legged partridges and a pair of yellow hose. It goes back to the time of Edward II, who was famous for thinking up silly inconveniences like that. Well, getting the partridges is no problem – we simply pick them up from our beet fields, but these days as far as the hose are concerned we make do with a pair of ballet tights from a dancewear suppliers. In case you are wondering what the Lord Lieutenant does with them, he wears them at the Boxing Day Drag Hunt. They go well with his saffron ballgown, in which he never rides sidesaddle. Somehow I think Edward II would have approved.
Finally Roger and I decided to get Uncle Igor a mobile phone for Christmas, so we can at least use it to wake him up when he falls asleep in department store windows in Louth. I got Asprey’s to make an attachment for Great-Uncle Vasily’s silver cigar-case (that's Great-Uncle Vasily on the main page, by the way) so he can keep the phone safe inside and hang it on his watch-chain and put it in his other waistcoat pocket. Justin even downloaded “Sche ne vmerla Ukraina” as a ringtone. Uncle always rises to his feet when it’s played, even if semi-conscious, so now we should be able to locate him anywhere. We tried it out after dinner when he was dozing off in Mr Obama’s senate chair, so we know it works. The only downside is that Uncle insists on singing all of it once it’s started, and at six and a half minutes it’s the longest national anthem in the world. Anyone who’s coming to stay with us this year can learn how it goes, and sing along with Uncle Igor, at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEksnU488qM
and the words at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shche_ne_vmerla_Ukrainy
Go on - he’ll be ever so pleased! He may even break out a bottle of his artichoke horilka (God knows the rest of us would like to see it finished).
January – Despite the grim economic outlook, our hedge fund continues to do well. We have 500 blackthorn, 300 hazel, 85 field maple and a dozen beech, so far. By March we should have enough to stop the wind blowing our top-dressing across Old Hundred, Gibbet Piece and Cromwell’s Bottom. Meanwhile, our new wind-turbines are up and running now but at 4am one morning we were all woken up by an enormous Clang! and several neighbours said they saw bright orange lights in the sky with tentacles dangling from them. At dawn we went out to look and one of the rotors had two of its three blades very badly bent, but there was no debris around, so Lord knows what hit it. Roger’s explanation is that it was one of those low-flying Taranis stealth bombers we aren’t supposed to know anything about. Justin very sarcastically said that a bright orange stealth bomber with tentacles that bumped into things in the night was so subtle no-one would ever suspect that was precisely what it was. Meanwhile, Tamsin is refusing to answer questions about the Cthulhu Christmas illumination she made last year, and what she has done with it. The Ministry of Defence say they are not investigating the matter, which is rather worrying because it means that is exactly what they are doing. The sooner Tamsin goes back to Oxford, the happier I shall be. The nice thing about January was that, at the Opening of Parliament, Humphrey took his well-deserved seat in the House of Lords. Well done again, Bunnykin!
February – What with all the wheat fetching premium prices for biofuel, we thought last year we’d try and make a maximum return on the cereal crunch, coming and going. It started because we had 110 acres down to lentils for Tesco’s, and then they changed their minds on us, leaving us with a bit of a problem. We tried adding lentils to the ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’ beer mash to reduce the wheat content, so we’d have more grain to sell for biofuel, only it made the beer so cloudy it couldn’t be cold-filtered out. Then Uncle lgor tried distilling some to see if that worked as biofuel, but it doesn’t have the necessary sugars unless you sprout the lentils first. That was fine until the carybaras got into the malting-floor and scoffed the lot - they love lentil sprouts. But that gave Justin an idea. By heat-treating the remaining, de-sprouted lentils (which taste sweet, like malt) so they exploded like popcorn, then spraying them with chocolate milkshake, they are almost indistinguishable from a certain well-known breakfast cereal. We had invented the breakfast pulse. Advertised as ‘Choco-Lenties, the low-fat, high-fibre puffed lentils in a chocolate coat, all-natural country goodness, right down to the last crunch, with a chocolate capybara in every pack’. We spent a fortune on an ad. with Anglia TV, showing our capybaras paddling around in the brewery mash-tun full of the stuff, apparently singing ‘Guantanamera’ and ‘Carmen Capybara’ (it was Ernesto, really, he’s the most intelligent of the whole bunch) telling you “Ay, Ay! They’re Choco-Lentil-icious!”. The whole venture seemed so promising until Wetland World at Louth heard about it, and had the cheek to demand royalty payments for the capybaras, who, they insisted, were their property. So we put in a counter-claim for eighteen months’ feed, accommodation and veterinary bills. An out-of-court, no-score draw, so now we’re having a go at Choco-Dal Crocodile in India. “Be seeing you later, Ali Gator!”, he shouts to his amphibian chum in the Ganges, since he’s too busy chomping his breakfast bowlful of Choco-Dal to go and play just yet. But when he does, he’ll have all the energy he needs to… well, you get the idea. The things one has to do to make a profit out of farming, these days. What a crazy, crazy world we live in!
March – April –A rare letter from Julia, saying she’s with the Legion’s Deuxième Régiment des Parachutistes in Afghanistan. One of her old Roedean chums has joined the same unit, under the name of Karl, so that will be lovely for them both. I almost feel sorry for the Taliban. Her all-legionnaire rock band, ‘Feuerfeucht’, have made a new video and you can watch it here:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=077_1242699437
(that’s Julia and Karl on vocals, by the way). Julia says that German is such a pretty language to sing in. Can’t say I agree, but Uncle Igor loves the video. Says it reminds him of the old days before he came to England.
May – After all the terrible fuss about Parliamentary expenses, poor Humphrey has had to pay for the capybara house on the moat and the restoration of the bell tower out of his own pocket. Really I had no idea we were down as his second home address. He said it was to allow him to be closer to London, which of course it is, much closer than his estate in Cumberland.
June – Our Longwool tup Bertram (get it?) came second at the County Agricultural Show, with his ‘Andy Renwick’s Ferret’ dance medley. The Twins had worked really hard with him ever since last show. He would have come first, but spoiled it all at the last minute by mounting one of the judges’ Old English Sheepdog bitch. Well, they do look like Longwools, don’t they?
July – When Sammy, one of our Tamworth barrows, went for this year’s breakfasts last year, Justin borrowed some of Aunt Eudoxia’s rather wobbly rejected ethnic pots from her night school pottery class, filled them with the burnt bones and buried them for a few months. Then he took them along to the pagan moot in Lincoln and put them down on a table, saying he’d been “ploughing over one o’ them lil’ hills on th’ farm” and that these had turned up, so here they were, he couldn’t be arsed to take them to the County Archaeology Unit so they could have them for honouring as their sp[iritual ancestors, and re-cremate them, because he’d heard that’s what they wanted to do with prehistoric remains. He said their faces were a picture. Honestly, one of these days Justin is going to take one of his practical jokes too far.
August – I’ve been busy giving Tamiflu to our Tamworths because they seemed very listless and off their grub. All DEFRA had to say was they usually respond to supportive treatment, so keep them warm and give them plenty to drink and the chances are they won’t die. Can you imagine what a riot there would be if the Health Minister had said that? So, since the government are spending millions on over-producing flu vaccines this summer I thought they might as well have some even if we didn’t need it. As it turned out, thank goodness, they were all right as rain once the effects of eating our cider pressings wore off.
September - Old Mrs Sausthorpe got her honorary Doctorate in Finance and Business Economics at the University of Kesteven, and we all went along for the ceremony. We are all so proud of Nanny. She’s taken a very nice retainer from Kleinwort Benson and the nursing home in Ingoldmells now lets her have as many snails in her bedroom as she wants. The tea-leaf readings are for short-range forecasts only, you see: the snails, she says, tell her what the futures markets will be doing next year.
October – A canvasser for the British National Party called, so I invited him in to talk to Uncle Igor because there was no-one else at home and I was busy making plum brandy bread for Tar Baby Night. It wasn’t long before, looking out of the kitchen window, I saw him running away through the walled garden with Uncle in pursuit, shouting uncomplimentary things after him concerning his views on East European agricultural workers. After all, he was one, during the War. Then he collided with a group of our seasonal workers from Byelarus grading carrots and it was ages before they, and Igor, let him go. Poor man, I couldn’t do a thing for him with my hands in the pudding basin. I’ve sent some flowers to the Infirmary, though.
November – Uncle Juan hinted that a Papal visit to Britain is on His Holiness’ itinerary for next year, so we have a few months to redecorate. We are all thrilled to bits. Except Uncle Igor, who we haven’t told.
December – I don’t know who packed up the Christmas tree lights last year, but when I came to unpack them again to redecorate the tree this year, they were all knotted up in a hopeless tangle. Uncle Juan saw me trying to sort them all out on my knees on the floor, then came and knelt down beside me to help. At his suggestion we said the Rosary together, bulb by bulb, and offered it up as an Advent penance. He is such a dear man.
Well, that’s about all for another year. The little lights Mr Benniwell saw on the Fen last Tuesday night that he swore were corpse-candles, or will-o-the-wisps (“Boggan Tapers on the Fen, foretell the deaths of many men”) turned out to be a disappointment, because Mrs Wragby our neighbour has installed some silly electric mushrooms in her garden, which she evidently thinks enhance the gnomes and other twee concrete statuary amongst the barbecue detritus and tractor spares. But this evening he says the monks of Minting Priory have been heard chanting Vespers, and as he quotes, with that appalling memory of his, from the Prophecies of Old Mother Hemingby: “When Minting’s monks sing Evensong, there shall be michel grief and wrong.” All I can say is, it can’t get much worse. At least, not because of that. Justin has just come in and plonked his portable CD player and collection of Gregorian chant albums down on the kitchen table where I’m writing this, with an evil grin on his face. So all I can say to that is, the omens are that Christmas and the year to come will be nowhere near as wretched as one might have expected. At any rate, let’s hope so! Love from us all, to all of you…
As ever,
Anastasia XX.
What a year it’s been for all of us! Money worries for everyone, so many poor folk struggling even to keep a roof over their heads. Christmas Day is, of course, for us, Rent Day. The lordship of the manor of Sotby confers an obligation in fee entail to present to the monarch, as represented by the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Lincoln, by way of yearly rental on Christmas Day, a brace of red-legged partridges and a pair of yellow hose. It goes back to the time of Edward II, who was famous for thinking up silly inconveniences like that. Well, getting the partridges is no problem – we simply pick them up from our beet fields, but these days as far as the hose are concerned we make do with a pair of ballet tights from a dancewear suppliers. In case you are wondering what the Lord Lieutenant does with them, he wears them at the Boxing Day Drag Hunt. They go well with his saffron ballgown, in which he never rides sidesaddle. Somehow I think Edward II would have approved.
Finally Roger and I decided to get Uncle Igor a mobile phone for Christmas, so we can at least use it to wake him up when he falls asleep in department store windows in Louth. I got Asprey’s to make an attachment for Great-Uncle Vasily’s silver cigar-case (that's Great-Uncle Vasily on the main page, by the way) so he can keep the phone safe inside and hang it on his watch-chain and put it in his other waistcoat pocket. Justin even downloaded “Sche ne vmerla Ukraina” as a ringtone. Uncle always rises to his feet when it’s played, even if semi-conscious, so now we should be able to locate him anywhere. We tried it out after dinner when he was dozing off in Mr Obama’s senate chair, so we know it works. The only downside is that Uncle insists on singing all of it once it’s started, and at six and a half minutes it’s the longest national anthem in the world. Anyone who’s coming to stay with us this year can learn how it goes, and sing along with Uncle Igor, at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEksnU488qM
and the words at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shche_ne_vmerla_Ukrainy
Go on - he’ll be ever so pleased! He may even break out a bottle of his artichoke horilka (God knows the rest of us would like to see it finished).
January – Despite the grim economic outlook, our hedge fund continues to do well. We have 500 blackthorn, 300 hazel, 85 field maple and a dozen beech, so far. By March we should have enough to stop the wind blowing our top-dressing across Old Hundred, Gibbet Piece and Cromwell’s Bottom. Meanwhile, our new wind-turbines are up and running now but at 4am one morning we were all woken up by an enormous Clang! and several neighbours said they saw bright orange lights in the sky with tentacles dangling from them. At dawn we went out to look and one of the rotors had two of its three blades very badly bent, but there was no debris around, so Lord knows what hit it. Roger’s explanation is that it was one of those low-flying Taranis stealth bombers we aren’t supposed to know anything about. Justin very sarcastically said that a bright orange stealth bomber with tentacles that bumped into things in the night was so subtle no-one would ever suspect that was precisely what it was. Meanwhile, Tamsin is refusing to answer questions about the Cthulhu Christmas illumination she made last year, and what she has done with it. The Ministry of Defence say they are not investigating the matter, which is rather worrying because it means that is exactly what they are doing. The sooner Tamsin goes back to Oxford, the happier I shall be. The nice thing about January was that, at the Opening of Parliament, Humphrey took his well-deserved seat in the House of Lords. Well done again, Bunnykin!
February – What with all the wheat fetching premium prices for biofuel, we thought last year we’d try and make a maximum return on the cereal crunch, coming and going. It started because we had 110 acres down to lentils for Tesco’s, and then they changed their minds on us, leaving us with a bit of a problem. We tried adding lentils to the ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’ beer mash to reduce the wheat content, so we’d have more grain to sell for biofuel, only it made the beer so cloudy it couldn’t be cold-filtered out. Then Uncle lgor tried distilling some to see if that worked as biofuel, but it doesn’t have the necessary sugars unless you sprout the lentils first. That was fine until the carybaras got into the malting-floor and scoffed the lot - they love lentil sprouts. But that gave Justin an idea. By heat-treating the remaining, de-sprouted lentils (which taste sweet, like malt) so they exploded like popcorn, then spraying them with chocolate milkshake, they are almost indistinguishable from a certain well-known breakfast cereal. We had invented the breakfast pulse. Advertised as ‘Choco-Lenties, the low-fat, high-fibre puffed lentils in a chocolate coat, all-natural country goodness, right down to the last crunch, with a chocolate capybara in every pack’. We spent a fortune on an ad. with Anglia TV, showing our capybaras paddling around in the brewery mash-tun full of the stuff, apparently singing ‘Guantanamera’ and ‘Carmen Capybara’ (it was Ernesto, really, he’s the most intelligent of the whole bunch) telling you “Ay, Ay! They’re Choco-Lentil-icious!”. The whole venture seemed so promising until Wetland World at Louth heard about it, and had the cheek to demand royalty payments for the capybaras, who, they insisted, were their property. So we put in a counter-claim for eighteen months’ feed, accommodation and veterinary bills. An out-of-court, no-score draw, so now we’re having a go at Choco-Dal Crocodile in India. “Be seeing you later, Ali Gator!”, he shouts to his amphibian chum in the Ganges, since he’s too busy chomping his breakfast bowlful of Choco-Dal to go and play just yet. But when he does, he’ll have all the energy he needs to… well, you get the idea. The things one has to do to make a profit out of farming, these days. What a crazy, crazy world we live in!
March – April –A rare letter from Julia, saying she’s with the Legion’s Deuxième Régiment des Parachutistes in Afghanistan. One of her old Roedean chums has joined the same unit, under the name of Karl, so that will be lovely for them both. I almost feel sorry for the Taliban. Her all-legionnaire rock band, ‘Feuerfeucht’, have made a new video and you can watch it here:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=077_1242699437
(that’s Julia and Karl on vocals, by the way). Julia says that German is such a pretty language to sing in. Can’t say I agree, but Uncle Igor loves the video. Says it reminds him of the old days before he came to England.
May – After all the terrible fuss about Parliamentary expenses, poor Humphrey has had to pay for the capybara house on the moat and the restoration of the bell tower out of his own pocket. Really I had no idea we were down as his second home address. He said it was to allow him to be closer to London, which of course it is, much closer than his estate in Cumberland.
June – Our Longwool tup Bertram (get it?) came second at the County Agricultural Show, with his ‘Andy Renwick’s Ferret’ dance medley. The Twins had worked really hard with him ever since last show. He would have come first, but spoiled it all at the last minute by mounting one of the judges’ Old English Sheepdog bitch. Well, they do look like Longwools, don’t they?
July – When Sammy, one of our Tamworth barrows, went for this year’s breakfasts last year, Justin borrowed some of Aunt Eudoxia’s rather wobbly rejected ethnic pots from her night school pottery class, filled them with the burnt bones and buried them for a few months. Then he took them along to the pagan moot in Lincoln and put them down on a table, saying he’d been “ploughing over one o’ them lil’ hills on th’ farm” and that these had turned up, so here they were, he couldn’t be arsed to take them to the County Archaeology Unit so they could have them for honouring as their sp[iritual ancestors, and re-cremate them, because he’d heard that’s what they wanted to do with prehistoric remains. He said their faces were a picture. Honestly, one of these days Justin is going to take one of his practical jokes too far.
August – I’ve been busy giving Tamiflu to our Tamworths because they seemed very listless and off their grub. All DEFRA had to say was they usually respond to supportive treatment, so keep them warm and give them plenty to drink and the chances are they won’t die. Can you imagine what a riot there would be if the Health Minister had said that? So, since the government are spending millions on over-producing flu vaccines this summer I thought they might as well have some even if we didn’t need it. As it turned out, thank goodness, they were all right as rain once the effects of eating our cider pressings wore off.
September - Old Mrs Sausthorpe got her honorary Doctorate in Finance and Business Economics at the University of Kesteven, and we all went along for the ceremony. We are all so proud of Nanny. She’s taken a very nice retainer from Kleinwort Benson and the nursing home in Ingoldmells now lets her have as many snails in her bedroom as she wants. The tea-leaf readings are for short-range forecasts only, you see: the snails, she says, tell her what the futures markets will be doing next year.
October – A canvasser for the British National Party called, so I invited him in to talk to Uncle Igor because there was no-one else at home and I was busy making plum brandy bread for Tar Baby Night. It wasn’t long before, looking out of the kitchen window, I saw him running away through the walled garden with Uncle in pursuit, shouting uncomplimentary things after him concerning his views on East European agricultural workers. After all, he was one, during the War. Then he collided with a group of our seasonal workers from Byelarus grading carrots and it was ages before they, and Igor, let him go. Poor man, I couldn’t do a thing for him with my hands in the pudding basin. I’ve sent some flowers to the Infirmary, though.
November – Uncle Juan hinted that a Papal visit to Britain is on His Holiness’ itinerary for next year, so we have a few months to redecorate. We are all thrilled to bits. Except Uncle Igor, who we haven’t told.
December – I don’t know who packed up the Christmas tree lights last year, but when I came to unpack them again to redecorate the tree this year, they were all knotted up in a hopeless tangle. Uncle Juan saw me trying to sort them all out on my knees on the floor, then came and knelt down beside me to help. At his suggestion we said the Rosary together, bulb by bulb, and offered it up as an Advent penance. He is such a dear man.
Well, that’s about all for another year. The little lights Mr Benniwell saw on the Fen last Tuesday night that he swore were corpse-candles, or will-o-the-wisps (“Boggan Tapers on the Fen, foretell the deaths of many men”) turned out to be a disappointment, because Mrs Wragby our neighbour has installed some silly electric mushrooms in her garden, which she evidently thinks enhance the gnomes and other twee concrete statuary amongst the barbecue detritus and tractor spares. But this evening he says the monks of Minting Priory have been heard chanting Vespers, and as he quotes, with that appalling memory of his, from the Prophecies of Old Mother Hemingby: “When Minting’s monks sing Evensong, there shall be michel grief and wrong.” All I can say is, it can’t get much worse. At least, not because of that. Justin has just come in and plonked his portable CD player and collection of Gregorian chant albums down on the kitchen table where I’m writing this, with an evil grin on his face. So all I can say to that is, the omens are that Christmas and the year to come will be nowhere near as wretched as one might have expected. At any rate, let’s hope so! Love from us all, to all of you…
As ever,
Anastasia XX.
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Christmas Newsletter 2008
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
As I sit down to write at last, my laptop perched precariously on the heaving, furry bulk of one or other of our capybaras – Bombur, I think: the no-longer-quite-so-little chap has quite taken to me, and is snoring on my lap in front of the parlour fire – a glass of Uncle Igor’s whortleberry vodka at my elbow, Hermione staring jealously up at Bombur(?) from her basket on the hearthrug, all the presents wrapped and heaped beneath the tree in the Great Hall, with Cetchewayo brooding up top in his tutu, Roger lost to the world in his spreadsheets, Justin and the twins out at the Sedge Bear Wassailing, Tamsin down from Bolingbroke, Julia up from Castelnaudary and Xavier out on parole and all three down the pub, with Wilhelmina safely plugged into her iPod and installed on her exercise bike propelling the electricity generator in the barn (it’s amazing what they can achieve with tricyclic antidepressants, these days), something approaching peace descends on our house and, on this very special night, with Ukranian carols playing in the background – A v’Yerusalymi dzvony at the moment - and Uncle Igor and the migrant farmworkers singing raucously along in the butler’s pantry, I reflect on everything the year has brought us.
Well, well – who’d have thought it? Nanny was right, after all. I didn’t believe her prediction last December about the sighting of the old wreck of the Incroyable meaning there would be an international banking crisis, but there we are - the global markets are in financial meltdown, though I must say our stall on Horncastle Farmers’ Market continues to go from strength to strength. Stranger still, old Mrs Sausthorpe has been receiving some very important visitors at her sanitorium in Ingoldmells, asking for all kinds of advice on how to salvage their national economies. Anyway, here’s the rest of our year’s news, which I know you’ll all have been dying to learn…
January – The capybaras seem to have adopted Hermione, who is nonplussed about it and seeks refuge in the airing cupboard. All of them are too big now to wriggle through the cat-flap in the airing cupboard door, so they all sit on the landing outside, squeaking for her. Funny little things. We have decided to name them Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Balin, Balan, Bilbo, Bambi, Bolivar, Buendia and Ernesto. (He’s the one the Ranby and Sotby Brownie Troop got into trouble for calling Jesus, last year).
February – The 27th saw another earthquake, centred on Market Rasen, just like the one in ’04 that emanated from Grantham, but bigger – a quite respectable 5.2 on the Richter Scale. This time, both dogs fell off the mantelpiece. Over at Wragby, the tremor caused a truckload of sugar-beet to spill its contents all over the road, and our Holsteins wandered over and stuffed themselves. It kept the Horncastle News in copy for all of March. That, and, on Shrew Tuesday’s Shrewing Fair, Wilhelmina prancing off with the Shrew Riband and silver ladle once again. I really must get her medication changed.
March – The Utterby St. Martin carnival was the usual riot, and when the torchlit procession down to the marshes ended with the customary ritual of 'Hanging the Frenchman', Cetchewayo, who had been asleep in the back of our Range Rover since we drove it out of the garage without realising, woke up and saw the landlord of the Three Legged Mare in his gorilla suit, apparently about to be lynched by a mob. Well, bless him, he waded in, in a spirit of selfless simian-specific solidarity, and laid four of them out before the police, in the ensuing confusion, bundled off the landlord to the cells in Louth police station and escorted Cetchewayo back behind the bar of the pub. It was quite a party. The case comes up at Sleaford Magistrates’ Court next month. It promises to be an interesting one.
April – It was, indeed. Roger dismissed the charge against the landlord for keeping a disorderly public house, seeing that the police custody sergeant had transferred him to the RSPCA shelter in Lincoln at the time, which was quite an alibi. Instead, the four complainants were all fined for ill-treating an animal, under a separate action brought about by Lincoln RSPCA.
May – The Lord Lieutenant’s garden party was beset by the vilest tempest that ever typified an English summer. No fewer than five inches of rain fell, horizontally, in a Force Seven gale, and the gazebo has not been seen since, though we heard afterwards that the Danish and German Air Forces had both been put on alert when a strange alien craft had been sighted over Flensburg two days later.
June – Showtime again, at the Lincolnshire Agricultural Show. Some upstart of a Norfolk Horn – from New Zealand, I ask you! - won the Dancing Sheep Competition with a sort of soft shoe shuffle, so I’m going to teach our Lincolnshire Longwools to tapdance for next year. One of our Tamworths did well by coming a close second in the pig racing event, though.
July – Lincolnshire Constabulary have launched a campaign against binge drinking by setting out a number of mannequins in high street shop windows showing people in a very unattractive and advanced state of intoxication, with the caption:“You wouldn't start a night like this, so why end it that way?". When poor Uncle Igor went shopping in Louth the other weekend and fell asleep in the window of Eve and Ranshaw’s, it took Roger ages to persuade the manager to give him up as he was one of our family.
August – So we finally discovered what became of the Lord Lieutenant’s gazebo. With a homing instinct uncanny in an inanimate object, it flew home to the source of its manufacture to shelter the Beijing Olympics under its wings. At least, the stadium looked to me an awful lot like some wretched cheap Chinese garden furniture monstrosity in a characteristic state of mangled collapse – don’t you think?
September - Oscar has finally given up on his project for a musical version of The Mabinogion. Now he wants to do it on ice. I despair. I really do.
October – Pope Benedict XVI's third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, isn’t going to come out this year after all because of the burgeoning economic problems, but Uncle Juan assures me that Tamsin is definitely down for Dame of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, since the manuscript of her unpublished book, The Dawkins Delusion, which Juan took with him to the Vatican last year, was such an inspiration to His Holiness.
November – The new Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate TV ad has sent Cetchewayo into another cathartic frenzy (you will recall last year he was shortlisted to play the drums for it but didn’t get the part in the end). This time, instead of throwing the drum kit through the orangery windows into the moat, he’s produced a very wild impasto work in purple, white and (mostly) brown, which Justin tells me is called Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Is Shit. Speaking of Cetchewayo, no sooner had the American election results come through than we got a call from his dealer in New York. Apparently the new First Family wants to improve the rather staid, colonial White House fine art collection with some new, vital work by an African painter, and a Zimbabwean refugee exile living in England ticks all the boxes for political correctness. Justin thought of renaming Cetchewayo’s latest work Uncle Tom’s Cabin To White House, but the dealer has settled for All The Oranges I Have Ever Slept With, and Neon Meat Dream Of An Octofish: A Tribute To Don Van Vliet. Speaking of the former, the Yellow Room will be big enough to take it (just), and regarding the latter…
December – … Tamsin came back from University intent on making another protest against what she calls the cultural kitsch devaluation of Christmas. It took the form of a giant squid done out in lights on the roof, with waving tentacles. She says it’s an ancient proto-Atlantean god called Cthulhu, and he has about as much right to be up in lights at this time of year as that old pagan Finnish trickster wizard Väinnämöinen, with his reindeer sled. One could see it for miles, until ISTAR at RAF Waddington made her take it down. Apparently NATO’s Allied Air Command (Europe) have had us under surveillance ever since the garden party in May. We decided it wouldn’t really be fair to charge Mr Obama for the paintings, so we’re going to ask for his old Senate chair, if it hasn’t already been sold. If it’s anything like the green leather House of Lords ones, it’ll look nice in the library.
I’m told by old Mr Benniworth that Blind Byard has been scaring lone cyclists, by jumping the A17 at High Dyke. Either it’s the ISTAR Nimrods are flying low in the fog, or Old Meg is abroad once more. Possibly both. You’ll remember the old rhyme:
“When winter’s fogs do cloak the fen,
And Blind Byard doth leap again,
Then Old Meg is come from her den,
To wreak the ruin of maids and men.”
In the light of last year’s prophecy, I was hesitant to alarm anyone so I thought I’d go and ask old Mrs Sausthorpe about it. You could hardly get near the place for Learjets and limousines and shifty-looking men in black suits. She said: “That nasty Mr Brown came for a tea-leaf reading, so I threw the pot at him. He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat.” And that was it. I was only allowed two minutes before the next politician with a pair of heavy suitcases came in. So this New Year’s prognostication is shrouded in mystery – perhaps that’s better for all of us!
Well, that’s about all our news. I can hear the Sedge Bear Wassailers meeting the Ukranians and the revellers back from The Green Man. By the sound of it, something made of glass has just broken and Julia is singing La Marseillaise. I’d better go and sort it out. And Aunt Olga and our Kiev cousins have just rolled up in a taxi. So – have a lovely Christmas and may everything in 2009 be a surprise!
As ever,
As I sit down to write at last, my laptop perched precariously on the heaving, furry bulk of one or other of our capybaras – Bombur, I think: the no-longer-quite-so-little chap has quite taken to me, and is snoring on my lap in front of the parlour fire – a glass of Uncle Igor’s whortleberry vodka at my elbow, Hermione staring jealously up at Bombur(?) from her basket on the hearthrug, all the presents wrapped and heaped beneath the tree in the Great Hall, with Cetchewayo brooding up top in his tutu, Roger lost to the world in his spreadsheets, Justin and the twins out at the Sedge Bear Wassailing, Tamsin down from Bolingbroke, Julia up from Castelnaudary and Xavier out on parole and all three down the pub, with Wilhelmina safely plugged into her iPod and installed on her exercise bike propelling the electricity generator in the barn (it’s amazing what they can achieve with tricyclic antidepressants, these days), something approaching peace descends on our house and, on this very special night, with Ukranian carols playing in the background – A v’Yerusalymi dzvony at the moment - and Uncle Igor and the migrant farmworkers singing raucously along in the butler’s pantry, I reflect on everything the year has brought us.
Well, well – who’d have thought it? Nanny was right, after all. I didn’t believe her prediction last December about the sighting of the old wreck of the Incroyable meaning there would be an international banking crisis, but there we are - the global markets are in financial meltdown, though I must say our stall on Horncastle Farmers’ Market continues to go from strength to strength. Stranger still, old Mrs Sausthorpe has been receiving some very important visitors at her sanitorium in Ingoldmells, asking for all kinds of advice on how to salvage their national economies. Anyway, here’s the rest of our year’s news, which I know you’ll all have been dying to learn…
January – The capybaras seem to have adopted Hermione, who is nonplussed about it and seeks refuge in the airing cupboard. All of them are too big now to wriggle through the cat-flap in the airing cupboard door, so they all sit on the landing outside, squeaking for her. Funny little things. We have decided to name them Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Balin, Balan, Bilbo, Bambi, Bolivar, Buendia and Ernesto. (He’s the one the Ranby and Sotby Brownie Troop got into trouble for calling Jesus, last year).
February – The 27th saw another earthquake, centred on Market Rasen, just like the one in ’04 that emanated from Grantham, but bigger – a quite respectable 5.2 on the Richter Scale. This time, both dogs fell off the mantelpiece. Over at Wragby, the tremor caused a truckload of sugar-beet to spill its contents all over the road, and our Holsteins wandered over and stuffed themselves. It kept the Horncastle News in copy for all of March. That, and, on Shrew Tuesday’s Shrewing Fair, Wilhelmina prancing off with the Shrew Riband and silver ladle once again. I really must get her medication changed.
March – The Utterby St. Martin carnival was the usual riot, and when the torchlit procession down to the marshes ended with the customary ritual of 'Hanging the Frenchman', Cetchewayo, who had been asleep in the back of our Range Rover since we drove it out of the garage without realising, woke up and saw the landlord of the Three Legged Mare in his gorilla suit, apparently about to be lynched by a mob. Well, bless him, he waded in, in a spirit of selfless simian-specific solidarity, and laid four of them out before the police, in the ensuing confusion, bundled off the landlord to the cells in Louth police station and escorted Cetchewayo back behind the bar of the pub. It was quite a party. The case comes up at Sleaford Magistrates’ Court next month. It promises to be an interesting one.
April – It was, indeed. Roger dismissed the charge against the landlord for keeping a disorderly public house, seeing that the police custody sergeant had transferred him to the RSPCA shelter in Lincoln at the time, which was quite an alibi. Instead, the four complainants were all fined for ill-treating an animal, under a separate action brought about by Lincoln RSPCA.
May – The Lord Lieutenant’s garden party was beset by the vilest tempest that ever typified an English summer. No fewer than five inches of rain fell, horizontally, in a Force Seven gale, and the gazebo has not been seen since, though we heard afterwards that the Danish and German Air Forces had both been put on alert when a strange alien craft had been sighted over Flensburg two days later.
June – Showtime again, at the Lincolnshire Agricultural Show. Some upstart of a Norfolk Horn – from New Zealand, I ask you! - won the Dancing Sheep Competition with a sort of soft shoe shuffle, so I’m going to teach our Lincolnshire Longwools to tapdance for next year. One of our Tamworths did well by coming a close second in the pig racing event, though.
July – Lincolnshire Constabulary have launched a campaign against binge drinking by setting out a number of mannequins in high street shop windows showing people in a very unattractive and advanced state of intoxication, with the caption:“You wouldn't start a night like this, so why end it that way?". When poor Uncle Igor went shopping in Louth the other weekend and fell asleep in the window of Eve and Ranshaw’s, it took Roger ages to persuade the manager to give him up as he was one of our family.
August – So we finally discovered what became of the Lord Lieutenant’s gazebo. With a homing instinct uncanny in an inanimate object, it flew home to the source of its manufacture to shelter the Beijing Olympics under its wings. At least, the stadium looked to me an awful lot like some wretched cheap Chinese garden furniture monstrosity in a characteristic state of mangled collapse – don’t you think?
September - Oscar has finally given up on his project for a musical version of The Mabinogion. Now he wants to do it on ice. I despair. I really do.
October – Pope Benedict XVI's third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, isn’t going to come out this year after all because of the burgeoning economic problems, but Uncle Juan assures me that Tamsin is definitely down for Dame of the Order of Saint Gregory the Great, since the manuscript of her unpublished book, The Dawkins Delusion, which Juan took with him to the Vatican last year, was such an inspiration to His Holiness.
November – The new Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate TV ad has sent Cetchewayo into another cathartic frenzy (you will recall last year he was shortlisted to play the drums for it but didn’t get the part in the end). This time, instead of throwing the drum kit through the orangery windows into the moat, he’s produced a very wild impasto work in purple, white and (mostly) brown, which Justin tells me is called Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Is Shit. Speaking of Cetchewayo, no sooner had the American election results come through than we got a call from his dealer in New York. Apparently the new First Family wants to improve the rather staid, colonial White House fine art collection with some new, vital work by an African painter, and a Zimbabwean refugee exile living in England ticks all the boxes for political correctness. Justin thought of renaming Cetchewayo’s latest work Uncle Tom’s Cabin To White House, but the dealer has settled for All The Oranges I Have Ever Slept With, and Neon Meat Dream Of An Octofish: A Tribute To Don Van Vliet. Speaking of the former, the Yellow Room will be big enough to take it (just), and regarding the latter…
December – … Tamsin came back from University intent on making another protest against what she calls the cultural kitsch devaluation of Christmas. It took the form of a giant squid done out in lights on the roof, with waving tentacles. She says it’s an ancient proto-Atlantean god called Cthulhu, and he has about as much right to be up in lights at this time of year as that old pagan Finnish trickster wizard Väinnämöinen, with his reindeer sled. One could see it for miles, until ISTAR at RAF Waddington made her take it down. Apparently NATO’s Allied Air Command (Europe) have had us under surveillance ever since the garden party in May. We decided it wouldn’t really be fair to charge Mr Obama for the paintings, so we’re going to ask for his old Senate chair, if it hasn’t already been sold. If it’s anything like the green leather House of Lords ones, it’ll look nice in the library.
I’m told by old Mr Benniworth that Blind Byard has been scaring lone cyclists, by jumping the A17 at High Dyke. Either it’s the ISTAR Nimrods are flying low in the fog, or Old Meg is abroad once more. Possibly both. You’ll remember the old rhyme:
“When winter’s fogs do cloak the fen,
And Blind Byard doth leap again,
Then Old Meg is come from her den,
To wreak the ruin of maids and men.”
In the light of last year’s prophecy, I was hesitant to alarm anyone so I thought I’d go and ask old Mrs Sausthorpe about it. You could hardly get near the place for Learjets and limousines and shifty-looking men in black suits. She said: “That nasty Mr Brown came for a tea-leaf reading, so I threw the pot at him. He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat.” And that was it. I was only allowed two minutes before the next politician with a pair of heavy suitcases came in. So this New Year’s prognostication is shrouded in mystery – perhaps that’s better for all of us!
Well, that’s about all our news. I can hear the Sedge Bear Wassailers meeting the Ukranians and the revellers back from The Green Man. By the sound of it, something made of glass has just broken and Julia is singing La Marseillaise. I’d better go and sort it out. And Aunt Olga and our Kiev cousins have just rolled up in a taxi. So – have a lovely Christmas and may everything in 2009 be a surprise!
As ever,
Monday, 31 December 2007
Christmas Newsletter 2007
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
Thank you so much, as always, for your e-cards and newsletters. They really help to make the season bright. Well, here’s another year gone by already…
January –Oscar has engaged in a therapeutic project to get his mind off his romantic disappointment of last September. It was something Justin suggested to him. He wants to turn the Mabinogion into a series of Bollywood musicals, done in early medieval Welsh (so even a Welsh audience will need English subtitles) and dubbed into Hindi. He says it’s time Britain had her own all-singing, all-dancing Mahabharatam. The working title is ‘VerNana KaraNa’ (which, I’m told, is Hindi for ‘Mabinogion’). I must say the stories seem extremely silly and unpromising. He wants to start with ‘Pwyll Pendaran Dyfed’ which is some ridiculous story about a hero marrying a horse from another world, then follow up with ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’ where the suitor and his exasperated friends (including the entire retinue of King Arthur’s court, King Arthur himself and a Celtic god or two) end up killing the bride’s father only after doing about a hundred impossible things to get him various treasures and curiosities by way of a bride-price. Then he wants to conclude with ‘Math ap Mathonwy’ where a wizard makes his unmarriageable son a prosthetic wife from flowers but she transfigures into an owl after having an affair with a lover who turns her husband into an eagle by killing him when he’s getting half-clothed into a bath which is floating on a river. At least, that’s what I think he was telling me but I was only giving him half my attention because when he was burbling enthusiastically to me about it, I was trying to get everything sorted out for the Wren Hunt. Roger quite rightly refused to fund it (the musical, not the Wren Hunt) but Oscar has written to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant and is currently touring the Home Counties for rich Indian Gallophile backers. And for all we know, he might even make a go of it: the Tristan and Iseult story has already had the Bollywood treatment by Subhash Ghai in ‘Pardes’. I know this because we had to sit through a showing of the whole thing the other night. So far Oscar’s review blogs have failed to stimulate much interest but at least he’s not moping around the place any more.
February – The plumbers have been in with a vengeance, replacing our old steam heating – and a number of concealed objects have been found. A mummified horseshoe bat in a bottle under the hearthstone of the Great Hall, an old shoe stuffed with moles’ skulls up the Old Solar chimney and in the wall of the New Buttery a perfectly dreadful dessicated musty leathery old thing that Roger says is an incunabulum, but Uncle Juan identified it from photographs as an incubacunabulum, a kind of medieval imp that sleeps on babies’ faces when no-one’s looking, in the shape of a cat. He said he thought it might be one of Charles’ familiars. If so, I said, it really is too much. Then I made the mistake of asking Uncle Juan what the difference was between incubacunabula and succubacunbula. Juan explained that succubacunabula are pre-printed books, manuscript codices not to be confused with incubicula, which are things found in bedrooms, which would include succubacula (monsters found only under children’s beds), whereas incubabula are modern printed works that have taken to their sickbeds, their burgeoning typographical errors being aided and abetted by computerized spell-checking, especially those resulting from the B key on the keyboard being next to that for N. The so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ (the one printed in 1631 that says: “Thou shalt commit adultery”), Juan said, was just one such early specimen of , like that grimoire from which the legendary Doctor Faustus was working when he made that awful pact and sold his immortal soul to Santa instead of Satan. It was only at that point that I realized he was having his little joke. With Juan, one hardly ever knows, and working in the Vatican over the past year or two has made his sense of humour even stranger.
March – We had all the concealed objects in the walls of the Great Hall, the Solar and the New Buttery exposed in glass frames. A colleague of Roger’s (Waitrose Professor of Visual Studies, apparently) from The University of Kesteven came to dinner one evening and raved about them. Before Roger could say anything, Justin offered to come round to his house, knock a square hole in one of his walls, insert something surreal like a dried turnip studded with rusty nails, then cover it with glass and frame it, for £25,000. Happily at that point Cetchewayo came in, dragging his latest canvas and fortuitously changed the subject to the use of banana and peanut butter as impasto media.
April – Julia has decided to continue her military career and has been accepted by the Fourth Regiment of the French Foreign Legion as an unarmed combat, airborne skills and PT instructor. We’re ever so excited, as she’s another first for us! The Legion’s very first female officer. She looks very smart in her new uniform, and we all went to Castelnaudary to watch her inauguration. So nice to think that she’ll be so close to home, comparatively speaking, after all that time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
May – Oscar, it seems, hasn’t given up on Morag. He’s disappeared off to some perfectly dreadful craft-weaving event on North Uist, called the Llama Tweed Festival, organized by the Euro-American Celtic Association. Apparently, people come to it from as far away as Patagonia (whence, I suppose, the llamas). I do wish he could find a Bollywood backer for his Celtic-Hindu epic.
June – After six weeks of incessant rain, Wragby Fen has surrounded Hatton and Panton, and starts at the end of our lane.
July – Uncle Igor rushed in the other day, in a state of great agitation. He spoke of never drinking sugarbeet vodka again, and – in the same breath - of seeing giant rats the size of mastiffs swimming about in Wragby Fen. He positively insisted we all go and look. Poor Uncle – he was sooo relieved when he found we could see them, too. We found out later that, with all the recent flooding, a family of capybaras have escaped from Wetland World at Louth.
By the way, I almost forgot – Tamsin got her First – Trivia summa cum Laude - from Bolingbroke College. We’re all so terribly proud of her, just as we are of Julia, head-butting her inimitable way into what was formerly an all-male preserve. She’s taken to smoking a pipe and wearing tweed jackets. She’ll be staying on for her Master’s Degree even though Porterhouse in Cambridge, Harvard and Moscow all sat up and begged to take her on. Justin suggested a six-figure transfer fee to the Senior Bursar at the graduation dinner, which nearly made the poor old chap choke on his Eton Mess. Tamsin’s dissertation, at Roger’s suggestion, will be an adaptation of her unpublished book ‘The Dawkins Delusion’. Yes – she found Richard Dawkins so absolutely repellent she’s become a good lapsed Catholic girl once more. Meanwhile, Uncle Juan asked to borrow the manuscript and between ourselves, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if we see a Papal encyclical on a closely-related subject some time towards the end of the year.
August – The floodwaters have receded, but the capybaras have chosen to stay in our moat. The swans are not best pleased, and neither am I. Like geese, they do help keep the grass on the lawns down but the downside is in the enormous whoopsies they leave in the process. However, the children find them perfectly captivating (the capybaras, I mean) and they’re far less of a worry, in their way, than hamsters. No chance of one of those getting lost under the floorboards.
September - Roger was horrified to find that most of our Lincoln Longwools seemed to have caught Bluetongue Disease – but – thank goodness - they hadn’t. Our stockman had been dosing them with Methylene as they’d been at the broad beans again, where we’d planted them as a cover crop in Old Hundred.
October – Many people have been asking whether the drum-playing gorilla on the TV advertisement for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate, is Cetchewayo. Of course it isn’t, sillies. Anyone can see the big chap on the drum kit’s not a silverback. The fact is, Cetchewayo failed the audition, and he’s been sulking about it ever since. He refuses to watch the television at all, and whenever he even hears anyone singing or whistling ‘In The Air Tonight’, he stomps off to the orangery to paint. And he hasn’t touched his drum kit since. Does anybody want one, before it goes on EBay? Or any baby capybaras? We found one enterprising mum had littered in the bathroom the other morning.
November – Huge uproar on the Parish Council after Ranby and Sotby Brownie Troop voted to call their new mascot Capybara Jesus. Several councilors have demanded the Brown Owl’s resignation. Justin, when he found out, said he thought that was too lenient by far: he says she should be imprisoned for fifteen days, given forty lashes and then beheaded. He wound a tea-towel around his head to tell me that, so I guessed he was probably joking. Meanwhile, Tamsin has bought a goldfish and named him God. Roger and I only found out by reading her Facebook page. I suppose she thinks it’s funny. Really, it’s all getting too silly for words.
December – A terrible mistake: we mulled our last bottle of Chateau Lafite 1947 for the carol singers. That meant we all sat down to eat our Christmas dinner with a bottle of Igor’s whortleberry and banana skin sherry. Fortunately we regained consciousness before the pudding boiled dry. The Strubby Turkey Racing was great fun as always.
The old prison hulk, L’Incroyable, has washed up again into Anderby Creek, after the storms and high seas: it had been buried in the sand-dunes around Mablethorpe for almost 80 years. The last time this happened, according to old Mrs Sausthorpe, was to announce the Great Depression of 1927, and before that, the Stock Exchange Panic of 1857 – so, she insists, this portends financial ruin for many. And to make matters worse, the snails are hibernating very low on the walls this year. And the cards are all coming up spades. Of course she’s 97, in a home in Ingoldmells and completely ga-ga, poor thing, and it’s longer than I care to remember since I believed Nanny was right about everything. Financial ruin? Let’s hope it’s just the Labour Party!
All our very best wishes for an otherwise uneventful but prosperous 2008, from all of us, to all of you!
As ever,
Thank you so much, as always, for your e-cards and newsletters. They really help to make the season bright. Well, here’s another year gone by already…
January –Oscar has engaged in a therapeutic project to get his mind off his romantic disappointment of last September. It was something Justin suggested to him. He wants to turn the Mabinogion into a series of Bollywood musicals, done in early medieval Welsh (so even a Welsh audience will need English subtitles) and dubbed into Hindi. He says it’s time Britain had her own all-singing, all-dancing Mahabharatam. The working title is ‘VerNana KaraNa’ (which, I’m told, is Hindi for ‘Mabinogion’). I must say the stories seem extremely silly and unpromising. He wants to start with ‘Pwyll Pendaran Dyfed’ which is some ridiculous story about a hero marrying a horse from another world, then follow up with ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’ where the suitor and his exasperated friends (including the entire retinue of King Arthur’s court, King Arthur himself and a Celtic god or two) end up killing the bride’s father only after doing about a hundred impossible things to get him various treasures and curiosities by way of a bride-price. Then he wants to conclude with ‘Math ap Mathonwy’ where a wizard makes his unmarriageable son a prosthetic wife from flowers but she transfigures into an owl after having an affair with a lover who turns her husband into an eagle by killing him when he’s getting half-clothed into a bath which is floating on a river. At least, that’s what I think he was telling me but I was only giving him half my attention because when he was burbling enthusiastically to me about it, I was trying to get everything sorted out for the Wren Hunt. Roger quite rightly refused to fund it (the musical, not the Wren Hunt) but Oscar has written to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant and is currently touring the Home Counties for rich Indian Gallophile backers. And for all we know, he might even make a go of it: the Tristan and Iseult story has already had the Bollywood treatment by Subhash Ghai in ‘Pardes’. I know this because we had to sit through a showing of the whole thing the other night. So far Oscar’s review blogs have failed to stimulate much interest but at least he’s not moping around the place any more.
February – The plumbers have been in with a vengeance, replacing our old steam heating – and a number of concealed objects have been found. A mummified horseshoe bat in a bottle under the hearthstone of the Great Hall, an old shoe stuffed with moles’ skulls up the Old Solar chimney and in the wall of the New Buttery a perfectly dreadful dessicated musty leathery old thing that Roger says is an incunabulum, but Uncle Juan identified it from photographs as an incubacunabulum, a kind of medieval imp that sleeps on babies’ faces when no-one’s looking, in the shape of a cat. He said he thought it might be one of Charles’ familiars. If so, I said, it really is too much. Then I made the mistake of asking Uncle Juan what the difference was between incubacunabula and succubacunbula. Juan explained that succubacunabula are pre-printed books, manuscript codices not to be confused with incubicula, which are things found in bedrooms, which would include succubacula (monsters found only under children’s beds), whereas incubabula are modern printed works that have taken to their sickbeds, their burgeoning typographical errors being aided and abetted by computerized spell-checking, especially those resulting from the B key on the keyboard being next to that for N. The so-called ‘Wicked Bible’ (the one printed in 1631 that says: “Thou shalt commit adultery”), Juan said, was just one such early specimen of , like that grimoire from which the legendary Doctor Faustus was working when he made that awful pact and sold his immortal soul to Santa instead of Satan. It was only at that point that I realized he was having his little joke. With Juan, one hardly ever knows, and working in the Vatican over the past year or two has made his sense of humour even stranger.
March – We had all the concealed objects in the walls of the Great Hall, the Solar and the New Buttery exposed in glass frames. A colleague of Roger’s (Waitrose Professor of Visual Studies, apparently) from The University of Kesteven came to dinner one evening and raved about them. Before Roger could say anything, Justin offered to come round to his house, knock a square hole in one of his walls, insert something surreal like a dried turnip studded with rusty nails, then cover it with glass and frame it, for £25,000. Happily at that point Cetchewayo came in, dragging his latest canvas and fortuitously changed the subject to the use of banana and peanut butter as impasto media.
April – Julia has decided to continue her military career and has been accepted by the Fourth Regiment of the French Foreign Legion as an unarmed combat, airborne skills and PT instructor. We’re ever so excited, as she’s another first for us! The Legion’s very first female officer. She looks very smart in her new uniform, and we all went to Castelnaudary to watch her inauguration. So nice to think that she’ll be so close to home, comparatively speaking, after all that time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
May – Oscar, it seems, hasn’t given up on Morag. He’s disappeared off to some perfectly dreadful craft-weaving event on North Uist, called the Llama Tweed Festival, organized by the Euro-American Celtic Association. Apparently, people come to it from as far away as Patagonia (whence, I suppose, the llamas). I do wish he could find a Bollywood backer for his Celtic-Hindu epic.
June – After six weeks of incessant rain, Wragby Fen has surrounded Hatton and Panton, and starts at the end of our lane.
July – Uncle Igor rushed in the other day, in a state of great agitation. He spoke of never drinking sugarbeet vodka again, and – in the same breath - of seeing giant rats the size of mastiffs swimming about in Wragby Fen. He positively insisted we all go and look. Poor Uncle – he was sooo relieved when he found we could see them, too. We found out later that, with all the recent flooding, a family of capybaras have escaped from Wetland World at Louth.
By the way, I almost forgot – Tamsin got her First – Trivia summa cum Laude - from Bolingbroke College. We’re all so terribly proud of her, just as we are of Julia, head-butting her inimitable way into what was formerly an all-male preserve. She’s taken to smoking a pipe and wearing tweed jackets. She’ll be staying on for her Master’s Degree even though Porterhouse in Cambridge, Harvard and Moscow all sat up and begged to take her on. Justin suggested a six-figure transfer fee to the Senior Bursar at the graduation dinner, which nearly made the poor old chap choke on his Eton Mess. Tamsin’s dissertation, at Roger’s suggestion, will be an adaptation of her unpublished book ‘The Dawkins Delusion’. Yes – she found Richard Dawkins so absolutely repellent she’s become a good lapsed Catholic girl once more. Meanwhile, Uncle Juan asked to borrow the manuscript and between ourselves, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if we see a Papal encyclical on a closely-related subject some time towards the end of the year.
August – The floodwaters have receded, but the capybaras have chosen to stay in our moat. The swans are not best pleased, and neither am I. Like geese, they do help keep the grass on the lawns down but the downside is in the enormous whoopsies they leave in the process. However, the children find them perfectly captivating (the capybaras, I mean) and they’re far less of a worry, in their way, than hamsters. No chance of one of those getting lost under the floorboards.
September - Roger was horrified to find that most of our Lincoln Longwools seemed to have caught Bluetongue Disease – but – thank goodness - they hadn’t. Our stockman had been dosing them with Methylene as they’d been at the broad beans again, where we’d planted them as a cover crop in Old Hundred.
October – Many people have been asking whether the drum-playing gorilla on the TV advertisement for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate, is Cetchewayo. Of course it isn’t, sillies. Anyone can see the big chap on the drum kit’s not a silverback. The fact is, Cetchewayo failed the audition, and he’s been sulking about it ever since. He refuses to watch the television at all, and whenever he even hears anyone singing or whistling ‘In The Air Tonight’, he stomps off to the orangery to paint. And he hasn’t touched his drum kit since. Does anybody want one, before it goes on EBay? Or any baby capybaras? We found one enterprising mum had littered in the bathroom the other morning.
November – Huge uproar on the Parish Council after Ranby and Sotby Brownie Troop voted to call their new mascot Capybara Jesus. Several councilors have demanded the Brown Owl’s resignation. Justin, when he found out, said he thought that was too lenient by far: he says she should be imprisoned for fifteen days, given forty lashes and then beheaded. He wound a tea-towel around his head to tell me that, so I guessed he was probably joking. Meanwhile, Tamsin has bought a goldfish and named him God. Roger and I only found out by reading her Facebook page. I suppose she thinks it’s funny. Really, it’s all getting too silly for words.
December – A terrible mistake: we mulled our last bottle of Chateau Lafite 1947 for the carol singers. That meant we all sat down to eat our Christmas dinner with a bottle of Igor’s whortleberry and banana skin sherry. Fortunately we regained consciousness before the pudding boiled dry. The Strubby Turkey Racing was great fun as always.
The old prison hulk, L’Incroyable, has washed up again into Anderby Creek, after the storms and high seas: it had been buried in the sand-dunes around Mablethorpe for almost 80 years. The last time this happened, according to old Mrs Sausthorpe, was to announce the Great Depression of 1927, and before that, the Stock Exchange Panic of 1857 – so, she insists, this portends financial ruin for many. And to make matters worse, the snails are hibernating very low on the walls this year. And the cards are all coming up spades. Of course she’s 97, in a home in Ingoldmells and completely ga-ga, poor thing, and it’s longer than I care to remember since I believed Nanny was right about everything. Financial ruin? Let’s hope it’s just the Labour Party!
All our very best wishes for an otherwise uneventful but prosperous 2008, from all of us, to all of you!
As ever,
Sunday, 31 December 2006
Christmas Newsletter 2006
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
Can it really be that time of year again? Well, it’s certainly been a case of “interesting times” for us, I can tell you.
January – No sugar-beet wassailing this year, thank goodness! Instead, the twins had one of their brainwaves. In addition to being the Bain Valley Brewery, we are now the Avalon Orchard Burial Trust – eco-friendly woodland burials for all those New Agers, hippies and neo-pagans – any tree you like, so long as it’s a variety of apple. It’s going to appeal, apparently, to all those people who like everything Celtic – druids, and that sort of thing. Mistletoe extra. I can see where this is going already, and I don’t think I like it. We’ve made a go of planting most things in the past, but I think dead people is the limit. Unfortunately Roger is as enthusiastic about the idea as anyone, so we’ve made a start and registered a domain name and are building a website. It will be at the very least another seven years before any of the trees start to fruit, by which time I suppose Justin and Roger may have gone off the idea of cider production. Meanwhile, Roger says that £500 a time is an unmissably good price for planting trees, the slow-release fertilizer is free, and there’s the added possibility of a development grant from DEFRA or the EU or North Kesteven District Council.
February – The bird ‘flu paranoia reached its peak in our part of the world when Justin telephoned the DEFRA Avian Influenza Helpline to report, just as the DEFRA handouts say you should, that he had seen a pile of dead wild birds, all the same specie, dozens of them. They weren’t best pleased when, arriving in six Land Rovers, all in white space suits and face masks, they found themselves at the bag count of one of our biggest pheasant shoots of the year. Justin kept a perfectly straight face and told them that he had heard a swan cough on Kidby Long Drain a day or two before, and had they come about that and did they want to know where it was? Hours later they apparently turned up, in answer to another alarm call about a lot of dead chickens, at a GPS mapping reference that turned out to be the location of the frozen poultry aisle in Sainsbury’s in Sleaford. I can guess who made that call, too.
March - The biennial Shrewing Festival at Wragby took place on Shrew Tuesday, which this year was February 28th, or the Ides of March, Old Style. The Shrew Riband and silver ladle were both presented to little Wilhelmina – imagine! We were all so thrilled!
April – This is always a busy time of the year on a modern English farm, when we turn out the overwintered East European migrant workers from the holiday cottages to redecorate for the coming season, then there’s fertilizing the grass, maize sowing and planting the other game cover crops – linseed, mustard, kale, cannabis. It all goes by in a blur, but one thing I do distinctly remember: on one of his infrequent visits, Charles brought an old mirror which he asked us to store for him. It looked rather nice so I hung it in the hall over the fireplace. Some of the old silvering on the back has tarnished into a pattern of what looks for all the world like another room. Tamsin says it’s possible that the silver nitrate they used to use, which is light-sensitive, has picked up the image of the room seen from where it used to hang, like a slow photograph taken over many years. In the middle, where it is least obscure, you can make out a fireplace and a couple of faces. It is strangely compelling, and the more one looks at it, the more one wants to.
May – It seems that Justin and Uncle Igor managed to hide a few hundred litres of their sugar beet cider last year, despite Roger ordering them to pour it all down the drain at gunpoint. I intercepted a letter to Justin agreeing a 'Hanuman Special Export Coconut Toddy' sponsorship deal for the 27th All-India Inter State Electricity Board Kabbadi Tournament. And – since the stuff cleaned out our septic tank so well last year - the Taj-I-Noor Kebab & Curry House in Louth has ordered two more cases of the fragipani perfumed variety marketed as Green-Kleen Drain Cleaner to offer as a complimentary digestive to obnoxious drunks they want to get rid of after closing time.
June – Busy, busy, busy – cattle mating, silage-making. More people appear to have moved into the room in the mirror-picture over the fireplace, almost as if they are looking out, with their backs to the fire. You can almost see the flames flickering – I know it must be a trick of the light and a slight flaw in the old hand-rolled glass, but it all does seem very lifelike, like the ghosting effect you get on a television screen sometimes. The other day I found I’d been staring at it for half an hour, with no recollection of the passage of time.
July – Uncle Juan came for a few days, inviting us back to Rome for the rest of the month. He – and several others in the Office of the Holy Inquisition – are working on a Vatican response to prove The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, which is odd because I thought that was what it was supposed to be. Apparently, the whole point is that people believe it to be a revelation of secret truth about Jesus and the Church, so the Catholic Truth Society plans to publish a whole series on different artists, such as The Caravaggio Key, The Constable Cipher, The Lowry Leitmotif, The Stubbs Sigils, The Giotto Glyphs, Durer Decrypted, The Reynolds Riddle, The Augustus Egg Enigma, The Monet Mandalas, The Manet Mystery, The Picasso Puzzle and so on. By arranging a lot of lines around blank spaces in the paintings, and projecting these onto a map of France, and then looking at things that the places the lines join up have in common, each one will demonstrate beyond all doubt that the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes or the Society of Oddfellows or the League of Rechabites, has for millennia been running the planet in partnership with the intergalactic slave-trading clone-farming lizard men of Alpha Centauri, one of whom was Christopher Marlowe who after faking his own ritual murder spent the rest of his life writing the complete works of Shakespeare as a set of encoded prophecies for the Aquarian Age. I asked Juan: But what if people end up believing all those too, and still consider the Bible to be a work of fiction? He says that at least the Catholic Church will be getting a big share of a vigorous growth market, and one or two might even consider a career in the priesthood as a result.
Juan also left a preview copy of next year’s Calendario Romano (www.calendarioromano.co.uk/). As in former years, all the pictures are photographs of handsome young priests. I thought they looked rather scrummy (especially the August one), but Tamsin absolutely went off on one and called it vile and revolting. Since she’s the only non-Catholic in the family (non-practising, I mean, once a Catholic, always a Catholic), I do find her attitude peculiar to say the least.
August – A really elegant crop circle appeared right in the middle of the GM maize one morning. It was actually a labyrinth, so of course we started putting up road signs to ‘Sotby Hall Farm Maize Maze’ straight away. Roger denies all knowledge of it having been any of his Postmodernist Mythology and Media Studies students, and the two aliens who were walking round and round in it all day looking hopelessly lost, who I took to be the twins in masks and kitchen-foil suits, weren’t.
We took Charles’ old mirror to Rome with us, at Juan’s insistence. He said he knew a firm of specialists who are very good at resilvering old mirrors, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we brought it back, good as new, all the tarnishing gone. All you can see now is your own reflection in it. Charles was very ungrateful when he saw it – obviously he preferred the patina of age, and I suppose we should really have asked him – but what good is a mirror you can’t see into properly?
September - Poor Oscar’s life is in ruins, or at least you’d think so to see him moping about the place. You see, for the past two years he’s had this online love affair over the internet with someone called Morag MacKendrick, who was supposed to be a designer tweed and cairngorm jewellery supermodel somewhere up in the Scottish highlands. I ask you. They were always emailing one another, and I even had to ask him to put away his mobile and stop texting her at the dinner table. What seems most peculiar to me is that during all this time they never actually met. Anyway, what destroyed the romance was him finding out that Morag was a 15-year old schoolgirl and her friend on a council estate in Cumbernauld. He really ought to get a life. He says he’s going to join the French Foreign Legion. Julia (living with us at the moment, and who is actually thinking of taking a commission in the Legion now her regiment has been disbanded) rather upset him by suggesting that he try a virtual role-playing game variety instead – and if there isn’t one, he could make a fortune starting one up for other sad cases like him. One finds it worrying enough when at age 8 or so one’s children have their imaginary friends, but at 25, it’s really too silly for words.
October – The Bain Valley Hunt enjoyed a really splendid meet this month. We drove one fox, fifteen Animal Rights activist-released farm mink and a mysterious panther-like creature to Bracey’s Covert where the waiting guns blew them all to bits. No-one from the League Against Cruel Sports was there, so we made a video-recording of the whole thing ourselves and sent it to them.
November – Roger bought me a super birthday present – an infrared sauna! I enjoyed it exactly once, as it lasted only three hours and seventeen minutes. Uncle Igor had to try it out, taking a bucket of water in with him – when he threw it on the infrared lamps, to get some steam up, as he explained - he not only ruined the sauna, but also plunged the entire farm into darkness. The only one whose work or recreation it didn’t interrupt, was Cetchewayo.
December - The Boxing Day Drag Hunt was a great deal more fun than anyone expected it to be. There were some spectacular turnouts. The deputy Lord Lieutenant even wore an evening gown, long gloves and a tiara. Jumping Kidby Long Drain sidesaddle and wearing long skirts really sorts out the horsemen from the dillies, you know.
And another hunt has been heard, if not seen, in the skies over the Bain Valley – one that I should like to see the anti-hunting monitors get in the way of! Of course it’s really thunder and migrating graylags that have been heard, and not horses’ hooves and baying of hounds, but old Mr. Benniworth shakes his head, and recites: “When the Wild Hunt rides o’er Ranby Hill, to all the land it bodes great ill.” He claims to have last heard the horses in 1939, and that his father before him heard the hounds in 1914. “When the horses’ hooves ye hear, great danger cometh England near,” he said, and added: “When the hounds bay in the sky, many living soon shall die.” What’s going to happen now he’s heard both, I wonder? Will they cancel each other out? Or should we start filling sandbags? Whatever happens, we shall just have to make the best of things, I suppose, as we always do. At least life never ever seems to be dull…Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws, anyway, for another year!
As ever,
Can it really be that time of year again? Well, it’s certainly been a case of “interesting times” for us, I can tell you.
January – No sugar-beet wassailing this year, thank goodness! Instead, the twins had one of their brainwaves. In addition to being the Bain Valley Brewery, we are now the Avalon Orchard Burial Trust – eco-friendly woodland burials for all those New Agers, hippies and neo-pagans – any tree you like, so long as it’s a variety of apple. It’s going to appeal, apparently, to all those people who like everything Celtic – druids, and that sort of thing. Mistletoe extra. I can see where this is going already, and I don’t think I like it. We’ve made a go of planting most things in the past, but I think dead people is the limit. Unfortunately Roger is as enthusiastic about the idea as anyone, so we’ve made a start and registered a domain name and are building a website. It will be at the very least another seven years before any of the trees start to fruit, by which time I suppose Justin and Roger may have gone off the idea of cider production. Meanwhile, Roger says that £500 a time is an unmissably good price for planting trees, the slow-release fertilizer is free, and there’s the added possibility of a development grant from DEFRA or the EU or North Kesteven District Council.
February – The bird ‘flu paranoia reached its peak in our part of the world when Justin telephoned the DEFRA Avian Influenza Helpline to report, just as the DEFRA handouts say you should, that he had seen a pile of dead wild birds, all the same specie, dozens of them. They weren’t best pleased when, arriving in six Land Rovers, all in white space suits and face masks, they found themselves at the bag count of one of our biggest pheasant shoots of the year. Justin kept a perfectly straight face and told them that he had heard a swan cough on Kidby Long Drain a day or two before, and had they come about that and did they want to know where it was? Hours later they apparently turned up, in answer to another alarm call about a lot of dead chickens, at a GPS mapping reference that turned out to be the location of the frozen poultry aisle in Sainsbury’s in Sleaford. I can guess who made that call, too.
March - The biennial Shrewing Festival at Wragby took place on Shrew Tuesday, which this year was February 28th, or the Ides of March, Old Style. The Shrew Riband and silver ladle were both presented to little Wilhelmina – imagine! We were all so thrilled!
April – This is always a busy time of the year on a modern English farm, when we turn out the overwintered East European migrant workers from the holiday cottages to redecorate for the coming season, then there’s fertilizing the grass, maize sowing and planting the other game cover crops – linseed, mustard, kale, cannabis. It all goes by in a blur, but one thing I do distinctly remember: on one of his infrequent visits, Charles brought an old mirror which he asked us to store for him. It looked rather nice so I hung it in the hall over the fireplace. Some of the old silvering on the back has tarnished into a pattern of what looks for all the world like another room. Tamsin says it’s possible that the silver nitrate they used to use, which is light-sensitive, has picked up the image of the room seen from where it used to hang, like a slow photograph taken over many years. In the middle, where it is least obscure, you can make out a fireplace and a couple of faces. It is strangely compelling, and the more one looks at it, the more one wants to.
May – It seems that Justin and Uncle Igor managed to hide a few hundred litres of their sugar beet cider last year, despite Roger ordering them to pour it all down the drain at gunpoint. I intercepted a letter to Justin agreeing a 'Hanuman Special Export Coconut Toddy' sponsorship deal for the 27th All-India Inter State Electricity Board Kabbadi Tournament. And – since the stuff cleaned out our septic tank so well last year - the Taj-I-Noor Kebab & Curry House in Louth has ordered two more cases of the fragipani perfumed variety marketed as Green-Kleen Drain Cleaner to offer as a complimentary digestive to obnoxious drunks they want to get rid of after closing time.
June – Busy, busy, busy – cattle mating, silage-making. More people appear to have moved into the room in the mirror-picture over the fireplace, almost as if they are looking out, with their backs to the fire. You can almost see the flames flickering – I know it must be a trick of the light and a slight flaw in the old hand-rolled glass, but it all does seem very lifelike, like the ghosting effect you get on a television screen sometimes. The other day I found I’d been staring at it for half an hour, with no recollection of the passage of time.
July – Uncle Juan came for a few days, inviting us back to Rome for the rest of the month. He – and several others in the Office of the Holy Inquisition – are working on a Vatican response to prove The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, which is odd because I thought that was what it was supposed to be. Apparently, the whole point is that people believe it to be a revelation of secret truth about Jesus and the Church, so the Catholic Truth Society plans to publish a whole series on different artists, such as The Caravaggio Key, The Constable Cipher, The Lowry Leitmotif, The Stubbs Sigils, The Giotto Glyphs, Durer Decrypted, The Reynolds Riddle, The Augustus Egg Enigma, The Monet Mandalas, The Manet Mystery, The Picasso Puzzle and so on. By arranging a lot of lines around blank spaces in the paintings, and projecting these onto a map of France, and then looking at things that the places the lines join up have in common, each one will demonstrate beyond all doubt that the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes or the Society of Oddfellows or the League of Rechabites, has for millennia been running the planet in partnership with the intergalactic slave-trading clone-farming lizard men of Alpha Centauri, one of whom was Christopher Marlowe who after faking his own ritual murder spent the rest of his life writing the complete works of Shakespeare as a set of encoded prophecies for the Aquarian Age. I asked Juan: But what if people end up believing all those too, and still consider the Bible to be a work of fiction? He says that at least the Catholic Church will be getting a big share of a vigorous growth market, and one or two might even consider a career in the priesthood as a result.
Juan also left a preview copy of next year’s Calendario Romano (www.calendarioromano.co.uk/). As in former years, all the pictures are photographs of handsome young priests. I thought they looked rather scrummy (especially the August one), but Tamsin absolutely went off on one and called it vile and revolting. Since she’s the only non-Catholic in the family (non-practising, I mean, once a Catholic, always a Catholic), I do find her attitude peculiar to say the least.
August – A really elegant crop circle appeared right in the middle of the GM maize one morning. It was actually a labyrinth, so of course we started putting up road signs to ‘Sotby Hall Farm Maize Maze’ straight away. Roger denies all knowledge of it having been any of his Postmodernist Mythology and Media Studies students, and the two aliens who were walking round and round in it all day looking hopelessly lost, who I took to be the twins in masks and kitchen-foil suits, weren’t.
We took Charles’ old mirror to Rome with us, at Juan’s insistence. He said he knew a firm of specialists who are very good at resilvering old mirrors, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we brought it back, good as new, all the tarnishing gone. All you can see now is your own reflection in it. Charles was very ungrateful when he saw it – obviously he preferred the patina of age, and I suppose we should really have asked him – but what good is a mirror you can’t see into properly?
September - Poor Oscar’s life is in ruins, or at least you’d think so to see him moping about the place. You see, for the past two years he’s had this online love affair over the internet with someone called Morag MacKendrick, who was supposed to be a designer tweed and cairngorm jewellery supermodel somewhere up in the Scottish highlands. I ask you. They were always emailing one another, and I even had to ask him to put away his mobile and stop texting her at the dinner table. What seems most peculiar to me is that during all this time they never actually met. Anyway, what destroyed the romance was him finding out that Morag was a 15-year old schoolgirl and her friend on a council estate in Cumbernauld. He really ought to get a life. He says he’s going to join the French Foreign Legion. Julia (living with us at the moment, and who is actually thinking of taking a commission in the Legion now her regiment has been disbanded) rather upset him by suggesting that he try a virtual role-playing game variety instead – and if there isn’t one, he could make a fortune starting one up for other sad cases like him. One finds it worrying enough when at age 8 or so one’s children have their imaginary friends, but at 25, it’s really too silly for words.
October – The Bain Valley Hunt enjoyed a really splendid meet this month. We drove one fox, fifteen Animal Rights activist-released farm mink and a mysterious panther-like creature to Bracey’s Covert where the waiting guns blew them all to bits. No-one from the League Against Cruel Sports was there, so we made a video-recording of the whole thing ourselves and sent it to them.
November – Roger bought me a super birthday present – an infrared sauna! I enjoyed it exactly once, as it lasted only three hours and seventeen minutes. Uncle Igor had to try it out, taking a bucket of water in with him – when he threw it on the infrared lamps, to get some steam up, as he explained - he not only ruined the sauna, but also plunged the entire farm into darkness. The only one whose work or recreation it didn’t interrupt, was Cetchewayo.
December - The Boxing Day Drag Hunt was a great deal more fun than anyone expected it to be. There were some spectacular turnouts. The deputy Lord Lieutenant even wore an evening gown, long gloves and a tiara. Jumping Kidby Long Drain sidesaddle and wearing long skirts really sorts out the horsemen from the dillies, you know.
And another hunt has been heard, if not seen, in the skies over the Bain Valley – one that I should like to see the anti-hunting monitors get in the way of! Of course it’s really thunder and migrating graylags that have been heard, and not horses’ hooves and baying of hounds, but old Mr. Benniworth shakes his head, and recites: “When the Wild Hunt rides o’er Ranby Hill, to all the land it bodes great ill.” He claims to have last heard the horses in 1939, and that his father before him heard the hounds in 1914. “When the horses’ hooves ye hear, great danger cometh England near,” he said, and added: “When the hounds bay in the sky, many living soon shall die.” What’s going to happen now he’s heard both, I wonder? Will they cancel each other out? Or should we start filling sandbags? Whatever happens, we shall just have to make the best of things, I suppose, as we always do. At least life never ever seems to be dull…Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws, anyway, for another year!
As ever,
Saturday, 24 December 2005
Christmas Newsletter 2005
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
Whoosh! Another year gone by already! Well, I expect you've been wondering what we've all been up to…
January – Wondering what to put Old Hundred under last year, we decided to go in for a crop of. sugar beet this winter. To get over the awful sense of anticlimax following New Year, Roger and I thought it would be nice to have a Twelfth Night celebration to involve the whole village – something like an apple-tree wassailing – the only problem being that we haven't any apple trees. So, typically, Justin suggested we wassail the sugar-beets instead. Roger said that was silly but Justin pointed out that the only real difference between singing to one plantation of vegetables and another was whether you made alcohol out of them.
Unfortunately, Uncle Igor (who I thought had been asleep all this time) had been listening to every word, and was seized with enthusiasm. The sugar beet contains up to 15 per cent sugar in solution, he said, so the end product, if handled properly, could prove very similar to the birch-sap wine of the Old Country.
So there he was, out in the middle of Old Hundred at midnight on the 6th, yodelling away to the beets in Ukranian (Fortunately Roger saw this coming and locked away all the shotguns beforehand). In translation, Uncle Igor's song goes something like this:
The Sotby Wassail
Now merry meet, thou sugar beet / 'Tis time to wassail thee;
Green grow thy top, to bear good crop / (Though thou art not a tree).
Well grow thy shoot, and broad thy root, / Much sugar may'st thou bear
To make the drink that we all sink / For wassailing each year!
February – When we lifted the beets this month, Uncle Igor kept a ton or two back to mash and boil for – you'd never guess – Sotby Hall Cider. Roger argued in vain. Uncle Igor insisted that since most commonly available commercially-made ciders are mostly made from maize syrup, if he added a little acetone, some sulphur dioxide and a handful of oak chippings, no-one would be able to tell the difference. He could well be right, but if it does work he'll only want to produce Sotby Hall Apple Brandy the year following. I really must put my foot down this time.
The Mink Hounds were still running on the 19th, and so are the local League Against Cruel Sports, making sure we're not chasing anything more sentient than an aniseed bag, so we like to take them through Wragby Fen, where between the really deep bits and the punt-guns of the wildfowlers, they stand a sporting chance of survival – which is more than they've been offering the Bain Valley Hunt.
No sooner did the news break of Prince Charles' official engagement to Mrs Parker-Bowles, than friends and neighbours were clamouring to know whether we had been invited to the wedding. I would have thought that the question that should have been uppermost in people's minds was: did we approve? Well, of course we didn't. If Prince Charles had become a Catholic, it might have been a different matter – but he isn't, so it isn't, and we didn't, and we don't, and we wouldn't even if we had been – which, by the way, we weren't.
March - Tamsin has been asking Uncle Juan, in his capacity as a bishop (a cardinal bishop, since February, did I mention?) and as her godfather, if she can get an excommunication certificate – like a certificate of baptism, she says, but the other way round, so she can produce it as evidence of her good standing when she applies to join the Humanist Society. He told her "once a Catholic, always a Catholic". You can be an excommunicated Catholic – and renouncing your faith automatically carries excommunication – and you are denied the sacraments of the Church – and even the conversation of fellow-Catholics, in extreme cases – but you are, nonetheless, still a Catholic. She is dreadfully disappointed, but Uncle Juan very nicely suggested that, if she writes to the Bishop of Louth asking him to confirm that as an atheist she is excommunicate, the bishop's letter of reply will be the nearest thing she can get to an excommunication certificate.
Charles insists that's nonsense, that it's like the ordination of priests which can be reversed in a ritual of defrocking. The fact that there's no prescribed rite makes it just the same as exorcism, he says – you make it up as you go along. He says he knows a defrocked priest who will do a reverse baptism with a hair-dryer and some witch-hazel. I told him to keep his New Age mumbo-jumbo to himself. I'd rather Tamsin were an atheist Catholic, than none at all .
April – Sad news, and good. Poor old Pope John Paul II having gone to his eternal reward, Uncle Juan flew off to Rome for the Papal elections, and for a while it actually looked as if we might end up with a pope in the family!
Xavier's extensive contacts in Latin America were willing and eager to rally round, but, in the end – what a disappointment! A German! But on the plus side, dear Juan has been appointed Legate to the European Episcopal Synod, and (much to Charles' irreverent amusement) Avocato di Diavolo in the matter of documenting and authentication of miracles. He reports to the Prefect of the Congregation, the Holy Office, and of course, His Holiness. Along with these appointments there are a few perks, like time-share use of the new Vatican jet. He's very kindly agreed to fly poor Wilhelmina to Lourdes next month as she is convinced that her hysterical paralysis is caused by the chain coming off. And, since he now gets to preview the new Harry Potter films before anybody else outside the studios, it was nice to see 'The Half-Blood Prince' on DVD before the book even came out – even if it was dubbed in Italian. Hagrid sounds like Tito Gobbi, but it's quite amusing.
May – Uncle Igor tapped the first drum of sugar beet cider. What a relief! The liquor that came out was grey with a frothy scum and had bits floating about in it, rather like well-used washing-up water. It smelled of bad drains and tasted – according to Justin – altogether like the coconut firewater they make in South India. Roger was absolutely adamant that Igor and Justin were not going to bottle it and brand it as 'Hanuman Special Export Coconut Toddy' for sale to the alcoholic no-hopers in Sri Lanka. He made them empty every drum down the drain at gunpoint. When the man came to empty the septic tank at the end of the month, he said he'd never known the tank smelling so bad - nor looking so clean. Now Justin is experimenting with heavy perfumes to mask the smell and market the stuff as 'Green-Kleen – The Organic Sewage Sanitiser that makes your Septic Tank as Sweet and Sparkling-Fresh as a Summer Meadow'. So far, the only fragrance that works on the vile brew is frangipani.
June – Roger's College is now officially Kesteven University! And guess who the wife of the Vice-Chancellor is?
July – The Taj-I-Noor Kebab & Curry House in Louth has ordered a case of Fragipani Green-Kleen to offer as a complimentary digestive to obnoxious drunks they want to get rid of after closing time. Igor and Justin never know when to give up, it seems.
August –- Roger is hardly out of his study, these days: he's learning Proto-Indo-European in order to be able to deconstruct Dumezil's primary epigraphic sources, he says. God knows what he's really doing on that computer of his, now we've got broad-band. I've told him that, if this means that the traditional Aryan tripartite social system is a myth after all, he can jolly well help everyone else with the silage.
September - Oscar copied all of Uncle Igor's Ukranian folk-songs from his collection of old 78-rpm gramophone records onto one of those I-pod players for his birthday. Igor was delighted. So were we. Now we don't have to listen to the dreadful things ever again.
October – Tamsin is settling in well to her second year at Bolingbroke, and we've all got used to calling her Thomas. The only bothersome thing was, she kept saying she wanted to drop Physics and do Sociology instead. As Justin said, it would save everyone a lot of trouble if they included deep frying and table-wiping in what they teach them. I don't want any daughter of mine to end up in a Kentucky King Mac Happy Meal Eatery. Fortunately, Roger cured her by taking her to the Social Science faculty Alumni Cheese and Wine Party at Kesteven University, where everyone was either an anthropologist or a sociologist (I don't really know what the difference is – I suppose that anthropologists study humans, and sociologists don't bother?). Anyway, he told her just to sit there and observe. An hour or two later she phoned us and begged to be taken home. She was visibly shaken, and promised to be a good girl and carry on with something useful like astrophysics. Sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind. The downside of her shock treatment, though, is that she is now more firmly convinced than ever that God cannot possibly exist.
November – I have taken to going out to the Horncastle Mothers' Union Every Wednesday night, to hear riveting lectures on How To Crochet Your Own Hang Glider, or Pilates Skateboarding For Health And Beauty, by and for a bunch of demented middle-class housewives, bored to utter distraction. Not that life is boring, here, of course – but I am being driven to absolute distraction by Roberta's insistence on watching every episode of the BBC/HBO serial TV production of 'Rome'. How dreadful it all is: in particular, it's the sex scenes I can't stand. Or, to be exact, what I can't stand is little Roberta incessantly pointing out that there is no archaeological evidence for half of what they do that isn't daubed on the walls of Pompeii brothels or graphically inscribed on Etruscan black-figure ware. How would she know?
December - The ghostly patrol of Roman soldiers (a vexillation of the lost Ninth Legion, Roberta assures me) has caused several traffic accidents on the A15 in the last few weeks. Local lore says that, if they're seen marching south, it's a dire portent for the year to come! Well, all I can say is, I hope it's London they're heading for!
Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws,
Whoosh! Another year gone by already! Well, I expect you've been wondering what we've all been up to…
January – Wondering what to put Old Hundred under last year, we decided to go in for a crop of. sugar beet this winter. To get over the awful sense of anticlimax following New Year, Roger and I thought it would be nice to have a Twelfth Night celebration to involve the whole village – something like an apple-tree wassailing – the only problem being that we haven't any apple trees. So, typically, Justin suggested we wassail the sugar-beets instead. Roger said that was silly but Justin pointed out that the only real difference between singing to one plantation of vegetables and another was whether you made alcohol out of them.
Unfortunately, Uncle Igor (who I thought had been asleep all this time) had been listening to every word, and was seized with enthusiasm. The sugar beet contains up to 15 per cent sugar in solution, he said, so the end product, if handled properly, could prove very similar to the birch-sap wine of the Old Country.
So there he was, out in the middle of Old Hundred at midnight on the 6th, yodelling away to the beets in Ukranian (Fortunately Roger saw this coming and locked away all the shotguns beforehand). In translation, Uncle Igor's song goes something like this:
The Sotby Wassail
Now merry meet, thou sugar beet / 'Tis time to wassail thee;
Green grow thy top, to bear good crop / (Though thou art not a tree).
Well grow thy shoot, and broad thy root, / Much sugar may'st thou bear
To make the drink that we all sink / For wassailing each year!
February – When we lifted the beets this month, Uncle Igor kept a ton or two back to mash and boil for – you'd never guess – Sotby Hall Cider. Roger argued in vain. Uncle Igor insisted that since most commonly available commercially-made ciders are mostly made from maize syrup, if he added a little acetone, some sulphur dioxide and a handful of oak chippings, no-one would be able to tell the difference. He could well be right, but if it does work he'll only want to produce Sotby Hall Apple Brandy the year following. I really must put my foot down this time.
The Mink Hounds were still running on the 19th, and so are the local League Against Cruel Sports, making sure we're not chasing anything more sentient than an aniseed bag, so we like to take them through Wragby Fen, where between the really deep bits and the punt-guns of the wildfowlers, they stand a sporting chance of survival – which is more than they've been offering the Bain Valley Hunt.
No sooner did the news break of Prince Charles' official engagement to Mrs Parker-Bowles, than friends and neighbours were clamouring to know whether we had been invited to the wedding. I would have thought that the question that should have been uppermost in people's minds was: did we approve? Well, of course we didn't. If Prince Charles had become a Catholic, it might have been a different matter – but he isn't, so it isn't, and we didn't, and we don't, and we wouldn't even if we had been – which, by the way, we weren't.
March - Tamsin has been asking Uncle Juan, in his capacity as a bishop (a cardinal bishop, since February, did I mention?) and as her godfather, if she can get an excommunication certificate – like a certificate of baptism, she says, but the other way round, so she can produce it as evidence of her good standing when she applies to join the Humanist Society. He told her "once a Catholic, always a Catholic". You can be an excommunicated Catholic – and renouncing your faith automatically carries excommunication – and you are denied the sacraments of the Church – and even the conversation of fellow-Catholics, in extreme cases – but you are, nonetheless, still a Catholic. She is dreadfully disappointed, but Uncle Juan very nicely suggested that, if she writes to the Bishop of Louth asking him to confirm that as an atheist she is excommunicate, the bishop's letter of reply will be the nearest thing she can get to an excommunication certificate.
Charles insists that's nonsense, that it's like the ordination of priests which can be reversed in a ritual of defrocking. The fact that there's no prescribed rite makes it just the same as exorcism, he says – you make it up as you go along. He says he knows a defrocked priest who will do a reverse baptism with a hair-dryer and some witch-hazel. I told him to keep his New Age mumbo-jumbo to himself. I'd rather Tamsin were an atheist Catholic, than none at all .
April – Sad news, and good. Poor old Pope John Paul II having gone to his eternal reward, Uncle Juan flew off to Rome for the Papal elections, and for a while it actually looked as if we might end up with a pope in the family!
Xavier's extensive contacts in Latin America were willing and eager to rally round, but, in the end – what a disappointment! A German! But on the plus side, dear Juan has been appointed Legate to the European Episcopal Synod, and (much to Charles' irreverent amusement) Avocato di Diavolo in the matter of documenting and authentication of miracles. He reports to the Prefect of the Congregation, the Holy Office, and of course, His Holiness. Along with these appointments there are a few perks, like time-share use of the new Vatican jet. He's very kindly agreed to fly poor Wilhelmina to Lourdes next month as she is convinced that her hysterical paralysis is caused by the chain coming off. And, since he now gets to preview the new Harry Potter films before anybody else outside the studios, it was nice to see 'The Half-Blood Prince' on DVD before the book even came out – even if it was dubbed in Italian. Hagrid sounds like Tito Gobbi, but it's quite amusing.
May – Uncle Igor tapped the first drum of sugar beet cider. What a relief! The liquor that came out was grey with a frothy scum and had bits floating about in it, rather like well-used washing-up water. It smelled of bad drains and tasted – according to Justin – altogether like the coconut firewater they make in South India. Roger was absolutely adamant that Igor and Justin were not going to bottle it and brand it as 'Hanuman Special Export Coconut Toddy' for sale to the alcoholic no-hopers in Sri Lanka. He made them empty every drum down the drain at gunpoint. When the man came to empty the septic tank at the end of the month, he said he'd never known the tank smelling so bad - nor looking so clean. Now Justin is experimenting with heavy perfumes to mask the smell and market the stuff as 'Green-Kleen – The Organic Sewage Sanitiser that makes your Septic Tank as Sweet and Sparkling-Fresh as a Summer Meadow'. So far, the only fragrance that works on the vile brew is frangipani.
June – Roger's College is now officially Kesteven University! And guess who the wife of the Vice-Chancellor is?
July – The Taj-I-Noor Kebab & Curry House in Louth has ordered a case of Fragipani Green-Kleen to offer as a complimentary digestive to obnoxious drunks they want to get rid of after closing time. Igor and Justin never know when to give up, it seems.
August –- Roger is hardly out of his study, these days: he's learning Proto-Indo-European in order to be able to deconstruct Dumezil's primary epigraphic sources, he says. God knows what he's really doing on that computer of his, now we've got broad-band. I've told him that, if this means that the traditional Aryan tripartite social system is a myth after all, he can jolly well help everyone else with the silage.
September - Oscar copied all of Uncle Igor's Ukranian folk-songs from his collection of old 78-rpm gramophone records onto one of those I-pod players for his birthday. Igor was delighted. So were we. Now we don't have to listen to the dreadful things ever again.
October – Tamsin is settling in well to her second year at Bolingbroke, and we've all got used to calling her Thomas. The only bothersome thing was, she kept saying she wanted to drop Physics and do Sociology instead. As Justin said, it would save everyone a lot of trouble if they included deep frying and table-wiping in what they teach them. I don't want any daughter of mine to end up in a Kentucky King Mac Happy Meal Eatery. Fortunately, Roger cured her by taking her to the Social Science faculty Alumni Cheese and Wine Party at Kesteven University, where everyone was either an anthropologist or a sociologist (I don't really know what the difference is – I suppose that anthropologists study humans, and sociologists don't bother?). Anyway, he told her just to sit there and observe. An hour or two later she phoned us and begged to be taken home. She was visibly shaken, and promised to be a good girl and carry on with something useful like astrophysics. Sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind. The downside of her shock treatment, though, is that she is now more firmly convinced than ever that God cannot possibly exist.
November – I have taken to going out to the Horncastle Mothers' Union Every Wednesday night, to hear riveting lectures on How To Crochet Your Own Hang Glider, or Pilates Skateboarding For Health And Beauty, by and for a bunch of demented middle-class housewives, bored to utter distraction. Not that life is boring, here, of course – but I am being driven to absolute distraction by Roberta's insistence on watching every episode of the BBC/HBO serial TV production of 'Rome'. How dreadful it all is: in particular, it's the sex scenes I can't stand. Or, to be exact, what I can't stand is little Roberta incessantly pointing out that there is no archaeological evidence for half of what they do that isn't daubed on the walls of Pompeii brothels or graphically inscribed on Etruscan black-figure ware. How would she know?
December - The ghostly patrol of Roman soldiers (a vexillation of the lost Ninth Legion, Roberta assures me) has caused several traffic accidents on the A15 in the last few weeks. Local lore says that, if they're seen marching south, it's a dire portent for the year to come! Well, all I can say is, I hope it's London they're heading for!
Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws,
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