Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
Every family has its Yuletide traditions, and everyone cherishes some event or other that heralds, for them, the excitement of its beginning - so I thought you might like to know how we celebrate the festive season at Sotby Hall Farm. The real start of Christmas for me begins with the scent of fir boughs, when the twins rig up a block and tackle in the roof beams of the Great Hall and hoist Mr Benniworth up with a chainsaw to prune the tree - which has been a permanent fixture in the Great Hall since 1919, when Great-Grandfather found it had rooted through the pot and the cracks beween the flagstones, into the earth floor beneath. Julia used to be so good at doing this, but nowadays she's rarely with us at this time of year... anyway, while this is going on the rest of us collect all the offcuts and bind them into nice sprays with fir-cones and ivy from off the walls - it's as much as we can do these days to keep the inside walls clear of the stuff.
Mistletoe is brought in from the orchard - just as soon as there isn't a woodland burial going on - and it's Roger's job to fumigate the harmonium in the minstrels' gallery so Igor can accompany the carol singers when they pay us a call. and soon the family start arriving from far-flung places - Xavier from La Paz, Julia from Tagab if the Legion can spare her, Juan from Rome, Eudoxia and the cousins from Kyiv, Tamsin from Oxford, Roger from marking PhD theses in the library, and - hopefully - fingers crossed, everyone! Humphrey will be allowed out on parole to be with us, too.
By then the tree is decorated with the presents (or the keys to the presents, when it's a new tractor or a gun safe or a 4x4), and ever since Justin put Cetchewayo in a tutu and tiara a few Christmases ago - didn't I tell you? - guess who the Christmas Tree Fairy has to be!
Because our home is so large, as is our family when it gets together, we only decorate the Great Hall, which is the one room big enough for everyone to sit down and eat in all at the same time... unless you count as Christmas decorations the little wreaths Aunt Eudora makes with a lit candle in the middle of each, which she puts on window-sills all around the house, one for every deceased family member, to guide their spirits back home for the holidays, from the Otherworld beyond the fens. It's an ancient local custom hereabouts, where they're known as 'corpse candles'. They do look very pretty from a distance at night. Even so, the only family members they've guided back so far are Igor and Justin, who usually come home rather the worse for wear after last-minute deliveries of 'Lincolnshire Poacher' to the pubs in Horncastle and Market Rasen.
Soon the carol-singers come, and we're ready for them with hot mince pies and mulled beetroot claret. They always sing the Osgodby Carol, which is very old and in English, so no-one understands what it means any more:
"Edil be þu, levedi quene;
Ne was no wight ne so wel bisene
As þu, þat bar þe blissed daye-springe
At midernicht, þat beeþ þe hevene kinge."
Even so, we all love it, though Justin says it was written to be sung by drunks because the pronunciation doesn't scan if you try to sing it otherwise.
Between sunset and midnight we also await the coming of Minting Mummers with the Yule Bear, who doesn't look like a bear at all but a walking cone of bean-sticks covered in ivy. He (or it) is accompanied by six swordsmen with branches on their heads to represent antlers, a man dressed as a woman with a cow's tail, a crusader knight on a hobby horse, a Robin Hood and a Turk with a cork-blackened face. Sometimes there's also an accordionist but often they just borrow the harmonium. The Bear dances a bit, falls over, is given a drink, gets up again, dances a bit more and away they all go to their next call. Folklorists say there must have been a lot more to it at one time because of all the other characters, but the ancient pagan essence of the death and resurrection of the natural world at the winter solstice is there, at its heart, still. Roger tells me the Bear has also been equated with the Green Man carved on the choirstalls at Minting church, some Celtic Dionysus, or possibly the Norse god Baldur. Justin says since time out of mind it's always been some unsteady and oblivious drunk who's been dressed up like that for a joke. Meaning is wherever you find it, I suppose.
Juan celebrates Midnight Mass in the chapel, and on Christmas morning Uncle Igor likes to go for a swim in the moat. It seems to sober him up, and he maintains he owes his robust health and longevity to midwinter bathing. He even used to do it on the Eastern Front during the war, and insisted the whole company join him. Lately Roger and I have been worried about the shock of the freezing cold water on his heart, so we hit on the idea of turning the whole moat into a hot tub by using a geothermal bore (since Igor wrecked the dry sauna the other year by throwing water on the heating elements to make steam). It's been a partial success, heating the moat by only a few degrees so at least he doesn't have to break the ice before his morning dip. That's probably why the capybaras decided to stay with us after the floodwaters receded and Wragby Fen shrank back to its usual size. The carp seem to be growing bigger as a result too, which is good news since we can get more than £50 a kilo as soon as they're over eight inches long.
Now - what news have I got to tell you?
To be honest, it's been a quiet year. It was nice to have a little break in April to go to William and Kate's wedding - though I thought the Bishop's reference to St Catherine of Siena in his sermon was in rather poor taste, seeing that she made a vow of chastity at the age of seven. Her mystical marriage to Jesus later on was, I suppose, a reference to Prince William being one day the future head of the Church of England. I really don't know why they don't declare all members of the royal family to be living saints. like the ancient Romans deified their emperors, and have done with it. It wouldn't be the wickedest or the silliest thing to have come out of Lambeth Palace in the last 475 years. The food at the reception afterwards was absolutely scrummy but I rather thought the cake looked like a traffic cone. Anyway, we do wish them well, poor things. As to where the private island where they spent their honeymoon actually was, Xavier's lips are still sealed.
We went on to Oxford to visit Tamsin at Bolingbroke, quite a privilege for me as no woman has been allowed in the college since its foundation in the fourteenth century and apparently no-one ever thought to invite one in before. Mind you, it is almost unbelievably small. Tamsin, of course, won her case at the European Court of Human Rights (and it was nice too see Strasbourg, and be there just in time for the International Film Festival). We were so proud to see Tamsin conducting her own case, an appeal based on Article 9 of the Convention which guarantees freedom of thought and belief. The Court upheld her appeal on the grounds that she has every right to believe herself to be a pipe-smoking middle-aged don with a tweed jacket and external gonads, and has an equal right to manifest that belief by studying and teaching at Bolingbroke. Hurrah! We pushed the boat out rather afterwards, and celebrated with a Methusaleh or two of Cristal Brut 1900. At least we thought we had, when Justin confessed to decanting some of Igor's kale and sultana premier cru Sekt into the Cristal bottles. Then he said he was joking, but to be honest it just didn't taste the same afterwards.
Something rather odd happened at Bolingbroke that weekend, or to be precise, at the much larger, overshadowing Saint Aldate's College next door. Famous for their parsimony despite the fact that they own half of Oxford, Aldate's, I was shocked to learn, employ illegal immigrants as college scouts (citing the Statute of Labourers Act of 1351) and even charge people admission to walk through their Quad. This is quite unfair, and causes no little hardship to their poor undergraduate students who have no choice but to pay to enter and leave and come back again. As for the scouts, the coin-operated turnstiles mean that many have been working there for years under a kind of debt slavery. Even the College rubbish-bins, identifiable with the College coat of arms, are padlocked and chained to the pavement.
Anyway, Saint Aldate's College now owns a large expanse of water-meadow which they won in a fixed game of cricket against its original owners, Harton College, back in the 1890s. It has proved a bone of contention between the two colleges ever since. Well, imagine the fuss one morning when the College cattle (a very pretty little herd of Ayrshire-Angus crosses) who normally graze there, were all missing, and a frantic search found them all in St Aldate's Quad, wearing Harton scarves! The finger of blame has been pointed, quite unjustly, at Bolingbroke students. Anyway, it was all quite interesting and very reassuring to see Tamsin going around with a serene smile on her face - and in a dress - after all the trouble she's had.
The Christmas crackers are doing well at the Farmers' Markets. I'm so glad we found a use for the GM cattlefeed lentils after the breakfast cereal fiasco. With a bit of butter spread on and a slice of something good and strong like Cote Hill Blue, they don't taste half bad.
The Friends Of Market Rasen Old Police Station have been gathering support for the "jewel in the crown of the town" since they launched a Facebook page at the beginning of December. No, really. They want to make sure it's open to the public. Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to think that moving some policemen back inside would be a good start. Go and have a look on Facebook, if you must. It's at https://www.facebook.com/groups/FOMROPS/.
Oh, and that reminds me: I've decided that if you can't beat Facebook, one had better join it. Look out for the Kirov-Renshaw Family Facebook page, coming soon!
So, let's see what 2012 holds for us all - apart from the Olympics, of course. We're all so looking forward to watching little Wilhelmina compete, especially in the BMX events. I do think she deserves a medal at least, having been pipped for the yellow jersey at Grenoble this year.
We thought a great black phantom dog, last seen in 1926, had been seen over the Revesby side of Horncastle, leaping hedges and overtaking cars, but it turned out to be a black plastic haylage bale rolling and bouncing about in a rather stiff breeze. Old Mr Benniworth just shakes his head, and says:
"When howls th'east wind o'er Dogdyke Fen,
It bodes but ill for beasts and men."
And they say the world will be coming to an end on 21st December 2012. Well, if it does, at any rate, we shan't miss the Olympics!
As ever,
Saturday 24 December 2011
Tuesday 1 March 2011
Christmas Newsletter 2010
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!
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!
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