Sotby Hall, Christmas Eve, 2015

 

Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,

 

Mum (Anastasia to you) decided to accompany Dad (Roger to you) to the Macrotheme International Conference in Rome on the 18th, where he delivered the keynote speech, and to stay on there with Great Uncle Juan for a few weeks. As you’ll know from last year’s letter, she got quite upset over Great Uncle Igor’s death and some remark Dad made at the time, and didn’t speak to Dad for months. But since he was working on his conference paper Spreadsheet Epistemology And The Circular Reference: A Logical Positivist Approach To Global Trends In Academic Research And Applied Studies, it was some weeks before he noticed. Now you may not have known this, but ever since the time of Benedict XVI, the monastery of Mater Ecclesiae (which he had renovated so he could retire there as Pope Emeritus, with Juan as his confessor) is a giant Faraday cage, the walls, floor and ceiling gridded with copper and zinc bars which block out radio signals which, the Holy Father insisted, were giving him impure thoughts. He was worried about all the invisible porn downloads zipping about in the aether, and this was the only way he could think of to exorcize them. If you think this is just mad rubbish, try reading Phil Rickman’s The Lamp Of The Wicked. Consequently mobiles and laptops don’t work there. Well, that’s Mum’s excuse and she’s sticking to it – so this is me, Justin, giving you all the annual family update.

 

As I sit typing this with the snow falling gently outside, collecting on the trees and settling on the frozen moat, I am in a quiet darkness lit only by the glow of the MacBook, the logs glowing in the grate, and a few candles about the place, and the profound silence is broken only by the distant chugging of a diesel generator at Home Farm, the chanting of the druids in the woodland cemetery and what sounds like a fight breaking out between the Minting Mummers’ Sedge Bear Wassailing and the carol singers from St Martin’s somewhere between the yew walk and the croquet lawn. I do hope we get the mains power back soon, because the spare tractor battery I’m plugged into, won’t last forever, and Wilhelmina now believes that a captive exercise bike attached to a turbine is cruel, so we had to find it a good home on eBay. Our diesel generator, you’ll recall, hasn’t been up to much since Dad fuelled it with a gallon of Great Uncle Igor’s homemade horilko…

 

Poor, dear mad old bugger (and inspired business partner). I always think of Great Uncle Igor this time of year, inviting all the local farm workers from Eastern Europe, who couldn’t get home for Christmas, into the barn where he kept his still, and teaching them all to sing  A v’Yerusalaymi dzvony and Oi na gori, ta I zhentzi zhnuth. By the time they got on to Hey, Sokoli! He would get quite maudlin, especially at the verse where the young Cossack soldier tells the falcons of the steppe to bury him in faraway Ukraine, to lie in death next to his sweetheart. It made no difference that he married Great Aunt Maria, a cousin, here in Lincolnshire, and she is buried at Holy Rood, Market Rasen  - where he, too, left instructions to be buried (and where we did bury him – not for him the arch-cathedral in Lviv, nor our woodland cemetery below Old Hundred). Nostalgia, melancholy and horilko always went together with Uncle Igor, and to deny him the one, was to deny him both the others. 

 

It’s a family thing, I suppose: here I am, feeling much the same way towards the old sod, missing the mayhem and drama he used to create. We can’t bear to close his Facebook page. Isn’t it silly of us? I am sipping the last of his beetroot claret, mulled, as I type this. Well, I needed to clear some space in the barn for doing up the Brough Superior Overhead 680, so the word to the wise is, don’t go bidding for any surprise cases of 1951 Penfold’s Grange this coming year: the provenance is not beyond doubt.

 

Yes, so, one way and another, the house will be quiet this season: Tamsin is wedded to her Max Planck Institute work in Tubingen, Mum and Dad are with Uncle Juan in Rome (and Julia of course), Xavier at a funeral in Bogota, Humphrey is still in Paris, and Charles is in protective custody while he helps the Special Branch with their enquiries. That only leaves – barring visitors - me, Aunt Lavinia and Cetchewayo, the twins Oscar and Wilhelmina, Hermione and Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Balin, Balan, Bilbo, Bambi, Bolivar, Buendia and, of course, Ernesto. This chilly weather, they’re mostly keeping to the airing cupboard. Hermione and Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Balin, Balan, Bilbo, Bambi, Bolivar, Buendia and Ernesto, I mean. Not the family.

 

It’s been a quiet year, too. The Bain Valley Farmers’ Co-operative have submitted their tax plans to HMRC for approval. We’re hoping Horncastle Chamber of Commerce will also declare itself as having tax-exempt offshore status. It’s nice to see the Bain Valley Brewery up there with Google, Starbucks, Amazon, Crickhowell and the rest. Naturally I went to see old Nanny Sausthorpe at Elm Meadows Nursing Home (soon to be the Ingoldmells Institute) to consult her about it first, and bumped into George Osborne coming out. He looked bright and cheerful, but then he always does. He’s one of Uncle Xavier’s best customers. Anyway, the snails were all munching celery leaves on her coffee table apart from one, which was resolutely climbing up a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill on the wall. “That’s you, young Master Justin,” she quavered, pointing a skinny finger at the pair of them. The old girl and her snails have never been wrong, so that was a good enough omen for me.

 

Cetchewayo has been experimenting with watercolour, doing very sensitive and surprisingly representational landscapes of what he can see from the conservatory roof (we don’t let him out any more, since last winter’s escapade at Friskney). But while the art market can’t get enough of the old expressionist impasto, this new stuff isn’t selling at all. My only consolation is that his old works are soaring in value now he’s stopped turning them out on a daily basis – and we did manage to get one watercolour identified as a De Wint at the Antiques Roadshow at Coningsby last May.

 

The twins have gone into business selling bits of twig to pagans. Rowan twigs, to be exact. They’re trading as ‘Wicken Rede’. Old Mr Benniworth met them out with the hedge-cutter, and told them that ‘You don’ wanna throw them away. When you thought you were overlooked by the Evil Eye, you got a piece o’ wicken tree, see? You understand there is heder wicken, and there’s sheder wicken, one has berries, and the t’other has none; if the person overlookin’ you was he, you got a piece of sheder wicken; if it was she, you got heder wicken, and made a T with it on the hob, and then they could do nowt at you. An’ one in the milkin’ pail will stop the milk goin’ sour, an’ if you tie one round a pig’s neck, he’ll fatten up quicker.”  They’re only £5 each (£6.50 p&p), and each comes in its own hand-crafted velvet bag.

 

We may all be needing one soon (if not two – one of each). Depending on how well you know Horncastle, you may or may not know there’s a black and white house next door to the chip shop on South Street (number 30), with an ugly head over the door, said to be the death mask of ‘Tiger’ Tim (or ‘Rough Tom’) Brammer, a local celebrity hanged at Lincoln Gaol in 1830 for armed robbery. He was sentenced by the famous William Garrow (of ‘Garrow’s Law’), by then a judge, who tried without success to get Mr Brammer to change his plea to Not Guilty. On the scaffold, Tim Brammer kicked off his shoes to spite, it is said, his mother who always said he’d die with them on.

Well, old Mr. Benniworth says that when he cycled past to get his cod, chips and mushy peas last Friday, the head was weeping. Raining? I asked. Not a bit of it, Master Justin, he said. And it weren’t no leaky gutter, neither. And he began to recite, like the Sybilline oracle:

“When Rough Tom Brammer’s head do weep,

Make fast your door, at home safe keep;

For evil-doing shall come nigh

Such as to make dead brigands cry.”

 

You just made that up, I said. Oh no, Master Justin, he said, ‘tis in Old Mother Martin’s Book Of Prophecy. Mark her words, what died three hundred year afore ole Rough Tom were born. Tis a deep misfortune for us all, and we’ll be beggin’ the Angel O’ Death to sound ‘is trumpet afore the year’s old, he said. Bar yer doors, an’ hang up heder an’ sheder wicken boughs. And off he rode, like a raven on a bicycle.

I will admit I’ve interspersed some heder and sheder wicken among the holly and ivy. You never know. Here’s hoping it works… have as least baleful a Christmas and a New Year with as little ruination and misery as you can, and perhaps we’ll all be around this time next year to have a laugh about it all.

 

Pip, pip!

 

 

 

 

 

Justin.