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,
Sunday, 31 December 2006
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,
Wednesday, 22 December 2004
Christmas Newsletter 2004
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
Well, here we are again - the years seem to go by in a blur these days! The Boxing Day Wren Hunt was very quiet this year: no saboteurs in the woods at all. The twins were ever so disappointed – all those traps dug for nothing. It certainly isn't the sporting event it used to be.
January – Splendid news came through from Uncle Juan that dear great-aunt Emilia is up for beatification. It will be nice to have another saint in the family, although I do think the Pope is making rather too many lately, like Tony Blair with his MBEs. The only difference is that a candidate for sainthood can hardly refuse the honour. After all, it would be positively unchristian, wouldn't it?
February – A small earthquake, with its epicentre at Grantham, knocked one of our awful Staffordshire dogs off the drawing-room mantelpiece. It was broken but unfortunately Roger says the damage is repairable. He was terribly upset as the pair has been in the family – and on the mantelpiece, too, for that matter - for centuries. As if that were a sensible reason for keeping stuffed terriers on the mantelpiece. I don't know of any other family that does. Old Sempringham says that bad luck will come of it. We'll see.
March - The Kesteven Archaeology Field Club had their annual fieldwalking in Old Hundred on the weekend of the 17th-18th. At first we were very excited when what looked like a chariot burial was detected by a geophysical reading down at Kidby Long Drain – but it turned out to be a traction engine, dating from the 1820s, probably one that rioting unemployed farm labourers ‘disappeared’ in the hope of protecting their livelihood against mechanization. Restoring it will give the twins something to do.
April – Speaking of Americans, The Wrenshore Society were right! We are related. After several months’ researching, I’ve found that Tadeusz Hrenszaw is descended from a Captain John Wrenshore who fought at the battle of Worcester in 1653. Records from the city archives say he died a prisoner in the Cathedral crypt after the battle, but give no hint of where he came from. Apparently he had two sons – the elder was Richard, who fought with him at Worcester but escaped to France, where he became a soldier of fortune and was made Constable of Rennes by Louis XIV. Changing his name to le Chevalier de Rennes-le-Chateau, or Rennes-Sieur, he produced a line of Rennesieurs who fled the French Revolution in 1790, returning to England where they married the Hertfordshire Wrenshores (descended from Captain Wrenshore’s second son Thomas, a lawyer in London, who had a son Tobias (1623-1665), who in turn had a son Obadiah (born 1648), who married a Miss Rejoice-In-The-Lord’s-Election Barguest (yes – wouldn’t you know it?!) and with whom Obadiah emigrated to New Hampshire in 1683.
That isn’t all, by a long way – The Chevalier Rennesieur was killed campaigning in Poland in 1697, and Tadeusz Hrenszaw was his son. He was disinherited by his father after a quarrel, and earned his living as a shipwright, accompanying Peter The Great on his incognito trip to England. On their return, Tsar Peter later ennobled him as Count Hrenszaw, and his son Piotr Hrenszaw, a lover of Katherine the Great, had a daughter Sofia who became the second wife of Baron Nikolai Kirov, of Hoeppenthal in Galicia-Podolia (now Kirov in Russia – or, I should say, the Republic of the Ukraine, as Uncle Igor reminds me). Her second son, I think it was, a Colonel Fyodor Kirov-Hrenszaw, serving in the Ruritanian army, was rewarded for his valour at the siege of Balitzlav-Zhtovsk, its castle was renamed Hrenszaw in his honour and the Colonel was awarded a dukedom. Because of the pro-Austrian sympathies of the Ruritanian court, the family name and that of the castle were later changed from Hrenszaw to Hentzau. The line died out in 1903 with the death of the famous Prinz Rupprecht von Hentzau, but the really exciting thing is that were are related to the Elfbergs! Meanwhile – as most of you probably knew from Roger anyway - ‘our’ lot left St Petersburg in 1917 during the Revolution and came to England. Baron Aleksandr Mikhailovitch and Baroness Eudoxia Bogdanova Kirov-Hrenszaw ended up in the Royal Hotel in Harrogate with a suitcase of family jewels. Fortunately they used the last of them to buy Sotby Hall before they attracted Queen Mary’s avaricious admiration. It was Aleksandr - Roger’s grandfather – who anglicised the spelling of the family name from Kirov-Hrenszaw to Kirov-Renshaw. He thought it more appropriately inconspicuous for an English gentleman farmer.
May – The Hexagon Society – La Societe de l’Hexagone, I should say - have promoted Charles from Chevalier to Prieur-Commandant de la Langue Angloise, on the strength of his descent from Le Chevalier Rennes-Sieur. So now we are not only a mixed farm and a brewery, we are a Commanderie as well! We were thrilled to go to Soissons for his investiture, though of course we had to be blindfolded once we were inside the keep. It was quite a surprise to meet – oh, no, I mustn’t tell you who we met at the reception after the ceremony. But I thought he’d been dead for years.
June – Tamsin got nothing but Firsts, A’s, Grade 1 passes or whatever they are calling National Certificate grades this year – twelve of them! Somerville and Girton have been falling over themselves to offer her a place next term but at 15 I think she’s rather too young. Roger, on the other hand, is all for it – says the two years’ fees saved from Roedean will help us find her enormous tuition fees. Why has State education become more expensive than an English Public School? But he wants her to go to Bolingbroke College, which is a family tradition. I pointed out to him that Bolingbroke still doesn’t admit girls, but Roger says there has to be a first time for everything. He likes a fight, as you know.
July – Tamsin has announced that she won’t go to University at all – she wants to become a nun. Roger and I were absolutely firm with her and told her that she must finish her education first. She went straight up to her room, locked the door and didn't come out or speak to anyone for a month.
August – Roger and I had a wonderful three weeks in Florida. As he says, it’s like a gigantic Butlin’s retirement home built on a crocodile-infested swamp, but the Latin American emigres are absolutely charming, extremely generous and most hospitable. Xavier has many friends in the Cuban, Colombian and Venezuelan expatriate community there, but what a place to retire to from the political instability of one’s own country! The crime rate in Florida is so high that these well-to-do South Americans all seem to live virtually under siege, and the state police are so under-resourced that Xavier’s friends have to arm their servants with machine-guns. I wonder whether President Bush has any idea what a mess his brother has got into as governor. Of course it’s all too easy to see that the cause of all that crime in Florida is allowing all the work-shy petty criminals from council estates all over Britain to buy time-share apartments there. I’d write to Mr Bush and tell him myself, if I weren’t worried that he’d have them all forcibly repatriated.
Anyway, we arrived home late one night from the airport, absolutely shattered. All the lights were off but we could see – of all things - a floodlight trained on Tamsin’s window (until there was a tinkling of broken glass and it went out). There was also something luminous thrashing about in the moat. When we drove up we could see in the light of the car headlamps that it was Justin wearing a fluorescent white dress with a light blue cloak and a long blonde wig. As he scrambled up the bank towards us we noticed Tamsin’s bedroom window was open and she was screaming abuse and throwing shoes and books at Justin. He admitted that he had thought it a good idea to dress up as the Virgin Mary, lowering himself down from the roof to hover, radiating light, in the air outside Tamsin’s window, telling her what a bad girl she was to disobey her parents and how disappointed she was in her, and that she must agree to read Physics at Bolingbroke. Tamsin had spotted the deception at once, and cut the wire, about five minutes before we arrived on the scene. Roger’s response was to push Justin back into the moat, which brought Justin back within range of a well-aimed paperweight from Tamsin, knocking him out cold. We had a lot of explaining to do at the Casualty Department of Louth Infirmary, but at least Tamsin is speaking to us again.
September - Justin offered to stand in for Cetchewayo at the opening of his exhibition in New York. He doesn’t learn. Great-Aunt Lavinia insisted on going instead.. Roger schooled her in all the right things to say about composition, chiaroscuro, impasto, gestural quality, atmospheric perspective, the beholder's share and things like that.
October – Tamsin is settling in well at Oxford (apparently the Dean and the Senior Tutor of Bolingbroke College are old friends of Charles’s, so she's been entered as Thomas not Tamsin), but she writes to say she has become an atheist. If there really were a God, she argues, how could He allow people like Justin to exist? I have to admit that I sometimes wonder myself. There was a bit of a panic one morning when Cetchewayo escaped from the Orangery (I suppose he was looking for Great Aunt Lavinia, as he's been missing her terribly during her American tour). The police found him in an art materials shop in Mablethorpe, and they called in the RSPCA, who eventually overpowered him and brought him back. The bill is not something we want to think about. That's the downside of having an artistic temperament in the family, so to speak.
November – Reports that the Black Beast of Benniworth has been seen again, turned out to be groundless. It was a silage bale that made Mr Wragby's horse bolt after all.
December - Roger's book-signing tour meant it was tedious not to have him around to help with the Christmas preparations, but it does mean we'll be able to keep Matilda in the air for another year. Hurrah!
The Corpse Candles have been appearing over the Mere on frosty nights before Saint Andrew’s Eve, so I fear 2005 will prove to be a bit of a roller-coaster. Hang on tight!
Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws,
Well, here we are again - the years seem to go by in a blur these days! The Boxing Day Wren Hunt was very quiet this year: no saboteurs in the woods at all. The twins were ever so disappointed – all those traps dug for nothing. It certainly isn't the sporting event it used to be.
January – Splendid news came through from Uncle Juan that dear great-aunt Emilia is up for beatification. It will be nice to have another saint in the family, although I do think the Pope is making rather too many lately, like Tony Blair with his MBEs. The only difference is that a candidate for sainthood can hardly refuse the honour. After all, it would be positively unchristian, wouldn't it?
February – A small earthquake, with its epicentre at Grantham, knocked one of our awful Staffordshire dogs off the drawing-room mantelpiece. It was broken but unfortunately Roger says the damage is repairable. He was terribly upset as the pair has been in the family – and on the mantelpiece, too, for that matter - for centuries. As if that were a sensible reason for keeping stuffed terriers on the mantelpiece. I don't know of any other family that does. Old Sempringham says that bad luck will come of it. We'll see.
March - The Kesteven Archaeology Field Club had their annual fieldwalking in Old Hundred on the weekend of the 17th-18th. At first we were very excited when what looked like a chariot burial was detected by a geophysical reading down at Kidby Long Drain – but it turned out to be a traction engine, dating from the 1820s, probably one that rioting unemployed farm labourers ‘disappeared’ in the hope of protecting their livelihood against mechanization. Restoring it will give the twins something to do.
April – Speaking of Americans, The Wrenshore Society were right! We are related. After several months’ researching, I’ve found that Tadeusz Hrenszaw is descended from a Captain John Wrenshore who fought at the battle of Worcester in 1653. Records from the city archives say he died a prisoner in the Cathedral crypt after the battle, but give no hint of where he came from. Apparently he had two sons – the elder was Richard, who fought with him at Worcester but escaped to France, where he became a soldier of fortune and was made Constable of Rennes by Louis XIV. Changing his name to le Chevalier de Rennes-le-Chateau, or Rennes-Sieur, he produced a line of Rennesieurs who fled the French Revolution in 1790, returning to England where they married the Hertfordshire Wrenshores (descended from Captain Wrenshore’s second son Thomas, a lawyer in London, who had a son Tobias (1623-1665), who in turn had a son Obadiah (born 1648), who married a Miss Rejoice-In-The-Lord’s-Election Barguest (yes – wouldn’t you know it?!) and with whom Obadiah emigrated to New Hampshire in 1683.
That isn’t all, by a long way – The Chevalier Rennesieur was killed campaigning in Poland in 1697, and Tadeusz Hrenszaw was his son. He was disinherited by his father after a quarrel, and earned his living as a shipwright, accompanying Peter The Great on his incognito trip to England. On their return, Tsar Peter later ennobled him as Count Hrenszaw, and his son Piotr Hrenszaw, a lover of Katherine the Great, had a daughter Sofia who became the second wife of Baron Nikolai Kirov, of Hoeppenthal in Galicia-Podolia (now Kirov in Russia – or, I should say, the Republic of the Ukraine, as Uncle Igor reminds me). Her second son, I think it was, a Colonel Fyodor Kirov-Hrenszaw, serving in the Ruritanian army, was rewarded for his valour at the siege of Balitzlav-Zhtovsk, its castle was renamed Hrenszaw in his honour and the Colonel was awarded a dukedom. Because of the pro-Austrian sympathies of the Ruritanian court, the family name and that of the castle were later changed from Hrenszaw to Hentzau. The line died out in 1903 with the death of the famous Prinz Rupprecht von Hentzau, but the really exciting thing is that were are related to the Elfbergs! Meanwhile – as most of you probably knew from Roger anyway - ‘our’ lot left St Petersburg in 1917 during the Revolution and came to England. Baron Aleksandr Mikhailovitch and Baroness Eudoxia Bogdanova Kirov-Hrenszaw ended up in the Royal Hotel in Harrogate with a suitcase of family jewels. Fortunately they used the last of them to buy Sotby Hall before they attracted Queen Mary’s avaricious admiration. It was Aleksandr - Roger’s grandfather – who anglicised the spelling of the family name from Kirov-Hrenszaw to Kirov-Renshaw. He thought it more appropriately inconspicuous for an English gentleman farmer.
May – The Hexagon Society – La Societe de l’Hexagone, I should say - have promoted Charles from Chevalier to Prieur-Commandant de la Langue Angloise, on the strength of his descent from Le Chevalier Rennes-Sieur. So now we are not only a mixed farm and a brewery, we are a Commanderie as well! We were thrilled to go to Soissons for his investiture, though of course we had to be blindfolded once we were inside the keep. It was quite a surprise to meet – oh, no, I mustn’t tell you who we met at the reception after the ceremony. But I thought he’d been dead for years.
June – Tamsin got nothing but Firsts, A’s, Grade 1 passes or whatever they are calling National Certificate grades this year – twelve of them! Somerville and Girton have been falling over themselves to offer her a place next term but at 15 I think she’s rather too young. Roger, on the other hand, is all for it – says the two years’ fees saved from Roedean will help us find her enormous tuition fees. Why has State education become more expensive than an English Public School? But he wants her to go to Bolingbroke College, which is a family tradition. I pointed out to him that Bolingbroke still doesn’t admit girls, but Roger says there has to be a first time for everything. He likes a fight, as you know.
July – Tamsin has announced that she won’t go to University at all – she wants to become a nun. Roger and I were absolutely firm with her and told her that she must finish her education first. She went straight up to her room, locked the door and didn't come out or speak to anyone for a month.
August – Roger and I had a wonderful three weeks in Florida. As he says, it’s like a gigantic Butlin’s retirement home built on a crocodile-infested swamp, but the Latin American emigres are absolutely charming, extremely generous and most hospitable. Xavier has many friends in the Cuban, Colombian and Venezuelan expatriate community there, but what a place to retire to from the political instability of one’s own country! The crime rate in Florida is so high that these well-to-do South Americans all seem to live virtually under siege, and the state police are so under-resourced that Xavier’s friends have to arm their servants with machine-guns. I wonder whether President Bush has any idea what a mess his brother has got into as governor. Of course it’s all too easy to see that the cause of all that crime in Florida is allowing all the work-shy petty criminals from council estates all over Britain to buy time-share apartments there. I’d write to Mr Bush and tell him myself, if I weren’t worried that he’d have them all forcibly repatriated.
Anyway, we arrived home late one night from the airport, absolutely shattered. All the lights were off but we could see – of all things - a floodlight trained on Tamsin’s window (until there was a tinkling of broken glass and it went out). There was also something luminous thrashing about in the moat. When we drove up we could see in the light of the car headlamps that it was Justin wearing a fluorescent white dress with a light blue cloak and a long blonde wig. As he scrambled up the bank towards us we noticed Tamsin’s bedroom window was open and she was screaming abuse and throwing shoes and books at Justin. He admitted that he had thought it a good idea to dress up as the Virgin Mary, lowering himself down from the roof to hover, radiating light, in the air outside Tamsin’s window, telling her what a bad girl she was to disobey her parents and how disappointed she was in her, and that she must agree to read Physics at Bolingbroke. Tamsin had spotted the deception at once, and cut the wire, about five minutes before we arrived on the scene. Roger’s response was to push Justin back into the moat, which brought Justin back within range of a well-aimed paperweight from Tamsin, knocking him out cold. We had a lot of explaining to do at the Casualty Department of Louth Infirmary, but at least Tamsin is speaking to us again.
September - Justin offered to stand in for Cetchewayo at the opening of his exhibition in New York. He doesn’t learn. Great-Aunt Lavinia insisted on going instead.. Roger schooled her in all the right things to say about composition, chiaroscuro, impasto, gestural quality, atmospheric perspective, the beholder's share and things like that.
October – Tamsin is settling in well at Oxford (apparently the Dean and the Senior Tutor of Bolingbroke College are old friends of Charles’s, so she's been entered as Thomas not Tamsin), but she writes to say she has become an atheist. If there really were a God, she argues, how could He allow people like Justin to exist? I have to admit that I sometimes wonder myself. There was a bit of a panic one morning when Cetchewayo escaped from the Orangery (I suppose he was looking for Great Aunt Lavinia, as he's been missing her terribly during her American tour). The police found him in an art materials shop in Mablethorpe, and they called in the RSPCA, who eventually overpowered him and brought him back. The bill is not something we want to think about. That's the downside of having an artistic temperament in the family, so to speak.
November – Reports that the Black Beast of Benniworth has been seen again, turned out to be groundless. It was a silage bale that made Mr Wragby's horse bolt after all.
December - Roger's book-signing tour meant it was tedious not to have him around to help with the Christmas preparations, but it does mean we'll be able to keep Matilda in the air for another year. Hurrah!
The Corpse Candles have been appearing over the Mere on frosty nights before Saint Andrew’s Eve, so I fear 2005 will prove to be a bit of a roller-coaster. Hang on tight!
Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws,
Wednesday, 24 December 2003
Christmas Newsletter 2003
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
Well, here we are again - all another year older. What a year we’ve had!
January – We have a new priest at St Martin's, a Mr Benworth. Old Mr Theddlethorpe retired after 53 years’ ministry in the parish. He was never the same after the mince pie episode at the Millennium Carol Service, when I dusted the pies with what I’d thought was icing sugar but which turned out to be one of Xavier’s medicinal powders. You may remember the choir all started giggling and Mr Theddlethorpe, who ate several mince pies, thought his trousers were full of light and took them off to show everyone, poor man. Then he tried to get up the great hall chimney because he said he could see the Star of Bethlehem. He’s gone to his niece in Skegness for a well-earned rest.
Fr Benworth has revived the Plough Monday Mass and Almsgiving Procession at St Martin’s. I don’t think we’ve had one since 1547. It was very well-attended, and Mr Benworth blessed all the ploughs and tractors before they drove in procession around the village, singing for largesse and daring the householders to take the consequences of not giving them anything. Nearly £35,000 was collected, which is not really as surprising as it sounds because no-one wants their front gardens ploughed up. I like Mr Benworth. He is an unusual blend of traditionalist and entrepreneur, and could certainly teach some of the Countryside Alliance groups a thing or two about fund-raising.
February – We had a total power failure. Something had gnawed all the insulation off the cables in the main generator fuse-box in the Moat House. It seems to have been home to a colony of feral hamsters for a number of years – which is odd, as none of the children has ever had a hamster. But why do they always strip away wiring insulation? Roberta said perhaps they simply forage materials to make repairs on their spacecraft, and that we should look for a tiny crash-crater nearby. It would explain a lot about hamsters in general, and ours in particular.
March - We heard that Julia’s battalion took a town in Southern Iraq on the 19th. It’s all rather worrying, because the news said they’d taken it again on the 21st, on the 23rd, and again on the 25th. The BBC is getting dreadful for showing repeats. Then on the 28th we actually saw her on television, in a command post. They were all wearing gas-masks but you could tell it was Julia because she was the only officer carrying a hockey-stick.
April – Busy packing Cetchewayo’s paintings for an exhibition in New York. They do know he’s a gorilla, I suppose? Cetchewayo insisted on helping, so it took weeks. He has a fascination with bubble wrap, popping the little blisters the way that allegedly more intelligent humans do, for hours on end.
May – One morning I found Cetchewayo in Roger’s study, hunched over the computer. He was fascinated by a screen full of what looked just like little plastic bubbles. You click on a bubble with the mouse and it pops, just like the real thing only not so wasteful. It turned out that the twins had logged him onto a website called – would you believe it? www.virtualbubblewrap.com. Well, it keeps him quiet so that we can finish packing his paintings in peace. A few days later Justin hired a gorilla suit and logged onto the Tate Gallery online, and I actually thought for a minute it was really Cetchewayo. It would have been quite a good joke I suppose, but at that moment Cetchewayo shambled into the room, no doubt looking forward to a few hours’ virtual bubble-popping. He went into a perfect fit of rage at seeing what appeared to be another gorilla seated at Roger’s Apple Macintosh. Justin was rushed to hospital and I’m glad to say is as well as can be expected.
June – Cetchewayo has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year. Dear Aunt Lavinia is so proud.
July – We decided not to get rid of Rebecca’s camel after all. She was off her feed for a while and terribly moody, so the twins went and got her a boyfriend. As soon as she was lactating – we might have known – Uncle Igor simply couldn’t resist milking her to make shu’bat, which he tells me from his days out East is the ancestor of what we call sherbet today. Well, it’s fizzy but there the resemblance ends. Imagine a caffe latte made with double cream yoghurt which bubbles and is alcoholic, and doesn’t taste of coffee so much as those Norwegian goat cheeses you can pick up at Fortnum’s. Justin suggested offering some to the new Iraqi deputy finance minister, who stopped off with Charles and Xavier on their way to Baghdad - but he’s very Westernised and prefers Scotch and Diet Coke (together, unfortunately). Roger nearly went ballistic when he mixed himself a large one with ice, a twist of lemon and a 20-year-old Deanston. I told Roger that you have to be patient with foreigners who are struggling to copy our ways.
August – Some Americans – the Wrenshore Society - have been in touch, claiming kinship. They say they are descended from a Mr Obadiah and a Mrs Rejoice-In-The-Lord’s-Election Wrenshore, who went over from Boston in 1678. I confess I would have preferred some good Maryland Catholics, but we must be content with what we can get. I always thought we came from a Tadeusz Hrenszaw, a Lithuanian shipwright and drinking companion of Peter the Great. I really must do some research of my own. Perhaps we can host a Clan Gathering next year – Americans all seem to like that sort of thing. It might even make us some money, which farming certainly doesn’t.
September - Roger is looking at DEFRA grants for a wind farm. Not that we want a forest of those horrid propellers on masts, you understand – nothing of the sort. Roger reckons our Frisian herd produces enough methane to light up most of Kesteven.
October – It hasn’t rained for 22 weeks now. The only person we know who is at all pleased about this is Uncle Igor, who says the beet mash is yielding a specific gravity several points higher than usual, because of the high sugar level due to the reduced water content of the beet.
November - To Horncastle with the Mink Hounds for Declaration Day. Lately, no Animal Righters have bothered the Hunt. Perhaps they think that with the new legislation it’s all in the bag – anyway, the Louth branch of the League Against Cruel Sports have turned their attention to the bloodthirsty depravity of angling. They’re picketing the fish and chip shop. I ask you! Perhaps they hope one day to see, when all right-thinking people will be Vegans and the rest of us in prison, the waters of the River Bain full once more of innocent cod and haddock, frolicking free from molestation.
The Horncastle Tar Baby Night was great fun as usual. The Fire Brigade were out in force. It’s impossible to insure the event these days, so it was just as well that the only place that burned down this year was the Fire Station. It turned out that one of the firemen had left a chip pan on the stove.
What a splendid Rugby World Cup Final! After 37 years of boredom watching the Australians win year after year, it seems as if absolutely everyone thought it was time for a change (except the Australians, of course). On television you could see people supporting England everywhere – even in the Republic of Georgia, where they were having a revolution, the TV news showed the streets of Tblisi were packed with cheering people waving England flags.
I am disappointed in the Reverend Mr Benworth: he has decided to have an Anthony Trollope Carol Service on Advent Sunday to get us all in the Christmas spirit, with everyone dressed up as characters from Trollope’s novels, with drifts of polystyrene snow and lanterns on sticks and the local TV present. No doubt there will be fast food trailers manned by mob-capped creatures selling their Dunkin’ Do-Nuts repackaged as Mrs Miggins’ Figgy Muffins. I have to say it all sounds absolutely ghastly.
December - I must say I misjudged Mr Benworth. It was a wonderful event. Everyone joined in with spirit. Uncle Igor dressed up as Mr Harrison, Olivia and Robert as Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba (though I’m not sure who was which), Roger went as Silas Marner, Mr Wragby as Rupert of Hentzau and Wilhelmina as Daisy Miller. The twins were the Hound of the Baskervilles and the Beckings managed to represent every single member of the Forsyte family. I went as Becky Sharp, and so did half the WI, but apart from that little unpleasantness it was all tremendous fun and I’m just amazed at how well-read we all are as a community here. Oscar was Ivanhoe, and Julia, on home leave, made a splendid Flashman. As it was advertised in the diocesan magazine last month, people came from miles around to see it and take part.
Uncle Igor’s mulled beetroot and cranberry Merlot went down very well. Good job there were plenty of polystyrene granules on the ground, for those unused to the punch it delivers. Tamsin is looking at a way of binding the polystyrene granules together so they can be thrown like snowballs which break up on impact. It could be a saleable, all-the-year-round novelty, especially as Christmas seems to come upon us earlier every year and it almost never snows in Lincolnshire until January. Next year I can see all the little grinning urchin chimney-sweeps at the Trollope Yuletide Festival styrene-balling the top hats off the heads of the kindly old gentlemen. The media will love it.
Justin turned up kitted out as Bill Sykes, and caused havoc up on the church roof with a surplus tar baby which was supposed to be the kidnapped Tiny Tim from the tense last chapter of The Water Babies, the bit when the police are hunting him after he murders Little Nell. One waggish literatus in the crowd shouted out: “Fifty pounds for the boy!”, and several of the lads just coming out of The Three Legged Mare took him at his word. Fortunately Justin had roped himself to a stone angel on the tower. Unfortunately the angel was only held in place by cobwebs and gravity – so there’s now a lovely photograph of an airborne praying stone angel, Bill Sykes and a tar baby all roped together in mid-air, on our website at www.kirov-renshaws.org.uk. Justin was rushed to hospital and is doing as well as can be expected.
All through Advent the Horseless Headsman has been seen wandering around the ruins in Boggart’s Copse, beckoning, so it’s sure to mean interesting times in the year ahead. Let’s hope we all survive to see another Newsletter!
Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws,
Well, here we are again - all another year older. What a year we’ve had!
January – We have a new priest at St Martin's, a Mr Benworth. Old Mr Theddlethorpe retired after 53 years’ ministry in the parish. He was never the same after the mince pie episode at the Millennium Carol Service, when I dusted the pies with what I’d thought was icing sugar but which turned out to be one of Xavier’s medicinal powders. You may remember the choir all started giggling and Mr Theddlethorpe, who ate several mince pies, thought his trousers were full of light and took them off to show everyone, poor man. Then he tried to get up the great hall chimney because he said he could see the Star of Bethlehem. He’s gone to his niece in Skegness for a well-earned rest.
Fr Benworth has revived the Plough Monday Mass and Almsgiving Procession at St Martin’s. I don’t think we’ve had one since 1547. It was very well-attended, and Mr Benworth blessed all the ploughs and tractors before they drove in procession around the village, singing for largesse and daring the householders to take the consequences of not giving them anything. Nearly £35,000 was collected, which is not really as surprising as it sounds because no-one wants their front gardens ploughed up. I like Mr Benworth. He is an unusual blend of traditionalist and entrepreneur, and could certainly teach some of the Countryside Alliance groups a thing or two about fund-raising.
February – We had a total power failure. Something had gnawed all the insulation off the cables in the main generator fuse-box in the Moat House. It seems to have been home to a colony of feral hamsters for a number of years – which is odd, as none of the children has ever had a hamster. But why do they always strip away wiring insulation? Roberta said perhaps they simply forage materials to make repairs on their spacecraft, and that we should look for a tiny crash-crater nearby. It would explain a lot about hamsters in general, and ours in particular.
March - We heard that Julia’s battalion took a town in Southern Iraq on the 19th. It’s all rather worrying, because the news said they’d taken it again on the 21st, on the 23rd, and again on the 25th. The BBC is getting dreadful for showing repeats. Then on the 28th we actually saw her on television, in a command post. They were all wearing gas-masks but you could tell it was Julia because she was the only officer carrying a hockey-stick.
April – Busy packing Cetchewayo’s paintings for an exhibition in New York. They do know he’s a gorilla, I suppose? Cetchewayo insisted on helping, so it took weeks. He has a fascination with bubble wrap, popping the little blisters the way that allegedly more intelligent humans do, for hours on end.
May – One morning I found Cetchewayo in Roger’s study, hunched over the computer. He was fascinated by a screen full of what looked just like little plastic bubbles. You click on a bubble with the mouse and it pops, just like the real thing only not so wasteful. It turned out that the twins had logged him onto a website called – would you believe it? www.virtualbubblewrap.com. Well, it keeps him quiet so that we can finish packing his paintings in peace. A few days later Justin hired a gorilla suit and logged onto the Tate Gallery online, and I actually thought for a minute it was really Cetchewayo. It would have been quite a good joke I suppose, but at that moment Cetchewayo shambled into the room, no doubt looking forward to a few hours’ virtual bubble-popping. He went into a perfect fit of rage at seeing what appeared to be another gorilla seated at Roger’s Apple Macintosh. Justin was rushed to hospital and I’m glad to say is as well as can be expected.
June – Cetchewayo has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year. Dear Aunt Lavinia is so proud.
July – We decided not to get rid of Rebecca’s camel after all. She was off her feed for a while and terribly moody, so the twins went and got her a boyfriend. As soon as she was lactating – we might have known – Uncle Igor simply couldn’t resist milking her to make shu’bat, which he tells me from his days out East is the ancestor of what we call sherbet today. Well, it’s fizzy but there the resemblance ends. Imagine a caffe latte made with double cream yoghurt which bubbles and is alcoholic, and doesn’t taste of coffee so much as those Norwegian goat cheeses you can pick up at Fortnum’s. Justin suggested offering some to the new Iraqi deputy finance minister, who stopped off with Charles and Xavier on their way to Baghdad - but he’s very Westernised and prefers Scotch and Diet Coke (together, unfortunately). Roger nearly went ballistic when he mixed himself a large one with ice, a twist of lemon and a 20-year-old Deanston. I told Roger that you have to be patient with foreigners who are struggling to copy our ways.
August – Some Americans – the Wrenshore Society - have been in touch, claiming kinship. They say they are descended from a Mr Obadiah and a Mrs Rejoice-In-The-Lord’s-Election Wrenshore, who went over from Boston in 1678. I confess I would have preferred some good Maryland Catholics, but we must be content with what we can get. I always thought we came from a Tadeusz Hrenszaw, a Lithuanian shipwright and drinking companion of Peter the Great. I really must do some research of my own. Perhaps we can host a Clan Gathering next year – Americans all seem to like that sort of thing. It might even make us some money, which farming certainly doesn’t.
September - Roger is looking at DEFRA grants for a wind farm. Not that we want a forest of those horrid propellers on masts, you understand – nothing of the sort. Roger reckons our Frisian herd produces enough methane to light up most of Kesteven.
October – It hasn’t rained for 22 weeks now. The only person we know who is at all pleased about this is Uncle Igor, who says the beet mash is yielding a specific gravity several points higher than usual, because of the high sugar level due to the reduced water content of the beet.
November - To Horncastle with the Mink Hounds for Declaration Day. Lately, no Animal Righters have bothered the Hunt. Perhaps they think that with the new legislation it’s all in the bag – anyway, the Louth branch of the League Against Cruel Sports have turned their attention to the bloodthirsty depravity of angling. They’re picketing the fish and chip shop. I ask you! Perhaps they hope one day to see, when all right-thinking people will be Vegans and the rest of us in prison, the waters of the River Bain full once more of innocent cod and haddock, frolicking free from molestation.
The Horncastle Tar Baby Night was great fun as usual. The Fire Brigade were out in force. It’s impossible to insure the event these days, so it was just as well that the only place that burned down this year was the Fire Station. It turned out that one of the firemen had left a chip pan on the stove.
What a splendid Rugby World Cup Final! After 37 years of boredom watching the Australians win year after year, it seems as if absolutely everyone thought it was time for a change (except the Australians, of course). On television you could see people supporting England everywhere – even in the Republic of Georgia, where they were having a revolution, the TV news showed the streets of Tblisi were packed with cheering people waving England flags.
I am disappointed in the Reverend Mr Benworth: he has decided to have an Anthony Trollope Carol Service on Advent Sunday to get us all in the Christmas spirit, with everyone dressed up as characters from Trollope’s novels, with drifts of polystyrene snow and lanterns on sticks and the local TV present. No doubt there will be fast food trailers manned by mob-capped creatures selling their Dunkin’ Do-Nuts repackaged as Mrs Miggins’ Figgy Muffins. I have to say it all sounds absolutely ghastly.
December - I must say I misjudged Mr Benworth. It was a wonderful event. Everyone joined in with spirit. Uncle Igor dressed up as Mr Harrison, Olivia and Robert as Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba (though I’m not sure who was which), Roger went as Silas Marner, Mr Wragby as Rupert of Hentzau and Wilhelmina as Daisy Miller. The twins were the Hound of the Baskervilles and the Beckings managed to represent every single member of the Forsyte family. I went as Becky Sharp, and so did half the WI, but apart from that little unpleasantness it was all tremendous fun and I’m just amazed at how well-read we all are as a community here. Oscar was Ivanhoe, and Julia, on home leave, made a splendid Flashman. As it was advertised in the diocesan magazine last month, people came from miles around to see it and take part.
Uncle Igor’s mulled beetroot and cranberry Merlot went down very well. Good job there were plenty of polystyrene granules on the ground, for those unused to the punch it delivers. Tamsin is looking at a way of binding the polystyrene granules together so they can be thrown like snowballs which break up on impact. It could be a saleable, all-the-year-round novelty, especially as Christmas seems to come upon us earlier every year and it almost never snows in Lincolnshire until January. Next year I can see all the little grinning urchin chimney-sweeps at the Trollope Yuletide Festival styrene-balling the top hats off the heads of the kindly old gentlemen. The media will love it.
Justin turned up kitted out as Bill Sykes, and caused havoc up on the church roof with a surplus tar baby which was supposed to be the kidnapped Tiny Tim from the tense last chapter of The Water Babies, the bit when the police are hunting him after he murders Little Nell. One waggish literatus in the crowd shouted out: “Fifty pounds for the boy!”, and several of the lads just coming out of The Three Legged Mare took him at his word. Fortunately Justin had roped himself to a stone angel on the tower. Unfortunately the angel was only held in place by cobwebs and gravity – so there’s now a lovely photograph of an airborne praying stone angel, Bill Sykes and a tar baby all roped together in mid-air, on our website at www.kirov-renshaws.org.uk. Justin was rushed to hospital and is doing as well as can be expected.
All through Advent the Horseless Headsman has been seen wandering around the ruins in Boggart’s Copse, beckoning, so it’s sure to mean interesting times in the year ahead. Let’s hope we all survive to see another Newsletter!
Best wishes from all the Kirov-Renshaws,
Tuesday, 24 December 2002
Christmas Newsletter 2002
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
So sorry you didn’t hear from us last year - I quite forgot to send out
the Newsletter because of all the trouble with the floods, and then with Foot and Mouth. Of course, it could have been much worse for us. As it happened, Olivia’s TA battalion was on standby at the time, so we had them stand guard over the stock after we fed them with the mashings from Uncle Igor’s vodka still. They all looked dead enough to convince the DEFRA inspectors (who have only the vaguest idea what a sheep or a cow looks like anyway). Then we had an ideal excuse to burn up all the old tractor tyres and Wellingtons that have been piling up around the place since the War, along with poor Aunt Eudora’s collection of shoes. The things one has to do to in farming nowadays. I must say, though, that grim as life is, things this year seem to have taken a turn for the better - though it didn’t seem that way at first...
the Newsletter because of all the trouble with the floods, and then with Foot and Mouth. Of course, it could have been much worse for us. As it happened, Olivia’s TA battalion was on standby at the time, so we had them stand guard over the stock after we fed them with the mashings from Uncle Igor’s vodka still. They all looked dead enough to convince the DEFRA inspectors (who have only the vaguest idea what a sheep or a cow looks like anyway). Then we had an ideal excuse to burn up all the old tractor tyres and Wellingtons that have been piling up around the place since the War, along with poor Aunt Eudora’s collection of shoes. The things one has to do to in farming nowadays. I must say, though, that grim as life is, things this year seem to have taken a turn for the better - though it didn’t seem that way at first...
January - Terrible news came from cousin Benjamin on his farm in Zimbabwe: he was besieged by hundreds of war veterans, to whom the government has promised his land. I really can’t imagine anything like that happening in England - say, the Louth branch of the Royal British Legion camping out in our beet and demanding the whole place be turned into Council allotments. They must be mad. Nobody in their right minds wants to take up farming.
February - Benjamin asked if he could send Great-Aunt Lavinia to us. We could hardly refuse. Nor, it seems, could we refuse her silver-backed gorilla, Cetchewayo. Because of the
cold weather we put him in the Orangery to acclimatise. He is an engaging chap, if rather wilful, he really took to living in the Orangery, and absolutely refused to budge from there (he likes to nest in the branches of the hybrid Satsuma grapefruits, much to dear old Gresham’s
consternation, bless him). Roger, to cheer up poor Great-Aunt Lavinia, engaged an artist to come and paint Cetchewayo as a birthday surprise.
cold weather we put him in the Orangery to acclimatise. He is an engaging chap, if rather wilful, he really took to living in the Orangery, and absolutely refused to budge from there (he likes to nest in the branches of the hybrid Satsuma grapefruits, much to dear old Gresham’s
consternation, bless him). Roger, to cheer up poor Great-Aunt Lavinia, engaged an artist to come and paint Cetchewayo as a birthday surprise.
March - The painter, by arrangement, and so as not to arouse Lavinia’s suspicions, agreed to pose as the new under-gardener, whose first job was to hand-pollinate the trees in the Orangery. This conveniently explains his long-term presence in the Orangery, his paintbrushes, and his spending hours in the tree canopies up a step-ladder near Cetchewayo. It also means he can pollinate the citrus flowers at the same time.
April - Roger’s seminal work Post-Processualism and the Permeability Paradigm: Cognitive Problems in Late 20th Century Silaging, which caused such a storm at the Montevideo Conference in 1997, came out in paperback. Naturally, he’s delighted. Justin calls Roger the James Joyce of the academic world - no-one can understand a word he writes, so he must be a genius. He’s jealous, of course. To cap it all, Roger was also awarded the Sainsbury
Humanities Professorship at Kesteven University College. Perhaps he can now do something about persuading Sainsbury’s to pay us slightly more for our milk than it costs us to produce. If not, we might as well let the cows go, buy our milk from Sainsbury’s, empty it into the tanker and sell it back to them. We’d have a use for all the empty plastic containers, too: you see, we are now officially the Bain Valley Brewery, as well as Sotby Hall Farm. Uncle Igor’s GM maize lager made its first appearance two years ago as a guest beer at the Green Man in Utterby, then won the Gold Medal at the Market Rasen Beer Festival, and last year we started supplying two or three other local pubs with a barrel. Now we do four farmers’ markets and a dozen pubs between Louth and Lincoln. Uncle Igor wanted to call it “Kirov Cossack For Men”, until Oscar persuaded him that that was already the name for a popular aftershave. Justin said no-one would know the difference. Anyway, thanks to Oscar, it’s now sold as “Lincolnshire Poacher Ale - Smooth and Golden as the Cornfields of the Lincolnshire Wolds”. Roger says it tastes like a low-calorie diet pilsener with a double scotch in it. I wouldn’t know about that, but the landlord at the Green Man makes his customers hand over their car keys before he sells them a half pint (he refuses to serve it in pint glasses at all), and when it was offered to the Hunt as a stirrup-cup at the Utterby Meet last year, no-one got further than the first hedge.
Humanities Professorship at Kesteven University College. Perhaps he can now do something about persuading Sainsbury’s to pay us slightly more for our milk than it costs us to produce. If not, we might as well let the cows go, buy our milk from Sainsbury’s, empty it into the tanker and sell it back to them. We’d have a use for all the empty plastic containers, too: you see, we are now officially the Bain Valley Brewery, as well as Sotby Hall Farm. Uncle Igor’s GM maize lager made its first appearance two years ago as a guest beer at the Green Man in Utterby, then won the Gold Medal at the Market Rasen Beer Festival, and last year we started supplying two or three other local pubs with a barrel. Now we do four farmers’ markets and a dozen pubs between Louth and Lincoln. Uncle Igor wanted to call it “Kirov Cossack For Men”, until Oscar persuaded him that that was already the name for a popular aftershave. Justin said no-one would know the difference. Anyway, thanks to Oscar, it’s now sold as “Lincolnshire Poacher Ale - Smooth and Golden as the Cornfields of the Lincolnshire Wolds”. Roger says it tastes like a low-calorie diet pilsener with a double scotch in it. I wouldn’t know about that, but the landlord at the Green Man makes his customers hand over their car keys before he sells them a half pint (he refuses to serve it in pint glasses at all), and when it was offered to the Hunt as a stirrup-cup at the Utterby Meet last year, no-one got further than the first hedge.
May - Mr Ford the painter and Cetchewayo are getting along famously. He has built a platform up in the canopy, where he now takes his meals and even sleeps at night. He has had to supply Cetchewayo with his own paints, brushes and canvases, because the gorilla is so interested in what he’s doing and wants to help, and gets awfully cross if he isn’t allowed. So Cetchewayo paints away and allows Mr Ford to paint him. Mr Ford says Cetchewayo has produced several works already which wouldn’t look out of place in the Tate Modern. He says he may be able to interest a collector, in return for an agent’s commission.
June - Imagine! A rather large painting by Cetchewayo, just a few stripes of raw colour running into each other really, fetched £17,500 at Bonham’s the other day! More wonderful news - Wilhelmina, as part of her therapy, is now working in the accessories department at
Halford’s in Market Rasen. She’s doing well, although suddenly coming across a complete bicycle will still cause her screaming fits. Everyone says what a brave girl she is.
Halford’s in Market Rasen. She’s doing well, although suddenly coming across a complete bicycle will still cause her screaming fits. Everyone says what a brave girl she is.
July - Rebecca won a Waitrose Bursary, which we’re all over the moon about, but it now means the camel will need a new home - so if you think you can help, do please get in touch!
August - Our agricultural student accidentally fuelled up the combine harvester with a drum
of Uncle Igor’s beetroot kvass, mistaking it for red diesel. At least we’re fairly sure that’s what happened. There was an almighty explosion, and the only trace left was a huge spiral swathe in the middle of our hundred acres of barley. We reported the combine as stolen, and we’ve made up for the spoiled barley by charging hippies from Lincoln £5 a time to see the crop circle. Together with the insurance money for the combine, we should be able to make ends meet on the cereal front for another year. Good old Uncle Igor!
September - Most of us went down to Town for the Countryside Alliance March, in two coaches chartered by the Bain Valley Mink Hounds - which some of you may remember were
founded in 1995 after a mob of Animal Righters released about 5,000 caged mink from Mr Jennings’ farm over at Ranby. At the time, most of them were rounded up and homed in Paula’s laboratories, and they’ve come on wonderfully since then. The Mink Hound is a lovely, intelligent creature with a beautiful coat, part dachshund, part miniature Yorkshire terrier and - of course - part mink. They retrieve salmon, trout and waterfowl, and will give any pike a jolly good run for its money. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to interest them in
foxes - and Cruft’s won’t recognise them as a breed, which is an absolute disgrace.
founded in 1995 after a mob of Animal Righters released about 5,000 caged mink from Mr Jennings’ farm over at Ranby. At the time, most of them were rounded up and homed in Paula’s laboratories, and they’ve come on wonderfully since then. The Mink Hound is a lovely, intelligent creature with a beautiful coat, part dachshund, part miniature Yorkshire terrier and - of course - part mink. They retrieve salmon, trout and waterfowl, and will give any pike a jolly good run for its money. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to interest them in
foxes - and Cruft’s won’t recognise them as a breed, which is an absolute disgrace.
Anyway, once in London we decided to do both the ‘Liberty’ and the ‘Livelihood’ march routes, so I suppose we were counted twice - which is only fair as we had to leave Justine and some of the boys at home to watch the stables and kennels. At Hyde Park Corner we were confronted by a sort of New Age type, with pink hair and a nose ring, handing out leaflets explaining that it was morally depraved for people to do what we do. She said that she couldn’t understand what country people were complaining about, as no-one had to eat
meat and we all have such lovely fruit, vegetables and corn right outside our front doors, while people like her in the cities have to go a very long way to the supermarket. She said it cost her much more to drive her car than it did us, too, because city people don’t get cheap red diesel from the government like we do. She said that it would be much more humane to shoot foxes if they were a problem, and they could get the Army to do it like they did with all the cattle during the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak.
meat and we all have such lovely fruit, vegetables and corn right outside our front doors, while people like her in the cities have to go a very long way to the supermarket. She said it cost her much more to drive her car than it did us, too, because city people don’t get cheap red diesel from the government like we do. She said that it would be much more humane to shoot foxes if they were a problem, and they could get the Army to do it like they did with all the cattle during the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak.
While Paula and Justin held Roger back and Tamsin stuffed a bacon sandwich into his mouth, I drew a deep breath and told her that what we were protesting about was that country people have to go a very long way to find a fox, often having to travel great distances on horseback owing to the high cost of car insurance and the absence of public transport in rural areas. And thatwe might as well exercise the dogs while we’re at it. I added that when foxes run away across the fields and we follow them, it keeps them from being run over by traffic on busy roads too. I explained that foxes were moving into the towns from the countryside because it’s so hard for anything to make a living in the country any more. I said that if the government wants to stop it they should build more affordable houses in the countryside, which will attract more foxes and so country people won’t have to go so far to find one. She believed every word, and before she went away smiling and happy, Roger gave her a couple of Liberty and Livelihood stickers and a Mink Hounds placard. We spotted her
later on, marching through Parliament Square, and she waved to us.
later on, marching through Parliament Square, and she waved to us.
October - Uncle Juan came to stay for a few days on his way home from Rome. All very quiet until Hallowe’en, when he and Charles had a terrible argument. I don’t know what started it, but they’ve been very edgy in each other’s presence ever since Uncle Juan fixed the damp problem in the cellar two years ago. They were in the Billiard Room at midnight, shouting at each other in Latin and waving their arms about. There was a goat with Charles, and Uncle Juan was shouting at it, too. Then Charles left, slamming the door and drove away furiously. Then Uncle Juan celebrated Mass - on his own, just like the other year, but in the Billiard Room. After midnight. I ask you. I sometimes wonder if he’s finding that being a bishop is rather too much of a strain. We can’t find the goat anywhere.
November - The Horncastle Tar Baby Night was the usual riot of fun. Like all these old customs, its origins are lost in antiquity, and people still do them because they always have done. Needless to say, most of the Tar babies resembled Mr Blair again this year. If it really IS an old pagan magical practice of getting rid of evil spirits, I’d like to know what it is we’re doing wrong.
December - The plaintive whistle of the old Louth-Horncastle Flyer has been heard on still,
frosty nights. The last time that happened was just before it disappeared in a snowdrift during the terrible winter of 1895. I think something dreadful is going to happen, but Roger tells me not to be silly as it’s really quite good time-keeping for Great North-Eastern Trains.
frosty nights. The last time that happened was just before it disappeared in a snowdrift during the terrible winter of 1895. I think something dreadful is going to happen, but Roger tells me not to be silly as it’s really quite good time-keeping for Great North-Eastern Trains.
Well, all the best for a happy and prosperous New Year, from all of us Kirov-Renshaws!
Wednesday, 22 December 1999
Christmas Newsletter 1999
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
How time flies! It seems nothing like a year ago since I last snatched a few moments from my busy life to let you all have our news - but it is, isn't it?
Where to begin? The Boxing Day Hunt was a spectacular success: the Ridgebacks flushed seventeen hunt-saboteurs out of Bracey's Covert, and a Guardian reporter fell into a tiger pit the twins had dug at the edge of the wood. He was very nasty when I explained they were only playing and that anyway he was trespassing. Just as I was threatening to leave him there, Roger and Justin came up in the Jeep and hauled him out, then, as he was obviously in shock, took him to the station and put him on the express to Edinburgh, instead of the London train. We were in perfect fits about it for hours afterwards!
In January, Roger got a nice advance from the University press for his second work Contradictions in Post–Deconstructionist Semiotics: Arable or Dairy?, which unfortunately had to go straight towards paying for Tamsin's first year at Roedean. Uncle Igor converted the Aga to run on chicken methane, and following this up with his next project, the pheasant pens are producing enough fuel for the Head Keeper's Subaru. Then there was also a wonderful find! Joseph discovered a cache of 1797 Bual hidden behind a wall the builders were knocking down to enlarge the cellar so Charles can do his rituals properly when he's home.
February:
News came that Julia's paratroopers had retaken the airport at San Carlos! And a fortnight later Uncle Juan flew back there to celebrate a special thanksgiving Episcopal High Mass in the Cathedral. President Almeira is a very charming man and has very kindly written to say he will be delighted to come over to Lincolnshire for some rough shooting just as soon as his provisional government is recognized by the Foreign Office –though Xavier, Oscar and Humphrey (I should say Sir Humphrey now, really, shouldn't I? Well done, Bunnykin!) say we shouldn't hold our breath.
March:
Rain, rain, rain! The causeway was under water for three whole weeks! Justin and I had to take the dinghy to St. Martin's and rescue the sheep from the tower, where they had taken refuge. Clever things! Then in mid-month we were faced with enormous bills for repairing the hole in the roof after the Barguests left last year (I dare say you all remember what a trial that was), to pay for Rebecca's camel and Wilhelmina's sanatorium fees. So Roger and I simply had to agree that there was nothing for it but to apply for Government funding again.
Our Heritage Lottery bid had been rejected out of hand (that was their loss, and Bonhams' gain, as the stained glass fetched quite a bit over the reserve price), and to cap it all the National Trust and English Heritage had the cheek to tell us that in order to qualify for a grant we had to open up our dear lovely old home to people we don't even know!! As if having to meet some of our tenants' perfectly ghastly families at every New Year Dinner Dance at the Hall weren't ordeal enough... Roger was furious. Then, when I finally prevailed upon him to say we could let the public in for the couple of weeks in February while we're away in Barbados, and we offered them that, they said it wasn't enough! Would you believe they actually expected us to keep open house all through the summer? Yes! We couldn't believe it. So we've had to sell the lovely gardener's cottage to some retired time share agent from Manchester. Old Gresham was very good about having to move, poor dear man, and he is now nicely settled in a little Council house in Louth, and says he enjoys the nine miles' cycle ride here and back every day. Justin very sweetly fixed up a trailer for his bike so he can bring the lawn roller to work with him every day. He was so grateful to Justin he didn't know what to say, and burst into tears. So very embarrassing, but heartwarming at the same time.
April:
We finally got connected to the Internet! Come and say hello at kirov-renshaws@gchq.gov.uk! Dear, clever Oscar 'patched us in' from where he works, and said it wouldn't cost a penny. We started off getting thousands of messages every day, from people all over the world, nearly all of whom we don't even know, in every language you can think of, and on all kinds of subjects. I suppose lots of messages are bound to go astray, what with crossed telephone lines, wrong n umbers and that sort of thing: it's even worse than the Post Office.
May:
The Utterby St.Martin carnival was great fun as usual, not least its traditional climax when the torchlit procession down to the marshes ends with the customary ritual of 'Hanging the Frenchman'. Uncle Igor had volunteered to be the monkey this year, and looked a perfect scream in a gorilla suit he hired from Jester’s. It took six big lads from the village to hold him down (it seems he hadn't quite realized what was involved, and that no-one was going to actually kill him), and a Maria-ful of policemen from Louth to prevent the usual high-spirited horseplay from getting out of hand when Uncle Igor (who proved to have been a little bit the worse for racking off his sugar-beet sauternes that morning) grabbed the May Queen and climbed the church tower with the poor girl under his arm. Once at the top, he held her hostage and kept screaming things about having spent the entire war in Lincolnshire as a reserved-occupation farm labourer. Fortunately he was so upset he said it all in Ukranian. It took police helicopter to persuade him to come down, and free drinks at The Green Man all evening to mollify the local people. So much for ski-ing at Interlaken this year... I must say, though, that Uncle Igor is remarkably fit, considering he'll be 83 next birthday. He attributes it to plenty of turnip riesling and a physically active life undiminished since his days as a pris farm labourer in the 1940s.
June:
We had a surprise visit from four friends of Oscar's, who work with him in Cheltenham. Oscar wasn't at home, and they were so disappointed when we said we'd no idea where he was (you'd have thought they would have known, wouldn't you?) They asked if they could use our computer – it belongs to Oscar, anyway – and they very kindly took all the disks they said Oscar had forgotten to bring to work, and then they sat up half the night making back-up copies of everything on the computer for Oscar at Cheltenham - wasn't that nice of them? And they even installed some sort of programme to filter out all the lost messages we were getting. What wonderfully kind friends Oscar has.
July:
The cellar extension started to grow a smelly black mould in the centre of the floor, on the ceiling directly above and on the floor of the butler's pantry above that, on the ceiling of the butler's pantry as well. I thought the builders must have bridged the damp proof course, but Roger said we didn't have one. He immediately got on the telephone to Uncle Juan, of all people, who flew over the following weekend and fixed it. Then, oddly, he celebrated Mass all by himself down there in the basement. He seemed very cross with poor Charles, which I think is rather unfair as the damp can't have been his fault. Anyway, the whole house seems a lot warmer now. I never knew Uncle Juan was good at building ventilation -well, you don't expect a bishop to know about things like that, do you?
August:
The business of the Grey Lady running screaming down the Yew Walk last December turned out to have been poor Wilhelmina. In one of her more lucid moments she told us she had been having a recurring nightmare about all the family being bicycles and trying to make her one of them. She told us this on a visit with dear Doctor Hegel, who was delighted with her progress. Then, when it was time for her to go, Justin went and spoiled it all by lying in wait for her in the Long Gallery, leaning against the wall on his hands and knees with a glazed expression on his face and a bicycle-pump stuck through his belt at the back. He thought it was a huge joke until she retaliated by putting drawing-pins in his Wellingtons - "to puncture the bastard 's tyres," as she put it. Justin said rather nastily afterwards that if the Grey Lady did exist, the reason for her running screaming down the Yew Walk was because she'd met Wilhelmina coming the other way. What a tiresome thing sibling rivalry can be at times.
September:
Our GM soya crop of last year produced a splendid yield - Monsanto's were delighted, and so were we. We didn't dare tell a soul until now for security reasons – what with all the dreadful trouble others have had with those well-meaning city people who don't understand the country, grubbing the crops up without a by-your-leave. After all, it's obvious that these people don't really care about nature as we do in the country, because if they did, they'd be helping to protect rare plant species instead of destroying them, wouldn't they? Anyway, this year, all the weeds within a mile of the crop haven't seeded at all, so these GM plants are really much more beneficial to the environment than people realise.
October:
Uncle Igor couldn't resist trying his hand at GM Soya-bean lager. We'll let you know how it turns out next year.
November:
Oscar came home for a brief stay, for the first time in months. He seemed very upset that he had missed his friends in June. Charles was even more upset that Uncle Juan had been in the cellar. He's such an emotional lad. I told him the damp wasn't his fault, but still he seems to blame himself for some reason.
Oscar's friends turned up again, very early the next morning: they must work terribly hard at the Foreign Office. They very kindly offered Oscar a lift in their car back to Cheltenham, and wouldn't take no for an answer. He is ever so lucky to have colleagues like that. Then later, when Oscar was upstairs in his room, getting ready to go with them (two of his friends absolutely insisted on helping him pack), he fell out of the window but one of his friends just managed to catch hold of his arm and haul him back to safety. Oscar seemed very subdued after his near-accident – I expect it must have been the shock. He didn't even wave us goodbye when they drove off. Such a sensitive young man. That's Roger's side of the family, of course... And now here we are, nearly at the end of December, and the badgers are still using the dining-room carpet, so we decided to let them have it. Oscar and Justin took it down to the sett, left it outside one of the holes and the next morning it had disappeared. Such a lovely Ispahan. Now and again, though, when the dining-room is quiet in the late evening, one still snuffles in through the French windows and looks around in a confused sort of way as if looking for something, shakes his head and waddles off again.
Cook and I made the mince pies early this year. Going through the pantry, we found an envelope addressed to Xavier, which turned out to have a packet of icing sugar inside. It didn't taste quite right but, rather than waste it, we used it to dust the mince pies. I expect Xavier found a burst bag and used the first thing that came to hand, bless him!
The vicar and choir of St. Martin's came to sing carols as usual on the fourteenth, and as usual we served everyone hot punch and mince pies. I think the punch was rather too strong, because everyone started laughing and staggering, and couldn't sing a note afterwards (though it didn't stop them trying). Poor Mr. Theddlethorpe, the vicar, was decidedly squiffy. He suddenly shouted in a loud voice that his trousers were full of light. He then tried to take them off so he could show everyone, got his legs hopelessly tangled and fell over sideways in the fireplace, giggling, with the fire-dogs on top of him. It was only with great difficulty that Roger and Mr Tathwell, our new butler and Roger's chauffeur, managed to restrain him from climbing up the chimney because he said he could see the Star of Bethlehem. He hasn't looked me in the eye since. He's usually such a dignified man. I must have a word with Uncle Igor and tell him never to put any of his beetroot claret in the punch again. The phantom bomber squadron has been seen and heard at dusk lately on the old airfield, so some national disaster is expected before the New Year is very old. Let's hope it misses us and ours!
So - all the very best for the season from
All the Kirov-Renshaws.
How time flies! It seems nothing like a year ago since I last snatched a few moments from my busy life to let you all have our news - but it is, isn't it?
Where to begin? The Boxing Day Hunt was a spectacular success: the Ridgebacks flushed seventeen hunt-saboteurs out of Bracey's Covert, and a Guardian reporter fell into a tiger pit the twins had dug at the edge of the wood. He was very nasty when I explained they were only playing and that anyway he was trespassing. Just as I was threatening to leave him there, Roger and Justin came up in the Jeep and hauled him out, then, as he was obviously in shock, took him to the station and put him on the express to Edinburgh, instead of the London train. We were in perfect fits about it for hours afterwards!
In January, Roger got a nice advance from the University press for his second work Contradictions in Post–Deconstructionist Semiotics: Arable or Dairy?, which unfortunately had to go straight towards paying for Tamsin's first year at Roedean. Uncle Igor converted the Aga to run on chicken methane, and following this up with his next project, the pheasant pens are producing enough fuel for the Head Keeper's Subaru. Then there was also a wonderful find! Joseph discovered a cache of 1797 Bual hidden behind a wall the builders were knocking down to enlarge the cellar so Charles can do his rituals properly when he's home.
February:
News came that Julia's paratroopers had retaken the airport at San Carlos! And a fortnight later Uncle Juan flew back there to celebrate a special thanksgiving Episcopal High Mass in the Cathedral. President Almeira is a very charming man and has very kindly written to say he will be delighted to come over to Lincolnshire for some rough shooting just as soon as his provisional government is recognized by the Foreign Office –though Xavier, Oscar and Humphrey (I should say Sir Humphrey now, really, shouldn't I? Well done, Bunnykin!) say we shouldn't hold our breath.
March:
Rain, rain, rain! The causeway was under water for three whole weeks! Justin and I had to take the dinghy to St. Martin's and rescue the sheep from the tower, where they had taken refuge. Clever things! Then in mid-month we were faced with enormous bills for repairing the hole in the roof after the Barguests left last year (I dare say you all remember what a trial that was), to pay for Rebecca's camel and Wilhelmina's sanatorium fees. So Roger and I simply had to agree that there was nothing for it but to apply for Government funding again.
Our Heritage Lottery bid had been rejected out of hand (that was their loss, and Bonhams' gain, as the stained glass fetched quite a bit over the reserve price), and to cap it all the National Trust and English Heritage had the cheek to tell us that in order to qualify for a grant we had to open up our dear lovely old home to people we don't even know!! As if having to meet some of our tenants' perfectly ghastly families at every New Year Dinner Dance at the Hall weren't ordeal enough... Roger was furious. Then, when I finally prevailed upon him to say we could let the public in for the couple of weeks in February while we're away in Barbados, and we offered them that, they said it wasn't enough! Would you believe they actually expected us to keep open house all through the summer? Yes! We couldn't believe it. So we've had to sell the lovely gardener's cottage to some retired time share agent from Manchester. Old Gresham was very good about having to move, poor dear man, and he is now nicely settled in a little Council house in Louth, and says he enjoys the nine miles' cycle ride here and back every day. Justin very sweetly fixed up a trailer for his bike so he can bring the lawn roller to work with him every day. He was so grateful to Justin he didn't know what to say, and burst into tears. So very embarrassing, but heartwarming at the same time.
April:
We finally got connected to the Internet! Come and say hello at kirov-renshaws@gchq.gov.uk! Dear, clever Oscar 'patched us in' from where he works, and said it wouldn't cost a penny. We started off getting thousands of messages every day, from people all over the world, nearly all of whom we don't even know, in every language you can think of, and on all kinds of subjects. I suppose lots of messages are bound to go astray, what with crossed telephone lines, wrong n umbers and that sort of thing: it's even worse than the Post Office.
May:
The Utterby St.Martin carnival was great fun as usual, not least its traditional climax when the torchlit procession down to the marshes ends with the customary ritual of 'Hanging the Frenchman'. Uncle Igor had volunteered to be the monkey this year, and looked a perfect scream in a gorilla suit he hired from Jester’s. It took six big lads from the village to hold him down (it seems he hadn't quite realized what was involved, and that no-one was going to actually kill him), and a Maria-ful of policemen from Louth to prevent the usual high-spirited horseplay from getting out of hand when Uncle Igor (who proved to have been a little bit the worse for racking off his sugar-beet sauternes that morning) grabbed the May Queen and climbed the church tower with the poor girl under his arm. Once at the top, he held her hostage and kept screaming things about having spent the entire war in Lincolnshire as a reserved-occupation farm labourer. Fortunately he was so upset he said it all in Ukranian. It took police helicopter to persuade him to come down, and free drinks at The Green Man all evening to mollify the local people. So much for ski-ing at Interlaken this year... I must say, though, that Uncle Igor is remarkably fit, considering he'll be 83 next birthday. He attributes it to plenty of turnip riesling and a physically active life undiminished since his days as a pris farm labourer in the 1940s.
June:
We had a surprise visit from four friends of Oscar's, who work with him in Cheltenham. Oscar wasn't at home, and they were so disappointed when we said we'd no idea where he was (you'd have thought they would have known, wouldn't you?) They asked if they could use our computer – it belongs to Oscar, anyway – and they very kindly took all the disks they said Oscar had forgotten to bring to work, and then they sat up half the night making back-up copies of everything on the computer for Oscar at Cheltenham - wasn't that nice of them? And they even installed some sort of programme to filter out all the lost messages we were getting. What wonderfully kind friends Oscar has.
July:
The cellar extension started to grow a smelly black mould in the centre of the floor, on the ceiling directly above and on the floor of the butler's pantry above that, on the ceiling of the butler's pantry as well. I thought the builders must have bridged the damp proof course, but Roger said we didn't have one. He immediately got on the telephone to Uncle Juan, of all people, who flew over the following weekend and fixed it. Then, oddly, he celebrated Mass all by himself down there in the basement. He seemed very cross with poor Charles, which I think is rather unfair as the damp can't have been his fault. Anyway, the whole house seems a lot warmer now. I never knew Uncle Juan was good at building ventilation -well, you don't expect a bishop to know about things like that, do you?
August:
The business of the Grey Lady running screaming down the Yew Walk last December turned out to have been poor Wilhelmina. In one of her more lucid moments she told us she had been having a recurring nightmare about all the family being bicycles and trying to make her one of them. She told us this on a visit with dear Doctor Hegel, who was delighted with her progress. Then, when it was time for her to go, Justin went and spoiled it all by lying in wait for her in the Long Gallery, leaning against the wall on his hands and knees with a glazed expression on his face and a bicycle-pump stuck through his belt at the back. He thought it was a huge joke until she retaliated by putting drawing-pins in his Wellingtons - "to puncture the bastard 's tyres," as she put it. Justin said rather nastily afterwards that if the Grey Lady did exist, the reason for her running screaming down the Yew Walk was because she'd met Wilhelmina coming the other way. What a tiresome thing sibling rivalry can be at times.
September:
Our GM soya crop of last year produced a splendid yield - Monsanto's were delighted, and so were we. We didn't dare tell a soul until now for security reasons – what with all the dreadful trouble others have had with those well-meaning city people who don't understand the country, grubbing the crops up without a by-your-leave. After all, it's obvious that these people don't really care about nature as we do in the country, because if they did, they'd be helping to protect rare plant species instead of destroying them, wouldn't they? Anyway, this year, all the weeds within a mile of the crop haven't seeded at all, so these GM plants are really much more beneficial to the environment than people realise.
October:
Uncle Igor couldn't resist trying his hand at GM Soya-bean lager. We'll let you know how it turns out next year.
November:
Oscar came home for a brief stay, for the first time in months. He seemed very upset that he had missed his friends in June. Charles was even more upset that Uncle Juan had been in the cellar. He's such an emotional lad. I told him the damp wasn't his fault, but still he seems to blame himself for some reason.
Oscar's friends turned up again, very early the next morning: they must work terribly hard at the Foreign Office. They very kindly offered Oscar a lift in their car back to Cheltenham, and wouldn't take no for an answer. He is ever so lucky to have colleagues like that. Then later, when Oscar was upstairs in his room, getting ready to go with them (two of his friends absolutely insisted on helping him pack), he fell out of the window but one of his friends just managed to catch hold of his arm and haul him back to safety. Oscar seemed very subdued after his near-accident – I expect it must have been the shock. He didn't even wave us goodbye when they drove off. Such a sensitive young man. That's Roger's side of the family, of course... And now here we are, nearly at the end of December, and the badgers are still using the dining-room carpet, so we decided to let them have it. Oscar and Justin took it down to the sett, left it outside one of the holes and the next morning it had disappeared. Such a lovely Ispahan. Now and again, though, when the dining-room is quiet in the late evening, one still snuffles in through the French windows and looks around in a confused sort of way as if looking for something, shakes his head and waddles off again.
Cook and I made the mince pies early this year. Going through the pantry, we found an envelope addressed to Xavier, which turned out to have a packet of icing sugar inside. It didn't taste quite right but, rather than waste it, we used it to dust the mince pies. I expect Xavier found a burst bag and used the first thing that came to hand, bless him!
The vicar and choir of St. Martin's came to sing carols as usual on the fourteenth, and as usual we served everyone hot punch and mince pies. I think the punch was rather too strong, because everyone started laughing and staggering, and couldn't sing a note afterwards (though it didn't stop them trying). Poor Mr. Theddlethorpe, the vicar, was decidedly squiffy. He suddenly shouted in a loud voice that his trousers were full of light. He then tried to take them off so he could show everyone, got his legs hopelessly tangled and fell over sideways in the fireplace, giggling, with the fire-dogs on top of him. It was only with great difficulty that Roger and Mr Tathwell, our new butler and Roger's chauffeur, managed to restrain him from climbing up the chimney because he said he could see the Star of Bethlehem. He hasn't looked me in the eye since. He's usually such a dignified man. I must have a word with Uncle Igor and tell him never to put any of his beetroot claret in the punch again. The phantom bomber squadron has been seen and heard at dusk lately on the old airfield, so some national disaster is expected before the New Year is very old. Let's hope it misses us and ours!
So - all the very best for the season from
All the Kirov-Renshaws.
Saturday, 19 December 1998
Our first family Newsletter - Christmas Eve, 1998
Dear Distant Kin or Absent Friend,
This year we’ve decided to keep in touch with a round robin. Since he lives in the ivy which is slowly pulling down the stable block (or, possibly, holding it together), this is reasonably easy. The rest of you will have to make do with a cheap Christmas card and this word-processed circular.
Well, this year we have certainly had some ups and downs.
By the end of January, Roger’s post-doctoral thesis Non-Structuralism and the Determinist Ethos In Mixed Farming finally went to the publishers. There was an attempt on Xavier’s life in Buenos Aires, we think because of the old extradition problem. Thankfully he was just a shaken up, and only one of his bodyguards was killed.
In February, when draining the lake after Wilhelmina’s pet mackerel disappeared, Roger and Uncle Igor found the old stained-glass windows which have been missing from the chapel since the Reformation. Bonham’s have made us a very good offer but we’re still waiting to hear from the Heritage Lottery Fund before we commit ourselves to a final decision.
In March, molehills began to appear on the tennis-court, containing pieces of Roman tesserae, suggesting the mosaic floor of a villa beneath. Charles was consecrated as the new head of his Order. We weren’t allowed to attend, of course, but it must have been a very happy day for him and we’re sure you’ll join us in wishing him every success for the future.
April was very quiet. Hermione gave birth to five adorable little ones in the observatory. They choose the oddest places, don’t they? Tasha’s dirigible was sighted off Taiwan on the 26th.
In May, the Barguests finally went away! We all sleep much better now but the hole in the roof is going to be a problem for some time to come.
June: Olivia and Oscar jointly won the Gamage Cup at Hurlingham! Hurrah!
In July, the family triumphed again: Aunt Eudora’s ironing was awarded First Prize at the Institute’s annual Sale of Work and Uncle Igor’s Premier Grand Cru Sparkling Kale Wine received an honourable mention. He was awfully grumpy about it though, and it's as well the judges didn't understand Ukranian.
A very successful trout shoot on the river was organised in August by Roger and the boys for dear Count Mussorgsky and the Argentinian Defence Attache, a charming friend of Xavier’s. They got on surprisingly well together, and a glorious day’s bag was made even more memorable by the presence of the Bain Valley Mink Hounds, who kindly consented to act as beaters for us.
September was largely taken up with the removal of the tennis-court in numbered sections and its re-assembly on the other side of the orchard. The mole-hill tesserae turned out to have been a practical joke no-one will own up to. There are no moles on that part of the estate.
October saw the heaviest rains in living memory for this part of Lincolnshire. The cellars were flooded all month, so dear Uncle Igor’s still was an absolute godsend.
In November, we finally had to let old Mr. Kesteven go. A sad day. Eighty-seven years of loyal service. We understand he has a great-grand-niece in Mablethorpe who will look after him.
And here we are, nearly at the end of December, and the badgers are still using the dining-room carpet. Little Wilhelmina is getting over her fear of bicycles. The Grey Lady has been screaming down the Yew Walk again, so some national disaster is expected before the New Year is very old. Let’s hope it isn’t us! So - all the very best for the season from
All the Kirov-Renshaws.
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