Author Archives: Northern Hills

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In Which I Meet the Farmer on a Blustery Day

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I was about to say “You know how it is when you move house …”, but then I remembered that not everyone has packed up their worldly possessions over two dozen times, and there’s a very good chance you DON’T know how it is, so I’ll tell you.

When you move house, you are possessed by an almost fanatical determination that you are no longer going to live your life in deep litter. THIS time you will seize the opportunity of a new start to get your tragically shambolic life in order and keep it that way. Things will be placed in boxes, stacked on shelves and – in the case of clothes and bedding – laundered, ironed and folded neatly before being put away in their allotted homes.

And so it was that, having finally created some sort of order in the cottage, I decided the dogs’ hairy, smelly and generally objectionable bedding was ruining my carefully crafted ‘country idyll’ fantasy. I therefore heartlessly tempted them from their baskets with sausages, and purloined their blankets when their backs were turned. They, of course, weren’t remotely concerned. After all, that’s what your best armchairs are for.

It was perfect drying weather – sunny with a brisk breeze – promising to get everything dry and pong-free by evening. Smugly pleased with my handiwork, I left the machine churning away and set about unpacking a tea chest full of my most treasured ornaments. So immersed was I in welcoming my precious darlings  to their new home and finding just the right place for them on the whatnot that the strangled gurgling noises coming from the back of the house didn’t penetrate my brain until the water had flooded through the kitchen and was pooling around my feet in the hallway.

Screaming obscenities, I slithered and slipped over the near-lethal stone flags into the utility closely followed by two over-excited Jack Russells, who thought that I must have spotted a rabbit in the bedding plants, and were raring for the chase. The machine was haemorrhaging dirty water from the filter, which had been forced from its housing by the pressure of the accumulated hairs and gunk and was hanging down onto the floor, twitching as the machine lurched around in its death throes. Immediately, Boy Dog leapt on it, ripped it out and proceeded to worry it to death, showering the whole room with sodden fluff  and dog hairs, while the fat Old Lady Dog waddled about, bent double with excitement and barking herself into a coughing fit.

By the time I’d tripped over Boy Dog, reached the machine, tried and failed to turn it off, yanked the plug from the socket and finally wrestled the door open, I was as wet as the floor, but marginally drier than the blankets which had been part way through the rinse cycle when death came to Tricity Bendix.

I am not British for nothing however. I have the blood of Alfred the Great coursing through my veins, along with a helping of German, Irish, Scottish, French and Swedish – oh, and a teeny bit of Russian from my great-great-Aunt on my mother’s side. Nothing daunted, I wrung the blankets out by hand, dumped them in the laundry basket and took them out into the garden – where the brisk breeze of earlier in the day had cranked itself up into a Force 5. As Boy Dog ran deliriously around the shrubbery with the dead filter and Old Lady Dog wandered off to find some dirt to eat  I attached the blankets  to the line with virtually every clothes peg I possessed then went inside to clear up the mess and consider my options.

I was thumbing through the telephone book later that afternoon looking for the number of the nearest purveyor of washing machines when I glanced out of the window  just in time to see the Boy Dog’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ blanket hurtling over the hedge into the neighbouring field and straight, I had no doubt, into a cow clap.

There comes a point, during a day like this one, when a sort of calm resignation descends upon you and any subsequent domestic calamities simply have no power to touch you. I had reached that stage. My only reaction was, “Well, of course.”

A quick reconnaissance in the garden revealed that the blanket had not, in fact, landed in a cow clap at all but was snagged on a hawthorn, just out of reach – a preferable option, but one that meant I’d have to go round by the road to the gate and into the field to retrieve it.

At first glance the field was empty and I foolishly felt that perhaps – just perhaps – my luck was turning. That was before I spotted the cow. More specifically, before I spotted the cow standing by the cottage hedge with the blanket halfway down its throat.

With 20-20 hindsight, what I should probably have done is go and find the farmer and explain the problem. What I actually did, being both bloody minded and a bit thick, was go into the field, grab the remainder of the blanket and try to retrieve it from the cow’s gullet by brute force.

It’s amazing how strong a cow’s jaws are. You don’t really expect that from an animal that lives on grass. I mean, I’m an expert at forcing open a terrier’s jaws to separate it from favourite cardigans and whole chickens, but cows have teeth like tombstones and jaws of concrete and if they don’t want to open their mouths, nothing short of a car jack will make them.

I had the animal in a headlock when I noticed The Reverend Ruskin leaning on the gate, watching proceedings with mild interest.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted me with his usual amiable smile. “Should I go and fetch Maggie or Alec?”

“Who they?” I asked, trying to look as if wrestling with a Friesian was something I did every day.

“Oldhanger Farm. That’s one of their cows – and look – here come the others. Won’t be a minute – don’t go away. And don’t let go of that – whatever it is.”

I looked across the field in the direction he indicated and saw upwards of three dozen bovine silhouettes on the skyline, heading inexorably in my direction. And all the while, more and more of the blanket was disappearing into the cow’s slowly moving jaws.

By the time Maggie, a robustly-built woman in her forties clad in a tattersall check shirt and an ancient pair of dungarees, vaulted over the gate I was entirely surrounded by curious cows, and all you could see of Viggo Mortensen was his boots.

“Hello,” she said, cocking her head sideways. “I’m Maggie. I see you’ve met Betty.” She reached into a pocket and produced a handful of cattle pellets. “Look what I’ve got, Betts … your favourite … Let her come to me.”

I relinquished my hold on the animal who ambled towards Maggie in pursuit of cattle pellets, and I then watched queasily as the latter pulled Viggo and Orlando from the depths.

She handed it back to me with a barely suppressed smirk.

“I think it’ll need washing.”

Over at the gate, the Vicar snorted and went on his way.

(Picture credit: From a photograph by Peter Nijenhuis, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.)

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A Tortoise Called Eccles

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Tigh-na-MaraI’ve started working my way down my ‘To Do’ list.

It’s a thing of real beauty, written in neat capitals, logically laid out with the ‘Screamingly Urgent’ items at the top and the ‘When you get around to it” stuff at the bottom, and is – on the whole – a work of total fiction.

Human nature being what it is (especially THIS human’s nature) if the job at the top of the list doesn’t appeal much, and/or is likely to be expensive, I find something a little lower down that I hate the thought of less and which can theoretically be accomplished without any money changing hands.

Today was a case in point. At the top of the list is ‘Have Thatch Looked At’ – four words that contain the possibility of a whole world of pain. Thatched roofs, if in good nick and well-maintained, are wonderful things – waterproof, stormproof, cool in summer and warm in winter – but that ‘if’ is a loaded word. In his very carefully phrased report the Surveyor said that the roof appeared to be in reasonable shape for its years but he recommended calling in a thatcher to examine it properly, thus neatly discharging his duty to me as a surveyor and simultaneously whacking the ball straight back into my court.

Which is why I decided that what I really needed to do today was item number 5 on the list: ‘Animal-proof the garden’.

Confront most people with a young male Jack Russell, an elderly female Jack Russell and a tortoise of indeterminate years and then ask them which they would expect to be the hardest to keep in a garden, the vast majority would guess ‘the young male Jack Russell’, and they would be wrong. The answer is ‘the tortoise’.

My mother found the tortoise wandering across our lawn many years ago. It had a small hole drilled in its shell with a piece of frayed string threaded through it and it had plainly escaped from somewhere; but our enquiries locally drew a blank, so we kept it and christened it ‘Eccles’, just because we thought it was stupid name for a tortoise.

And here it is, several decades down the road, still with me, still taking its pleasures solemnly and still trying to escape at every available opportunity. I have over the years raked Eccles out of drains, from between rockery boulders and once, from part way up a chain link fence. I’ve chased him down the road, I’ve dug him out of rabbit burrows and I’ve found him stranded on his back on the patio – waving his stubby little legs wildly in the air and hissing in fury. Tortoise-proofing a garden isn’t a game for amateurs. It requires both low cunning and the ability to put yourself in the tortoise’s place, which is – of course – very close to the ground.

So there was a perfectly good reason why the Vicar found me flat on my stomach in the vegetable garden about three feet from the roadside hedge poking at the undergrowth with a broom handle. It just looked a bit eccentric.

“I’m Norman Ruskin. I’ve come to welcome you to Adverse Camber.” He tilted his head to one side, like a big, curious crow. “Can I help you with anything at all?”

“No. Uh … I mean – thank you, no.” I scrambled to my feet. “I’m just looking for escape holes for Eccles.”

I realized I could have phrased that more coherently, and had another go.

“I mean I’m looking for holes for Eccles to escape through – COULD escape to – escape THROUGH …. Hello Vicar, nice to meet you.” Desperately, I thrust my hand at him in greeting. “And I’m an atheist.”

I keep replaying it in my mind, over and over again. And every time, it gets worse.

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What’s in a Name?

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SIGNBeing nicely brought up, I felt obliged to offer the removal men breakfast down at the pub this morning.

I had no idea people could eat so much. You could have fed a small third-world nation on less than they put away between them in the space of half an hour. After dispatching bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, black pudding, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, tea, toast and marmalade with a speed more suggestive of famine than peckishness, they were still gazing longingly at the meat pies on the way out.

“Famous for our meat pies, we are.” The Landlord informed me, proudly. “If you want them, you’d better buy them now, because they’ll be gone before ten.”

I felt four pairs of pleading eyes swivelling towards me.

“No.” I said firmly. “I’ll make you all soup and sandwiches. Much healthier. Soup, sandwiches and fruit. No pies. Absolutely not.”

~~~:~~~

The Landlord very kindly loaned me a plastic bread tray to carry all the pies, crisps and sticky buns that I bought, and Big George bore it happily up the hill to the cottage while I used the pub’s Wi-Fi connection to check my almost non-existent bank balance.

By the time I’d had a little weep in a quiet corner, written the pub a cheque more in hope than expectation, walked and fed the dogs and deposited the tortoise in a place of safety in the garden, the house was rapidly filling with furniture and boxes. All in the wrong rooms.

“What happened to the system?!” I wailed.

Big George looked puzzled. “What system?”

“The coloured label system I explained to the lad with the earrings and the acne. Jason? Jackson?”

“Jenson.”

“Whatever. Coloured labels on doors of rooms. Coloured labels on boxes and bits of furniture. Match the two and bingo. Right stuff in right rooms.”

“Well, he didn’t mention it to me – but don’t worry Petal, I’ll sort it all out.” He took a deep breath and smiled at me as one would at a small child. “Now, how about a nice brew to go with those sticky buns?”

Two minutes later the entire village heard him telling Jenson exactly what he thought of his parentage, his unsavoury personal habits, his IQ and his likelihood of still having a job by nightfall – in no particular order.

After that, things went comparatively smoothly. By the time we broke for lunch, the van was three-quarters empty and we were all beginniing to relax a little.

Sitting in the front garden on an unlikely array of chairs, boxes and wobbly garden equipment we chatted amicably for a while about nothing in particular, until George’s eye alighted on the house name, swinging slightly drunkenly in an Olde Worlde fashion from a metal bracket by the front door: Tigh-na-Mara.

He sounded it out carefully. “Tie-na-mara. That’s a funny name.”

I was about to say “I know”, but before I could even draw breath, an unfamilar voice piped up from behind us.

“It’s TEE-na-mara actually.”

We all turned to look at the source of the sound – and it was the fourth removal man who hadn’t, as far as I could remember, uttered a single syllable in the last 48 hours. Short and squat and dark, he munched placidly on his crisps for a while before deciding to enlighten us.

“It’s Gaelic. It means ‘House by the Sea’. My gran used to run a B and B in Fife called Tigh-na-Mara.”

After that, he lapsed back into crunchy contemplation and never spoke again, leaving us to consider the local landscape of fields, hedges, trees, gardens, a couple of half-hearted streams and a bit of blasted heath … but no sea.

“Well, that’s odd.” George said eventually, with masterly understatement. “How far is the sea from here?”

“About 50 miles.” I hazarded, “Give or take.”

After that, we changed the subject.

By mid-afternoon they’d unloaded the last boxes and were gone, fortified with tea, sandwiches and a chunk of fruit cake I’d made in a fit of enthusiasm but then didn’t fancy on account of not really liking fruit cake.

Making their sandwiches had used up the last of my bread, so I thought it was an ideal opportunity to wander down into the village and make myself known at the local shop-cum-sub-post office.

Adverse Camber is a typical English village, having one main street and a central market square with many smaller roads radiating outwards, which is where the bulk of the villagers live. (Apart from those on ‘The New Estate’ who don’t really count because they aren’t really villagers – or so I’ve been told in complete confidence.)

The Post Office Stores occupy a prime position on Main Street, just up from Market Place, which would be an absolutely ideal location but for the fact that the pavement outside is just  wide enough for one person turned sideways – and the shop door therefore opens almost directly into the path of northbound traffic. The drag from passing logging lorries has been known to separate elderly ladies from their pensions.

Once inside, and clutching my sliced wholemeal, I struck up a conversation with the cheery middle-aged woman at the checkout.

“How do you do. ” I said, “I’ve just mov ….”

“Oh I know who you are dearie – you’ve just moved into Tigh-na-Mara. And very welcome you are too. That’ll be 99 pence, please.”

“Ah. Right. Good. Thank you.” As I handed over the money, a thought occurred to me. “The house name – Tigh-na-Mara … ”

“Yes?” She looked at me bright-eyed and expectant, poised to impart helpful information.

“Has it always been called that?”

“Oh no, dearie, no. The last owners – old Mr and Mrs Button – they called it that. They apparently saw it on a house when they were on holiday in Scotland and liked it so much, they changed the name of the cottage when they moved here – that’d be about 10 years ago now. Caused a bit of a stir at the time it did. You know – incomers arriving and changing historic house names and such.”

“I see. Yes. I imagine that it would.”

A cunning plan began to take shape in my brain, and I asked, as nonchalantly as I could, “What – er – what was it called before they changed it then?”

“Puddle Cottage.”

“Pardon?”

“Puddle Cottage. Seems the people who lived there back in the last century were the son and daughter-in-law of the owners of Pool House just up the hill. So they thought it would be funny to call it Puddle Cottage.”

I’m fairly sure that for a moment or two I just stood there with my mouth hanging open foolishly, but eventually I managed to gather my wits and, clasping my sliced wholemeal to my bosom  said weakly, “Tigh-na-Mara’s quite a nice name, don’t you think?” before launching myself into Main Street to take my chances with the logging lorries.

 

 

 

 

 

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Moving Day

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That went well.

In all of the many times I’ve moved house, I’ve never before seen the removal van stuck on a single track road in the middle of nowhere, with a car wedged sideways across the lane in front of it. In the car was a red-faced young woman in her early twenties, clutching the steering wheel in a death grip and sobbing convulsively.

It had all started so well – and everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the diversion …

I was up with the lark this morning and ready for the removal men when they arrived at 6.00am. (That’s ‘ready’ in the sense of upright, conscious and half-decently clothed – for the avoidance of doubt.)

By the time I’d put the kettle on for their first brew-up of the day, they’d already thrown half of the sitting room into the back of the van, and come midday they were grunting down the stairs with the contents of the library – 2,368 books packed neatly into cardboard boxes all thoughtfully labelled: “HEAVY – DANGER OF HERNIAS” (Well, I thought it was funny …)

By early-afternoon we were on our way to the village of Adverse Camber – the removal van going on ahead and Yours Truly bringing up the rear with two insanely barking Jack Russells, an antediluvian tortoise and the box containing the all-important kettle, mugs, tea bags and biscuits.

We knew where we were going. We’d pored over the map together and agreed on the best route to avoid narrow lanes, tractors and random flocks of sheep. What we hadn’t allowed for were the ‘ROAD AHEAD CLOSED’ signs and the big yellow and black diversion arrows pointing off at right angles to the way we wanted to go.

We followed them faithfully up into the hills, along lanes none of us even knew existed let alone had travelled down before until, finally, the signs stopped. That’s not ‘stopped’ as in ‘the diversion ended and we were back on track’ that’s ‘stopped’ as in ‘vanished into thin air’.

Turning around and going back wasn’t an option, so we all got out, spread the map on the bonnet of my car and peered at it, trying to work out which way we’d come and where we’d ended up. We eventually agreed unanimously that we had no idea (a) where we were or (b) how we got there.

Our only option was to carry on the way were going in the hope of either rejoining the main road or coming across someone we could ask for directions.

The road got narrower and narrower and rougher and rougher, and eventually sprouted grass and weeds down the middle – in exactly the way that most roads don’t. A little further on, the hedges started to brush the sides of the van and – worse – began to turn into drystone walls. Finally however, just as all hope seemed to be fading, we crested a hill and saw traffic moving along a road in the distance. Wonderful bright, shiny polluting traffic out in the real world.

Like a horse sensing water in the desert our mini-convoy picked up speed – and that’s when we met the unhappy young woman in her nice, new, little runaround. She was so startled that she almost ran into us, stopping inches from the van’s radiator grill. And then she just sat there, bug-eyed and shaken, waiting for the van driver to make the next move – which of course he couldn’t because he was driving a socking great pantechnicon and, additionally, had me (plus two insanely barking Jack Russells and an antediluvian tortoise) behind him.

He wound down the window and explained the problem to the girl, and as he talked to her, her eyes got bigger and bigger and bigger. Realizing we weren’t going anywhere in a hurry, I got out of my car and wandered down to see if I could be of any help. Well, okay, I actually just wanted a better view of the floor show, but in my own defence, I would have helped if I could have done anything useful, like mopping up blood or applying splints or something.

The driver – Ian – was explaining that he couldn’t reverse, so she was going to have to. She peered down hopelessly at her gear lever as if she’d never seen it before, and then there was a terrible grinding sound, the sort you make when you forget to depress the clutch.

Five minutes of grinding, juddering, revving and bunny-hopping followed, resulting in the car being wedged immovably across the lane. As we all stood there staring at it and wondering what to do next, a large rock fell out of the wall, landed with a sickening ‘THUNK’ on her bonnet and then slithered to the ground, leaving a snail-trail of scratched paintwork behind it.

That’s when she burst into tears.

It took the combined efforts of all four removal men, a tow rope and a car jack to straighten the little car up. The gaffer, George, then gallantly squeezed his enormous frame into it and backed it up to the nearest passing place, which turned out to be the visibility splay outside her house – where her bemused parents were standing, wondering what all the commotion up the lane was. The poor girl had travelled all of 500 yards.

By the time we’d sorted it all out, regained the main road and finally arrived at Adverse Camber the light was going, which wasn’t what I’d planned at all. The Master Plan – neatly written down and itemized in my ‘House Move’ notebook – had me safely tucked up in bed in my new home by nightfall. As it was, I didn’t even have the key.

I’d arranged with the agents that it would be left with a near neighbour who lived in a house called ‘Conifers’. The only flaw with that plan was that I had no idea where ‘Conifers’ was, but fortunately, shortly after we arrived an elderly man materialized out of nowhere to stare at the huge van partially blocking the road.

I smiled winsomely at him.

“Do you know where I can find a house called Conifers?”

“Oh yes. Down the road – white house with a blue gate.”

“Thank you.”

I hot-footed it down there, only to find the house in complete darkness and shut up as tight as a drum.

I returned to the van,and the still-loitering on-looker.

“There’s no-one in.” I said to him, trying to ignore the headache that was building behind my eyes.

“No there wouldn’t be,” he responded amiably, “I’ve been out for a walk. Do you want your key, then?”

It’s past midnight. The removal men have dossed down in the cottage and I’ve persuaded the local pub to open up and take pity on me. I think they realized it was either that or have me howling dementedly at their door all through the night …