Despair and Dreams
In Equal Measure
Since I Saw You Last
We had the vet visit to inspect our livestock for the VAN (Veterinary Attestation Number), needed to take animals pretty much anywhere - for sale, to market, for slaughter - and I was slightly dreading it, because we are so flooded, and things are being made worse by the still awaited fences to protect the new hedges.
She was lovely, though, and said all the animals look really well, and we were obviously doing our best in very difficult circumstances.
I finally got round to putting out ground cover and planting out some willow whips which I literally cut from my existing little basketry bed as I needed them
I really need to do a bit more research on how to harvest and use this willow. I have five colours, and the main bed has been there a couple of years now. I would absolutely love to be able to make a basket from our own willow - maybe to harvest vegetables into?
As I reported last time, we had the early girls in and underway. We were in two minds on that chilly Saturday evening whether it was a bit early to bring in those three early lambers. I won the toss and we did bring them in. Next morning, when Neil went down to do the jobs before church, he was met with the first lamb!
So that was a good call! She was a first time mother and had just got on and sorted everything out herself. Oxfords really are very unfussy sheep and grand mothers.
Unfortunately, as he set off up the field, he found another extra sheep! This time a little Welsh Mountain ram lamb, not ours at all!
Local investigations led us to discover that some of the ‘tack sheep’ (a large group of sheep from higher or wilder areas, wintering down in the lowlands and tended by a local contract shepherd) had become infected with a virus which blinds them! And this little fella had lost his friends, panicked, and happened upon our little flock.
From a biosecurity point of view, it’s less than ideal, especially since it sounds like the contract shepherd was avoiding using the word ‘listeriosis’. The lamb didn’t come into contact with ours, anyway, and so far no repercussions.
All three ‘early birds’ have now lambed - a single lamb each, two ewes and a ram - and gone back out, and the two elderly ladies of the late lambing crew are indoors enjoying a little extra attention. Darcy started to prolapse last week, so we had to do a mad dash to buy her a ewe truss, or harness, and since then she’s been doing amazingly well. Before going on the emergency shopping trip, I actually did a temporary fix which I’d spotted on a friend’s Instagram, creating an impromptu harness using baler twine (of course) and her fleece.
I finally got round to making my laundry detergent, a hybrid between Rhonda’s version from Down To Earth and Nancy Birtwhistle’s from her new book, Clean Magic. I had ordered the soapflakes online (which I must stop doing and locate locally) and when I took the pack out to start on the laundry liquid it said Savon de Marseilles ‘olive’. Sure enough, the soap flakes were a very attractive olive green!
Once mixed, my lovely laundry detergent came out a sort of sludge colour with overtones one would rather not discuss! I’m sure it will work just as well though.
All seven of the Marans chicks hatched! That’s another story to write up for The Resource Files!
Be Careful What You Wish For
Previously, as my regular reader will recall, I was moaning about the lack of fences to protect the abundant new hedges. Well.
Eventually, Tom and Andy (not their real names) turned up, with a machine the size of a tank, which bore fence posts and stock wire and barbed wire, and for all I know, a rocket launcher and/or a combine harvester. It is HUGE. It is tracked, rather than having wheels so in theory it does less damage to the ground. All things are relative, however.
At this point, it became apparent that there was a complete lack of understanding, the further up the communication chain you travelled, about our ethos, and the work we have done for the last quarter century. My carefully protected sward has been vandalised. It will be damaged for decades. Swales have been flattened, bridges broken, water channels destroyed. All because, apparently, wherever there is to be a fence this behemoth of a machine must go. The suggestion that perhaps, in more sensitive areas, Tom and Andy might alight from the gargantuan Transformer For Grownups and just knock in the odd post by hand, is met with the blankest of blank stares.
We have had to betray our own souls and our bank balance and call in favours from friends to move entire storage sheds and muckheaps to enable this monster to progress, and enable its orgy of destruction.
“The ground will recover sooner than you would believe possible” says the happily reappeared Sunny Simon, and everyone else who sees it, but it won’t you see. It will ‘recover’ to their standards, not ours. Never again in my lifetime - heavy, heavy words - will it bounce like an engorged sponge underfoot, caressing its many thousands of litres of water with careless, joyful capacity. They never understood what we were doing, and they still don’t.
Colour
I have finally taken the plunge - or at least a skein or two of wool has more accurately done the plunging - and dyed some homespun fleece with a natural dye - madder root to be precise.
I ignored the first principle that you should never use your cooking pots, but always have special receptacles for dyeing, working on the assumption that your average peasant probably just had the one pot for cooking, soap making, dying, preserving, etc., and our modern apology for a house has just about returned to peasant hovel dimensions so I simply can’t have a set of pots for everything. I thought this a reasonable strategy until Neil wisely questioned the average life expectancy of said peasant. I may have to throw out a colander.
I used an alum mordant, and a belated alkaline modifier in the rinse water, but the result was still a slightly disappointing orange. It’s a nice colour, but not what we were after. Still, in line with my current approach to just doing things, at least it is done, I have dyed wool which I spun from our own sheep, and that is a good thing.
A Course In Contentment
4. Curate Your Dreams
The sense of having finally dyed that wool was extraordinary. Not just because it is quite a cool thing to do, but because I had put it off for so long, it had created for itself a legend in my subconscious, whereby it was out of reach. It was as if I had long intended to fly to Jupiter. In fact, it has been entirely possible and just disregarded for decades. The actual doing of it was cathartic to and extent I could not have imagined.
This, you will recall, was how I felt about the Macramé Potholder of comparable myth. Why on earth had I held onto that idea for so many years, instead of just getting it out of my system?
Ideas which have self identified as dreams and incrementally upgraded themselves to epic sagas and ultimately timeless legends are doing me no good. They take up disproportionate space, both literal and metaphorical, and that is territory I need in order to learn to be content.
It would be a sad world, though, if we felt unable to dream. So for this month’s module in my self imposed Course in Contentment, I will be curating my dream collection.
Everyday, common or garden dreams such as dyeing wool, or macramé pot holders, will be brought down to earth with a bang. I must just do those things, and clear the space Sewing bread bags from tea towels is not the Mabinogion in the making. It’s a one hour sewing project, and should be completed, so that its shelf space is clear.
Big, ebullient dreams which are now out of reach must be lovingly rehomed. If they can be pruned down to a size and shape whereby they might fit into category one, then they can be moved. If they are of the past, sepia with sorrow or regret to which they have earned no right, then they must go, and their space can be cleaned and dusted, and lie in wait for a new dream.
New dreams can be as bold and exciting as I can make them, as long as they will fit the space left in this emerging Billy Bookcase of visions. I’m prepared to relocate the shelves, but its boundaries are firm. I already have one or two, and I fear they are being denied their space by those puffed up prosaic projects, and the cobweb crusted remains of visions of days gone by.
Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
and he will establish your plans.
Proverbs 16:3
Contentment is not a dead end. There can be peace and joy in the present, alongside hopes and dreams, for the near and substantive future.
Awesome post, Jackie! But gosh, the mass destruction of which you speak... humph! 😤
Mum would very often have dyepots on the go on top of the Aga, or in the bottom oven - she did use a different set of pans, but of course when you're working with any kind of chemical in the kitchen there were still risks around! Right from when we were very tiny we were told never to touch any powder or granules we saw on any surfaces in the kitchen - that would be unlikely to be sugar or salt, but more likely alum or goodness knows what else! The orange you got from the madder is lovely!
Ahhhh, and lambs! I love that picture - lambs are at their most beautiful when their legs are too long and their skins are still wrinkly. I've been reminiscing, actually, the last couple of days, and looking back to my childhood growing up with sheep. Lambing time was magical. Happy, happy days. x
Firstly, that behemoth of destruction. What in the actual?!?! That is the utter shits. I am so, so, SO sorry for the rampage...and also for the utter obliviousness of the pilots of said behemoth and the Happy Larrys who are only thinking of the state of the grass. The mind, it boggles.
Secondly --- I'm literally gigglesnorting over your Dream Management System. Why do these things inflate themselves? Getting ideas above their stations. Hmph. Also, that's a very marvelous retro orange...very snazzy, well done! I have a few overblown visions of my own that could do with being run through your System.
Finally, many congrats on the lambs! Well done, ladies! Hopefully the elders will proceed as effortlessly. Also good to hear the incubator is humming along. Such an abundance of new life. It almost makes up for eejity men in big machines. xo