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Cass shows off this season’s must-have accessory, a stylish coat of dried mud.
Yesterday I spent half an hour of very hard work brushing it off her, took her out for a walk and as soon as she hit the grass – down she went. She rolled five times during an hour’s wander, and by the end of it looked as muddy as she had before I brushed her. Only wetter. She frisked about like crazy on the grass too – you could see she hadn’t been out for such a long time. I took her out again today but didn’t bother brushing her first (I’m not stupid), and she was a lot calmer, I even got her trotting circles in the yard. Yay!
Duck is still sad, with her head down, though she's drinking and maybe eating and seems a lot stronger – she walks about (well, staggers really) and stretches her poor damaged wings. But we think she might never be able to lift her head properly, so this will pose a dilemma – she wouldn’t be able to preen and it can’t be very comfortable either – and I don't know if it would be right to keep her like that. She doesn’t seem to be in active pain any more so we’ll continue to see how she goes over the next few days. Maybe as she gets stronger she’ll lift her head. Maybe not.
Lovely dawn sky this morning, though by the time I’d run inside for my camera the most intense colours had faded. Almost makes it worth getting up before first light. (Almost.)
Yesterday evening I realized that the duck’s beak seemed to be pasted closed by gunk and dried blood, and I wondered if she was even able to drink, let alone eat. So we dipped it in warm salt water and cleaned it up, and that did seem to make a difference. When I gave her back the fresh water she took some sips, and then I put some food in front of her and she truffled into that in quite a starving manner. So that’s a good sign. Her head is still bowed right down though, in a really unnatural and disconcerting way. The male ate and drank yesterday and stretched his wings and tried to flap them, so you can see that although he’s still stiff and achey, he’s on the mend.
I went to the cinema last night (Revolutionary Road: a disappointment), and driving home late, I turned the radio on and caught a just-so-Italian discussion on how to make the perfect pesto.
You assemble your ingredients. Fresh basil. Two cheeses: Parmesan and seasoned pecorino, adjusting the relative quantities depending on how piccante you want your pesto to be. Garlic, which you mash slightly with the back of a spoon. Pine nuts. Oil (extra-virgin olive). Coarse sea salt. And a spoonful or two of the pasta cooking water, for starch.
Your mortar is of course made of marble, and your pestle of olive wood. And you simply mix everything together, crushing and mashing and pounding as required, until you have your pesto.
The two presenters spent a good ten minutes on this, talking with not only real enthusiasm but also deep-seated knowledge (where the best pine nuts come from, what kind of salt), even though I don’t think they were professional foodies. I couldn’t imagine such a discussion taking place on the radio in England, not without some degree of pretension.
Made me want to go and sow my basil seeds.
It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in from feeding the animals – and it's still light outside. What a great feeling that is. The day has been warm with lots of heavy rain showers and the ground is waterlogged, with all the trees dripping, but this evening the sky is somewhat clearer and maybe it’ll be nice tomorrow. The poor horse is soaking wet and covered in mud but she seems happy enough, apart from being bored because I haven’t taken her out for days.
The two remaining ducks are still hanging in there. The male will be fine, I think – he spent yesterday outside (in the run) and today going in and out of the duckhouse, and he’s been drinking and preening and trying to stretch his wings, all of which must be good signs, though he hasn’t eaten anything. The female is still alive but is just sitting in the duckhouse in not very good shape. Her neck droops over so that her beak is pointing downwards and almost touches the ground; I think the fox must have damaged some muscles or tendons in the neck, or maybe she’s just too tired to hold her head up. I think she’s drunk a little water. I’d have thought that if she were going to die, she’d have died by now; yesterday, I saw her keel over on to her side and just lie there, which is really bizarre for a duck and I was certain she was dying, but she didn’t and next time I checked on her she was upright again. So we just keep on waiting.
I wandered down the slope at 7.30 this morning to feed the animals, plate of food-scraps in hand, with the vague sensation that something was wrong but unable to pin it down. As I rounded the corner of the house all became clear. The ducks were silent – normally in the morning they hear me coming and start quacking and burbling excitedly – silence is sinister, and that’s what had stirred the feeling of unease in me.
It was a sight that made my blood run cold and I just stood there for several seconds taking it in. Something had got at the ducks. The roof of the pen had been knocked off and inwards. One of the white ducks, covered in a slick of mud, stood against the fence, her head looking upwards but her eyes blank. The male duck was huddled in a corner. The dark-feathered female was hunched in the middle of the run. They were all still, totally still, with an absolute lack of movement that was frightening. I thought they must all be dead – but the white one was standing up, so how could it be dead? As I moved slowly closer they started to move, the male scrambled in slow motion into the duckhouse, and the white one, too, managed to turn and stagger after him. The dark one was bowed over and I couldn’t see her head, but then she slowly lifted it out from beneath her, and then just as effortfully let it droop back onto the ground between her legs. The other white duck was missing; there was blood in patches on the ground and a few scattered white feathers.
I fetched John and he carried the injured duck away to put it out of its misery. We inspected the remaining two, and the white one had clearly been gripped in the fox’s jaws from behind, her shoulders were bitten and bloody and when we moved her blood dripped out of her beak. But we can’t tell how bad her internal injuries are and it’s possible she’ll survive. The male looks traumatized but physically ok. We’ve left them in the duckhouse to see whether the female gets better or worse during the day, and later we’ll decide whether we need to put her out of her suffering too. We moved the pen and I hosed down the mud and blood. The smell was sickening and is still in my nostrils.
I know they’re just ducks. And this was just a fox getting some ducks. How much more classic a country-life event can you have? But something about the aftermath of that unmalicious violence – the weird stillness of the ducks, the clarity of their trauma, the way the injured one bowed her head and shivered in fits – was really shocking. I’m not a sentimental person but this is horrible.
So I also want to post this today before it completely loses topicality – a photo of Obama giving his inauguration speech, the way we saw it on our lovely new LCD screen. History! The Italian simultaneous translation was pretty poor but we managed to make out some of his actual words beneath the overlay. This in fact was one occasion when the new digital TV's unencrypted BBC World channel would have come into its own, but for some reason the signal quality has gone from dodgy-but-watchable to so-poor-we're-not-even-going-to-show-you-the-picture, so we had to watch what RAI deigned to give us, which was about an hour's worth. Which was just about enough, actually, especially as I had to skip in and out of the kitchen during the speech as I was in the middle of making a lentil shepherd's pie. I bet Michelle Obama doesn't have to do that.
Watching Obama was quite a strange experience. Everything is so right about him that it's almost unreal. He looks like a film star and we felt we were watching a film, especially after we spent last year intensively watching the entire seven seasons of The West Wing – Obama is so photogenic and wish-fulfilling that it was hard not to believe we were watching an unexpected Season 8. Hope Obama lives up to the hype and gives us a happy ending.
The shepherd's pie was good.
I haven’t written for a while because this is a quiet time of year and the only thing I ever seemed to want to write about has been the weather … So – to get the weather out of the way – in the past two or three weeks we’ve had ice, freezing fog, sleet, rain, fog, sunshine, showers, and yesterday a big windy storm. The snow took ages to melt and has finally done so, leaving our road a soggy, rutted cart-track that non-4WD vehicles have a problem getting up. At least it’s an improvement on the solid ice skid-slope that it was for a few weeks when the temperature hardly went above zero – coming down it was terrifying. It's now bizarrely warm and almost springlike, which as it's only January is one of those cruel tricks that means we shall almost certainly be submerged under a metre snow by the end of tomorrow.
Coming up from the veg patch the other day I noticed that the bird nesting-box that the hornets built their huge nest around seemed to have a large hole in the bottom of it. On closer inspection, I could see that inside the box is – well, a hornets’ nest. It’s full of cells, which I suppose are full of larvae. The hornets must have gnawed (do hornets have teeth?) their way through the wood – and this is proper, 0.5cm-thick wood – and then constructed the inner core of their nest inside the box, and then turned their attention to the outside when they covered it with the layers of beautiful paper. So it was only the outer part that was destroyed in the high winds before Christmas, and I guess we still have a hornet problem.
The coldest temperature we’ve yet had this winter was —8ºC a few nights ago. The leftover snow has turned to a crunchy crust and our access road is an ice-slide. The valleys, though, are green (or brown) again. We had some bright, crisp days after New Year and went for a good walk with the dogs, but as I look out of the window I see it’s starting to snow again…
I took the horse out for a walk two or three times to see how she liked the snow – she stared at everything as if it all looked completely new and unexpected (as perhaps it did) but was fairly calm, considering. I took her into the big grass field and she pawed the snowy ground to uncover the grass just like wild ponies do. She also rolled several times in the snow, which made me laugh – it must be like some kind of therapeutic beauty treatment for her!
The ducks don’t mind the cold at all and continue their happy duck existence. They've finally discovered how to get in and out of the pond and have decided they like it: now they spend all day down there, scrabbling about on the edges, following the overflow stream down the side of the field, swimming about in the water, or just hanging out. It’s very nice to see them behaving like, well, ducks with a pond.
I hate to think what the veg patch will look like once we finally wrest it back from the elements. Frozen fennel, broken-stemmed greens, ice-scalded broccoli… Even the cabbages don't look very healthy. The other day we made nettle soup (from nettles we’d frozen in the autumn) and it was delicious. And free.
Cass shows off this season’s must-have accessory, a stylish coat of dried mud.
