Close Quarters

Living in the rented cottage was fun to begin with. It remains an extremely well-appointed holiday house. The not having any toys thing makes for remarkably clutter-less living. Truly remarkable for me. But on a Saturday when everyone else is out there isn’t much to do here and it’s no place to be on your own. Under normal circs on a Saturday such as this I would be cooking, radio on, singing, dancing, embarrassing any passing children.

We have collectively and individually become very good at spending as little time in the cottage as possible, the space being too small for the children to fight in, the kitchen too small to cook in for anything other than necessity and the bed too small for my husband and I ever to have a full night’s sleep in. (My husband or I can have a full night’s sleep in it, but not together.)

With the boys away killing birdies and my daughter at a friend’s house I have, until now, had a gratifyingly successful day of staying out of the cottage. I think what I have been doing is similar to what disaffected teenagers do. I may yet find myself hanging around the village cross at nine o’clock at night in inadequate clothes, furtively smoking whilst scowling.

I should acknowledge my horse’s help in facilitating my being out today. And, massively, my friend Ice Maiden AKA the Horse Whisperer. My horse went lame yesterday so I was up first thing to see him, dragging my daughter with me. He is staying at IM’s stable just now, my field (in which IM’s horses and mine live most of the time) being treacherously pitted with hoof prints, frozen solid and unusable. Having broken the early morning ice on the puddles at the stable my daughter snuck into IM’s house and ensconced herself. She has been quiet, tidy and helpful and has managed to stay there all day. Maximum points to her. I finished doing the horses and had a cup of tea. I sipped it slowly. I went and collected some hay from my store and stacked it in IM’s store. Very neatly. No point in going back to the cottage because the vet was coming. I went to our house and had a look round the building site where a totally humourless bearded man I have never seen before was standing in my son’s bedroom breaking something. I went and got some grit for the ice at the stables. I chatted to people I normally only nod to.

There are always horse poos to pick up. I did that too. Again. Then the vet came so I kept him talking for as long as I could. And the work experience girl who was with him. I’m sure she was more fascinated than she looked to learn that I did work experience with a vet when I was in 3rd year too. I fed my horse his pain killers and gave the other two something to eat too so they wouldn’t be jealous. Then it was lunch time – a dangerous break in the day. I went into the house to pretend that I was about to take my daughter and myself away and was offered some lunch. What could I say?

After lunch, the girls started designing a book. IM and Mr IM drifted off to do some DIY. Nothing to do at the stables so I walked across the garden to the field and attempted to pick up frozen horse poo there. The rake we use for the job was unwilling to be cajoled into service as an ice axe, a task for which it is plainly unsuited. A chip of frozen horse poo flew into my mouth. So I went and picked up some warm ones which by then had appeared at the stable.

It was too early to start putting the horses to bed so I went and had a coffee in the deli. I sipped it as slowly as I can sip a cappuccino. As I was leaving I saw someone I vaguely know walking up the main street. Even though my car was facing in the right direction for going back to the cottage I turned it round in the opposite direction and turned it again in her street, just in case she spotted me and perhaps, I dunno, asked me in for another coffee. But she had disappeared.

That was when I realised there was no avoiding going back to the cottage.

Now, fortunately, its time to start putting the horses to bed. It can take an hour if I steam all the hay, which obviously I will. Luckily we’re going out for dinner tonight. To Ice Maiden’s. Lucky for us, anyway.

Sing! Choirs of Angels

We had a sing-song in the car on the way to school today as we often do. The format this morning was everybody doing an individual turn rather than the mass choral effort that we only manage when everybody is in extremely good spirits. We had a couple of numbers from the school Christmas play, (of which we parents are expecting great things as the children have done little else but rehearse it since half term) we had the slightly tiresome old favourite The Wheels on the Bus and then it was my seven year-old daughter’s turn. She chose to perform a verse from Nickelback’s Rockstar.
“Well we all just wanna be big rock stars,” she started strongly.
“And live in hilltop houses drivin’ fifteen cars,” (Well you have a hillside house and three cars darling, I thought to myself, knowing that it would only have been something to say out loud had we been alone.)
“The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap,” I gripped the steering wheel.
“We’ll all stay skinny cause we just won’t eat.”
I try not to let my mouth fall open or to make value judgement faces but I failed on this occasion. My ten year-old son, who was sitting next to me noticed my expression. He chuckled conspiratorially. He enjoys his privileged position in the front of the car.
I wouldn’t say anything about houses and cars in public but should I allow casual references to cheap drugs and extreme dieting from a seven year-old? At eight thirty in the morning? With an impressionable six year-old girl in the car next to her?
My son shook his golden head.
“I know Mummy.”
He gave me a sympathetic look.
“She sounds like a total lezzer singing about girls coming easy.”

Bucking and Diving

I seem to have unwittingly become a horse dealer which is better, morally than being a crack dealer but not much. It’s probably worse than being a car dealer. Horse dealers make the Arthur Daleys and Frank Butchers of the world’s forecourts look positively benign and angelic.

My grey pony has to go. Two years ago when I bought him he was my children’s grey pony but they don’t want to know him any more so he has become mine. He is a companion for my overgrown pony and looks picturesque enough grazing in the field. He will allow small children to walk about safely near his hind legs and groom him. He is good with the blacksmith and the vet. He has huge black eyes and at this time of year, a coat like a polar bear. He has a fine life and is in rude health, his every need tended to daily by me. But I can’t be in the business of keeping ornamental ponies. Not even one.

Being a horse dealer now, you will have noticed that I didn’t mention in my description of him that he can be tricky to catch and he is a challenging ride. In fact he is a little bucker. He has bucked my son off several times, bucked me off and most embarrassingly bucked off my mother’s oldest friend’s granddaughter. He has galloped victoriously through the village, reins and stirrups flying after dumping children, he has ruined riding lessons and has put both my children off riding for life. (Something for which I am aware I should maybe thank him, but we don't have that kind of relationship.) I did consider giving him a career putting other people’s children off riding – hiring him out a week at a time to frighten and disillusion pony mad children into a sensible, cheap sport. But where to advertise that kind of service?

So I advertised him for sale on a horsey website. I was a bit vague in the advertisement but resolved to be honest with anyone who got in touch about him. I didn’t want anyone else’s child’s dream of Olympic glory or true pony love being trampled beneath Grey Pony’s hard little hooves. I couldn’t have that on my conscience.

I was truthful with the first person who got me to call her back and then hung up on me. The second person said she didn’t mind buying a pony that needed work. I seized on this unguarded revelation and worked at it like a garrulous tinker at Appleby Fair. She wasn’t convinced. I may have told the third person that both my children have hacked him out alone but then I cracked and had to mention the few wee bucks he sometimes puts in. Conscience is not useful for horse dealers. The phone went quiet for weeks.

And then a friend said he had a friend in the horse business who might be interested. When I say in the horse business, she actually, er, runs a riding school. So lots of people’s children would be riding him. I think my friend told her the story of Grey Pony but I didn’t check meticulously. On Friday I loaded him up into the trailer and drove him over to be inspected by the riding school lady. (It wasn’t actually quite as simple as that. He ran away from me after I caught him and had to be apprehended by The Horse Whisperer, and then I loaded him up; hard little hooves, hard little heart, the whole lot.)

Riding school lady looked him over in the trailer and liked him. I was encouraged, so much so that when describing his time with us I’m not sure that I used the exact word ‘buck’. I unloaded him and walked him up. She made a few positive noises. I spoke eloquently about his time in the pony club with his previous owners. She scratched his nose and asked him if he would like to come and live with her. I maintained my impassive expression while my heart leapt at the prospect of possibly selling him before we go on holiday at Christmas. She asked if she could have him on trial for a bit. I managed to look regretful as I left him in her stable.

He has now been there for four days and I haven’t heard anything. Could no news be good news? I have told myself that if she thinks he is a suitable pony for a riding school with all her experience, then who am I to argue? We horse dealers can be so plausible.

Put It Away

I turned 39 on Friday and went for a night out in Edinburgh on Saturday. The two events were unrelated – I was almost as uninterested in this bridesmaid of a birthday as the people I live with were. Not quite – I did remember about it. My brother, my father and I all forgot my mother's birthday once so I put it down to a motherhood milestone. There will be no chance of any of them forgetting about it next year.

The night out started badly. The dress I had brought to wear had shrunk in the wash and was borderline for a 39 year-old to be wearing in public, The Wee Craicer called off and the taxi had £5 on the meter when we got into it outside my parents’ house where we were staying. The £5 was my fault for agonising into extra time about the shrunken dress. While the taxi rattled in the street outside, my daughter suggested that I wear the slip only, without the chiffon dress on top, my son was unequivocal about how bad it looked and my mother thought it was fine. My Dad thought it looked great, as did my very long ago former boyfriend, The Director, when we finally got to the packed bar we were meeting in. The Director had come dressed to carry out a burglary so I wasn’t the only one looking a little bit niche. We might both have looked quite zeitgeisty in NoLita or Hoxton, I in outgrown rags, he in streetwear that suggested malicious intent. But we were in Edinburgh where despite the temperature outside, lots of bare flesh was on show; some expanses firmer than others. The wobblier the flesh, the louder they were shouting. And the drinks were eight pounds each.

Only half the people we had originally designed to be on this rare and precious night out shoved their way through the bar to our table in the restaurant. The others were snugly at home with their sick children, workloads and music at an acceptible level. My husband was wearing the locked-in look that means he can’t hear anything and is wondering whether to drink white or red while he observes the evening. I felt sorry for him. As I sat eating and catching up with the The Perfect Couple and The Director I became aware that it would have been nicer to have been in one of our houses. (Not our rental or our building site actually, but either of their's.)

But what was I thinking? If we had been in one of their houses there wouldn’t have been a club to look forward to. And a club was where we were headed. At someone’s house there would have been no anticipation of that completely abandoned singalong dancing that you can really lose yourself in with old friends and not care who sees you. No glitter ball or hand waving or hair shaking or lights. No being gripped in a sweaty headlock by a drunk friend and told you are loved. After dinner things would liven up.

That was what we were all looking forward to as we descended from the blustery pavement into the breathy fug of the club. But it was rammed too. My husband took up smoking again just to get outside. The most expensive two cigarettes ever - bought from a machine for over three quid each. I mounted a halting expedition to the dance floor but it was listless hands by your sides dancing only and the music was so emptily wetly lame and generic that the urge to put my hands up (for Detroit or anywhere else) was gone. It was the final two fingers up to that night out and possibly all nights out for us. Even the music would have been better in any of our kitchens. Staying in looks like it really is the new going out. And if buying into that isn’t an appropriate way to mark your 39th birthday, (whether you mean to or not) I don’t know what is.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

A friend gave my son a ferret for his tenth birthday in August. They say ferrets bite. They are right. This one, named disrespectfully after my husband, did little else apart from eating and pooping. It bit my son more than anyone. It also bit his friends, my friends, babysitters, someone who works for my husband and the blacksmith’s apprentice who is a ferret expert and managed to handle it for longer than anyone else before being bitten. About 20 seconds. The blacksmith’s apprentice is tough and accustomed to wrestling huge horses but he was no match for the ferret.

We don’t seem to have much luck with animals smaller than Labradors. My two ponies are very happy, our Labrador is one of the oldest and contentedly smelliest in the county. But our hamsters have all escaped, the guinea pig was dropped resulting in a fatal concussion and one rabbit froze to death while another ran away. (There was a period when rabbits were pets before they became prey.) I should have known the ferret would be a disaster. I probably did, but my better judgement was swayed by the idea that perhaps having a ferret would mean that my son could go and kill rabbits in the garden without a firearm or a resentful adult being involved.

We tried everything suggested by books, the internet, the person who gave it to my son and the blacksmith’s apprentice. Everything short of buying it a friend. Nothing worked. It hated us, we hated it and the rule that if my son had a ferret he had to look after it was eventually being flouted every day. I became quite ingenious at feeding it without touching it and filling its water with a hose over the door of the stable that had become its home. Cleaning it out was more of a challenge.

Anyway, whadya know? One day a couple of weeks ago it escaped. We went happily back to a ferret free existence. Free from anxiety about being savaged by it, free from guilt about whether it needed a friend, free from having to make special expeditions to a particularly dreary industrial estate in the third-rate local town to buy ferret nuggets and free from the smell of ferret. But you know what they (the same lot who say that ferrets bite) say about bad smells? (And ferret is a very bad smell.) Instead of taking itself off to the moor to live off voles and ticks or allowing itself to be lifted away by the scruff of its ungrateful neck by a hungry buzzard, it decided to hang around our house. In fact it moved in. Every morning last week, when the builders arrived it would be there before them, curled up in some of our lovely new insulation or beadily eyeing one of the bunches of expensive new cables which seem to be everywhere and smacking its curled lips.

There is now a price on the ferret's head. It is slightly less than the cost of replacing one bunch of newly installed data cables, but is still a significant sum.

Not a Bunny Boiler

I think rabbits are sweet, although I was a bit annoyed when the courgettes my daughter was growing were eaten by the pesky varmints. My solution to the problem was to cuss them up a bit while I erected a fence. (I may not, in truth have erected the fence myself, I may have persuaded a man to do it, fence building being mens’ work.) The fence meant that the courgettes were safe and I when I opened my curtains in the morning I could still see thumpers in the garden hopping around and doing that cute thing to their faces with their wittle paws.

If my ten year old son happens to be with me when I open the curtains, his reaction to the sight of early morning rabbits is somewhat different to mine. He might do any of the following: a) tap on the window repeatedly, gesticulating at them to get off the garden, b) take our ancient dog outside to be humiliated by them, c) hurl the window up and yell impotently into the gale at them or d) begin the process of attrition with which he will finally persuade his father to take him out in the evening to shoot them.

When he first became interested in killing things at the age of about 5, I knew it was fruitless to try to persuade a small boy that all life is sacred so instead I set about teaching him that if he killed something, it mustn’t die in vain and the best way to ensure that it didn’t was to eat it. He took that lesson very much to heart. Being an up-for-it kind of cook and pretty non-squeamish I didn’t think to drum into his impressionable young head that his kill also should be given to the kitchen oven-ready. In those early days he might have presented me with one Daddy-shot pheasant a month. Now that he is actually nailing animals himself, not merely watching his father, (who can take animal murder or leave it) the lolling head count in the kitchen has increased hugely. Its not that I mind doing it every once in a while but there are things I could more profitably be doing than gutting and plucking or skinning several animals a week. Claws and fur add greatly to cooking times.

On Thursday my son shot a rabbit which he brought to me triumphantly and said he wanted to have stuffed for his Christmas present. Fantastic. All I had to do was shove it - whole and hairy - into a plastic bag and into the freezer. And phone the taxidermist. But instead of calling it a night, his father allowed him to shoot two more. These two were for the pot.

Rabbits need to be gutted as soon as they are shot or all kinds of disgusting things start happening like the contents of their intestines being reabsorbed into their flesh. I told my son that I was just putting dinner on the table but if he wanted to gut them I would keep his warm. The smell of shepherd’s pie wasn’t enough to tempt him away from the rabbits for the short time it would take them to start absorbing the contents of their alimentary canals therefore rendering themselves useless for human consumption, dammit. He wanted to gut them. Which he did, leaving the entrails by the doorstep of the rented house we are living in for the owner to step over when he let his dog out last thing at night. The rabbits were brought in dripping a little and still furry.

“Could you skin them, darling please?” I asked.

His response was along the lines of no. He had selflessly hunter-gathered something delicious (both killed cleanly with the first shot) for the family pot and the least I could do was skin them myself. I began to point out that he is the only person in the family who likes rabbit, but it occurred to me that I was raining on his parade so I shut up.

Eating rabbit would be very credit crunch, but the only thing about it that appeals to me is its essential zeitgeistyness. The results do not justify the immense effort required. Its now Monday and Thursday’s rabbits remain in the fridge, approaching, surely, their use-by date and still furry. But if we don’t eat them my well-trained son will be appalled at the wasted lives.

Meanwhile I’m snacking on six quid a tub granola which is crunchy, but definitely not credit crunchy.

All aboard

Had my children been on holiday and my family enjoying our half term visit to London this week, we would definitely have gone to see the victory parade for the Olympic medal winners today. We devoured the Olympics and to say that the games saved August for us would not be an exaggeration. My son and I regularly did six hour stints in front of the television watching any sport (except sailing – there were limits) and we watched at all hours. The closest either of us got to participating in any sport during that fortnight was driving to the nearby field where my horse was recuperating from an injury and throwing some food and pain killers in his general direction. (While the three day event was happening we told him how the Brits were doing while he ate before jumping back into the car and hurrying back to the sofa.) I wept at medal ceremonies, marvelled at the skill and commitment of the competitors and dived under cushions which I chewed while London’s contribution to the closing ceremony was being broadcast. I watched the whole closing ceremony. That is how much I loved the Olympics.

I can’t say I watched a single second of the Paralympics, although I did catch a fascinating programme before the games about a paralympic dressage rider and his preparation for his event. The achievements of the paralympians are in many cases greater than those of the able bodied Olympians but they are personal triumphs, sources of great interest and pride to the family and friends of the competitors and of no more than passing interest to anyone else. I don’t know anyone who watched the Paralympics. Not even my most sport-obsessed male friends who will watch football matches between Burundi and Ulan-Bator, DVDs of rugby matches played last century, in fact anything that involves running around wearing a number, even shinty. And yet despite the fact that there must be few people in the UK who were not directly involved with the paralympics who could name a single athlete, the paralympic medallists paraded today alongside the Olympians. Their achievements are impressive but in no way comparable to those of the athletes who triumphed over thousands of others worldwide to qualify for and win their events. The numbers of disabled athletes competing worldwide in each event are tiny in comparison. Having them on the open-topped bus alongside Chris Hoy was awkwardly inclusive at best, head-pattingly patronising at worst.