36 of 50

My Uncle Harry kept chickens, but he wasn’t really my Uncle. Uncle and Aunt were terms that were often used in our family for non-family members over a certain age who held a position that should be respected. So “Uncle Harry” was in fact my Godmother’s Father, there was a distant connection through second marriages but no direct bloodline linkages.

Each school holiday we would go and visit Uncle Harry and Auntie Dora and their chickens. At the end of their long garden was a purpose built (thinking back I wonder whether this was actually an old brick built air raid shelter that had been converted) brick chicken house and run which took up quite a bit of the garden.

He had around a dozen or so chickens in there and the highlight of a visit would be to walk down to the end of the garden and check to see if there were any eggs, which we would collect and take home a half-dozen. We had to be careful not to collect the china eggs (which were there to encourage the hens to lay) or let the hens escape from their run, and if we timed it right give them a scoop of feed.

On one occasion I got to go with Uncle Harry to collect some new hens. I don’t remember where exactly we went other than it was out in the countryside somewhere to a farm where there were hundreds of chickens all running around. I was told to wait by the car as I watched him and some strangers corral a few birds and place them in a couple of cardboard boxes which went into the car boot and back to Uncle Harry’s house, where they joined his other birds.

He kept his chickens for their eggs and as far as I know they were never kept for the pot, even when they got old and stop laying.

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading these posts for a while we will shortly be moving house. Although it won’t happen right away one of my goals is to have chickens of my own. It’s something I could have done before now, but it often felt like we didn’t have enough space or there was another reason why it wouldn’t have worked.

I know that our chickens will effectively become pets, so will hopefully provide us with eggs and be responsible for some pest control in the garden. I have some experience of chicken keeping but that knowledge is probably rusty, so I’ll be treating it as a learning curve and a new experience. As pets I suspect that all of the hens will end up with names and if we should get a rooster he will of course be known as Harry and if not I dare say there’ll be hens Harriet and Dora.

Thanks for reading.

34 of 50

This makes for pretty depressing reading so I completely understand if you want to skip this week’s newsletter.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

Carl Sagan

The comparisons between my childhood and now, are in many ways all too depressingly easy at the moment. Whether it be the Russian invasion of Ukraine, compared to the late 70’s and early 80’s when it felt to me like the possibility of a nuclear war was very real. Or the current cost of living crisis and the levels of inflation, power cuts and general strike also of the 70’s and 80’s. I can still remember my parents talking about mortgage interest rates that hit the high-teen percentage points when they were trying to raise me, provide food etc. Now we are contending with not only inflation levels moving in to similar domains but also fuel bills that are completely out of control. We still managed to have the odd “staycation” in the school holidays but I can remember never venturing very far from home during those years.

I’ve written before about comparison on the weather now and in 1976, and then there’s the sewage on beaches and rivers and a whole mirriad of other quite uncanningly comparable events. Does history repeat itself? Seems like whilst they might not be quite repeats they’re maybe reboots. Sadly you’d think with a reboot we might get a better outcome or perhaps even avoid the situation in the first place? No it seems that certain ideologies don’t learn from their past mistakes, they just make them all over again.

It might be that it’s far enough back that whilst many of us can point to similar times when the same experiences were had, our knowledge of them is vague enough or wasn’t experienced in the same way as now. For example I can remember planned power cuts when I was a kid, but I didn’t know they were planned, I just remember the power being off. If that happens this winter I’ll have a little more context as to why it’s happening and where the fault lies.

Similarly with the invasion of Ukraine, I have more knowledge of the background than I did in the cold war times when the two largest superpowers were trying to build the biggest arsenal of weapons to assure mutual annihilation and pop singers were writing songs about it (and re-releasing the same song now).

In some ways the media was a little obsessed with the idea, and trying to make people think about how close they might be to a “primary” target. I can remember hiding under the bed clothes at night worried about a so called “First Strike”, (not that I think I actually knew what that meant) but looking back now and remembering that if it were to happen hopefully the bed clothes would mask the bright light.

In truth it doesn’t really matter how close you are, if you’re unlucky enough to survive the initial blast then the resultant nuclear winter, fallout and general collapse of society will probably get you. That hasn’t changed in all that time and the media is still obsessed about it. Actually maybe you’d be better off being close to a primary target? Given that I live less than ten miles from one of the biggest naval bases in the country I probably won’t be able to come back on here and tell you whether I’m right or not.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

It’s impossible to know what the future will hold, and whether a mad man with a nuclear arsenal is more dangerous than historical precedent. It’s impossible to know whether a government that made the same mistakes before will learn from them and be able to turn the fate of a country around without having to be forced from office by the people at an election (assuming of course that they don’t try and prevent there being democratic elections).

The origins of the phrase “May you live in interesting times” are somewhat contested but given one alternative of its origin is that of an ancient Chinese curse it certainly seems fitting at the moment because although the times might be interesting they certainly ain’t fun.

Take care and stay safe, and thanks for reading.

33 of 50

I sending this out a day early because it doesn’t feel right to send it out tomorrow. Back to Mondays next week.

I guess I would have been about seven or eight years old and there had been a certain buzz in the air for a few weeks – The Queen is coming, The Queen is coming. We’d been told that we were going to meet The Queen!

I honestly don’t remember now, why she was coming. I guess probably to open something or some such event, but we’d been told that we were going there to stand in the crowd and meet The Queen. When you’re that age you of course mostly believe everything that an adult tells you – Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy – The Queen is coming, we’re going to meet The Queen.

When the appointed day finally arrived, we were inspected by our classroom teacher, proper school uniform, shoes shined, hair brushed, teeth clean, matching socks, etc. and then packed into a coach and taken to the city. There was a palpable energy on the coach and I remember being told off more than once for making too much noise, I wasn’t the only one of course – excitement like that is contagious.

When we got there we were marshalled to stand on one side of the street and were told that The Queen and Prince Philip would walk down the street and say hello. Both sides of the street were packed with people, lots of children from other schools were present as well as many regular members of the public either intentionally or otherwise caught up in the days events. We were roped back from the road to prevent us surging forward the moment The Queen arrived and were waiting in anticipation, keyed up with the expectation of being told for a couple of weeks – The Queen is coming, The Queen is coming.

Then it started to rain, not hard just a good bit of British drizzle.

Then the Queen arrived, only she wasn’t walking she was in a Royal car which drove slowly down the road. The Queen was sitting on the other side of the car from us, so we saw the back of her head but that was about it. Evidently the rain had been enough to cancel the proposed walkabout and instead she had been driven along the route waving from the car window instead. Because we were on the other side of the road we didn’t even get a wave, I remember at the time feeling gutted.

Although I never got to meet The Queen, she has been the only monarch that I have known for the first fifty of my orbits of the sun. My Mum can remember her father and the coronation, and quite vividly too despite her Alzheimer’s. I guess that I might also be able to say something similar, maybe. If King Charles lives to be the same age as his mother then I’ll be the same age as he is now.

To me The Queen has been quite a constant, I remember her Silver Jubilee quite vividly when there was a tea party for the village kids in the parish hall, and obviously the more recent 50th and 70th celebrations. She has given her life to public service achieved countless things in representing this country and the Commonwealth, and she has done so in such an understated way.

I have no strong feelings either way about the monarchy although I am aware that many do, but I don’t think now is the time or the place for those discussions. It is a time to celebrate a truly great woman, and to mourn her passing in our own ways.

To Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

32 of 50

As kids, my friends and I were blessed with to have lots of space to play. Most of us had relatively large gardens and we all had local woods or open space where we could roam free. To a certain extent we were allowed to free range, within certain parameters set by our parents.

As you’d probably expect for young boys of that time (1970’s) we would climb trees, build dens and reenact out favourite movies; war films, Bond films and Star Wars movies were all deriguour. We were taught to say “no” to strangers (although I don’t remember having cause to) and often had sandwiches and squash with us for our “lunch”, with instructions to be back at a certain time for tea. I don’t ever remember those sandwiches ever actually being eaten at lunchtime, most likely they were forgotten about because we were having too much fun and eaten just before we were due back, or eaten as soon as practical because we were starving.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to come across the local gamekeeper and his assistant, who to be fair was pretty tolerant of us roam the woods. His general approach seemed to be that so long as we stayed away from his pheasant pens he had no problem with us. The threat of joining the jays and magpies on his gibbet was probably enough incentive to not upset him.

As we got older we were allowed to roam further afield. At the time we also had CB radios, this enabled us to play other games and looking back I also suspect now that it enable our parents to monitor what we were up to, although they never said anything at the time.

Nowadays I still occasionally walk in those woods where I played as a child, to my memory little seems to have changed. There’s no longer a pheasant shoot, so the wildlife is different – more what a gamekeeper would probably consider pests or predators – some paths have been allowed to grow over and others established. It’s still a working woodland, although much more mechanised that it was 40+ years ago, but ultimately the products produced remain pretty similar to what was produced all those years ago. It seems as though were some things have changed, many remain the same.

It’s also busier. As a child we’d go all day without seeing anyone, now there are dog walkers, runners and other users spread throughout the wood. My memory for the quiet spots is still pretty good though, so if I want to escape my fellow humans I can normally find a refuge.

When we move house in a few weeks I’ll also be closer to those woods again and able to visit more frequently. It makes me think if it will still be the same in another 40 years (although I probably won’t be around to tell you) but I will be able to see how it changes in the rest of my lifetime I suppose.

Thanks for reading.

31 of 50

The end of an era was how my friend Christian described it this week when I announced that I would be giving up my allotment

As you may know we’re going to be moving house in the not too distant future, and as a result moving out of the area that means I can’t keep the allotment. I could probably keep it for another year, but the house that we hope to be moving to has quite a big garden and that would mean the upkeep of both, and a substantial commute every time I wanted to visit the allotment. So I’ve decided to give it up at the end of October when the new fees are due. This week I started clearing out my shed and tidying up things a little bit for whoever is going to take it on after me.

It is a little bit tinged with sadness as I have had that plot for over 14 years and taken it from a desolate, weed covered patch to something productive that has provided a considerable amount of fruit and veg for our family over those years. It also become a place of solace for me, where I retreated to when I needed to think. It was a place of contemplation and meditation for me, and where I thought about many problems and solved most of them too. I will miss it.

But it is only a stage in my gardening story. I regularly give talks on growing vegetables and other allotment and garden type tales, I like to tell stories. Almost all of these are to complete strangers, so naturally I introduce myself and tell a little of my gardening story.

I started young. Around about three years old.

I was encouraged by my Dad and my Grandad.

I had one of those packets of seeds that you can get for kids that has an assortment of things that are “easy” to grow – carrots, peas, pumpkins, beans – and a patch of ground in my parents garden.

My parents taught me how to plant those seeds, grow the plants and harvest the veg. They also taught me how to save seed, and over time how to grow just about everything.

As I grew older there were times when I didn’t have much space for growing things because I didn’t have a garden as such, but I still managed a grobag with tomatoes here, a pot of herbs on a windowsill there. When I wasn’t able to grow vegetables, I had house plants.

Then in time I took on my allotment. When I took it on, it was a bit neglected and riddled with creeping buttercup. I was told I had three months in which I had to dig over the whole plot and if I could do that then it was mine to keep for as long as I wanted it and looked after it. I managed to do it in two. Working every Saturday and Sunday, hampered by the wettest couple of months I can remember, but by the time I was done, I had my first plants in – runner beans and courgettes and grand plans for the rest of the plot.

Over time I put up a shed – something I wished I had in the first weeks when it was raining and I had nowhere to shelter to drink a coffee. Well the shed was actually the best parts of two sheds put together, and whoever gets the plot after me will inherit that shed, hopefully it will give them shelter in their first months.

I think the allotment has also made me a better cook. When you have a ready supply of fruit and veg you have to learn to deal with gluts (too much of one thing all at the same time), without driving your family to distraction by constantly serving the same meals / veg. So being able to be creative as well as learning how to preserve things, and make jams and chutneys and all sorts of other ways to use what you have when you have it, without necessarily eating it there and then.

So yes it is the end of an era, and almost a third of my lifetime has been occupied with my allotment. I’m looking forward to starting somewhere new, although I’m not looking forward to starting from scratch again quite as much as I did all those years ago when I first took on the plot. I have plans though, things that I wasn’t able to do for practical reasons on the allotment that I think I can do in the new garden. So there’ll be new things to learn as well as using the lessons built up over the years and more vegetables and fruit.

Thanks for reading.

30 of 50

As I mentioned last week Covid finally caught up with me and despite feeling a little better and no longer testing positive I don’t feel like I’m completely back to normal yet.

Inevitably someone asked me if this was the worst illness I’d ever had. Too be honest no it wasn’t, although probably would have been a lot worse if we didn’t have the vaccines, but it ranks up there. The first few days were the worst with cough, temperature and a range of other symptoms, the tail of those symptoms lasted the better part of two weeks. The government is telling people (via it’s app) that after six days you can go back out into the world. After six days I was still testing positive, it took 11 days to get a negative result and even then I was feeling unwell.

As a kid I was always ill (or at least it felt that way). I was a martyr to just about every chest infection, cough or cold that was going. Being mildly asthmatic meant that I also ended up sounding like a congested steam train most of the time.

Doctors used to tell me and my Mum that I would “grow out of it” and largely they were right but that took years and required me to reach adulthood. I missed a lot of school, drank lots of hot Ribena (the modern stuff isn’t a patch on what they made 40+ years ago), dosed on Junior Disprin and occasionally nice pink antibiotic medicine. Read a lot and listened to Radio 2.

The sickest I think I’ve ever been was when I was in my late 20’s when I caught tonsillitis. This was a viral version (although we only worked that out when the antibiotics I was initially given didn’t work) and I can remember having had a sore throat for a week or so before waking up one morning unable to swallow and looking down my throat in the mirror and seeing two golf balls where the back of throat should have been. I had to tough it out, and ended up being off work for over 4 weeks, including missing our staff Christmas party. I was pretty miserable and my memory tells me that although I wasn’t any sicker than I’ve just been with Covid the duration of the illness made it feel like it was worse. It too had quite a long tail of post viral symptoms the same as Covid seems to at the moment.

I’ve had a few trips to hospital, a couple for out-patient appointments and three or four times via Accident and Emergency as a result of accidents, but never been admitted.

I have to say my experience with Covid wasn’t pleasant and I can very easily understand why it has taken so many lives. What I don’t understand is why many governments think it’s over. I certainly don’t want to catch it again, and as that is a possibility I will be continuing to take precautions and where a mask when in crowded places or indoors with others. Whilst this maybe didn’t protect me, I’m pretty sure I was asymptomatic for a couple of days before I realised I was infected so wearing a mask will help protect others if this happens to me again. The new bivalent vaccines sound promising, so there’s hope that we can truly make this endemic and not pretend we have as we are currently doing.

Overall I think I’ve been lucky with my health to date and try not to take it for granted, I’ve had no serious illness and although I still have the asthma, nothing that would be classed as chronic. All in all for 50 years I think I’ve done pretty well, and hope the next 50 go as smoothly.

Thanks for reading.

29 of 50

I’ve had a good dose of Covid this last week, so apologies if this post is a little more incoherent than usual.

For the first time in over 15 years I’m starting to get all of my books on shelves rather than in boxes in the attic.

But this story doesn’t begin here, it starts back about 35 or more years ago. Some of the first modern adult novels (no not those sort!) I read were by authors Alistair Maclean and Dick Francis – crime and thriller writers, I’d already been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle, mostly Sherlock Holmes and these three authors became my “go to” writers when I wanted something new to read. Maclean and Francis were both still alive at this point, so new books were coming about once a year from both.

I started to collect books by these authors and in particular with Maclean and Francis look for First Editions and start a proper collection.

As you’ll be able to see from the photograph I also added Stephen King to the shelves too. However he got a bit weird at one point and I stopped collecting him for a while.

None of them are worth particularly much, but I am pleased to own some of my favourites as First Editions. At the time secondhand bookshops got to learn that I was collecting and would hold copies for me. Ringing to see if I had a particular title or that perhaps the one that they had was in better condition that the one that I had and perhaps I might like to ‘trade-up’.

I enjoyed reading these books, and many I’ve not read for a long time and would probably enjoy rereading today. Indeed I have been doing that with some of the Alistair Maclean’s over the last couple of years.

The last time we moved house many of these went into storage in boxes in our loft. The plan was for them to be there temporarily but ultimately it ended up being a lot longer. Now we’re on the move again and I am determined that they will have shelf space in our new home and not be consigned to the loft as before.

I might even start to fill in some of the gaps, although I doubt it. These are a pleasure to me, and I enjoy reading them, but I have no one to leave them to, so there doesn’t seem much point in spending the money on ‘new’ First Editions. At least not at the moment anyways, other priorities like heating and eating seem like they should rightly take precedence. I am pleased that they will have shelf space though and that I’ll be able to look at them, and perhaps share them as a Zoom or Teams background when I’m on a call.

I’m also pleased to be able to have the space to commit to my Tsundoku and not feel guilty about it or keep tripping over them.

Thanks for reading.