Photos for "You, too, shall go to the ball..."

The local village fete - spot the sunshine!

One of the "Ancient World" ball decorations...

You, too, shall go to the ball...

One of the (myriad) joys of being part of a small rural community is attending unmissable annual events such as the local village church fête. Saturday was the appointed day for our annual shindig (see photo) and, by some sort of miracle,  the village was blessed with a gloriously sunny May day - which just happened to be sandwiched between two bitterly cold, wet November days.  I previously referred to this rare appearance by the sun as some sort of miracle, but in fact our (sadly soon to be leaving) lady minister assured me - tongue firmly in her holy cheek - that she had been on her knees all night putting up prayers. As I commented to her, it must be rather handy to be so well connected!

What’s particularly fascinating about such village events is the way that you see, rubbing shoulders with each other, the full gamut of the indigenous local species - ranging from feisty, dyed-in-the-wool, slightly eccentric older folk through to young, too-cool-for-school teenagers and even younger primary school kids, whose sole purpose throughout the afternoon is to pay as many visits to the ice cream tent as their parents will sanction. Evidently local parents were fairly liberal in their ice cream funding habits on Saturday, so sadly all the ice cream had vanished by the time Yours Truly pitched up at the tent - having previously fought her way to the front of the home-made fudge queue, narrowly avoided being mown down by a gundog in full retrieval mode, and having secured a bargain set of Kavanagh QC videos for HunterGatherer. 

Actually, I have to confess that HunterGatherer very nearly didn’t get the videos I’d so generously bought him (for the princely sum of £1), as he spent part of the weekend in deepest disgrace after committing a cardinal sin. To elucidate, he saw fit to store his syringe, dosing gun and open bottle of Ovivac-P - fresh from active duty that morning dosing lambs in the paddock - on the top shelf of the household fridge WITHOUT putting it inside a plastic bag first. ARGH! I suppose the only upside of any possible cross-contamination with our cheese rations is that we should be fairly immune to pasteurella and/or any clostridial diseases that might be lurking in our fridge. 

HG then further blotted his copybook by getting a bit over-enthusiastic with the chain saw and chopping down a part of the hedge that screens the cottage to the south-east.  I had particularly wanted to retain the high hedge (instead of the now Legoland version) as the local Council, in their immeasurable wisdom, have just given permission for a land developer to squeeze two houses into a fairly small corner of the field next door to us. Having not been used for the past 15 years to having anyone able to peer in through my windows (our nearest neighbours on the other side being a respectable distance away), I do have a tendency to wander around the house occasionally in a state of undress that might not be deemed a welcome sight by any newcomer to the area. Hence the hedge was supposed to be left intact, to avoid any nasty surprises for the builders (and in turn the new neighbours) when they arrive.  The selfsame local Council is also currently contemplating giving permission for a 45m wind turbine within sight of our smallholding. Suddenly our wee rural idyll is feeling somewhat under siege.

Still, things are not all doom and gloom. Down south, amidst the Dreamy Spires, Daughter No. 1 was in frantic ‘organising’ mode on Saturday. Just in case their library-like reading lists and multifarious sporting endeavours didn’t fill their every waking moment quite full enough, she and a group of her 2^nd year college buddies have spent the last 10 months organising the St Something’s Summer Ball.  To honour the year of the Olympics, they elected to have The Ancient World as their theme for the event, and from the series of photos (one of them attached, featuring a giant helmet) she texted me as Saturday progressed, it boded to be a fantasmagorical night out, with no detail overlooked. 

Reports on Sunday indicated that all went well, apart from the usual expected hiccups involved in organising an event attended by 1,700 students (yes, you read that right – I double-checked the figure!).  By ‘hiccups’, I mean minor problems such as folk trying to gatecrash, and thus avoid paying, by dint of climbing over the boundaries of the St Something’s walled garden. 

Little did these unsuspecting fare-dodgers know that the savvy and ultra-efficient Committee had fore-guessed this shady little ball-crashing scheme, so a “friendly” welcoming party awaited any intruders in the form of a rabid guard dog and his (potentially equally rabid) minder.  Apart from one quasi-mauling (perfectly in keeping with the significant role of savage animals in the Ancient World), apparently no damage was done.  By 9 a.m. on Sunday, the massive clear-up operation had begun, which (according to Daughter No.1) made even tackling Son&Heir’s bedroom seem like a picnic in the park – and that means it must have been a task of Herculean proportions (note astute Ancient World analogy).

Amusingly, it appears that various items of interest were unearthed during Sunday’s mass post-ball sanitation operation, including a random bra and a shoe. When I heard this, I couldn’t help but wonder if a modern-day version of the Cinderella story will now ensue, with the girls of St Something’s and other Colleges from far and wide queuing up impatiently to see which mysterious maiden will fit the appropriate parts of their anatomy perfectly into the lost items ...

Lambs and exams

It’s that time of year again - the one when suddenly school pupils of a certain age wish they’d applied themselves rather more assiduously during the previous two and a half terms of the academic session. Our sporty Son&Heir is seemingly no exception to this rule and has, very uncharacteristically, rung from HockeySchool in the south (where it’s fair to say he saves his energies for outside the classroom) to ask for some maternal coaching in French - not just on one, but on a couple of occasions within the last week. 

The supreme irony of this is that half a dozen of his former year group at the local school have been coming to see Yours Truly every week for the past five months and actually paying to listen to my pearls of wisdom.  Whereas for the past five years Son&Heir has regularly been offered (completely free of charge, might I add!) the fruits of my linguistic learning, and has each time told me precisely where to put my French verbs.  I fear his exact instructions might well lose something in translation and so they are best left to the imagination.

Meanwhile, just down the road at Edinburgh’s illustrious seat of academic endeavour, music student Daughter No.2 is also in mid-exam mode, though she - at least - has put in a modicum of work during the last two terms.  Her nose was evidently somewhat out of joint yesterday afternoon, as I had (shock, horror!) omitted to send a good luck text for yesterday morning’s exam.

This serious oversight, which was most likely the result of being distracted by my current frequent mad dashes outside to remove escapee lambs from the garden, was apparently not compensated for by the fact that I had sent her a good luck card at the outset of the exams last week. And there was me thinking I’d done rather well remembering to send that! Perhaps I’d better despatch the good luck text for her next exam right now – while my addled middle-aged brain still remembers – even if it arrives a few days early! That might redeem my maternal standing a tad.

Talking of mothers, the black sheep of our little flock (see the photo – and check out those piercing eyes...) certainly lived up to her name last night. For her lamb it was who, some time around midnight, became entangled in some netting (put up the day before by HunterGatherer in a fond attempt to keep Houdini-like lambs in the paddock and out of our garden).

The lamb in question may well have had aspirations, but he definitely wasn’t a patch on the master himself.  As a result, the wannabe escape artist had somehow managed to twist his little lamb legs into some kind of reef knot, while at the same time succeeding in sticking his head through another part of the net. Had I not heard his plaintive bleating outside while I sat typing a “gripping” article about running spikes (yes, my literary talents know no bounds...), it might well have been curtains for Master Lamb. 

And I have to confess that while I was wrestling around in the dark with the wet and woolly wee rascal, all the while getting covered in ‘eau de mouton’ and mud (did I mention that it had been raining - again - for most of the day?), the words “mint sauce” did, inexcusably, escape my lips.  But I only whispered them ... and just once... honest!

Orange rings and other things

Sunday is generally anything but a day of rest on the smallholding, and yesterday was no exception. The last of our Shetland ewes lambed on Friday, and we’ve ended up with a “baker’s dozen” (i.e. 13) lambs.  Apparently this expression dates back to the days when bakers would make thirteen instead of a dozen loaves in a batch, to avoid being punished for selling underweight bread. 

Sadly, over half of this year’s “crop” of lambs are males, meaning that - as none of them appears sufficiently macho-looking to be a “tup” (ram) in the future - they all have to be castrated. So the first job on yesterday’s lengthy “to do” list was the rather unpleasant task of applying an orange rubber ring to the poor wee chaps’ nether regions.  Even as a rough-tough farmer’s daughter, I still struggle with this concept, despite knowing that it needs done or we’d have a problem on our hands come weaning time in the autumn,  in the form a posse of rampant, hormone-charged male lambs running amok. So HunterGatherer did the deed while I averted my gaze...

Next task on the list was our burgeoning compost heap, which was bursting out over its netting enclosure in all directions. HG began to dig up and ferry fresh compost (possibly an oxymoron?) by wheelbarrow to the flowerbeds as a Sunday ‘treat’ for the rosebushes.  Meanwhile, Yours Truly grabbed the opportunity to nip into the village to wrestle with netting of a different sort i.e. play a quick game (OK, six quick games...) of tennis.  I should explain - in my defence - that this was a tennis club social event, which the secretary had taken the time and trouble to organise, so I felt it my moral duty to support this good lady (though the choice between ferrying compost to and fro and belting tennis balls to and fro did make the “moral duty” option considerably more appealing!). 

By the time I returned, HunterGatherer had also zipped over the whole lawn (a third of an acre approx.) on his ride-on mower, and the whole place was beginning to look far more shipshape...  Which is just as well, as Daughter No. 1 has left us with strict instructions about the things that need “a good tidy up” before she returns north from the Dreamy Spires at the end of June.  A gaggle (not sure what the collective noun for swats is...) of her study buddies from St Something’s will be accompanying her north to attend her belated 21^st birthday Supper’n Reels night in our local village hall.  D1’s actual birthday is half-way through May (eek! must post her card soon...), but as that falls in the middle of term, the party has to take place over a month later. This is fortunate indeed, given that the list of interior and exterior ‘anomalies’ which HunterGatherer and I have to address before the Sassenach invasion occurs is long - very long!

The hall wallpaper was one of the eyesores identified by our beloved eldest as needing “sorted”, and in fairness she does have a point. Unfortunately, the folk who had the house before we moved in (15 years ago this July) appear to have had shares in a tobacco factory, with the result that much of the wallpaper is stained a characteristic browny shade - not the most attractive then and certainly no less unattractive a decade and a half later.  After returning from another day’s ditch-digging endeavours on the land, HunterGatherer has thus begun wielding the steam wallpaper stripper with gusto this evening.  Our original plan was simply to paint the bare wall – until, that was, we saw the uneven bumps and lumps of plaster all over the surface of said wall and realised that a protective layer of wallpaper was definitely required for cosmetic reasons.  

Of course, one of the great joys of middle age is that by this time in one’s life, one has learned to do oneself the things that one is good at and to commission other people to do everything else – in our case, wallpapering definitely falls into the “everything else” category, so I have rung a good friend who possesses the necessary papering pedigree and enlisted his services. I should explain that HG’s only previous attempt at papering is the reason that “re-paper bathroom” also appears on Daughter No.1’s list.  In his blissful ignorance of interior decor etiquette, HG left large bubbles in the paper, which he then eliminated by dint of slicing them with a Stanley knife.  End result: our bathroom walls looks as if they have been operated on by a plastic surgeon of very dubious repute.  We have had to endure looking at the resultant hideous scars every day for the past 15 years.  Sadly, even the Sudocrem plastered on the wall by toddler Son&Heir at various points in the early years didn’t magically heal them.  

With the third week in June suddenly seeming much closer now that we’re a full week into May, all these tasks suddenly feel a tad more urgent than when Daughter no. 1 first drew them to our attention at Easter.  Don’t suppose by some miracle there’s a TV film crew currently looking for a “Changing Rooms” (or better still “changing entire houses”) project to get stuck into?  No – thought not...

Words don’t (always) come easy

Working as a translator for two decades, I inevitably became a ‘Jill of all trades and master of none’. Over the years, I morphed overnight into an expert on zip manufacture (70,000 words – riveting...), raising geese for pâté de foie gras (revolting practice – wouldn’t eat the stuff if you paid me!), MBAs (reckon I’m probably in line for an honorary degree after proofreading all those course materials) and multifarious other topics.

This aspect of the work is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, because often just as you begin to grasp the rudiments of one topic, the project’s suddenly over and you have to start from scratch again, mugging up on another area of expertise.

Interpreting (ie converting the spoken, not written, word into another language) is similar – only worse.  As you can imagine, if you’re in a board meeting or at a conference there’s no time to pore painstakingly over a dictionary to find that elusive and clever ‘jeu de mots’ the speaker has just used to conclude their speech triumphantly.

You need to have the right words ready immediately to hand (or, better still, to tongue), no matter how technical the terminology that’s being bandied about by delegates,  who – let’s not forget – probably eat, sleep and breath their specialism. They’ve had years to accumulate all the jargon in their mother tongue, while you’ve had a couple of days to ‘cram’ it all in your own beleaguered brain – in both your mother tongue plus a foreign language.

And, as I’ve discovered to my cost, one thing is for sure: no matter how long you immerse yourself in the subject matter for a forthcoming assignment, there’s always a phrase or two guaranteed to catch you out.

One of my more memorable jobs occurred early in my career, when I was sent to interpret at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London (not a place I’m planning on returning to any time soon – those pneumatic doors nearly frightened the life out of me).

I’d been warned that the prisoner for whom I’d be interpreting (a French-speaking African) had allegedly been involved in practising voodoo, so I’d compiled an extensive - if rather alarming - list of vocabulary,  so I was pretty confident that I knew my gris-gris from my Ouija... What I wasn’t prepared for was when the lawyer asked me to put the following question to the accused party: “And did you at any point push Mr X’s face into a bowl of chicken entrails?” It was then that I realised that sometimes in life, no amount of preparation is ever going to be enough...

Spring has sprung – the perfect time for a fresh start!

Mortification personified!  Just realised how many weeks and months have passed since my last blog post. Of course, I could bore you with tales of husbands (or rather husband – I only have one!) being made redundant, a succession of teenage/twenty-something offspring requiring moral support  in their hours of need, various credit-crunch induced financial crises, and of course the ever-increasing demands of Yours Truly’s professional plate-spinning... but I won’t.  

Suffice to say, life has simply been indescribably busy as I begin to meander towards the big 5-0 landmark next summer.  It was perhaps the dawning of this realisation (just over a year of being 40-something left...) coupled with a recent fortuitous change in employment circumstances (no more 80-mile round trips to the big smoke – yeehaa!) that has inspired me to resume my virtual scribblings about life in and around the Square Sparrow smallholding. 

And whilst I’ve been busy for the past 18 months burning up the country’s precious carbon resources by zipping daily up and down the motorway,  Spot and Cocoa, our two ovine Casanovas would appear to have been equally busy,  judging by the number of lambs (last count 11) in the paddock. 

As ever, the lambkins are a motley but delightful crew, ranging from pure creamy white, via mottled grey (perfect for morphing into the drystane dyke and causing us to worry that they’ve been lifted by a peckish bird of prey) through to charcoal with white faces and/or legs and finally to midnight black.  Whilst they cause their mothers almost perpetual angst by belting off with their similarly high-spirited buddies and running “lamb races” up and down the field, they certainly provide an endless source of amusement for this easily distracted writer as she sits tapping away on a computer, strategically positioned at a window that overlooks their field.

HunterGatherer has fewer opportunities to admire their antics, as his rural self-employment endeavours take him off at crack of dawn most mornings.  Last week he was unfortunate enough to be digging drains and ditches in the driving rain, and returned home every evening muttering darkly about the miseries of working outside on the land. 

Today, however, the rare yellow orb made an appearance in the heavens above, so it was Yours Truly who was muttering complaints about having to sit indoors seeking interesting things to say about oil and gas technology while he whizzed around on a quad bike in the open air, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back. The rural worthy who long ago coined the expression about the grass on the other side of the fence always being greener wasn’t far wrong!

Chocolate Woolly Jumpers

 

For several years, our croft has been home to 10 Shetland sheep - a race of feisty yet friendly little critters which come in an amazing selection of different colours. Ours range from dark chocolate through milk chocolate to white chocolate. And if you think it’s strange to compare wool colours to chocolate, then you completely underestimate the importance of chocolate to the (not so) Little Bo Peep in charge of this delightful miniature flock...

There was great excitement this weekend, as our two tups (Scottish parlance for rams) were unleashed on their eight unsuspecting lady sheep partners, split between our two paddocks (one amorous tup per paddock = no fighting over women!).   

Old Spot gives the impression of being on his last legs - both his horns are broken, and there’s a bit of grey appearing round his muzzle - which is no doubt why Scottish Natural Heritage were disposing of him last spring. I suspect that in offering him a home, we may well have saved him from a swift trip to that great sheep shed in the sky.

His sidekick Cocoa (so-called because his tummy is a gorgeous shade of chocolate brown) is, by contrast, young and fit - and quite the lad about town.  So if HunterGatherer was expecting trouble, he’d have bet on Cocoa being in the thick of the action.  And he’d have lost…

Because while HunterGatherer was busy allocating a couple of the ewes to Cocoa (the ovine equivalent of David Beckham), dear old Spot (more akin to Sir Alex Ferguson) had been contained in a small pen in the corner of his soon-to-be paddock). However, he had obviously espied his new lady friends already and had promptly decided that nothing was going to stand between him and a long-awaited bit of nookie. 

Evidently forgetting his advancing years - and completely oblivious to the potential hazards to his ancient family jewels - he launched himself into mid-air from a standstill and cleared the gate of his pen by miles. Before HunterGatherer could say "hold your horses", Spot was happily pursuing sheepish brides around the paddock and looking happy as a pig in clover (apologies for mixing animal metaphors!?).