The other day a very old friend was telling me about how he'd read that one of the signs of getting older was putting on your favourite shorts, staring into the mirror and seeing Baden Powell staring back.



Now I'd like to add to that, staring at a photo of yourself and seeing your dad staring back. Normally I see Stephen Merchant staring back*, but not this time.

It was shot on a bright day and I had to look skywards for the pic so it was a perfect recipe for the undeniable crowsfeet to be fully evident. But still. What next, shiny speedos and jumpers with patches at the elbow?

The picture was by Harry Borden. It's for the Observer Magazine, out this coming Sunday. I'd rather hoped they would use a particular picture by Jason Ingram - partly because I'm vain enough to want them to use what I think may be the least worst picture of me, and partly as I had a jammed week and photoshoots - even for just one shot - can take an age. And Jason is a mighty fine photographer.

Nope, it had to be Harry, they said - he only lives up the road and he is a great photographer.



Photographers can be a tedious bunch - often very egotistical, incapable of talking about anything else but themselves, and it's a reasonably accurate (although by no means infallible) law that the more average the snapper the more comprehensively they will exhibit those traits.

I checked out Harry's website and immediately started recognising images: I know that picture of Richard Harris, that's the image of Michael Hutchence (this one), what an amazing picture of Gilbert and George. He has over 100 images in the National Portrait Gallery. He can take a picture. Nice for me then, that he lives part of the time only half an hour away.**




So, if you want to know what my dad looked like (if he'd been paler, taller and slimmer), get the Observer on Sunday 5 September.



The top pic is of a purple hazel....the middle one's a Czar plum...the bottom one of Szechuan pepper plants.


* They must be using that pasty-faced-pencil-neck filter on their cameras

** After being here, he was off to Israel, to shoot Blair (only photographically story-hunters)

Lately everything has seemed insurmountable, uninteresting and dull. I've been deeply unenthusiastic, wrestling with writing even the simplest piece, haven't had a clue about what to add to the place for next year and I haven't had anything falling into my mind to blog about...until I realised I should be blogging about not having anything falling into my mind to blog about.



Once in a distinctly random while I get as low as a iguana's instep. Flat as the proverbial witch's tit. Unable even to string three poor similies together. Not only does everything feel difficult, that the place is a waste of time/moneypit/misguided nonsense, I get furious with myself for feeling like it - so the tedium compounds.

Fear not, loyal reader, I am not about to unload tales of secret depression, childhood wrongings and how Morrissey wrote those songs just for me*...I've just been dischuffed for no good reason for a short while. And in the interests of keeping this blog at least partially warts n all, have some warts.

Out the other side. And very nice it is too. Although I feel uninspired still - as if mildly hungover - and it's time I decided on what and how Otter Farm moves forwards next year. Courses, residential courses even, an outlet, back to growing the organic cut flowers, certainly more grinding peppers, herbs? And I've 50 Japanese plums arriving sometime. The forest garden will expand, this autumn for sure, but there's a piece missing and I'm not sure what it might be. I think it should have money attached to it though - something that will produce relatively quickly and be reasonably useful in it's level of return. Dream on.



Rather happily, some of my favourite fruit are around - Japanese wineberres especially. Deeper, tastier, winier than the raspberry, I can't get enough of them. They're also deeply sensible in that they only release their fruit from the papery calyx a day or two before they're ripe - then traffic-light quickly through from green to yellow to orange and into deep red. I eat most on the way to and from the chickens, but once in a while I hold myself back and get some into the house. When I do, this is as good a use as I can find: cranachan.



A very good handful of rolled oats - toasted for a mo in a dry pan, a pot of double cream whisked, a generous dribble of honey and a nice glug of your second best whiskey, all stirred in with as many wineberries as you fancy. It is champion.

One of the reasons I think I dipped is that the place started to look crap. The book is about to come out and as review copies fly out people want to come and look. This is one of the worst times to come - it promises so much, the height of the season and all that, but the big show is over, the colour of most of the flowering stuff has past, and the morning and evening air has more than an edge of autumn about it. The phacelia has lost it's zap. A few weeks ago this couple of acres was extraordinary. A chest-high sea of purple either side of the vineyard - it looked like lavender from a distance - bringing the most ridiculous waves of insects to the farm. Throw one of those ludicrous metre quadrats from school into the patch and you'll have certainly enclosed 50 bees alone. The noise is astonishing, but only if you stop. I lose track of how many things are like that here. If you walk you are aware of the bees, but only when you stop does the level and solidity of the hum hit you. Same with the scent from the quince flowers in spring. Stillness is the only way to enjoy it.



But it's gone, over, lost most of that purple, and the wind and rain of the last fortnight have turned it into a pale brown duvet dotted with blotches of purple here and there. Some flowers poke through regardless and the bees thank them for it, but a spectacle it ain't. With most of the apricots, peaches and nectarines picked, the spectacle absent and me a miserable sod has meant I've been saying no to most visits (including one of the more famous chefs) and turning down some of the opportunities to talk and demo that have come my way. There's no point in doing them when I feel like that, as it all feels like treacle.

It's all wind and rain here at the moment, which means more than the usual dotting of windfalls in the apple orchard. Most are one of my favourites - the livid red, early Beauty of Bath. I resent each one that hits the grass and is set upon by wasps, slugs and flies. The ones I can rescue make juice, the ones invaded are picked first thing in the morning while the wasps are still snoozy and thrown to the grateful pigs.



The pecans can blow all they like though - there are no nuts yet and their looseness was made for the wind.



As I write I think I'm hitting on at least part of what it is that's had me flat - we've been in that lull between the properly up and the properly down, that place that's neither high summer nor autumn, good looking nor allowed to be wrapping up warm. There are grapes to come and some Szechuan pepper, but not until we're well into October so it feels like the place is failing in some way. And then I come along and make it worse by losing my umph for driving the whole thing forward into next year - not ideal. I resolve to take a holiday in August next year, to let the rhythm of the farm have its way, to leave for once happy that there's not so much I should be doing, and that it won't be the end of the world to let it ride for a few days.



I have a new camera. Already it is making me very happy. I have a long while before I can wield it as I would like but I already I feel attached to it - it suits me. It is a full frame camera (here you go anoraks), the advantages of which are only apparent when you shift from one that isn't to one that is. The world you see through it stops being confined or so much of a representation of the world, and you feel more like you are capturing what you see or want to see rather than trying to recreate it. It was deliciously expensive and (and this is vital) the shutter makes me feel like Carlos the Jackal using the perfect gun with the perfect silencer. Tight and slack at the same time, like when Dennis Taylor says 'black', snooker fans.

I am embarrassed to say that using it may well have been one of the things that has cheered me up, such is the trivial shallowness of my woefully Western dip. Sod it though, nice pic of the Japanese wineberries eh.



* although clearly he did. (Or did he?)

Before I get on with it, any food/garden bloggers out there who'd like a review copy of my new book - A Taste of the Unexpected - can email Quadrille and they may not have run out yet.

Now, where was I...

I'm between* the horns of a dilemma**. Or rather two dilemmas***.

I have some grapes, maybe a quarter of a ton of them, and they all look lovely and proper, as if I knew what I was doing. Or rather Trent and I knew what we were doing.



On the one hand this is good - a real, if small, commercial scale harvest of something. On the other - it's been a belting year for vineyards after several years of not, and wineries are already overrun with orders for turning lovely grapes into wine in a few months time. It means that they can be a little more choosey about the minimum quantity they accept. Quarter of a ton sounds a fair lump, but it's only perhaps a quarter of what it seems I will need to interest a winery.

This gives me three choices (so I guess that's a trilemma):

1 - I can send a winery my grapes to go with their own of the same variety, have a chat about the style to make them into etc, and they will send me back bottles of sparkling and still wine in whatever proportion I fancy

2 - I can search high and low for another small scale winery that might take my quarter of a ton and process it separately. This is likely to be fruitless and may take a lot of time that I'm pretty short of

3 - I can try making the wine myself. This sounds like fun. It sounds like a very River Cottage thing to do. It will almost certainly end in disappointment for one very simple reason: I've never had a homemade wine that's any better than carwash. I have no intention of wincing my way through even a glass of what usually looks and tastes like the drippings from a welldiggers arse just so I can say 'I made that'.

There is a fourth way...knock all the grapes off now, two months or more before maturity, so that the plants' energies are spent developing even more of a root system. That one's a bit dull though isn't it.



Option 1 sounds fine, and undoubtedly the easiest and most sensible - but (and it's a big but) I will be drinking and giving friends wine that's only partly from the grapes of Otter Farm and I'm not quite sure how satisfying that would be. At least a few very lovely English wines are made using a large percentage of grapes grown by other people and very few of them make that clear on the label - so you might buy, for argument's sake, 'Bison Canyon' sparkling, find it absolutely fabulous and feel like your excursion into the romance of Englishwinesville has been amply rewarded. If a fair proportion of those grapes don't come from the vineyards of Bison Canyon, is that a problem? It's certainly not illegal. And perhaps I'm alone in this, but I'd like that to be made very clear on the bottle: 'made with grapes from Bison Canyon and other vineyards' or whatever. I'm guessing some places don't put it on for fear that it would make me do exactly what it would make me do - think twice about buying it. I suspect most people buy English wine at least partly because they're interested in the story of where it comes from, supporting a local product, investing a little expendable income in the romance of a wine grown and made just 'there' - otherwise why not buy a good French/New World wine for a lot less? If that story is muddied then who knows what effect that'd have on sales. Unless it's cheap, wine has to be to people's taste for them to buy it twice, but the first sale is the key to that - hence, I suspect, the opacity.



So Option 2 it is - phoning a few small scale vineyards who's wine I like, to see if they have a small scale winery or know someone who will entertain the idea of making a batch on the scale we might (fingers crossed) have in a few months time. Do shout if you know a vineyard or winery that fits the description - I'll make sure a couple of bottles of carwash come your way.

The other dilemma, I realise now I've got this far, actually falls into the threatening-my-cosy-prejudices category and is deserving of a separate blog all of it's own. Maybe even quite soon. I'm almost certain it will include the usual targets of my ferocity: the Moanic Stoat Poachers Manic Street Preachers, Michelle from Eastenders and, of course, Brighton.


* Or should that be 'on'?
** There is a person called Dai Lemma on Facebook, couldn't help looking
*** Is that a quadrilemma?

A fruit cage has arrived. It remains in its constituent parts, partly as I've been busy on other things and mostly because there are a few pieces to come. A discrepancy between the actual area to be caged and the size the supplier* was told is to blame**.

Having a fruit cage arrive has a strange rights-of-passage feel to it. Something previously impossible (or at least utterly irrelevant) - like buying a not-necessarily flattering coat because it keeps the rain off when your walking/working, being on tv, buying insurance, paying for software, not accompanying the breaking of wind with either a request to 'pull my finger' or a mime of revving a motorbike - has turned up. It's all a bit grown up***.



I have no shortage of fruit to go in it. Redcurrant, blackcurrant and whitecurrant half-standards, a good half dozen varieties of blackberry, a couple of tayberries, some summer raspberries, sunberries, loganberries, strawberries, a cherry, a dwarf peach and nectarine, a couple of kiwis and a few grapevines. Anything, essentially, that I've grown tired of the birds getting more than I do of. Not sure that was a real sentence - do feel free to rearrange.

It's quite large (8m x 10m) but still a little shy of the regulation length for a cricket pitch (22 yards). This is a shame as I have spent the last weeks absentmindedly bowling anything vaguely spherical around the fields. Small apples and apricots jettisoned by the tree to allow it to carry the rest of its load to ripeness have been picked up and delivered to one corner or another of the orchard. Usually in an impersonation of some famous bowler of yesteryear. Bob Willis (bowling wrist cocked for the length of his angled run in), Shane Warne and Max Walker (second ball in...judging from his run up I think he may have a wet medicine ball in his left pocket pulling him over, and only his right shoulder has a socket). All have graced the imaginary pitches of Otter Farm. I've even taken to bowling any wasp-attacked fruit into the pig pen for them to scoff on.

Why all this fruity cricketing wizardry? River Cottage played Gardeners World at cricket a weekend or two back and it's been a while since I turned my arm over. And the last time I did (16 or so years ago) my last action was to take a marvelous, boundary-edge catch to win the game. Had slow-mo cameras been in operation they would've seen me scurrying around the rope into position admirably early, watching the ball without waver, hands cupped, fingertips up. The ball reaches them, I move my hands towards my body to cushion the blow which parts my wrists slightly, allowing the ball to roll down my forearms past me elbows hitting me squarely in the testicles before bouncing back past my elbows along my forearms into my hands. I raise my hand in the seconds between contact and the pain kicking in. Team jubilation follows, somewhat through gritted teeth by your correspondent on the boundary.



It was mostly about cream teas and cider to be honest but some cricket was played. 25 overs a side, and River Cottage romped home to a 45 run victory. Not before I was out for a duck. A golden duck. First ball. Out. As I walked in, the outgoing batsman said 'watch out, he's pretty fast'. In the 17.4m to the crease I had wiped that remark from my mind. I took aim, he bowled fast and straight, on a good length - all those thigns you could reasonably be forgiven for not expecting in a mtch of this kind. Accommodatingly I chose to keep my feet still and play around the line of the ball. My stumps did this. I walked off to a generous guard of honour from my teammates - who kindly formed an arch for me to walk through. Read about it here if you've nothing better to do.

Modesty prevents me from recounting how my gameturning spell of misery medium pace quietened the opposition when they were in danger of winning. Let's just say that I bowled a gameturning spell of misery medium pace that quietened the opposition when they were in danger of winning and leave it at that. I'd also like to say I took a blistering catch in the covers****. There was a little mild sledging (conversations between fielders and batsman - such as this) - but nothing too strong. It's usually done to put your opponent off a little but it can always backfire. Brilliant but often fiery Australian bowler Glenn McGrath was bowling to Zimbabwe's last batsman Eddo Brandes – who refused to get out. McGrath, frustrated, asked Brandes 'Hey Eddo, why are you so fat?' to which he replied, 'Because every time I shag your wife, she gives me a biscuit'.

Huge thanks to those who played and attended - £900 was raised for the chosen charity, Thrive.



Back to the fruit cage. Although it will happily protect the fruit that will become the next fruity cricket balls to be sprayed, in character, around the farm when the rematch nears, it clearly cannot double as a suitable cricketing net, generously sized though it is. But I'm determiend to find a dual sporting purpose for it now my mind has strayed across the idea. I'm not sure if the construction will happily stand the weight of a dartboard, but once it's in place I'll see how it feels. Perhaps an outdoor table tennis table, although that'd mean plenty of ground space being left plant-free, although after Alex Higgins***** sadly dying this week, a snooker table might be appropriate if a little exposed to the elements. Any other suggestions for suitable double uses for the fruit cage would be most appreciated. Perhaps redcurrant marbles.




* Harrod Horticultural
** I'm currently searching for others to blame
***Having written all this, I've just discovered that almost exactly a year ago I was pondering something similar. I must be running out of things to say
**** ...but I can't
***** Even completely plastered he was something else

So what could be causing this then?



I thought 'cat' until I saw the deeper scratches, the higher scratches and the fact that almost every one of the 40 trees in the apple orchard has been affected.

Most of the scratches are at knee to thigh height but some are up in the trees, even as high as 7 feet up.



A badger, mink or maybe a hugely strong tomcat maybe....but I'm thinking mink might be the favourite as we're near a river



To add to the mystery, all five of our chickens vanished in one night last week adn there are no signs of even a stray feather....



A neighbour is convinced it's a two legged pest arsing about...but could it be as Lia Leendertz wonders, something altogether spookier ?



Any suggestions welcome.....

Camping's crap isn't it. Someone had to say it. Yes there are magical moments, and an occasional sense of getting back to a more pared down, essential way of living away from the guff and distractions of modern life in a reasonably affluent western country yadda yadda, but they're few and far between.

It's a tough one to own up to. You may as well own up to having a small knob, loving the Nolans or being a dab hand at butterfly cakes for all the manpoints it awards. Don't like camping: you're half a man. It kind of implies you're awful in bed. I maybe* awful in bed, but it's got nowt to do with camping.




Actually, it's not that I don't like camping. I DO like camping. I just don't like packing to get ready to go; the setting the sodding thing up; the hot nights; the light mornings; the inability to sit in any way that might be regarded as comfortable for the duration of the holiday; the need for a strategic peeing regime (SPR) starting at 6pm, that will give you some hope of not having to get up in the night; the niggle in the bladder that says you need a pee around 35 minutes after you went to bed despite having stuck to your SPR; and finding that pee was perhaps two thimblesful and almost entirely the result of an overactive mind telling you that despite having adhered to your SPR you need a pee. This is the same part of the brain that swears they always score when you go for a wee in the middle of big football matches.

And, I forgot, that weird wax that your body always feels coated in after one night's sleep in a tent...like you're gently seeping beeswax from the moment of sundown to sun up. Showers can't touch it...only a hot bath, in your own bath, will remove it.



Camping is apparently simple living. Try going with even just a wife and one child - your car will be full of guff that is essential for making this simple living possible.

A couple of days near the Dorset coast are enough to make anyone happy. It was blazing with a cool breeze, lots of lovely food, lunch with Ray Smith and his wife Mary that involved very much in the way of cured pork. And a bit of champagne. With Ray and Mary you are in the company of greatness and a knowledge that is held by very few others. I made my very first sausages, salami, chorizo and airdried ham with Ray, butchering my first pig with him 7 years ago or thereabouts. I've met very few cheerier people, and very few less willing to live with laziness and incompetance - it's a combination I like very much and he's been a very good friend ever since. He's also never short of an opinion about anything, especially what it is that you do for a living. He knows best. I like that too. He's also very good at swearing. This may make him the complete human being.

A lunch and an afternoon spent with Ray and Mary, sunny paddling at Burton Bradstock, woodpeckers flying about being replaced by hawk moths when they went to bed, fish and chips on the beach at West Bay. All fabulous. All in the two days we were away. And that's a lot of loveliness for two days. It's also a lot of neckache and lack of sleep. Gristle grumble.

I think what I'm partly moaning about is wishing I loved the palaver that comes with camping more than I do. I want to be Grizzly Adams**, or at least on the odd weekend and sunny week I do. I also feel a calling to go to a hotel by the sea, sit outside sipping cocktails and eating stuff someone else has cooked and know I don't have to queue if I fancy a chod.



It makes me feel slightly older not loving camping. Or rather loving camping in the less than unconditional way that I do. I may be slightly sensitive to feeling older this week as it's my birthday. I really couldn't be arsed about getting older, not in that 'oh my God I'm 21, life's over' kind of a way. Even in my teens my brain always thought it was cobblers - surely it's about how long you have left (and the quality of that time) rather than how long you've had. I may live to be 67, 97, or anywhere in between***, and without knowing which, it really is entirely irrelevant whether I'm 21 or 51. I may have 46 years left either way.

Life has got incrimentally lovelier for the most part. I do, however, get fed up with life's creeping ignomies as the years shuffle by. For a man, these mainly involve body hair and its increasing propensity for poking out in places it was never fashionable to show. When having my haircut about 7 years ago the hairdresser made a wafty movement and asked 'Shall I tidy these up for you?' I really didn't know what he meant. Mishearing or misunderstanding a hairdresser gets me instantly embarrassed - it recalls a day when as a young lad I went to get my hair cut with my dad. He had his cut, went off to by some fags and a paper while I had mine cut...and the barber asked me if I wanted something for the weekend. I was left utterly confused. I must've only been 12 or so. I also wouldn't let it lie. 'What sort of thing?' 'What do you mean?' I carried this on even when my dad returned, genuinely wanting to be let in on the secret. I was carted off to much giggling between my dad and the barber and was not in any way enlightened on the X57 home. The blushing came years later when I remembered the event now fully acquainted with exactly what that 'something' was. Now if he'd have asked me if I'd wanted a seagulls welly I might have known what he was on about.

So, reddening, I asked him what he meant. My eyebrows. He had that look of a man familiar with the self-deniers. I genuinely hadn't noticed the odd lengthy one sticking out - but deny it and you sound like an arse, compelled to over-explain your surprise. Which makes you sound like you're making your ignorance up. That day was the start of the nasal and eyebrow hair war. Tweezers entered my world for something other than the infrequent nipping out of splinters. For a fleeting moment I understood what it must feel like to be a woman, to feel compelled by society to wax this, pluck that, cover those...but within a microsecond that vanished under a cloud of self-obsession. I just felt older. This shit happens to old men. I felt like Ursula Andress in the last minutes of 'She'.

There is still the odd day I wake up and think I'm in jail, before realising it's just dangling eyebrows, and winding the offending hairs around the doorhandle and slamming the door to pluck them free - but that's it: the sum total of feeling older. As it goes, it beats colostomy**** bags and arthritis.



There was a very lovely piece about Otter Farm in the Independent on Saturday by Anna Pavord. She came here a few weeks ago. I was a tad nervous. Anna is one of the queens of garden writing and Otter Farm is nothing if not rough around the edges. Very much a smallholding rather than a garden. I tried to get her onside with a piece of strawberry and rhubarb tart before she saw the jungle and it may have worked. Having spent a good part of her life creating a garden and reinstating the former glories of a house herself she completely understood the wrestling match that is trying to create something out of an unrelated starting point, on a limited budget, with a whole load of other stuff going on. There are a couple of teeny inaccuracies in her piece that I spotted - a few plants mentioned as being in Veg Patch that aren't, but most importantly she had my age wrong. 43 it said. I did the maths...but that would make this 2010. Oh balls.

It can't be true...but even saying that makes me sound old. Being surprised by how old you are, saying you only feel 29 or something are defining characteristics of being an old sod. 34 looks about right. Nine years to be wiped off the slate then. There was a patch between 19 and 26 when I worked in the odd seasonal job in a kitchen and spent the rest of the time either training around Europe grapepicking and all that but essentially on the dole. That's seven years. And I took 3 years getting an 'E' and an 'O' at A level. The last year of the three was reasonably dedicated to listening to music and trying hard enough to get that 'E'. Some of the rest of the time was spent in the pub playing pool. A couple of us were given the keys for the pool table as we played in the team and the owner wanted us to win the league, so many a lunchtime became a long afternoon. Apart from that, those 2 years were wasted.

So I reckon that's two years plus the other seven makes nine...perhaps that's the reason for the mental discrepancy between 34 and 43. I think I only really started being energetic or vaguely driven by anything other than music at around 26, but thinking about it it was probably much later when it really kicked in, maybe only since I've come here to Otter Farm.



So, here I am, 43 apparently. At least for today. Tomorrow's a different story but I haven't been able to account for another year of discrepancy yet, hence posting this in a rush, today, so that the maths still works.


* I said 'maybe', ok

** Played by Dan Haggerty, not to be confused with Den Hegarty.

*** Or maybe even either side of that, but you get the picture.

**** My wife: Who's this on the radio?...'The Cure' I said...'Sounds like that bloke off Dexys Midnight Runners doesn't he' she replied...'Wha..!??!?! Don't be dosy'....said I. Impossible. I've seen The Cure all over the place, the first gig I ever went to, I thought, but about three months later when The Cure was on the radio again, I noticed it. She was right. So close I couldn't see the wood.

Dies ist meine Topflappen.



It may be that only one or fewer of those words is proper German. No matter: it's what I say everytime I use it. The Topflappen is a nicely insulated square of material and not heat may pass through it. If Kwai Chang Cain had strapped one to the inside of each forearm, moving the temple soup of the day might well have been less troublesome.

My wife bought me the Topflappen, fed up with hearing my bleats about the endless little blisters on my hands caused by using tea towels to remove half an oxen basting in goosefat on regulo 37. Those of you more familiar with this blog may remember that I have the hands of a howler monkey many years my senior, but I still don't want to make them any more unpleasant with burn scars.

I didn't know it was called Topflappen at first but one day, for no particular reason, I looked at the little label sown into the heat resistant square and noticed that it was Made in Germany, and that it had a real name: Topflappen. From that moment every time I withdrew a hot tray, a scorching pie dish or rearranged the hot oven shelves I would feel compelled to say 'Danke meine Topflappen', for removing from my life the spectre of oven burns. It makes dragging stuff like the strawberry and rhubarb tart solely about anticipation of pleasure rather than tainted with anticipation of pain. I love my Topflappen.



Work at home for any length of time and you'll find yourself doing the odd thing that may not be find accord with the rest of society. You might not get around to brushing your teeth until 3.47pm, you'll almost certainly talk to the radio, you may even find yourself doing impersonations* out loud in the otherwise empty house. Catch yourself in the mirror and you'll likely as not have 'homeworkers hair' - different every day, but usually with more than a passing resemblance to a Walnut Whip or a Mr Whippy that's slipping imperceptibly off it's wafery foundations.

It's most likely to occur when working on a book with a challenging deadline. I'm getting to grips with the fruity version of Veg Patch which means too many days where you get up, eat, sit in the office, leave only to go to the loo or kitchen, before catching a few moments of not working and going to sleep before the next day groundhogs around again.



Spending the day with limited human communication, minor irritations can become obsessions very easily. The bloke who drives by between 2 and 2.15 who insists, every day, on beeping his carhorn as he approaches the bend is, in my mind, Pol Pot in a runaway Trabant. The toaster's slow descent from peak-toasting machine to one-sided burn-or-raw performance is, I promise, noticeable when you work at home.

Flies invade the cool of the house around now every year, not in their hundreds but a few at a time, turning their tedious patterns in the kitchen. They really piss me off. They land on stuff and buzz and do 'fly' things. Like land on the musk strawberries.



I didn't know I had musk strawberries. I had grown a load of Fragaria chiloensis, the Chilean strawberry from which many of our common strawberries have been developed. It crawls easily forming a dense ground cover, if not one overprolific in fruit. But in amongst them I found something that was strawberry but not Chilean. They hang from little green hooked arms, like lanterns, pointing the fruit back to the centre of the plant.



Larger than an alpine but quite a bit smaller than a regular strawberry, I was stumped as to what they might be. Looking closely, they have very characteristic dimples. They're also unbelieveably good to eat. We're eating them ahead of the Emily and Honeoye strawberries and even the Mignonette alpines. Turns out that they are almost certainly musk strawberries (Fragaria moschata). I really don't want to share them, neither does my 4 year old daughter. Flies that land on them are inclined to get me and my daughter quite cross.



Occasionally I take a tea towel to them. I'm a Lord at tea towel flicking. This is not a specialist practice one might part with considerable sums to experience, but the old fashioned twist-it-up-and-flick-against-someones-leg-with-a-loud-snap painful thing, much beloved of school children. Third only to the Chinese burn and the dead leg. Or maybe fourth behind the wedgey. Depends which class of school you went to.

The tea towel is all very good but even when you are a Grandmaster of Teatowelery you're unlikely to get an astonishing hit rate. I've drawn blood with a casual flick of a tea towel, turned a light on with the snap of a wet tea towel, I've even flipped a tennis ball off the ground with one. I know what the shit I'm doing with a tea towel, but catching a fly, midair, I'm thinking my hit rate is maybe 20%, going up to maybe 60% for swatting one before it leaves a wall or kitchen surface. Like fly fishing, it's often more about the sport. Says the man who's never caught anything flyfishing.

I need another tool for delivering my prey unto the afterlife. If, while making one of my many cups of tea, I spot a few flies making parallelograms in the kitchen air or, worse, alighting on a surface, I walk around the kitchen with the Topflappen in one hand, slapping it against my leg or against the other palm, as if Major Von Hapen in Where Eagles Dare with a pair of leather gloves, having noticed something that's displeased him. This usually happens only when I'm on my own, at home, working. I don't actually mean to do it, it just happens. Probably as a result of repeated days working alone working on a book.

Around the kitchen I walk, a clipped march, with the occasional quick flourish of a turn. Heels may occasionally click together. The fly in range, I speak in a voice that alternates between Major Von Hapen's bark and a slightly camp Stephen Fry voice: 'Dies ist meine kitchen, und dies (SWAT).....ist meine Topflappen....und you vill bozzer meine kitchen nein more'.



I reckon my swat-to-kill rate is now about 80%. Thanks to meine Topflappen. Impressive stats homepestbotherers, I think you'll agree.




*Loyd Grossman and the original Churchill dog, if you must know.