It’s funny.  My new chickens have decided to roost outside at night in the big elderberry tree, rather than snuggle down in the hay during this nasty cold spell.  It’s not that they don’t know where the hen house is, or that they are still sorting out the pecking order with the older White Sussex hens, they just seem to prefer to go it alone outside.  I must confess, I worry about them sat out all night in the cold starlit night.

That reminds me a bit of my own circumstances.  Next month my chickens will be coming home to roost.  Let me explain.  After a long, profitable and enjoyable career in business, I have decided to give it all up and concentrate on my writing.  No longer will I have the warmth and comfort of a regular income but will have to strike out for myself and live on my wits to a greater degree.  I came to a point in my life where I felt there was not even a choice anymore – I just had to do it.

Sat reflecting on this it reminds me of Ecclesiastes III in the King James’ version of the Bible:

For every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.

And the time is right for me.  I need some time to myself.  I need to do things that I want to do whilst I have the wherewithal to do them.  I started to make a list:

Finish my second novel
Deliver a lecture then use it as the basis for another book
Sell my place in France and buy something similar in England
Do more voluntary work with local schools
Continue my quest to find the origins of the Towton Rose
Grow even more of my own fruit and vegetables
Spend more time with my two grown-up sons
Spend more time travelling
…….and the list goes on and on and on.

I thought I would get organised and tried to prioritise it but they are all important to me.  I guess it’s part of who I am, the DNA that makes up the individual.

So, wish me luck and keep reading these pages from time to time and check out how I’m doing.  Oh, and when you have a quiet moment, think about your own life.  Is there something that you have always wanted to do but never got around to it because you were too busy or did not have the confidence?  Go on, give it a try.  If you don’t, you’ll always be saying to yourself……”If only….”

If I wait long enough and stand as still as a statue, the tiny wood mouse creeps out to steal the chicken’s feed when I scatter it around the chicken run. Darting from one place of cover to another, he ventures further and further until he reaches the food, stuffs it in his cheeks and dives back into the undergrowth beyond the mesh fencing. I can tell it’s the same one as he has a bright ginger streak on his back and that’s what I call him. “Morning, Ginger”, I say in a whisper as he goes about his daily duty.
Not so this morning though, as I can tell something is not quite right before I even get to the chicken’s enclosure – there is a tiny bit of a commotion going on, judging by the clucking. Normally the chicks make a noise like a rusty old squeaking bike but this is a noise of distress.
Between the mesh fencing and the hedge, in the deep undergrowth, I see that one of the bantam chicks has managed to get free but he is not happy about it and wants me to be reunited with his Mum. I’m not sure whether, he’s somehow managed to get under the fence or flown out, as he roosts high in the elder tree, but either way he knows he has gone beyond his limits. When he sees me he throws himself at the fence in a desperate attempt to get back with his friends and I am scared that he might hurt himself. Any attempts to scoop him up in my protective arms send him deeper into the undergrowth, no doubt to the annoyance of Ginger the mouse.
Not a lot to do about it but have some patience. Bide my time while the opportunity is right. Once I am out of site, he perambulates around the fence perimeter with his clucking Mum and brother shadowing his every move. When he’s on the near side, I see my chance. There is no cover here and with a quick run I can grab him before he makes the other side. Stealing like a cat, I make my way around the potager, then bursting at a sprint through the rhubarb I’ve got him and launch him over the fence in a flurry of feathers back into the bosom of his family. His mother gives me a filthy look as if this is all my fault. That’s gratitude for you.
Anyhow, she has two boys so I can’t keep them together for too long as they will fight so I will have to find a home for one of them soon. If anyone can give a good home to a blue bantam cock, just let me know.
As my holiday is nearing its end, I reflect on how privileged we are to own somewhere like this. It’s an idyllic spot at any time of day, in any weather. Last night, at dusk, I was fascinated by the areal combat of the bats as they swoop around to feed on the moths. There were so many bats it was like watching a Battle of Britain dog fight. Earlier in the day I was impressed by the carpet of butterflies that rise every time I walk past the herb garden, where they busily feed on the flowers of mint and oregano.

My friend came to stay with us for a few days, en-route to southern France. His children, Fyodor, Nikkita and Daksha had a wonderful time playing hide and seek in the garden and walking in the woods, casting poo-sticks in the stately river Charentonne and then disturbing its tranquil flow by throwing progressively larger stones until the exploding droplets of water drenched us all. This place was meant for children and I can still hear their laughter ringing out now, days after they have gone.
Back to work on Monday. It seems ages since we arrived but all good things must come to an end as someone once said – bloomin’ spoilsport, whoever he was So, like the little bantam, I’ve had my moment of freedom but I think I can safely say that I enjoyed my Great Escape better than he did his.

I should have known I was headed for trouble when I went to feed the chickens – always the first job when we decamp for holiday on the farm. Whilst I was throwing stale pitta bread crumbs for my chooks, two fat voles emerged from the ivy, bold as you please and helped themselves to the chicken feed in the trough. Scolded by me, they made a temporary retreat, only to return again to grab a morsel of bread.
So, maybe this was a premonition of what was to come later when I sat down for a well earned mug of Yorkshire tea (special variety to accommodate hard French water).
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny critter emerge from under the front door post and set off with purposeful intent, scuttering across the tiled floor for the dining room. His gait (I think it was a he) reminded me of a marine commando, squeezing under the barbed wire and crawling on all fours to avoid the gun barrage.
A well aimed shoe (I suppose this was mortar fire to him), made him change his direction and dive for safety under the umbrella stand.
All this cussing and commotion attracted the attention of ‘Er Indoors, who does not have a good track record with shrews, as you will later see. Pulling faces worthy of Dame Edna Everage, she listened to my plan for a trouble free eviction of our unwanted visitor.
Open the front door to give a wide target for egress, lift the brolly stand and the critter would make its way outside. ‘Er indoors was to stand guard with a dastardly WWI bayonet in case it got through my defences. More grimacing and downturned corners of the mouth.
My plan worked though. Simple. A bit of DIY with some flint and woodfiller and the point of enemy ingress was sealed. ‘Er indoors was not happy though and with a hangdog expression, I set some traps on the front doorstep, just in case he had not got the message.
We have had our fair share of unwanted guests – rats in the henhouse, a bat in the A’letage and a dormouse in the P’tit Maison. Not your cute Alice in Wonderland dormouse but a gurt big creature the size of a rat, with a long nose, a white belly and hob-nail boots judging by the amount of stuff he knocked off the shelves and the rafters.
Shrews though, they are the nemesis of ‘Er Indoors as I said before. Here is a little ditty I penned about an encounter one Christmas. It’s hardly Wordsworth – more like Pam Ayers, but it always makes our family smile.

A fine lady, her husband and youngest son,
Went to spend Christmas at Broglie, on the Charentonne.
The house was called La Chaumiere
Away from the city and drizzly night air.

The spot was indeed in la France Profonde,
The grass stood to attention on the frozen ground.
But no fear, for very soon a fire was lit
And roared to life after blowing a bit.

Quite soon the lady, her name was Sue
Desperately needed to call on the loo.
For wine, in good measure she had quaffed
While her attendants stood waiting with their caps doffed.

But while on the throne our intrepid Sue
Encountered, face-to-face, a tiny Shrew.
“Waaah she bellowed I’ve seen a mouse
Get the ruddy thing outa me ‘ouse”.

With trousers round her ankles flapping
She bolted from the loo and caught her attendants laughing.
“I’m in need of a ‘ero” she screamed and she bellowed
“And all I find is tha two useless fellows”.

Alas the poor shrew took fright and ran home to his Mum with,
“The people in that house, it’s a right carry on!
One of them screaming while doing ablutions
And definitely in need of some good elocution.”

Made amends by picking first of the season brussel sprouts to accompany her chicken dinner. Thoughts of the shrew are gone now and all is well with the world

Many of you who follow my Blog have asked me to write some more about life on my little farmlet. Here are two new additions to keep up my egg production quota and I’m pleased to say that the bantams I wrote about last time, have settled in well. I’m sure one of the chicks is a boy because he is slightly larger than his sisters and he has feathered feet. They really amuse me as they follow their mother around the chicken coop, continually keeping up a squeaky noise, not unlike an old Raleigh bicycle with a rusty wheel.

I love coming down here. Now that the weather has warmed up you can literally smell the earth and when you walk the meadows you can sense the sap bursting from the rich sweet stems of grass. I weed the vegetable plot, overseen by Bob Frederick the Scarecrow, with his wisps of white candy floss hair fluttering across his sinister forehead like some rustic Jimmy Saville – “’Ows about it Mr. Algar? Sir Jim here, will fix it for you to have a bumper crop of potatoes this year! Ow’s about that then?”

In the top fold, the sheep and goats have made short work of munching the pasture, so that all that’s left above the top two centimetres are nettles. Saizer, the Ouessant sheep is becoming a bloomin’ nuisance, continually head butting me and raking my leg with her front hoof when she wants feeding a carrot. I did not know whether animals were right or left handed but Saizer definitely likes to lead with her right, and delivers several painful jab combinations that would put Ricky Hatton to shame.

It’s time to move them to the next field but not until the girls have been sheared. This year I have a professional shearer coming to do the job. It costs only 4 Euros a sheep and I reckon that’s a real bargain because it’s one job I do not like doing and the poor things end up looking a bit punkified by the time I have finished. Tan, the biggest ewe weighs in over 90kgs – that’s as big as some tups (rams). And when you try and hold her down and shear her you know you have a fight on your hands. You can tell she is a big girl when she bleats. Whenever I approach the field, I whistle the theme tune from the film The Long Ships. Dad ah dah. Dah ah dah. And that sets them off running and bleating towards the sheepshed. The goats give off a high pitched “Niii, Niiih”, Saizer bleats in an alto fashion and by the time we get down the octaves to Tan we have a deep Russian bass “baah”, not unlike a basso profondo singing an aria from Turandot.

It saddens me to think that I may have to leave them behind some day. As you know, ‘Er indoors wants me to sell up and buy another place in rural Yorkshire. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as proud a Yorkshireman as the next and the family have lived there since 1066 but somehow, Normandy will be a hard act to follow. There’s the climate for a start. I love to grow my own vegetables and they do better in the warmer clime of France. I have been trying to figure out why the move has sent me into such internal doubt and turmoil. It has taken a long time to arrive at the answer, but I think I have it, now that I have been reflecting on my own behaviour. It’s the fact that I cannot really plan ahead and people like me that like growing things, always have their eye on the future so that they can get a good yield. I have been frantically buying fruit trees – apples, pears, redcurrants, gooseberry, mulberry, you name it, and planting it all out in pots on the patio back in Yorkshire. Unconsciously I must have been thinking about where fate will take me and making sure I have a head start when I get there.

Now that that’s settled I can relax a bit and enjoy my time whilst I am here.

fighting bantams

Some of my chickens are getting old and gradually dying off now, so recently I went down to the market to buy some new stock. I normally buy White Sussex as this is the breed we had on my Auntie’s farm when I was a boy. The trip to the market was disappointing as the specimens on view were a sorry looking lot. I am always concerned about introducing disease into the flock so I passed them over. What caught my eye though was a beautiful looking little blue bantam hen and her four chicks. They are called blue bantams but they are almost a dove-grey in colour and look very appealing.
I have always fancied rearing bantams so, on an impulse, I parted with 25 euros and took the clucking little clutch home in the truck and felt very pleased with myself. As I got nearer the house though, I started to get worried. Introducing new birds is typically traumatic as the “pecking order” is adjusted and some of my recent additions had had a hard time of it, even being excluded from the hen house at night until they could pluck up courage to impose themselves on the rest of the gang.
This little bantam was a third the size of the White Sussex and her chicks were not much older than a few days. How would they cope?
I gingerly let them out of the box in the chicken run and the little bantams soon made themselves at home. The rest of the birds were wary at first but when one of my other chickens strayed too close for comfort, the new arrival flew at her and an almighty fight ensued. I managed to separate them but was worried that I had made the wrong choice – surely these little creatures would not survive long against their giant counterparts?
When I went down in the late afternoon to feed them, the chickens were very subdued and cautiously waddled around the side of the perimeter fence to get to the wheat, rather than cross the bantam’s path. Even Arthur the cockerel, undisputed champion cock of the valley, gave them a wide birth.
It would be interesting to see where they all slept at night so I went back down at dusk but there was no sign of the bantams in the hen-house. I could hear them though, and when I looked closely, there was mother, roosting high in the elder tree with her four little chicks snuggled down securely atop her back.
Somehow, I think they will do rather well

Idyllic homestead

I’ve had quite a few mails now from people, sympathising about my dilemma as to whether to put my little French homestead on the market. You can see how chocolate box beautiful La Chaumiere and La P’tit Maison are from the photograph. I have been wallowing in sympathy for myself and casting ‘er indoors spiteful looks, not that that makes much impression on her – she is a lot better at being stubborn than I am.
A close friend urged me to go and look at his sister’s farm in Halifax which she is soon to put on the market, as the family have got their Australian emigration papers through. He said it would suit me down to the ground. To be honest, I didn’t really fancy going. A toss up between rural France and Halifax? No contest. I have this mental picture of Halifax. The moors are desolate and bleak – I can picture consumptive Brontë’s ebbing their life away with a last hacking cough there. The scowling townships mind me of Rugby League on a wet, grisling afternoon, Webster’s Pennine Bitter and shops displaying wool, knitting patterns and dead flies in the window.
The journey to the farm did not put me in a better mood – desperately gripping my steering wheel as I dodged lorries and white van man on the M62. Then, descending and ascending through gritty townships, turning my pick-up truck through corners at impossible angles and then spewing out at a derelict mill at the bottom of the road that led to the farmstead. These were England’s dark satanic mills alright, ghosts of the long-dead workers glowering out at me through jagged broken windows with hostile intent. I could imagine the looms clattering away and the mill-hands trudging to work with shawls clasped around their shoulders, trying to hide their pinched hunger. Then, twisting up a long dirt track to what I thought would be Cold Comfort farm on a dripping, soggy, godforsaken hill.
You know when you get the feeling of having passed through a barrier? You sort of lose concentration for a minute or two, then open your eyes, blink and your surroundings look completely different.
I found myself in a beautiful valley – steep pastures with mixed woodland at the top and and an aura of graceful beauty. The grim moors were nowhere to be seen. And the house, a Grade II Georgian listed building, looked like it had been put there when Noah landed his ark. It had been very tastefully restored and even ‘er indoors would be impressed if she were to have a look around. She could even indulge herself with her predilection for bleach! Perhaps I should explain…she is banned from using bleach at La Chaumiere as the fosse septique works on organic principles. Putting bleach down the lavatory and plug holes upsets the balance of nature. Notwithstanding this, when I return from toiling in the cabbage patch, I find her with a guilty look on her face and a smell of bleach so strong that it peels your eyebrows off. I digress, I know, but these things are important to her and she would have no problem with her cleansing and scouring habits here.
Back to the house, plenty of room for my “clutter”. By that ‘er indoors refers to my period furniture, books and DVD collection and there is somewhere where I can sit peacefully and write.
It’s the outside that clinches it for me. Acres and acres of fields to keep livestock in and grow fruit and vegetables and a fair sized outbuilding and a massive barn. The pasture is sweet and there’s even a trickle of a stream that runs through.
The catch is the price, of course. It is way beyond what I had planned to spend. If I bought it, it would mean I would have to dig very deep into my meagre pension funds and continue working until I’m ninety four.
It’s got me thinking though and I’m taking ‘er indoors to see it tomorrow.
Where is it? I’m not telling you. I saw it first.

The next blog I post will be the long awaited “Author Interview”. We used my house in France for this piece as I thought that the medieval structure of the house – A-frame timbers, thatched roof and walls constructed from cow muck and straw, would have some resonance when I got to talking about the farm in Londesborough where young Henry was first taken.
If you see the next blog, it fits in well with the piece but I am quite sad, as we have made a decision to put it on the market this summer.
I had hoped to retire there but ‘er indoors, a Yorkshire lass through and through, has decided that ending her days away from the Broad Acres is not on. Besides she doesn’t speak the lingo and there is no gym within a 20 mile radius.
The concession is that I can buy somewhere with a bit of land in Yorkshire but the thing that’s worrying me is the logistics of getting everything back to Blighty and fitting it all in – hence the obscure picture of the beet cutter. I spent a whole winter restoring that and it now works as good as the day it was made – when Queen Victoria was on the throne.
It’s not just that, it’s all the trees I’ve planted. Apples, pears, quince, plums, figs, gooseberry, redcurrant and blackcurrant – not to mention the few vines I have. I’ve worked that land in the depths of winter, fingers freezing or sometimes slithering in the mud. I’ve toiled long and hard through blazing summers, sweat stinging my eyes and insects biting anything that was on offer. I’m proud of my bit of pasture too, finally ridding it of brambles, ground elder and nettles.
It’s all been a major part of my life, and I feel sad, but I have to be pragmatic and realise that we are only custodians of these lovely old houses and I have played my part in restoring the house and the land for someone else to enjoy.
At some stage I will have another challenge. Another house to fix up and a piece of land to lick into shape.
Who knows what the future has in store?