Pigs, Poultry and Poo E-Book

Jason Gibbs

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Pigs, Poultry and Poo is the story of two people who change their lives and discover a whole new world. Their first step is a move from living and working in the city to rural life and a two-hour commute. Over the five years recounted in the book they mature from feckless beginners to hardened country folk, shedding only the occasional tear when an animal dies. Their animal adventures start with a cat, before they move on to goats, and then chickens. Slowly building confidence they haphazardly add cows, pigs, alpacas, geese and ducks to their smallholding, before reaching a limit. On their journey they discover that cats like to sleep, that goats are poor predictors of the weather and that there is a serious possibility that a cow could jump over the moon. They pick up new skills, such as fencing, which they get to practise again and again as various animals helpfully demonstrate where they have gone wrong. There is occasionally the semblance of a plan, but often events overtake the couple and they have to learn to be resilient in the face of adversity. The animals have plenty of character, from the nervous goat and the grumpy cow to the randy pig. Looking after animals is often not easy, but at least for one newly countrified pair, it's deeply satisfying.

Leseprobe

First published in 2012 by

The Crowood Press Ltd,

Ramsbury, Marlborough,

Wiltshire, SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book edition first published in 2012

© Jason Gibbs 2012

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 978 1 84797 458 7

Frontispiece: our alpacas, Algy and Verdigris, looking inquisitive.

Contents

Introduction

PART 1: The Early Years

Bob the Cat

Bill and Ted: Our Venture into Goatkeeping

A Childhood Dream: Chickens

Expanding the Goat Herd

The Smallholder’s Cow

PART 2: Gaining Confidence

We Become Sheep Farmers

Birthday Piggies!

The Cows Widen Our Experience

Expanding the Sheep Flock

More Chicken Episodes

The Travails of Cow Keeping

PLATE SECTION

PART 3: Experienced Hands

Expanding the Pig Herd

Water and Basic Plumbing

Sheep, Foxes and Alpacas

The Lambing Season

Managing the Pig Enterprise

The Sheep Flock Prospers

A Full Set of Poultry

Coda: Life of Poo

The Country Idyll

Index

Introduction

This is not a story about two people leaving London to make a new home in the country, although that does occur. It is also not a story about converting a barn, in part because we haven’t finished. This is a story about animals and how we’ve come to care for an eclectic menagerie. Our aim is not to teach – though hopefully our mistakes and missteps will be useful to anyone considering taking on the responsibility of animals – but to entertain, and perhaps counsel caution.

The Plan

My wife and I used to live in a lower ground floor flat in Islington (or a basement flat in Hackney, depending on who’s describing it... I maintain that we paid Islington council tax so therefore it was in Islington – but I digress). I worked in IT in the City, a thirty-minute bus ride, or forty-minute walk away (literally), and Alex (my wife) worked at a law firm in Westminster, a rambling sixty minutes away each morning. We had a small outside space, about ten feet by ten feet, which was cut out of a larger garden owned by the flat above us, but it was enough for the occasional barbecue, and for my smoking friends to hang out in when the urge took them. We were often out at local restaurants, or exploring the nicer end of the food industry around the rest of London, and we could go out with friends at the drop of a hat. It was, all in all, a good life (though obviously not ‘The Good Life’) – so why did we leave all this and move to a dilapidated and unconverted barn in Hampshire? What madness overtook us?

Firstly I’d say that we weren’t upset by the hollow consumerism of our lives: we did indeed love living in London, and enjoyed the facilities of a large metropolis. It was more that when it came down to it we didn’t see ourselves living in Islington forever, and having pets or children there would be more challenging than perhaps we wanted. So we started thinking about moving out. We quickly realized that we weren’t entirely keen on the suburbs, because even though there was more space, it was still fairly packed, and of course house prices were somewhat discouraging.

Alex was from the wilds of Hampshire, and in my peripatetic youth I’d lived in some more rural locations, and gradually the siren call of the countryside began to impinge upon us. One concern I had about moving to the country was whether I had become too citified and would not be able to cope with the fresh air, greenery, animals, bugs and muck, but we experimented with a few trips outside the M25 and nothing tried to eat me or cover me in poo, so I felt a bit more confident. To be fair, my history with creepy crawlies at this point was not impressive, as Alex often reminds me... One night we were sound asleep in the flat and a giant spider landed on my face, waking me up and completely freaking me out – so much so that I insisted that we move to the spare room. Spiders in the distance are OK, but on my face, that’s horrible! Alex also wants me to point out that it was unlikely to be a ‘giant’, it was probably just a normal-sized spider – but then how would she know, she was fast asleep at the time! This incident might have held us back, but Alex usefully told me to ‘toughen up’; so with that resolved, we were all set...

Fish Keeping

Another reason we started looking in the countryside was that I’d decided I wanted to be a fish farmer. (This would, of course, have made Alex a fish wife, which still brings me amusement to this day...) I read an article in The Economist about the ‘Blue Revolution’ and how we’d be able to feed the world with fish farmed using recently developed techniques. It had everything: new technology, food, fish and an underlying mission. Some people might question whether I should have been looking for a loch or bit of Scottish coast, but I had a very specific plan. I was going to farm tilapia, a white fish which is vegetarian (in the sense of eating vegetable matter, not that it is a veggie option on menus), which to my mind is rather important, in that each kilogram of farmed salmon or trout has been fed on 4kg of wild fish caught from the sea (at least this was the case in 2003), which didn’t sound particularly sustainable to me.

I researched the topic at some length, covering integrated farming – a simple example being chicken poo fed to fish, fish poo fed to grains, grain fed to chickens, with the farmer taking surplus chicken, eggs, fish and grain out of the system – and subscribing to fish farming magazines. In the end I decided to try and develop a system similar to one I’d read about in the Lebanon, where a series of pools were connected with pipes so that as the fish matured they could be moved between pools until they could be taken out for food. I also had a crazy idea of letting the tilapia swim in a mixture of water and white wine for their final week or so to give them some extra flavour...

So there I was with a plan, some rough costings, and the requirement for some outbuildings. Alex was surprisingly supportive during this time – usually she spots when I’ve developed some hare-brained scheme and taunts me mercilessly until I give it up. I suspected it was because she felt it helped us to move out of the Big Smoke. Actually she had an alternative strategy ... she bought me some fish for Christmas.

Not just any fish: some tropical fish. Well, actually she bought me a large tank, and then later we both went to get the fish together. The tank was a rectangular fifty-litre glass box, with all the filters and heater in one corner, and was specifically designed for tropical fish. The instructions were to set it up, get some water in it and add a few chemicals, and then leave it for a week or so to allow it to settle before putting in any fish. I was so excited, the anticipation was excruciating, and I believe is part of a conspiracy between tank makers and fish sellers to encourage people to buy more.

After a breathless week of waiting we headed to the Sea Dragon, our local live fish vending establishment, and with a bit of advice, took home some tropical fish. As I recall we bought two albino tiger barbs (which we’ve since learned are aggressive fish and probably not good to start off with), four zebra danios (small, thin-striped fish), four neon tetras and four harlequins (which for some reason I named after the turtles, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael).

The arrival of the fish revealed a couple of traits in me which I’d kept long hidden: I can be slightly obsessive, and a little daft. I bought several books on keeping tropical fish, and a log book (in fact a normal lined paper book, but I used it as a log book). In the log book I recorded each time I fed the fish, each time we cleaned out the tank, and, sadly, each time a fish died – I’d even draw a little tombstone with RIP written on it. This lasted for about four months until I relaxed somewhat about the fish, and realized that my log was telling me very little. The books revealed that we knew very little about tropical fish: to summarize – they are very sensitive to temperature variations, and they can die at the drop of a hat. One book recommended we had our fish autopsied when they died, but that seemed somewhat ridiculous, and if possible, I’d guess rather expensive.

There are lots of diseases that affect tropical fish, and not many treatments, but one thing was clear from the books – stress was bad for them. I was considering arranging massages, and perhaps calming trips to a spa ... but instead we were very careful with the water changing, and we added a chemical called something like ‘Stress Relief’, which apparently helps to chill out the fish, and another chemical which helps to protect them from damage and some of the more common bugs. I think all the zebra danios died within a week or so of each other, but after that the tank settled down. One of the harlequins was often off on its own, clearly Raphael taking after his namesake.

This first experience of keeping animals was illuminating. The main chores were feeding them, and fishing out the occasional dead one, making it a low effort endeavour – except when cleaning out the tank. The authorities differ on what percentage of the water needs to be exchanged, but we were blessed with a system which did not require a full change of the tank, which I can imagine would be a complete nightmare. Instead we used to replace about a third of the water each time. The first part was obviously to get water out, which initially we accomplished using a pint glass. This was not very efficient, and also didn’t allow us to get to the muck at the bottom of the tank, so we bought a siphon kit. The siphon had a small hand pump on it and in theory would, once the water started to flow, allow us to use the end to suck up all the debris around the tank; it also had a filter to prevent any fish from being caught. Unfortunately the pump was rather inefficient, and the only way to get the siphon working was for me to suck on the output end until the water flowed out. About half the time I’d be able to get the water out without any ending up in my mouth – the other half of the time it was pretty unpleasant!

The final touch for the aquarium was to add some plants. We bought a few of the standard tropical plants and they added a lot of colour to the tank, and also gave the fish more places to hide, which hopefully helped de-stress them further. Something else also arrived with the plants: snails, probably carried as eggs on the plants. We were more than happy with these additional denizens of our watery pet area. I’d been quite tempted by getting a plastic skull, or maybe a castle, but they were just a little too tacky, and at least one of my fish books had said they were potentially poisonous to the fish due to the paints used in them. This didn’t sound entirely logical in that they were made specifically for fish tanks – but better safe than sorry.

So eventually the fish were all settled, we had a lovely aquarium in the corner of the room, and Alex thought that would be the end of my ramblings about becoming a fish farmer. She was wrong!

Looking for a Property

In the autumn of 2003 we started looking for a place to move to. Not in a very active sense, this was very much about getting a feel for the market, so we searched a plethora of websites. We hadn’t quite settled on a place to move to, but I was very clear that I wanted a commute of less than ninety minutes, and preferably sixty. I was working next to Liverpool Street, so this meant we needed to look north-east of London, but that it should be a simple train ride in. We started to concentrate on Suffolk, for a number of reasons, but in essence we didn’t want to live in Essex or Hertfordshire, as they were both too close to London, too expensive, and didn’t offer the types of property we wanted. Norfolk and Cambridgeshire were too far and too flat (according to Alex) respectively, and so Suffolk stood out clearly. We weren’t completely bound to the one county and searched for places in northern Essex, and Hertfordshire, and southern Cambridgeshire as well. Regarding the type of property, we decided to look for a place that was somewhat run down: not only would this help bring the price down, but we could then add some value by fixing it up – and Alex’s parents, Gordon and Sue, had expressed some willingness to help us.

Now Suffolk is a lovely county, mostly countryside, though to some tastes it still lacks a certain hilliness. We actually viewed a place north of Stowmarket, an old rectory right in the middle of nine acres of fields, with eight bedrooms and a flood in the cellar (or indoor pool, as I thought of it!). We did quite like it, but the indicative price was just beyond our limit, and then we were told it was going to go to sealed bids, which was likely to increase the price further. Besides, one of the other couples viewing it had brought their architect, which left us feeling we were out of our league...

We continued to look for several months, and found nothing suitable – it was all either too expensive, too far away in commuter terms, or didn’t have the facilities that we (I) wanted. So the search widened to include counties south and west of London too. I was afraid of moving south of the river – after all, I had spent eight years in North London disdaining those who were on the other side! Alex told me not to be silly, and that was that.

Having widened our search area there were more properties available, and we even viewed a couple of places in East Sussex, although this would have been a mighty commute into work. One was a farm with an astonishingly ugly house which faced north and on to the road, but which had a fabulous Sussex barn and collection of outbuildings. We thought it would make a wonderful conversion, and I decided to phone the planning department to find out what we’d need to do. (This is actually a moot point, as I hate using the phone and so Alex nearly always does the phoning. She disputed that I’d made this phone call, but as I could remember what the man had said and she couldn’t, she relented ... but I think she still doesn’t believe me.) It transpired that in order to convert a barn in East Sussex we had to arrange for Hell to freeze over, so that idea was dropped. Also the man in the planning department was grumpy, which reinforced my general aversion to phoning people! However, the idea of doing a barn conversion was now in our heads.

I did see another barn in East Sussex, which my friend Adam kindly drove me to. It had full planning permission, but it was in the middle of a large working farm, with a huge metal barn being built just next to it. Also the planning included the, to me, unforgivable step of putting a first floor into it, effectively just converting it into a normal house within a barn structure. My view is that if you live in a barn it should feel like a barn, and if you want to live in a modern four-bedroom house there are tens of thousands to choose from, whereas there are only a few barns. I was starting to become a bit of a barn zealot. Also I was amazed to learn that we were the third viewing that day, and they’d had five people the day before, which had been the first day of viewings! I therefore guessed it would go for a higher price than we could afford anyway...

Finally in the summer of 2004 we took a look at Hampshire. I’d always said that it was too expensive, but one thing we’d discovered in our nine months or so of searching was that the type of property we were looking for had its own price band, which was almost independent of any local pricing. However this, and a nice pay rise for each of us, meant that we could look at the prices without falling over, and some of them we could even afford!

We were visiting Alex’s parents, who still lived in the village she’d grown up in, the weekend before Alex was due to go on a two-week trip to Australia; they mentioned that they’d seen the details of a farm and barn being sold in lots just ten minutes down the road. The pictures on the internet were not entirely encouraging, but we thought we should visit it as we were in the area. Despite a feeling of weariness, off we trudged to look at it. Our first view was not exactly stunning... there was a large metal and asbestos barn, some ugly blockwork buildings, a partially dismantled Dutch barn, and almost hidden behind all of these, a tin-roofed wood-framed barn connected to some brick buildings. However, once we walked into the barn, it was a different matter... if you looked past the straw and the suspiciously squidgy brown piles on the floor, and the cobwebs and dust and the large tractor, there was a stunning building trying to get out. It was connected in an L shape to a brick cowshed that had chickens in it, which led on to another wooden barn with a hayloft. This was full of cobwebs and dust, and the hayloft had holes in the floor big enough to fall through. I was looking around thoughtfully, with my brain moving into the ‘well, it would be nice but we probably can’t do it’ realm, when I saw Alex’s face: she was besotted. We were in big trouble!

Acquiring Our Barn

We decamped to a local tea shop to discuss ideas. Gordon was excited too, as this was the kind of big project he really wanted to do. He had been running his own business for several years doing a combination of small building works, painting and general maintenance of property – fixing up windows, replacing doors and suchlike – and while he’d done some interesting work, he hadn’t had anything that had really caught his imagination – until now! With Alex and Gordon excitedly chatting through options, I was running the potential numbers through my head, and coming up a bit short, I have to admit. Still, after some discussion we seemed to have a workable plan: we would do a temporary conversion of the cowshed and live in that while we converted the rest of the barn, and we’d take as long as necessary to do it. No caravans for us, and no rushing.

I showed the website to one of my friends at work, and he thought I was joking. Then he thought I’d gone insane, and informed me there’d be an awful lot of work. For a start we’d need to repoint all the internal brickwork... this was after seeing a picture of one of the internal columns in the barn. This really made me laugh, and when I revealed that repointing was the least of our problems and indicated the true size of the task, he decided I really was crazy – and as was his way, decided to buy some popcorn and sit back and watch, with the occasional acerbic comment to keep things going!

The sale went to sealed bids, and we had a tough time deciding what to bid, but we really wanted it so went for the maximum amount we could possibly afford. In addition we had to agree to the challenging task of completing within four weeks of the offer being accepted, but we lined up our solicitors and the mortgage company, making both aware that this was part of the bid, and they both indicated that they believed it was possible, and when pushed, agreed that they would do their utmost to make it happen, which is about the best one can hope for. This was only a week after we’d seen the place, and as Alex was away I had to put the bid together and send it out without her usual guiding eye (being a solicitor, she is very sharp on such things); when I sent the bid in, I was more worried that I’d messed up the details than that the price was too low. Based on what the estate agent said when he phoned to tell me the good news, I suspect we blew away the opposition, but despite being slightly galling that wasn’t important: we now had the barn! We also had twelve acres of land, but that didn’t seem so important then.

We have never regretted that bid. I think a lot of people get too caught up in trying to screw down the vendor to the lowest they’ll accept and then risk losing the property. When we discussed the bid our biggest fear was losing it, not overbidding, and I still believe that was the best way to go ... and that’s in part due to the experiences of someone I knew at work. John was also looking for property outside London, and most especially a barn conversion, or renovation, and had been looking for around eighteen months, so was in a very similar position to us.

The day our offer was agreed I mentioned it in passing, and he told me that his offer for a barn in East Sussex had just fallen through. After a bit more discussion we established that it was the exact same barn I’d seen a year earlier, which had had all those people viewing it. What seemed to have happened is that John got the price down to a very keen level, but then the ill-will in the negotiation had caused the process to grind to a halt, and then eventually fail – and he’d lost the barn.

Unfortunately the bidder for the other lot wasn’t quite as organized as we were, and his bid in fact fell through. This affected us because the vendor wanted to sell everything in one go, and so we were all slowed down; during one follow-up visit we shared some of our frustration with him, and expressed our eagerness to get moving. The vendor was a farmer, Ben; he had lived on the land for sixty-one years, and was of the old school in the sense that once we’d made the agreement, it was settled. He spoke to his lawyers the day after we’d mentioned how slowly things were going, and from then on everything started to speed along.

Ben was clearly delighted to be retiring from the back-breaking and often heart-rending work of being a full-time farmer; his wife, however, was very upset at the prospect of having to leave the hearth and home she’d loved for over half a century. Nevertheless I think the extra profit they made from having obtained planning permission on the barn, a process which had taken nine years, meant they were going to live very well in their retirement, and Ben had also retained a couple of fields so he could still keep a few cows. Ben had clearly been running the farm at minimal maintenance for the last few years, which made sense given he was close to retirement, and this left us with minimal fencing – bits and pieces tied together with twine, and all sorts of temporary solutions. Over the years we often used the same sort of Heath Robinson approach, and we always thought of Ben when we did, and hoped he’d approve!

Converting the Cowshed

When the exchange finally happened it was almost a damp squib, having taken so long – nearly four months. We completed a month after exchange, at the end of October, and immediately went to work doing our temporary conversion of the cowshed. We had a basic plan of attack, which was to clear out the cowshed, deploy permanent drainage, and build a temporary structure within the cowshed. We were lucky in that bringing in electricity would be easy, as the line passed directly over the barn and taking a feed from it was surprisingly cheap.

Clearing the cowshed involved knocking down the internal walls, and this meant several weekends of hard graft with a sledgehammer as these were blockwork, filled with concrete and then covered in concrete render, and they really didn’t want to move. The underlying floor in the cowshed was concrete, sloping to a drainage channel in the centre, which meant it was likely to be saturated with cow urine and therefore not viable in the long term. However, for our short-term plan it made a good base for the supporting timbers of the floor. Short term was not particularly well defined at this point, but I think if anyone had asked we’d have said around twelve to eighteen months...

We were doing all this work during the winter, working at weekends when we could, and also taking time off to head down to the barn. It was often bitterly cold and our heating was rudimentary – namely jumpers, gloves and woolly hats! The facilities were fairly basic at first: we did have electricity, but no drainage until we put it in! Lunches usually consisted of an old-style Brevel ham and cheese toasty – truly delicious, though we occasionally treated ourselves to a trip to our local pub. The food there is excellent, but it often meant that lunch took two to three hours; still, it fortified us and enabled us to keep going.

One of the worst jobs during this stage was associated with putting in the drainage. We were fortunate that there was mains drainage available, we just needed to get our pipes about sixty feet out into the field, and then a further ninety feet along the edge of the buildings to where we needed it. Much of this was easy digger work, which Gordon loved (possibly related to the covered cab and seat), but about sixty feet of it involved breaking up some concrete which had been laid between the cowshed and the large steel barn (which needed to be taken down at some point). Initially we thought this concrete was fairly thin and would break up easily using a normal electric-powered breaker. Sadly, however, it was three to four inches thick and really tough, which makes sense as it had been the main trackway used by the cows to get out of the barn and into the field, and also I suspect an area where the farmer could corral the cows for inspection or loading into a lorry.

I don’t remember how many days I spent in the cold, often rain, with my hands juddering with the impact of the breaker as I slowly created a two-foot wide channel through the concrete. I suspect it was only three, but it felt like a lifetime; sometimes I was so tired I could barely lift the breaker out of the hole I’d just made. It helped me develop real respect for all those workmen you see on roadsides; the reason there needs to be several of them is so they can take turns and keep going, as well as supervision and tea duties. The latter were ably performed in our work gang by Sue, who also pulled a full shift at moving debris, and carting sand and shingle around. Her relentless stamina was inspiring, and occasionally depressing, as it meant I had to get up again to go back to work to try and catch up with her!

All this hammering and digging allowed us to put the drainage in, a very exciting thing indeed, and we started to build up the floors using bricks and beams to raise it up and then chipboard to fix it. We then put down insulation and covered it with chipboard – and that was it! No fancy terracotta tiles for us, no floorboards or carpet, just plain old chipboard until we moved into the permanent converted parts, which seemed a very long way off at this point. All this activity took place in the period up to Christmas, and just before the holidays started we had put in about a third of the floor, some twenty feet or so, which was planned to take a shower room and a separate toilet, and then the start of our bedroom.

Gordon decided that it was time for some proper toiletry facilities so he built a stud frame for the separate toilet, attached the door and installed the toilet – and so our first room was complete! As we had all the facilities we decided to host a New Year’s Eve party, warning everyone that it would be cold and that they needed to bring sleeping bags. I think the cold encouraged everyone to drink more to try and stay warm as it turned into one of the most drunken and raucous New Years I can remember (and I can barely remember it!) – but it was a great way to christen the house. We moved in properly less than a month later.

Another lesson of this period was that no matter how carefully you placed building materials when they arrived, you always seemed to need to move them – again, and again, and again! Moving insulation is no great problem, bricks are OK if tiring, but I really, really hate moving plasterboard: it’s heavy and awkward, and if you drop it or catch it then it shows it immediately, and it’s not fixable. After some practical experimentation we developed a technique that required two people to grasp it tightly on its upper edge with both hands, holding it a foot above the ground and shuffling along; any stops involved lowering the plasterboard on to one’s foot to take the strain and to make sure it didn’t knock into the ground. This was one of a host of techniques that we were all learning on the job as we slowly got to grips with the tasks in hand.

The internal walls were all unfinished plasterboard, and when we actually moved in, at the end of January, we had only three completed (of a fashion) rooms: our bedroom, the shower room and the extra toilet. If we looked at the ceiling we could see the roof tiles in some places and the sky in others, though most was covered by thick black plastic and insulation – not that it seemed to do much good. But we were in! Weirdly, the floor area of our temporary home was almost exactly the same as our old flat in Islington (which we sold shortly afterwards), so we were able to fit in the majority of our possessions. Or as a friend kindly observed, we’d moved our basement flat into a barn and paid a huge amount of money for the privilege!

Moving In

The night we moved in was one of the coldest I ever experienced, not outside, but inside. We spent the day moving boxes in, building the bed, and nailing up some last-minute insulation. Having no cooking facilities as yet we went to the local Thai restaurant and ordered lots of takeaway, and then took it home for our first meal in our new house, a veritable feast with the heat of the red curry helping to keep us warm.

Unfortunately our fish weren’t quite so lucky. One of our tank heaters seemed to have stopped working – we’d bought a second tank a few months before, partly for growth and partly as an isolation tank for new fish, and all the fish in that tank had just stopped moving. They weren’t floating to the top or sinking to the bottom, they were just stuck at whatever place they’d been swimming, as if they were frozen in place – which to an extent they were! Once we noticed their predicament (after our dinner, and with temperatures plummeting) we quickly fished them out and placed them in the other tank, where the water was much warmer, though at the bottom of the accepted range. Amazingly it was like bringing them back to life, and they immediately started swimming around as if nothing had happened. All in all we lost four fish as part of the move, which while sad, was certainly not as bad as it could have been; so we still had seven, the four harlequins and three recently purchased angel fish, whom I had named Symphony, Harmony and Rhapsody after the characters in Captain Scarlet.

After all this excitement we sat on our sofa, which looked tiny in the still open area of what was planned to be our temporary living room, dining room and kitchen. We opened a bottle of wine and then just slumped in exhaustion. I think both of us were questioning our mutual sanity, and as the temperature continued to drop there was also some fear as to our ongoing health! Cold was a particularly sensitive area for us, as we both come from families where the parents had always kept it colder than comfort would seem to dictate. ‘Put another jumper on then’, was what I was told if I complained about the cold, and Alex heard much the same – I think it’s a reflection of the generation born during the war and the austerity of the fifties... (or maybe they really did have ice running through their veins and couldn’t feel it). I’ve always felt that if it’s cold enough for icicles to form inside the house, even if they are against a window, then it’s too cold! This being our mutual background, we had enjoyed heating our flat to a minimum of 20°C at all times. By comparison the temperature that first evening was hovering around 4 to 5°C, and it was clear to us both that this was likely to be our evening temperature for some time to come!

Within a week of moving in we had Sky and broadband installed: we might be in the country but we wanted to have the benefits of technology, and early! But we did not have heating, and this was a really bad omission. The north wall was just a single brick in thickness, and when the north wind blew it was as if the wall wasn’t there at all and we were standing outside stark naked and covered in freezing water. As a moving-in present Gordon and Sue paid for a month’s use of the space heater we had been using for the final weeks to keep ourselves going, and this was a real godsend. I’d wake up in the morning with my whole body boiling hot but my face freezing cold, so I would then brace myself and run the length of the cowshed (about sixty feet) to switch on the space heater, then run back and dive back into bed before I was completely frozen. After about five minutes of space heating the cowshed was bearable and we could get up to shower, although this was still a bitter experience. Even after we completed the walls and bought storage heaters the temperature would regularly be as low as 5°C when we woke up in the morning throughout the time we lived in the cowshed.

Planning the Barn

Now that we were in the barn we needed to properly plan the rest of it. We asked a surveyor whom Gordon and Sue had used when they built their house extension to come and take a look around. Some might say that probably we should have done this before we bought the place, or at worst before we started on our temporary works, but we just hadn’t had the time, and I suspect we also didn’t want anyone to pour cold water on our dreams. And certainly the experience of the surveyor’s visit was a little depressing. First he told us that we were on a journey of a thousand decisions (this wasn’t depressing), and that our budget was completely wrong (in fact he laughed at it, a lot); he also informed us that we would not be able to recover any bricks from the old dairy which we had to knock down as part of the planning permission (one of my money-saving hopes).

After this we retired to the local pub to talk about it. In any project there is a triangle, the three sides representing quality, time and cost. It is only possible to get two of them close to perfect, and we chose to go with just one – quality. We decided that even if it took longer than expected, say five years, and cost more than we expected, say three or four times as much, we wanted the quality to shine through always. At the time it really did sound sensible!

When we’d bought the place almost everyone had said to us, ‘Oh yes, just like Grand Designs’, although I have to admit that we didn’t really know what they were talking about as we’d never watched that particular television programme! We did once we were in, however, and for a while it became one of our favourites and a source for a few of our ideas. Several people asked us why we didn’t go on the show, and to be honest the main reason was that I never wanted anyone coming along and poking around our house and judging all our decisions. In addition, and the reason I usually give, the show tends to want projects of a year or so, and we definitely weren’t one of those! One thing which amazes me about a lot of those property shows, especially the ones involving a search for a property for a discerning (read ‘picky’) couple, is the number of people who walk into wonderful buildings and just fail to see the beauty and possibilities within the structures.

Alex and I tend to hold strong opinions and argue about them fiercely, and usually we agree, although when we don’t we can get a bit voluble and vociferous. In the course of buying the barn and doing the initial conversion we had come to a very clear view of what we wanted to do with it, both in terms of look and floor plan. While we would tune this as we went along, and define the detail to a greater extent, we kept to this key vision throughout. Early on, however, we needed to get some more detailed plans together, so we resolved to speak to some architects and surveyors. We really liked one architect, but it was clear that he wanted to design the whole thing (as might be expected). This just wasn’t what we had in mind, so in the end we went with a surveyor who seemed to understand our intentions. He drew up some plans which we only changed a little, and then we were away.

Our Converted Way of Life

Over the following years our ongoing barn conversion became a sort of background hubbub to our lives. We’d often have to do some additional planning, or take a week off to finish a roof, or some other peak activity, or perhaps take a day off to go and ‘source’ products. Sourcing was actually one of the more enjoyable activities as it would involve visiting showrooms, builders’ yards or DIY shops to view potential materials or solutions for the house. We also needed to keep an eye on the costs, and manage the various contractors we brought in over the years to do specific jobs (electrician being one of the key jobs, especially after the law changed to require a qualified electrician either to perform all works, or at a minimum, review and certify everything). However, despite all this the barn never grew into a monstrous octopus dominating and controlling our lives and trying to suck all the joy out of it: instead it became almost part of who we were, and a generally fun part at that. I think this was because we were building something materially solid and lasting (which as a lawyer and an IT person was in stark contrast to our jobs), and also because we were constantly learning new things.

Quite a few of our friends worried that we’d be constantly dragging them to the barn and then forcing them to work on whatever dreadful tasks they imagined were required in the project, and I suspect that’s why they didn’t visit us – as well as the fear of the countryside and the huge distance from London, of course... One friend who helped us greatly was Adam: he was with us when we were putting up insulation, he helped when we were moving plasterboard around, and he was a huge help when we pulled down the dairy during our first Easter.

One of the parts of the planning required us to demolish the old dairy which sat in the crook of the L shape of the barn. It was a brick building with a white tile roof, and it presented a real destructive challenge – and entertainment! Adam was particularly involved in the destruction of the side walls, where we would all take turns to smash a sledgehammer into the wall until it finally cracked and fell over. I like to think he enjoyed the exercise! Another friend came to visit during the same period, and I couldn’t stop him from smashing down the dairy and nearly had to restrain him as he’d become so excited! However in general we didn’t ask people over to help, just to visit and be entertained – hopefully!

We had moved into the barn in Hampshire while we were still both working in London and commuting. My commute was around two hours each way (and much more on a bad day), but coming home, especially in the summer, was like going on holiday, every single day. Still, it took us a little while to get started... and our first morning was not the best. We decided to get the 07:44 train, as we figured it would get us to work for 09:00 without any problems. The alarm went off at 06:50 and we started our morning ablutions – jumping from warm bed into freezing air, then into hot shower and back out to freezing air and so on – and all seemed to be going well. However, we somehow slowed down and didn’t manage to leave the house until 07:30 or so – though still this seemed OK.

But when we got to the station we found we had to pay for the parking, and rushed around getting out coins and buying a ticket before running towards the train ... only to see it pull out! This precipitated a rather loud row in the middle of the ticket office where we both allocated blame, perhaps unfairly, until we calmed down long enough for me to buy a cup of tea and then get on the next train, slated to be the 08:14. This got me to work just before 10:15... The next day we managed to get the 07:44, but this got me to work for 09:40, so our target train became the 06:44...

Waking up at 06:00 to get ready in time to catch the train was a shock – but stepping out to see the fields and the early morning haze was just magical, and more than made up for the lack of sleep. All in all we’d been amazingly lucky to find the place, and we were enjoying living there. And that’s where we were when we started our menagerie...

PART 1: THE EARLY YEARS

BOB THE CAT

One of the great things about living in the country is the wildlife. Arriving home after a hard day in the big smoke and walking – when on the odd occasion Alex is away and has the car – up the drive on a summer’s eve to be greeted by deer, rabbits and the occasional owl or pheasant is quite special. However, there is one place I am unhappy to see the beasts of the field and fowls of the air, and that’s inside the house. Most especially I don’t like mice or rats, and for a reasonable period of time we had both. Some people have confidently stated to me that mice and rats don’t mix, and this may be true when planning a dinner party, but it certainly wasn’t true in our house. Of course it took a bit of effort to persuade Alex of both the problem and its eventual solutions, in part because Alex likes them – well, she likes mice, anyway – and she didn’t see why they shouldn’t have a decent home. I, of course, agreed, I just didn’t see why it had to be our home!

A Rat Problem

I first spotted the mice when one casually wandered along the wall plate above the television while I was watching it. Then there was some evidence of food being eaten, holes in boxes and the like. I was told not to fuss, it being the country and one just had to get used to it, and to be fair it didn’t bother me much, a few plastic tubs and extra tidiness around cleaning up after dinner (something Alex will claim rarely happened!) did not seem much of a burden to me (especially as it was Alex doing it!). But then I saw the rat. I know it was a rat because it was about five times the size of a mouse and had a rat’s tail, which seems all the evidence anyone could ask for.

Now rats I am really not keen on, partly as carriers of the Black Death and other nasties, and partly because they can attack humans (this may not be entirely true, but I’m sure they’re nasty, and that scene inIndiana Joneswas really quite scary) and cause quite a lot of harm. George Orwell’s1984and Room 101 really didn’t help either, and I’m sure most people would break when confronted with a cage full of snarling sharp-toothed rodents. When I told Alex about the rat she laughed at me, and assured me it was almost certainly just a mouse and that I should stop being a BGB (‘Big Girl’s Blouse’) – I did try and explain the creature’s definite ratliness, but to no avail.

For a couple of weeks after that the crafty little critter would wait for Alex to be out of the room before ducking out and waving at me, or at least scampering nimbly over the kitchen work-surfaces. (One key thing from this whole episode was that it persuaded me to be extra clean when preparing food, not something I had been terrible about, but laziness had occasionally crept in...) I mentioned that a cat might be an answer to our problems. In no uncertain terms, this suggestion was rejected on the grounds that a) I was the one getting all wibbly wobbly about a little mouse, and b) cats are evil, stroppy monsters, good for nothing other than plotting to take over the world (we had recently watched the film Cats and Dogs which is amusing, if a little prejudicial). The comedian Jack Dee’s sketch on the difference between cats and dogs, which was decidedly biased against cats, didn’t help the situation much either! Yes, Alex is a dog person.

Personally I am an animal person, and love both dogs and cats (and goats, cows, sheep and horses, but not rabbits, which I consider nasty, or rats, as already observed). But I have noted that people often tribalize (in this context meaning ‘to form tribes’ – with the author’s apologies for this verbalization) about relatively trivial things, and cats and dogs are one of the topics which most commonly bring about this behaviour (the other most common topic being football). Alex was particularly bad about being a ‘dogist’ – some might even say she was rather dogmatic... – especially as she generally showed little remorse that her few interactions with cats appear to have involved running them over (or nearly). Still, I thought some perseverance might bring her round. I mentioned that a cat’s purr will bring about feelings of happiness and contentment, that they are soft and strokable, and that they require little in the way of maintenance. I tried talking about how Siamese cats were talkative and friendly, only to be told coldly that they were the epitome of evil (Disney and his film production ofThe Lady and the Tramphave a lot to answer for!).

Alas, for weeks she would not be persuaded, and kept reminding me of the saying ‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff ’ – though this I think misses the point somewhat, even if it is true. We went so far as to buy some of those subsonic gadgets, which emit a sound at a frequency only rodents can hear and which are supposed to disturb them and scare them away; these worked in the sense of keeping some of the surfaces free, but as they don’t go through any surfaces they didn’t stop the little beasties getting into the drawers, for example. But alas for the rat, one day it decided to get into the cupboard and jump out at Alex when she opened it looking for some breakfast cereal. This was a truly monumental miscalculation on the part of the rat, and I can only attribute it to overconfidence and some form of adrenalin addiction. I was duly informed we had a rat and something needed to be done! Knowing the wisest way to respond, I acted surprised at the notion of a rat problem, and agreed to start thinking about what measures might be taken...

Taking Measures

My new and entirely unprecedented suggestion was that we should get a cat – and not any old cat, oh no, we should get a Farm Cat (I really wanted a Siamese, but the rumours of evil, and my concern they might be more into talking than ratting, persuaded me to avoid the topic). This semi-mythical feline was popularly held to have the power to hunt down vermin by the bucketload (a traditional measure of rats), and also to multiply like a rabbit (although I chose not to share the details of this second mythical superpower with Alex).

After some further discussion and cogitation my proposal was approved, and I set out on my quest to secure our new weapon against our unwanted house guests, using the power of the internet. Entering ‘farm cat’ into a number of search engines quickly directed me to an RSPCA centre in Kent which had a ‘semi-feral cat, about two years old, would make excellent farm cat’. I sent an email to the address noted (the fact that it was an email added to the allure of this particular ad – though I do often wonder why, after using the internet to start a process, people then insist on that old-fashioned medium the telephone to complete it) then phoned up to arrange to pick up ‘Becky’ from a relieved-sounding woman – perhaps alarm bells should have rung.

Alex drove us to the centre, which was near the mouth of the Thames, about two hours away from us (the geographical disconnection of the internet providing ample opportunity to see the country, albeit from a motorway, though I guess we could have just driven up and down the M3 for two hours to get the same effect), with a brief stop to pick up a cat carrier in Guildford. This stop was not exactly planned, in fact I think we were in a panic as we’d not only failed to consider the requirement for such a thing, but we were running late and already on the road; nevertheless a quick search of the internet (using my Blackberry) found us a pet shop in Guildford. Sitting just outside was a perfect cat-carrying contraption, which I purchased as quickly as the nice lady behind the counter would let me! There were no more stops, and we proceeded happily to deepest darkest Kent.

When we arrived at the address, we were a little confused as we appeared to be in the centre of a housing estate, but we went up to the nice semi and knocked on the door, assuming they’d tell us we were in the wrong county or something equally upsetting; but they were in fact happy to see us, and directed us to a large shed at the back of the garden. The shed opened into a relatively large, well-kept room with a wall of cages on one side. In one cage there was a cat and her recently born kittens, and the nice woman who ran the place was hand-feeding another kitten which had lost its mother.

When we said we were there to pick up Becky she looked very happy – almost too happy, in fact; and when she pulled on two large, kevlar-lined gloves those alarm bells really started to ring. She tentatively opened one of the cages and pulled out a spitting, snarling ball of fury which she very carefully – in the sense of keeping it as far away from her as possible – put into our carrier. She was so relieved that she almost forgot to get us to sign the paperwork and make an appropriate donation. We left in a state of mild apprehension, particularly as her parting shot was something to the effect that she’d never been so pleased to get rid of a cat...

Becky

While we were filling out the forms the woman had given us some history on Becky. She was about two years old (though I’m not sure how this was determined) and had been living on an industrial estate for a while before a man had picked her up and taken her home. She didn’t give details, but Becky clearly hadn’t fitted in well in the house, which already had a few cats in it, and had been brought to the RSPCA. As we didn’t have a cat she thought it wouldn’t be a problem, especially as we were planning for her to live semi-ferally anyway, in the sense that she would be able to roam around the fields and sheds. In passing she told us about a similarly excitable cat she’d had a few years before, which she’d passed on to a new male owner. Apparently he’d phoned a few months later to tell her that the cat was now sleeping on his chest, which was an amazing transformation from a cat that would claw anyone who got too close. We smiled in appreciation at the story, and wondered if she was just trying to soften the blow?

On the way back to her new home Becky seemed to calm down a little, although it still wasn’t wise to put one’s finger too close, as she was not averse to lashing out. She was a lovely cat though, all black with little white socks, and when she sat still she was ‘just so’. Before we even got home we decided that ‘Becky’ was really not an appropriate name for her, so after some debate we arrived at calling her Bob, and Kate for short. We had read up a lot about how to help cats get settled, and they all agreed that the new member of the family should not be allowed outside the house, and preferably not out of a single room, for at least a few weeks. However, at that time we didn’t really have complete internal walls, and any real climbing cat would be able to get out of any room; in addition there were several ways of getting under the floor, not to mention some larger than is perhaps normal holes in the external walls through which getting any cat to return might prove tricky – so we had purchased a couple of puppy cages and put them together to make her an area in our room. This, combined with a few toys and a bed, was to be her settling-down quarters.

Bob Settles In

Bob wasn’t entirely keen on the cage, as she showed by making quite a bit of noise during the first couple of nights, but after a while she seemed to decide that we weren’t monsters, that the food was OK, and that she could relax a bit, though she totally ignored the scratching post we bought her. This seemed to be a bit of a theme with her, in that she would never scratch any form of scratching toy, and after two more failures we stopped buying them. I let her out of the cage a few times, and she sniffed round the place, climbed on me a bit, and generally seemed to enjoy herself – and getting her back in wasn’t the trial I had expected.

After a while we let her out more and more, though always keeping the doors closed, and she became more and more friendly, until she got into the habit of sleeping on me, just like the man in the story. I nearly phoned up the woman in Kent, but chose not to as I decided she might think we were either joking or being mean (and it would involve phoning, which as I may have mentioned, I hate doing).