It was such glorious weather on Sunday that I ignored the clamour from my desk and departed for the great outdoors. I picked loads of elderberries, haws and blackberries. I discovered that Alice, the dog, loves blackberries. However she doesn’t have the ears for picking them herself and got herself hopelessly caught up in brambles. I had to extricate her, some considerable yelping here, and then picked a handful for Alice every so often. One happy spaniel. During the course of the day she lost 0.3 kilos in weight. This was due to the non stop pursuit of pheasants. Hundreds of them have been released and are cluttering up the lane and our fields and the neighbour’s fields. We were driving along the lane to Park Meadows when Alice saw the first lot, she shot out of the mule and fifteen minutes later and much squawking on the part of the pheasants, she returned. This went on all day in every field we went to although there is absolutely no chance she will ever catch one. When we got home she lay on the floor of the barn panting for a good half an hour.
Tonight I’m going to make elderberry jelly and elderberry syrup – apparently very good for coughs and colds but more to the point tremendous poured over ice cream and ideal for making ice cream and sorbets. And the haws will be brewed up and take their turn in the jelly bag
Two more cria were born on Friday, one so early in the morning that by the time we got to the office at 7.30 it was already running round the field. The other was more civilised and arrived around ten oclock. I watched it hanging out for ages until it finally plopped on to the ground. Only eleven more to go.
Joshua has communicated from Bolivia. He’s been down a silver mine that sounded like a claustrophobic nightmare involving extreme heat and then crawling through tiny tunnels plus a wacky guide who lit a stick of dynamite for them at the end. No health and safety there then. Josh is incommunicado for a week as he and a Dutch guy he’s met are off on a trek to some remote bit of the country. His last email said they had bought the food and were about a hire a guide and pack animals. Makes Devon seem a little tame.