Rye crackers

Ranch

Wispy wintry dawns, streaked in dank grey, break around 7 at this time of year and decent outdoor daylight lasts until after 4pm.

That means an 8 hour working day is possible, although I rarely achieve it. Visits to the ranch have been scant and the winter tasks of hedge husbandry and mulching are way behind. Still, there’s still time to catch up. Buds are budding, the catkins are out and Imbolc marked the imminent hurtling in of spring.

I’m trying to get a gardening group together of folk who share enough like-minded common ground (and common sense) to help farm my one and a half acres productively. I can offer seeds, plants, fruit and veg and space for folk to grow their own – not to mention a bit of knowledge from decades of doing everything the hard way.

The idea is good, but I’ve still a lot to learn about organisation. We’re meeting Friday afternoons 1-3. I’m sending out weekly emails, which have superseded the blogs.

Despite being short of time, I’m optimistic about a productive season. I’ve planted pepper seeds in a heated propagator and onion seeds in the warm kitchen. Outdoors, the garlic is doing well and purple sprouting broccoli is starting to form. Despite one lot of rye being eaten there’s a back-up in 2 trays under the lean-to. I’ve learned how to make delicious rye crackers. I still have the ears from the last 2 years to grind into flour.

We had a decent cold spell – actual winter + some windy storms and floods. Of course the media went ape-shit. I still maintain that our north-west UK climate is the best on earth as inevitable changes continue.

They found some ancient villages in the Sahara desert. How can that be? It’s far too hot. It wasn’t always hot. Once it was a lush paradise. The climate changed, albeit over thousands of years and it was nothing to do with human industrialisation because it didn’t exist back then. Likewise, when it got really cold and the woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers got wiped out.

Now the carbonistas are trying to convince us that we’re farting too much and we need to bottle them to save the planet.

Climate change is very real. Timeless and irrevocably inevitable. Nothing that humans can do can change it. On the other hand, poisoning of the micro-environment by the ultra rich and their gross over-industrialisation can be tackled. Two very different issues. Decent intelligent people are tricked into thinking that the latter is the former, in order to give up yet more personal freedom.

The first step is being able to see what’s really happening. An easy starting point is to look very carefully at everything forced upon us by the powers that be. The solution? Step out of the matrix and do it all yourself – food, fuel, electricity. Creep between the paradoxes and harvest the good stuff.

Doh. If only I’d seen all this coming thirty years ago. I would have happily traded my skis, golf clubs and trips abroad for land close to home. And a source of clean water. And an endless supply of organic material. I’m eternally grateful for my land.

I bit off more than I could chew. I bought a house with my lump sum, close to the ranch. I thought that I could do it up from scratch as an urban farmhouse to go with the land.

Even now, my naiveté knows no bounds. How was I to know that the jumped-up town clerk council jobsworths would double the poll tax?

How was I to know that building materials would double in price and not everyone who I trusted would be reliable?

I got despondent for a while but then I was reminded that one of the finest thing on earth is using all your human faculties to the maximum – exercise to the limit of your ability – brain, mind and body. For me that’s scrabbling outdoors – growing, designing and building for as long as I can. Love it. 

I also spend a lot of time sitting on the floor with my little best pal, playing with our cars. Picking him up from nursery and chatting in the queue outside is a social highlight.

One of our regular trips was to Oddies to get him a sausage roll. Sadly it closed a few weeks ago after being part of our landscape for 120 years. The times are changing.

Doing up the house and the associated research has taught me so much. Like everything else, having an overview of the whole picture is crucial. Equally important is the ability to hunker down to one project at a time. I have outdoor projects for fine weather ad indoor ones for rainy days.

As a psychological break, and a treat for myself, I decided to fit the range cooker in the middle room fireplace, which is literally at the heart of the house. It’s been a massive job, because my engineering mind convinced me to strengthen the single brick walls of the fireplace with heavy steel.

Stone plinth. Lime-plastering. Tiling. Liner and connectors. Two-part steel register plate. Pointing of the brickwork. 8X4 wooden mantelpiece. All done.

I just need a hand moving the 300kg range across the room. I can’t do the painting until the plaster is completely dry.

Oh how I have studied stoves and ranges. You name it, I’ve researched it in minute detail. Rayburn, Dunsley; Stanley; Walmsler; Aga; Esse and Cheaper Eastern European alternatives.

In the end, I took the best features from all of them, then designed my own. I even bought the steel to make it. Then I realised it would take me for ever, so I decided on a Rayburn. Even though the design has been fundamentally the same for 60 years, it’s still the best around. It’s possible to do all your cooking on it and provide hot water and central heating.

Stoves and ranges are messy and time-consuming but it’s part of a lifestyle choice. Cost-effectiveness is dependent on access to firewood which I’m lucky enough to have as part of my hedge-husbandry.

Elsewhere

I often use the analogy of a Punch and Judy show for the crazy world outside. The children are transfixed, not realising that the characters are just puppets. Perhaps a more encompassing analogy is a soap opera or an epic TV series like Game of thrones.

People are getting really fired up about the latest one, because it’s a real blockbuster and they’ve got some really good characters. Folk are expending huge amounts of energy on social media, trying to explain why the main character is so dastardly, instead of concentrating on face to face interaction.

Alas the genocides, the erosion of personal freedoms and environmental destruction are real.

I stepped away from social media and came off Twatter. I realised what an energy-sucking morass it is. There’s so much confusion. I’m out of the loop now in terms of knowing what’s going on out there. What I thought was extreme left turned out to be extreme right. National Socialism? Fascism? Then I realised that there is no left and right – just forces of darkness and forces of light. With the advent of AI, the sorcery is ever more sophisticated. People who begin to see through things are sucked in by ‘counter-algorithms’ which feed them a certain set of falsehoods to make them entirely dismissible by the majority of reasonable people.

Any conviction that comes exclusively from electronic devices can’t be trusted. That’s why expert testimony from those who are actually in the field is crucial. Hence I felt morally obliged to document what was actually going on in hospitals as the Covid debacle unfolded. I’m able to patiently explain the truth to people who have been taken in by the counter-narrative: hatred against frontline medical staff; ‘flu re-branded’; ‘there was no pandemic’; ‘the hospitals were empty’ and so on.

Even then, a few will call me a liar and an idiot. In turn, I’ll then think bad words about them. Then I too, have been taken in by divide and rule. The trick as ever, is to unite on common ground and withdraw from digital trickery. I have friends who truly believe certain things such as the earth being flat. No amount of reasoning will convince them otherwise.

Great prophets never ever go around saying ‘look at me – see how enlightened I am’. I’m wary of those who declare themselves as ‘awake’ and dismiss others as ‘sheeple’ and ‘normies’. Awakening is a step by step, layer by layer process and the next level can never be attained without humility and open-mindedness.

Three years is hardly anything in terms of medical science. Alas, the things I feared the most are coming true and I can no longer speak about them because they’re so close to home.

The ONS reveals that for the first time in fifty years, UK deaths exceed births. There are those that trusted the official narrative enough to accept a particular medical intervention and those that didn’t. They come from all walks of life irrespective of class or political persuasion.

There are still lots of great things about living in this country and as ever, humour and surreal wit pep up the gloom.

Rock and Roll

… is exquisite and quietly joyful. I’m back to my little back room and simple recording set-up, with no plans to play live at the moment.

My favourite saying from the world of music is MES’s ‘It could be me and your granny on bongos and it would still be The Fall’.

I’m just called HARTLEY now and it could be me and your granny on bongos and it would still be HARTLEY.

Sam and I have recorded a lovely EP of his songs – everything about it is just so. We’re happy with it and that’s all that matters.

A couple of weeks ago, Lee, Gaz and I recorded four of my songs live and that was just so too. Lee analyses all the chords, explaining that an augmented flat fifth sharp seventh could equally be a diminished eleventh diminished inversion. Gaz and I stare at him blankly.