The Last of Summer

Morning beckons. The light is peeping in the window. It begs you to open your eyes. It is perfectly peaceful. Now, even the birds are almost silent. The owl has ceased it’s night time talk. It has flown on a morning mission. This is your most tranquil moment in the day. You can really enjoy it. Open your eyes and breath in the country air. A study of the clock reveals that it is just short of the time that Wes will leave his new dwelling for work, which could be anywhere in this county, or the next. I will lie here a little longer enjoying my own thoughts for the day. I will silently take my morning drugs. They’ve got this well sorted at the surgery, but it’s not much use if I forget to take them.

Peter stirs. We get tea, according to who is most awake. I quietly tread down the stairs, My whole body is like one stiff mass, so I give it a talking to. The stairs are slow and painful, but eventually, the whole body unsticks it’s limbs and we are in business. It is still very peaceful, so I open the front door and reach for the bird feeder. Before I have filled it, birds are massing on the end of trees and even twigs. They are so idle. There are a lot of insects still about, but they must have their morning seed! I fill their improvised pottery dish with water and go and put the kettle on. The noise outside is quite distracting. Feathers are being flapped and the odd fight breaks out greed is definitely not just the province of the human world. The punch ups outside the front door are ongoing. Tea up and possibly toast with an egg rise up the stairs. There is a debate over egg timing. The fridge is set on maximum due to the heat. Normally, the eggs are boiled for six and a half minutes, but these are really large, so its 7 minutes. You are probably not married to an engineer, to whom egg timing is of the essence. Literally!

Cattle by Factory Bridge grazing on parched grass

Breakfast over. We have not been able to take a walk for months. First, we had the veg plot to keep going, then, we had the produce to use. Every bowl of water from the sink is used to keep plants going. We are feeling very challenged. Peter’s plan for vegetables to save money is working. All pensioners, no matter who they are will lose money this winter. One morning, a while ago, Peter worked out our situation, and to our surprise, we found that we had to take some action. He spent a happy engineers day in the study. We had savings, but they had not collected much interest in twenty years. He had a small number of shares, which were dying and worth very little. We had been all through this before. In 1986, we had just moved house. On the day that we moved, the interest rates shot up on the mortgage and they just kept going. Peter had five people to support including his elderly mother. I was lucky. I had a phone call asking me to return to work urgently. I could work the old Purchasing and Supply IT system on my own, while everybody learnt the new one. At this stage, a part of our new home subsided into the road. Peter arranged the repair and went to work, while I helped earn an additional sum. The children were looked after by granny and they got very tired of fish fingers! We also had the Black Monday stock market crash, when we lost every penny of Peter’s bonus, which was paid in shares. This was the money to help with our eldest child’s university fees completely gone! When we heard the news about this new national money crisis, we determined to be prepared. In the early spring, Peter ordered lots of compost and stretched our seed packets across the kitchen table. We could almost feed ourselves; certainly through summer and part of winter. We will, and lots of people can also do this next summer as well. Of course, we would rather have been climbing the hills and enjoying our local community, but we knew that we couldn’t take this awful business again! If you want to you can make a difference. Almost any patch of free land can be turned into food. Yesterday, Wes and Josie came to dinner. We had bought a chicken, but every accompanying vegetable had been grown and everybody had more than enough to eat. Wine was added from a carefully accumulated stock. On Friday Wes and Josie will receive a carefully collected vegetable box from our garden.

Peter is sweating a bit this morning. The chicken stock is taking its toll on poor Peter, but he has an air of determination about it! We had a stimulus to our approach last week, when we happily went on the month’s shop up to find a loaf of bread costing £4.70. All thought of a week off bread baking vanished and Peter produced his usual poppy seeded white loaf. He felt too tired to produce wholemeal. He produces home made jam, pickles and amazing stuff. Susan recognising that the decorative garden area has gone from bad to worse, uses her battery strimmer in the shade to keep the place slightly tidy. In case, Mr. Burglar, you are thinking of your usual autumn theft of gardening equipment dream on, we sleep with it all. It’s a really romantic thing.

Winter is coming. This is what 12 cubic metres of renewable energy enough for one winter looks like.

What else has been going on? Visits have been going on. We could see virtually nobody during Covid. We visited John and Tillie and had a cream tea. They visited us with the winter logs. We have had John’s logs every winter for twenty years. Chloe has worked for John for, well, a long time. She helped John with delivering the logs. John’s vegetable patch is always impressive. Peter knows that he can’t beat it. There is always something to learn. We sit under our apple tree as the June drop continues into July. We discuss bread making, cake making and all that country stuff as we sup tea and coffee. We are each looking forward to our annual break and chat away. Back to normal. Who would have thought it. Later, in the week, Tim comes around and spends a happy afternoon, eating cake and talking of his latest project. It’s always good to see Tim. He works so hard that it makes you feel as if you do nothing in life.

Just that time when the Machinery tells you it’s Time for Tea

Peter has had the mower out. It will chop the hedge cuttings up. Susan attempts to keep up with it all. Just as they are reaching the end, there is a cry of distress from the furthest end of the garden. Peter appears dragging the mower trailer and the mower. The wheel on the trailer, has a puncture for the first time in ten years. Would you believe that! Well, I never! This necessitates a trip to E Bowden & Son the traditional agricultural mower people in Bovey Tracey. What a place! Sue and Peter love it. There is stuff in there that you could only dream of. Susan watches as Peter just has a stroke of those lovely new yellow tractor mowers. After all, you can dream. You can do that when you slowly come to in the morning!

PS

Congratulations to all who contributed to the fund raising Chagford Market. Another great community effort.

Mike Palmer raising money for Cancer Research at the Chagford Street Market

Words by Sue

Pictures by Peter

Thought for the month

“Four weeks is an eternity in the life of a tomato”

Visit our Facebook Page at Dartmoor Diary Facebook Page and contact The Photographer directly on Peter Bennett Photos email The Photographer’s snapshots for this blog can be seen on     Dartmoor Diary Flickr Album or all his snapshots on  Flickr (follow link)           The serious stuff is currently only available directly from The Photographer. Any similarity between characters in this blog and real people, products or events is entirely co-incidental Any similarity between “The Little Town” and Chagford is entirely deliberate

The Closing of the Door

By “The Photographer’s Assistant”

 

The Photographer has, in his time, designed tractors, a little known item in his life history. The young man with a trailer full of logs for the winter looked uncomfortable with the small Devon gap in front of him. The Photographer looked totally unfazed, The Assistant hid in terror, but all she could hear was loud patient instructions. The young man emerged from the dump point impressed with his own performance. Objective achieved. Logs in for the winter, two large piles to be put in a shelter. The boyfriend came around and pounded away at his skill with construction and the Photographer was now the Assistant. Objective achieved. A small shelter erected for the logs. (editor’s note…..it’s a cathedral to sustainable fuel!)

 

 

That’s the way you do it……….the expert in his element

 

Only that week, The Photographer and his Assistant had struggled against the wind into the little town, which was now having summer blown out of its sails. Breakfast was taken at the Deli and winter plans discussed. Seeds had already disappeared from the ironmongers, where autumn supplies were arriving. This meant that they would have to pour over catalogues, cutting through some wonderfully colourful descriptions of very ordinary vegetables. A runner bean is a runner bean, it really doesn’t need to be named after an English princess, whatever it’s performance!

At the vegetable shop, there was a slight pause in the weather. There were the last of the English plums, and raspberries had been reduced. The Assistant joined a retired priest in choosing what to have. The priest had been a good priest and a popular one. He was very self effacing. In his company, the Assistant felt overly bumptious. The priest looked a little cold, despite his coat and could not decide between raspberries and plums. The Assistant had decided on both plus some spring onions. She felt outrageously extravagant as the priest departed with a small bag of plums. He had wanted just a small piece of autumn before it all disappeared.

Dartmoor was giving notice. The weather could and did do whatever it felt like. The wind blew and the rain came in torrents. Time and time again, the Photographer put a sock inside the bedroom door to stop it rattling. Now, only brave tourists were to be seen. The late September Monday saw visitors heading for the M5, as businesses prepared for the loss of income. The little town could have featured in a western with only the strong and experienced carrying on. Roadside signs swung in the breeze and the swimming pool shut at the end of the season. In the Photographer’s garden, the Assistant decided that enough was enough and up came the pumpkins to ripen in the conservatory. The Assistant had torn into the garden. While the Photographer divided plants that were too tough for her to handle, she pulled up dead vegetables and piles of weeds.

Inside the house, the Assistant began to think about what to do with the apples, which were now cascading off the trees. She looked in despair at the pantry, normally so well stocked and took time out to make lists. All would now have to be planned for. If she was careful, she could take time over restocking for the winter. The lists would be endless. This year, she would take account of being a little frailer and plan for not going to the little town if it snowed. Long, long lists would be made. There would be extra firelighters, tins, bottles, packets. If the electricity went down, there would be no water as their pump would stop, so larger containers would have to be bought. There would be no opening a freezer unless they could borrow a genny to run it. The kitchen range would begin to die, so camping gas stocks must be checked ———————

 

Time to hang up the watering cans

 

Amidst all of this though, the sky was suddenly, a wonderful blue and a buzzard mewed above. The sky was so clear that you could look at it forever and it would drink you up in its glory.

South South West at 33,000ft

 

The Daughter continues her gallant work for Oxfam with Oxjam to take place in Exeter. There are now over seventy music groups involved and you can find details and book on : Oxjam Exeter Takeover

Don’t forget to watch Exeter’s World Cup Matches at Northern Hay on the big screen, or just go to the little town and have a pint with it. It’s all happening out here in the west!!