Witchhazel Monday

Our annual flower festival has been a highlight of the county calendar for many a year. It gladdens the heart every September to see Mrs Fabricant"s logo of pansies in front of the war memorial: “FLORAL PLEASURES”.

Alas, we now live in Danny Boyle’s Britain. God forbid we celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Or World War Two. Or sensible genetic pruning. Or those amusing instant mashed potato robots. Apparently NOW we’re all supposed to prance around like gormless tar-baby versions of Hattie Jacques.

Well in my rural opinion - you reap what you sow.

Because now one of Boyle’s cowardly NHS toerags has taken a trowel to Mrs Fabricant’s “FLORAL PLEASURES” and removed the first two letters. Puerile. Blood boiling. A similar thing happened some years ago when the parish church held those evening “choral sex” sessions that were so popular at the time.

It’s verboten of course these days to point the finger but point it I shall, in the direction of a certain sullen teenage visitor I “engaged with” last week for leaning his bicycle against the church wall. Perhaps it was a religious hate crime I had interrupted. I cannot say. He certainly had a “touch of Islam” about him. Enoch and Pinochet could smell his fear and hostility before I had even unclipped their leashes.

Whether he was guilty of removing Mrs Fabricant’s pansies or not is immaterial. A crime was committed and someone was punished for it. This is all we seek in the Countryside. Justice. Justice, and lack of interference.

Alas, meddling in the affairs of the Countryside is “all the rage” whether it’s the Socialist Coalition’s ridiculous gun laws or the county council’s ‘no diseased or dying chickens in your organic wheelie bin” diktat. So answer me THIS, commissars of County Hall: if a diseased and dying chicken were the subject in 20 Questions would it be vegetable? Mineral? NO. Chicken = animal = organic = get off the Countryside’s back and let it stand on its own two feet with grant aid where appropriate. There. There’s your “equality”.

Oh, talking of “all the rage”. Bugger returned, blotto as usual, from the 19th Hole and punched me. Not “A&E” hard but hard enough to leave a bruise like tinned tomatoes. He’s just impossible sometimes, though I suppose he knows best. As we say in the Countryside, “a skinful leads to a handful”. Let’s face it, who needs silly old me quacking around the kitchen while he’s trying to load a gun?

Beasting Thursday

All quiet in the homestead. Bugger’s at the Fur and Feather Fair over in Bloodhampton. No wind today. Gentle sunshine.

In the Old Garden, a profusion of purple thyme and knapweed, yellow lady's bedstraw, honeysuckle, poker lilies, maiden’s tears, pearled marigold and wild roses need ripping out. Thankfully, most of the roots are very delicate and I’ve cleared space for the bags of sulphate pellets by lunchtime.

Gibbet Sunday

Traditionally this is the day when Countryside folk change their gibbet animals. It’s been several months since the strangled cat was hoist aloft at the farm gates to deter outsider cats from venturing too close.

The gibbet dog too will be little more than a wind-flapped remnant by now. Of course the metrosexual elite have no understanding of our ways, and think it cruel to display dead animals as a grim warning to others. Wilful ignorance again. Do these people imagine we murder animals on a whim? They should try strangling and gibbet-mounting a cow some time.

Bugger quite tipsy and emotional. “You always kill the thing you love” he murmurs, stroking the heifer’s still-twitching flank.

The days are getting darker.