Market day has always been the time when livestock and produce get converted into cash, when farmers change out of their boiler suits, sell their wares, buy what they need and catch up on the happenings of the previous week.

Tuesday is my market day. Dan the fishmonger is always there with his quips, recipe suggestions, flirt mode turned on high, a grin for all. His painted signs are things of beauty and utility. Every last fish, crustacean and mollusc on display is caught in the South West. This week’s crop of lovelies included sprats, mackerel, lemon sole, grey mullet, conger eel, prawns, mussels and skate wings.  Brain food for me on Tuesdays then, served with the first of the year’s purple sprouting.

Then there are the guys who started off selling a bit of artisan bread and quickly became known for creating every kind of fishcake imaginable. You couldn’t make better at home, and the queues are long, chatty and determined, sharing lunch preferences – coriander and cod, pollock with mozzarella and basil, or salmon and dill?

My little bit of cheese paradise only appears on market day; it’s a fairy tale cheese shop, awaking to display its wares for one special day a week.  The tiny space can just about fit in three shoppers weighed down with bags of veg and suet balls for the birds; you discuss what’s new, who made that gorgeous salty blue ewe’s milk cheese, that round of lemony goat.

This isn’t a farmer’s market as we’ve come to expect in recent times, it’s simply one that farmers use when they come to town to have their hair cut, buy some new boots or a cap and meet friends in the cafe for a mug of tea, a hot bacon sandwich, and share the news.  But it also has food of real quality – fresh, artisan, local as it gets, and such a range of things that you can source your whole meal:  chicken or sardines, carrots or pumpkins, thyme and saffron, cakes and fruit pies, cream (clotted if you like), the cheese board and oatcakes, apple juice, and Lindy’s hand cream smelling of roses to sooth the hands after the washing up.

The whole experience is to be enjoyed against the backdrop cacophony of the poultry auction.  Checking out the old garden and woodworking tools you amble ever closer to the ear-splitting crowing, quacking, and bellowing of the auctioneer and his lots.

Close to Christmas there’s also the deadstock sale, all the seasonal fowl – ducks, turkeys and geese – laid out in long rows, tagged with their provenance, some dressed ready for the oven, others merely plucked for the brave.  And a mass of holly and mistletoe sit in berried heaps to be auctioned off at the end of the day; you can seal the deal with a kiss.

Published in The Landsman December/January 2011 Issue 23

I’ve been toying forever with the notion of getting some cattle, but with so much going on in our lives and on the farm they always seem a step too far. But I can and do swap my pork for wondrous Devon Ruby beef.  Everyone is happy, the food mileage is miniscule and there is something satisfyingly simple about swapping your excess produce for something equally but differently mouth-watering.

And then there’s the brawn part of the equation. For years we’d given time and labour to help friends build stables, erect barns, make hay, drench sheep. Now, with multiple projects always on the go we are on the receiving end; roofs cover voids, brick walls rise from the ground and sheep mustered in a spirit of well-honed teamwork.

We’ve exchanged protein for brain power and artistry on more than one occasion; want a farm logo designed and have as much artistic flair as a camel?  Dangling a juicy joint of prime lamb can be a fine temptation to a designer.

Gardeners and smallholders are bartering for all they’re worth these days.  Have a glut of raspberries but a failed chilli crop? Swap jam for relish. Determined to try a bit of goat (meat or milk, cheese or butter) before you decide to buy some Anglo-Nubians of your own?  Those sheets of unused corrugated tin might be just the ticket for your friendly neighbourhood goat keeper.  Need a drake, got a spare duck?  Look through the small ads and make a few calls and you’re sorted.

A pal once told me that there was nothing interesting or cheering in looking at a fiver lying on a heap of straw, but a couple of softly snoring weaners was a different prospect altogether.  In the same vein, I’m convinced that bartering things animal, vegetable and mineral just feels better, more rewarding, than buying stuff with a fistful of readies.

At the moment we’re bartering logs for blacksmithing lessons and I wonder just how imaginative we can get in a non-currency economy.  I wait, fancifully, for the day I can pay my council tax in meat, cover my fuel bills with labour and eggs, and exchange access to grazing for tax owed.  I’d swap a bale of hay for a couple of litres of diesel any day.

But even the natural process of barter comes under the beady peepers of the tax man, and if you are registered for VAT both parties must account for VAT on the amounts you would each have paid for the goods or services as if there had been no barter and they had been paid for with money. Just reading those lines from HMRC makes me depressed. Trust them to take all the fun out of it.

Published in The Landsman October/November 2010 Issue 22

To reassure myself I attended a live to dead event run by EBLEX, held at a local abattoir; one of the most informative days I’ve ever spent.  In the lairage we handled live lambs from a scrawny article to a rather fat beast and everything in between, to estimate their grades. Dressed in white boilersuits, hairnets and hard hats we moved to the processing area. The scale took my breath away: a continuous line of machinery, people and lambs, with everyone focussed on their task. Asked if we wanted to see the slaughter, no-one baulked. It was so calm and professional, with the layout designed to cause nil stress to the animal and the slaughterer. I watched several animals being stunned and throats cut. I wanted to make sure I saw the reality of where my animals are headed, and I felt huge relief that such an important role in the food chain was being so expertly undertaken.

We followed the line as skins were removed, guts discarded and offal inspected. We saw condemned livers ruined by tapeworm, fluke and other parasites and arthritic joints spurned as unfit for human consumption. We clocked the results of injecting in the wrong muscles, and that lambs were being sent both too thin and too fat to slaughter.  We watched the grader determine the score of each lamb, the weighing, the tingling with electric current to reduce hanging time (hmm…not sure about that one), and then into the chiller, where the lambs we’d attempted to score were tagged with the official result.

So what have I learned over the years apart from how to stay calm?  If you are using a small abattoir you need to book well in advance, sometimes many weeks beforehand in the lead up to Easter and Christmas.  Do check that they take your type of livestock; not all of them do pigs. Make sure appropriate slaughter ear tags are in place. In winter your lambs will need to be bellied out the day before and all livestock need to be clean and empty (no food for 24 hours before you leave). When you get there don’t expect help unloading, so practice ‘til you are confident.  Have your much pondered cutting list ready, with the movement licence and food chain information form.  Decide if you want the skins and if so get them salted ready for the tannery. And finally, don’t ruin things by keeling over and fainting when you collect the offal and find that the oesophagus and lungs are still attached, or that you get a line of piggy nipples on your belly pork.

Published in The Landsman August/September 2010 Issue 21

But there was no road rage or irritation.  Instead, farmers stopped and looked at the tractor, debating its merits.  The school bus and the postman went the long way round, our neighbour-to-be following behind, and we all left the man in the low-loader to get on with it as we went to sort out sheep, poultry and more.  By late afternoon, now unstuck, the driver was beyond sneering and refused to manoeuvre down the perfectly navigable lane to the farm, and blocked the road again as he unloaded everything into a top field.  Our neighbour-to-be was stuck once more, but with a grin and a shrug asked if he could drive through our fields to get home.  That first night, as we lay in bed in our new home, we thought how differently our arrival could have been greeted and were hugely reassured that we had made the right move.

Two years later, haymaking in a small window of hot weather between dismal forecasts, huge tractors appeared from all points of the compass.  Unasked but most welcome, help had arrived to get our bales into the barn before rain kicked in; we did it with minutes to spare.  Then there was the day one of the rams bashed his way through sturdy rails, bursting with testosterone and sexual frustration.  He hadn’t accounted for the burly arms that seconds before had been steering a quad bike down the road grasping him before he could do a runner and holding him fast whilst we made quick repairs to the fence.  And when a group of neighbours had spent hours vaccinating sheep, I had the gall to ask if they would help catch the uncatchable llama so I could give him his Bluetongue vaccination.  Weary but accommodating, we grabbed a long rope and slowly pinned him into a shelter, everyone enjoying the novelty.

We know we can rely on our neighbours to take care of the animals if we both have to be away; we swap bits of equipment, labour and advice; we get a phone call to remind us of the next farmers group meeting; we find, in hunting season, enough pheasant, duck, pigeon and woodcock hanging in the workshop to keep our bellies and freezer full.  We have made fantastic friends who have welcomed us into their homes, and now ask us for favours that we are delighted to give. Neighbourliness is alive and kicking and so is the sharing of home-baked cake (chocolate, if you’re asking).

Published in The Landsman April/May 10 Issue 19

There are eleven mobile libraries in Devon alone, stopping in 1200 places, for ten minutes in secluded backwaters up to a couple of hours in small towns.  7,500 people are borrowers; not diminutive people living behind skirting boards, scouting for spare lumps of cheese, but regular users.  Dedicated though the remaining ones are, borrowers have decreased by 40% over the last decade, and as crucial a lifeline as it is to some, the times and days on offer now only suit a minority of rural dwellers.  Obliged to provide libraries in rural areas and determined to reverse the declining trend, the service is looking at setting up shop at times and in places where people congregate naturally, on market days, alongside the mobile post office and tying in with other village activities.

Their biggest problem is that not enough people know about the mobile library – those that do, love it and relish their chats with the mobile library assistants who double up as HGV drivers and who often hold the same post for twenty or more years.  They make sure the stock has something for all their customers including the under fives, families, young adults, and not just the elderly as many assume.

Finding a parking space is not the only consideration that limits where mobile libraries can stop; the slow spread of broadband into rural communities has had an impact too as they use the same computerised issue system as all Devon libraries, which is why you’ll find the vehicles parked up in high spots where they can get a signal.

I relied very heavily on the library as a child; my weekly trip didn’t come round anything like quickly enough and I’d read every book at least twice before it was time to visit again.  This was in the city, but even so, it was too far to walk on my own; having a mobile full of books at the end of my street would have been heaven, doubly so if it came complete with knowledgeable recommendations and chats about what stirred me in my reading.  Rather than the behemoth building  that was a bit scary with hard, ringing floors so you couldn’t be as quiet as the signs required, I’d have loved a cosy cave of child-sized possibilities where I could grab an unknown gem that made me gasp or giggle or groan.

By this winter the library service will make changes so we can start borrowing books in a way that fits more naturally with the way we work and live.  And if you like a bit of sand between the sheets of a juicy paperback to get you in the holiday spirit, the South Hams mobile library parks on the beach!

Published in The Landsman June/ July 10 Issue 20

Living with dogs makes my life in the countryside complete.  Watching them hooley through the wood, snuffling through crisp leaves to reveal a mouse hole, chase fox tracks along the hedges, stand hopefully on their back legs to see if they could just, possibly, reach the squirrel in the tree canopy, gives me another, more alert perspective on my surroundings.

Blackberrying becomes supremely companionable when I fill my basket from eyelevel brambles as the dogs delicately wrap their purpled lips round the juicy offerings at knee height.  No-one can come through the farm gate without the dogs warning me that there is someone to attend to.  And nothing is as good as a dog for getting me out and about for a dose of stretched legs and fresh air when I’ve been cooped up indoors, stale, pale and crotchety.

I can’t say my pair is much use around sheep, entirely unsuited as they are for shepherding work, but as long as I keep them in my sight I happily walk them through our flocks.  They will, of course, spot anything ill or vulnerable and that has its benefits.

Dogs aren’t all sweetness and light.  I’ve had sheep torn to bits by straying canines, and allowing unwormed dogs to foul on farmland can cause gid, a ghastly condition that attacks a sheep’s brain, resulting in blindness and death.   The countryside code for keeping dogs under close control is helpful, but I doubt if all dog owners know that they need to keep their dog wormed if they, like me, love a country stroll.

But dogs and the countryside definitely do mix in so many good ways, summer and winter. I don’t know what it is about hay but the dogs just adore it. They roll in it, burrow through it, toss it about and play with it. They drape it over their ears and stick their black button noses deep into the drying grass. It’s as if they inhale life, summer, pleasure and delight with every happy whiff.  Now it’s winter, my Bernese Mountain Dogs thrive in the cold weather; they are made for snow and seem to thrum with increased energy as the thermometer plummets.

The dogs give me the Bernese nudge, an insistent and forceful snout thrust, and I put on a second pair of trousers and socks, not having been naturally endowed with a fur coat. As we walk, they explore every conceivable size of hole in the ground, up trees, in the earth banks, behind troughs, under leaves. For them, the farm is thrutched up with animal life, scent flags waving for those with the sense to appreciate.

When thin sheets of ice seal the water in the troughs the dogs lick at it forlornly. They can easily break ice with their great paws, but they are slippers and pipe girls and wait for me to serve my purpose.  I always oblige.

(For the full countryside code regarding dogs:

http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/enjoying/countrysidecode/keepdogs.aspx )

Published in The Landsman Feb/March 10 Issue 18

Not one for Halloween (I forgot to grow pumpkins and am hopeless at bobbing for apples), instead I grabbed some sparklers on Guy Fawkes and twirled them in the dark under the stars, dogs dancing round my legs listening fearfully to far off fireworks.

A handful of days later it was Hatherleigh Carnival and the pulling of the tar barrels.  At 5am when I snoozed under a duvet, a group of traditionally minded lads with a taste for high drama pulled flaming barrels on a sledge, from the top of the town to the market square, to kick off carnival day.  At 10pm once the floats had travelled round the town they had another go (better lubricated), with hundreds of spectators cheering them on, agog at the speed of the barrels as they turned the corners, eyes wide and dry with the heat, in anticipation of stray flames.  It may or may not be successful at casting out evil spirits, but the stream of sparks and the massive blaze certainly gave everyone a thrill.

It’s also mumming season and you’ll find me at the Moorland Merrymakers panto in the middle of Dartmoor, where the players in full costume and inch thick grease paint turn waiter in the interval, serving the audience with hot pasties and mugs of tea.  Folk in Dorset have to wait ‘til New Year’s Eve for their own Symondsbury mummers play starring Captain Bluster and Colonel Spring.

As the temperature plummets, thick gloves are a necessity for joining the thorn cutting ceremony in Glastonbury, or nipping into Wiltshire to celebrate the winter solstice at Stonehenge

Come Christmas Eve you’ll find me back in Hatherleigh square singing carols as the Silver Band plays. Last year, walking up from the cattle market, I arrived to the sounds of a gorgeous, plaintive Silent Night. The service ended with hot cider and minced pies; there was real sadness, all in mourning for The George pub, six hundred years of history lost to fire the night before, the still smouldering soot-blackened ruins in full view as we sang and hoped for better things.

One of the seasonal jollies I shan’t be joining is the Christmas day swim in the sea at Exmouth; the very idea of stripping off any layers at a time when I’m adding extra, is more than the body can take.

After a quiet New Year’s Eve embellished with turkey leftovers, mid-January is time for orchard revels, to hang toast dipped in cider in the branches of the apple trees, and pour last year’s vintage onto the roots.  Wassailing placates the tree spirits, encourages a good apple harvest, and makes a lot of noise; pots and pans are clanged and bashed to frighten off the less amenable spirits.  I wonder where all these evil spirits go, chased away by fire, hot alcohol and soggy bread?

Published in The Landsman December 09/Jan 10 Issue 17

Back in February I waxed hopeful about the purchase of a permanent pig, and within the month Aunt Agatha, a pedigree Berkshire, was making the paddock her own, in snorting and nuzzling distance of nine neighbouring weaners.

She arrives having spent two days honeymooning with the boar and we are told to check whether she comes back into heat after three weeks.  I mark the days in the diary and peer at her rear end on and off for forty-eight hours, but can’t see anything suggestive of an unsatisfactory coupling.

Aunt Ag (we are bosom buddies now) swells and plumps like a juicy peach.  Pendulous of stomach and udder, she nonetheless scurries about in search of missed tidbits, and in hot weather makes her own wallow by thrusting her head into the trough and splashing out great waves into a sow-shaped muddy dent.

A week before her due date, we take the tractor into her field and scatter sow nuts into the entrance of the stock box.  She snuffles them up, then walks round and round the tractor to check if any of that is edible.  I chuck another handful into the far corner of the box, and watch, holding my breath, trying so very hard to appear nonchalant.  I scratch her back to calm myself as much as her, and then greed overcomes caution.  The door bolted, she’s lifted into the air and trundled to the barn.

For a week I attend Aunt Agatha in the barn, mucking out the soiled straw and communing with her, sharing grunts and oinks like a pair of biddies at bingo.  There’s a chair next to the pen for me to sit and watch and chat.  She sleeps great swathes of the day, her belly huge, rippling and distended, but even asleep she snorts to me as I come to see her.  When I rub her back she moves ecstatically under my hand, swinging her hips, her natural curry plant smell rising.

115 days is the sow gestation period; three months, three weeks and three days.  Never, in all my previous reading, have I come across the rather useful bit of information that Berkshires extend this to anything from 116 to 120 days.  But when day 118 dawns and Ag is still avidly holding on to her offspring, I start to do my own rooting around.  Armed with this revelation I tell her that she has two more days maximum, that my nerves can hardly cope with much more waiting, when she starts to build her nest with mouthfuls of straw.

Friends join us for supper, and every hour we nip out to check progress.  Yes, she is having contractions.  Yes, she’s let down her milk.  Yes, she has two piglets.  Now four. The sixth pops out like a cork from a bottle.  By midnight she’s had seven, a jumble of baby elephants with truncated trunks. At four a.m. there are nine piglets and she has cast both placentas.  Aunt Ag lies there, unmoving, exhausted, spent, grunting no longer to me, but to her sleek, black, demanding brood.

Published in The Landsman October/November 2009 Issue 16

But I had underestimated the community determination in the village.  Two mornings a week, for just five hours in total, something wonderful happens on the edge of the square in the Church Room.

The place buzzes with activity.  For fifty pence you get tea and a refill plus biscuits, and a sit down round a huge table with people passing the time of day, in no hurry to move off.  There are trestle tables bursting with bedding plants, runner beans, tomato plants and enough young things in pots to fill the most ambitious of borders and veg plots, for not much more than the cuppa. Another table has household essentials – baked beans, soup, flour, coffee, teabags and jam, envelopes and notepads.

Because the mobile post office equipment comes from the local market town of Hatherleigh five miles away, some thoughtful bod has arranged to bring orders of fresh bread from Pete’s bakery at the same time, so the place smells delicious.  You can order fresh milk too.  And best of all, two women have taken one morning each and bake for England the night before to fill yet more trestles with cakes and savouries.  Home made cheese scones, quiches, scotch eggs, sausage rolls and pasties, boiled fruit loaves, butterfly cakes and Victoria sponges are snapped up by the discerning who no doubt also make a beeline for the best W.I. fare wherever that’s on offer.  These goodies are so popular that some are sold before the official opening time to the early birds clamouring at the door.

Notwithstanding all the good humour and positive action, there is a frisson of fury with the Royal Mail at the moment; there has been no Internet connection for the past month and that means no online services and all payments have to be made in cash or by cheque.  I wasn’t there to see it, but the vicar heroically hung out of the window to try to improve things; the village has no broadband (another long and painful saga) and the outreach service relies on a temperamental satellite.  The story is that the leaves on the trees are interfering with the signal.  This might sound unbelievably bonkers to city dwellers, but my broadband goes down every time it’s raining or windy.  But post-mistress Angi cheerfully takes your post and your money and everyone just works around the problems.

It’s not perfect.  Two mornings of local services is not enough and I have to drive to other post offices at least twice a week, but rather than let a national organisation dictate a minimum service, the village has celebrated what it has, rolled up its communal sleeves and taken upon itself to provide something of real value that never fails to make me smile – a joke, a bun, a sense of achievement and a refusal to be outdone.

Published in The Landsman August/September 2009 Issue 15

I’m drawn like swarf to a magnet by farm and livestock auctions, particularly those that flog waterfowl. You may not think that bidding for a clutch of hatching eggs, a group of fluffy goslings, or some majestic Silver Appleyards is much of a thrill, but you’d be wrong. I push past the hordes eyeing up the squawking birds. I spot a fabulous cockerel – black, polished, mature, shiny-eyed. I don’t need a cockerel, but decide to bid if he’s going at the right price. Then there are the ones I’m really keen on: the trio of Khaki Campbells coming up to laying age or those fine, comical Indian Runner ducks that warrant their own primetime cartoon show.

I decide to bid, get my bidding number from the tiny booth, and though I’ve only bought twice before they know my address. The auctioneer’s hand does a quick check of notes, handkerchief and toupée. People cluster round trying to act nonchalant and mostly failing, the numbers of admired lots scrawled on the backs of their hands. The auctioneer’s patter booms through the mic, barely intelligible; I tune in to his wavelength knowing it’s a lost cause bidding on early birds.

The chosen lot comes up, I wait til the bidding slows and raise a hand. Sometimes there are no or few rival bids and you quench your desire for coins; you see something others don’t, or they see something you can’t. At other times a cage goes for bigger bucks than you can fathom. Concentration is total, even though you may be about to part with nothing more than a blue beer voucher. It’s over quickly, and there is an undeniable adrenalin rush.

It’s crucial to read the notices or the catalogue before you join the fray. Some sales are so supremely civilised they are barely auctions. At the Royal Cornwall I’ve slid along the for sale section, clocked a nice young pair of ducks, shoved over to the Treasurer’s desk, paid over my lucre and clicked a sold label onto the cage; done, dusted. But some venues like to keep you guessing; the weekly auctions are sold by the cage but priced per bird (and there may be three or more in a cage), whilst their monthly dos are priced per cage. Same venue, different rules. It’s all too easy to get confused and think you’re about to part with twenty pounds – plus buyers premium and VAT of course – only to find that you’ve committed to sixty quid plus the extras.

And eBay can be the place for auction action; last time I checked, six hatching eggs from rarer-than-hen’s-teeth Chocolate Orpingtons were going for nigh on two hundred smackers.

Published in The Landsman June/July 2009 Issue 14