Rendering Fat

This is what Polly's been doing all week: cutting a block of Stilton into bits for the freezer (see www. stiltoncheese.com), making wonderful soups, and rendering the fat from the ham joint from Christmas.

For the latter, all I did was cut it off, put it in a meat tray in the Rayburn with the door open for about three days (bottom oven is too cool and this heats the kitchen perfectly) and keep pouring off the fat that comes off it. It is beautiful and cream coloured, and I might use it for a high cholesterol goulash or three, or I might just heat it up and mix it with bird food for the little boydies. Today my best pic would have been of a robin on a margerine tub of fat and seeds that I made months ago and just took out of the freezer to make room for all the goodies.

BUT ... the crispy bits that are left are probably the most delicious things I will ever eat. They are just so sweet! They are beyond tasty. And I am wanting to eat them with white bread. How amazing is that: fat and white bread! Luckily I have some white bread in the house for about the first time this year. It is so cold that surely we are allowed. It's surely okay to eat fat if you saw your own logs.

It is so cold but so unbelievably beautiful out there tonight. I had to put out all the rubbish which means a bit of a trek with the various receptacles, but I didn't need a torch as the moon is now nearly a half moon but still so bright.

I geared up for the rubbish treks in all my scarecrow country and lower-class ski clothes. But although it was minus 4, there was no wind chill or damp chill factor, and it was such magic out there I didn't want to come in. I wanted to go for a moonlit walk, but wouldn't really dare on my own. I bet I would see foxes and badgers, deer and rabbits and goodness knows what else: hear the owls probably, but here I am typing this in my big hot coat while the central heating creaks and groans and the beauty is all outside, not in.

The stars are surely the best in January, as in Laurie Lee's Winter Poem (The stars have talons / there is hunger in the mouth of vole and badger / Silver agonies of breath in the nostril of the fox / Ice on the rabbit’s paw). He was the first poet I ever bought. Not a bad choice for a teenager.

Oh I LOVE January. New beginnings.



Orion: the first constellation I ever learnt when I was a wee girl in Scotland.

New Decade

It's not the end of the world to be away from one's blog for so long. The cycle of the years means that I can reread it according to the season. I started it with fox cubs barking three years ago and I continue it here with my memory of last night's midnight, the start of the new decade.

Going out to my lean-to, I suddenly saw that the moonlight was like a halogen lamp, so I went out to see the blue moon. It was so beautiful, a rainbow halo round it. Why ruin its peace and beauty with stupid fireworks? There she was, sailing radiantly above us, as she's done for centuries. And then a vixen barked: my first one of the year.



Then the decade started in earnest here in Wiltshire with the most beautiful sunshine. What a gift. I started as I mean to go on: with a really brisk walk (ha ha, my version of a jog which is me trotting down the lane for ten yards and breaking into an amble) in which I was pleased to see a water hen. We used to have loads in every ditch and pond till the neighbours' cats decimated them -- just as they decimated my great population of water voles. I also admired a stubble field from the autumn's sweetcorn, totally iced, the stubble in wonderful rows. I might take my new camera tomorrow.

But, hello again blog. I had a year so marked by deaths (including that of my best ever girlfriend which knocked me out for months) that it seemed part of life's rich pattern and that funerals were the regular thing.


In the summer I had wanted to blog about Wootton Bassett and what we do here, but it's a bit gratuitous. We just do what any sentient people would do. Enough to say that one day in the summer I came out from the launderette onto the pavement to stand to attention to the union-jack-covered coffin of an EIGHTEEN-year-old. This is so very very very wrong. For years I have watched the planes come down over Lynham. There is a particular type of plane (an RAF C-17 Globemaster) that comes down over my garden in the late mornings, and it is agonising to think of the feelings of the loved ones waiting.

None of the pictures in the press can show the kind of silence that falls on the town when the police outriders come through, emptying the street, or the abysmal wrongness of the slow arrival of the funeral car.

Third World Swindon

I loathe Swindon. No, this is not exactly true. Most days I actually love Swindon, and am in total sympathy and harmony with the wonderful blogs Hidden Swindon (see my link) and its sister blog Wrens and Hedgesparrows. I find it a nice democratic town in which to go about my business in peace.

However, late yesterday afternoon everything that I hate about the town (i.e. its moronic council and its pathetic planners) coalesced. Swindon does what John Prescott asks it to do and builds vile dense estates on the flood plain of its Front Garden. It builds a new hospital in an area of outstanding natural beauty by Coate Water because it had already used the acres of old railway workings in the town for a useless retail outlet. It confirms what we all knew would happen: that it would build out to the hospital and despoil Coate Water as it has the Front Garden. It finally decides to have recycling boxes and choses the colour orange for them, and black for its bins, so that the whole borough looks like a big litter dump. Oxford has green bins and green boxes so that they blend into the gardens. Swindon, as ever is pig ignorant. I once asked my friend why the recyclers don't leave the lids standing in the gross orange boxes when they've emptied them but instead throw them on the ground to blow all over the place. "That would be too logical," she replied.

It places a humungous chav telly screen in Wharf Green so that teenage louts and drinkers can have permanent loudspeaker decibels in their square and so that any third world visitors from, say, Moldova, could feel quite at home. Am I going to pollute my blog with this moronic looking bunch of suits, so happy to be adding to noise pollution in our town? Perhaps for a week and then I'll delete them. Yuk, yuk, yuk.


I looked around at the nastiness of Argos meets McDonald's meets charity shops, House of Fraser now an "outlet" House of Fraser, full of sad things that no one wants to buy, the closed down market and the general air of dead malaise and thought it was a foretaste of Hell.

However, there were two lovely things about yesterday's sunset: one was the tracery of the sycamore tree by the market, black with its complex twigs and seeds against the silver sky. The other was a glorious heron that flapped its leisurely way home, seen only, I think, by me, aloft in the pink and blue dusk that glowed over us all at closing time.

I HATE the wind

Today I wondered how many times in my life I'd yelled into the teeth of the wind, "I HATE the wind!"

I loathe, loathe, loathe it. Some people actually like it. I know a girl who does. But really all I ever want is CALM days. Oh how I adore calm weather. Homeopaths ask you whether you like or dislike the wind.

Today I was yelling "I HATE the wind" while trying to hang up my madly flapping washing.

When I got back from my travels the washing was half off the line and trailing in the grass.

My travels were vile because they were in the wind. I had to walk for half an hour in blasted heath open country to get a bus, holding onto my hood as I went. Then I had to stand at a windy bus stop for half an hour nearly dying of boredom. I have never ever been lucky yet getting a bus. It is always my luck that one has just gone. Then I had to walk for another ten minutes or so in the windy flatlands of Swindon to get my car.

My car had been in the garage in Swindon for a week because I filled it with petrol instead of diesel and it took a whole week to put it right. But that's another story.

Then I paid a lot of money and got into my hot, CALM car. Nice. There was my perfume that had been in the car pocket for a week. So I had a good spray of that (Jo Malone Amber and Lavender: nice).

I had to fill my lovely car up with diesel this time, not petrol. I had a few words with the guy at the petrol station and said I'd be having a few more words with his chief executive. I felt that I needed to break my diet with a dark Kitkat in order to rearrange my blood sugar. Then I was off on my lovely lovely travels in my lovely car, scoffing at the Kitkat just as hard as I could on the way.

Don't talk to me about my carbon footprint. I'd already had a nice talk with the vicar about that when I met him on his bike on my blasted heath walk an hour before. I told him that I would do anything rather than give up my car. I've planted 20 trees here and I haven't flown for two years.

So glad I was to get my car and get my photos of my woodshed that collapsed in the last lot of wind. I HATE the wind! And I HATE the way that uk.weather.com has changed its format. It's just about unbearable to use now. Someone tell me of a better site. Same with the BBC news website. It's vile. They synchronised their horrible changes obviously just so that they could annoy me in an already annoying week.


Perhaps I shouldn't complain. I could be stuck in a filthy city.

Many years ago, when I was stuck in a filthy city, I used to draw little pictures of what I longed for, and I now see that there was always a lovely washing line in them! Here is one of them. I've just noticed the little cat. How cute.