No panic buying means very limited rations
New Year’s Eve, or “Old Year’s Night”, is the traditional time to look back at the past year and resolve that the next one will be better. The thing is, you have to be feeling quite mellow to do that and we’re not feeling mellow.
The recent weather has been, as someone once described their son-in-law: “Not quite what we’d hoped for”. We have had more than 2ft of snow and temperatures went down to -20C in early December. Our neighbour, Robert, told us it was the worst he had seen on the range in more than 30 years. Even the army retreated to tropical Wales for the duration.
The intrepid postman made it through after 10 days to much anticipation. Sadly, all he brought was a pile of bills and a couple of invitations for me to have laser eye surgery. Still, at least he made the effort, despite the road being covered in about 6in of solid ice.
The bin men have been less adventurous, so the bins have not been emptied for more than three weeks. I’m not holding my breath, but I suspect I may soon be holding my nose.
At least we did get the tups out on time and they have been spotted in action, so we should still get a lamb crop in the spring. I understand that further up the range they couldn’t get the tups out for several weeks, so they may well be lambing into June.
Generally, our livestock seem to be doing OK at present, but they have made serious inroads into our supplies of fodder.
Apart from the usual disruption and inconvenience, the main consequences of the bad weather were:
a battery collapse in the tractor, despite the fact it was parked in the middle of the cattle shed; | |
the loss of guttering on the house for the second time this year; | |
the blocking of our road for several days; and | |
more than a week off school for the children. |
I have only managed to identify two good things:
the garden looks remarkably tidy under a covering of snow; and | |
when people reminisce about the winters of ’47 or ’63, we will finally be able to join in with our own memories of 2010. |
When we were snowed in, I was a bit worried we were starting to run out of food. I had seen the headlines predicting “Arctic weather coming”, “World to end on Tuesday”, and so on, and I reacted as any rational person would – by completely ignoring them. These sorts of predictions normally result in a few snowflakes in London and a few inches in Otterburn – much ado about nothing – but this time my lack of panic buying resulted in very limited rations.
A quick review of what the TV chefs call our “store cupboard essentials” revealed that 98% of our provisions were out of date, mostly by years rather than months or days. As for the remainder, I couldn’t think of anything I could make with a tin of condensed milk and a bottle of vinegar.
The drinks cupboard was similarly disappointing. Good wine is supposed to improve with age but I can reveal that tonic water which is three years over its sell by date tastes a bit funny. Fortunately, we did have lamb in the freezer, so lamb, peas and sweetcorn it was, for five nights running.
I have interviewed our children on how they look back on 2010. Julia (the optimist) thought it had all been very exciting and she couldn’t believe how quickly it had gone. Archie (the realist) said there were a few good bits but there were long periods when it was “like watching paint dry”, which sounds like very sensible preparation for later life.
As for New Year’s resolutions, Archie said he thought Jake’s resolution should be to keep the animals alive. I felt we should be aiming for something a bit more ambitious but maybe if the winter continues like this, that’s fair enough. Archie’s own resolutions are to improve at cricket and to increase his egg business. The latter shouldn’t be too hard as he hasn’t sold a single egg since the fox got the hens in the summer.
Julia is resolving to keep things tidy. This is entirely admirable but I’m not sure if it is realistic. After all, it was only after major excavation work that she was recently able to confirm that the colour of her bedroom carpet was blue.
Jake wants to expand the business, and I’ve narrowed mine down to one achievable target – I will make regular back-ups of our computer records.
My previous efforts have been rather sporadic. However, the chickens finally came home to roost when the farm computer suffered what is known in the trade as the “black screen of death”, just as I was finishing off the annual accounts.
I am hoping that an IT expert will be able to recover the data in due course, but in the meantime I have had to reconstruct the accounts from scratch. At least it’s something to do when you’re snowed in.