Review of 2008 - Predictions for 2009

Eat My Hat

For 2008. (Accuracy of last year’s predictions marked out of ten).

1) Recession for the UK. Acknowledged by March, fairly serious by October. Pound almost level with Euro by the end of the year. House prices down 20-25%. Uncanny. House prices drop 17% but otherwise spot on. 9/10.

2) Close race for White House. Hillary will beat Obama but lose narrowly to McCain who will be dogged by poor health as President. McCain did run for the Republicans and the rest is, thankfully, horseshit. 3/10

3) Electronic tagging offered for your children (in case of kidnapping etc). Like dogs, prisoners and children will be the first to get the rice sized micro transmitters that one day (within two decades) everyone will have in the earlobes and which will double up as mobile phones/communication devices/ personal PCs. Tagging for kids was already on offer apparently according to Google, the rest will have to wait. 3/10

4) More weird weather – very cold weather hits Europe in the winter and more floods in UK. The canal here is frozen over, and it’s been like returning to ‘a crypt’ according to another expat gone home up north, but otherwise not that remarkable in Europe. Cyclone kills 100,000 in Burma although the news coverage is almost nonexistent, more hurricanes trash Cuba, another ‘ice storm’ winter in the US, Australia in sixth year of very serious drought. 6/10

5) Dubai has tallest tower in the world and shortest HCT conference on record. Didn’t need a crystal ball for that one, but it’s quite a sight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai

No feedback on the HCT conference so I expect anyone trying to report on has been shot. 8/10

6) Britney Spears is committed. Andy Kershaw is released from prison and goes teetotal. She's back on the burgers and coke so watch this space. Kershaw is on the run from the police, practically living rough and drinking for England, so not yet. 1/10

7) Mugabi replaced as ZANU leader. (I can’t believe he’s still there) I still can’t believe he’s there. 0/10

8) Oil falls to 80 dollars as world recession hits. Vastly underestimated. It fell from 140 dollars to 40 dollars. If I had been a futures trader I’d be sitting in a mansion by now, doh! 8/10

9) Flares and handlebar moustaches are back. The spirit of 68 and a whiff of revolution in the air. No flares or moustaches yet, but Obama victory was a sign that the Reagan, Thatcher years are finally coming to an end. 5/10

10) Scotland moves closer to independence which will come within 5-8 years. I’d obviously run out of steam by this point. SNP have done well so yes, maybe. 5/10

Total = 48/100. Room for improvement.

Some more dull political predictions for 2009

1) As I write the Israeli army masses on the border of Gaza bombing one of the most densely populated areas in the world including mosques with ten killed in one today. That will obviously help ease tensions. No one will want to commit suicide by blowing themselves up in Israel anymore, especially as Gaza has giant walls around it, nobody can work, government buildings lie in rubble, there is hardly any water, food, electricity and they have done some hospital operations without anaesthetic. The lesson from this is the British should have sent fighter planes to bomb the Falls Road when they voted Sinn Fein, we should have walled all the Catholics in and starved them, cut off their water, shelled their churches… etc etc.

2) The Israelis are stupid enough to send troops into Gaza before the end of Bush’s term where they will inflame the situation beyond belief and probably sustain serious losses enough for ultra-hawk Netanyahu and Likud to win the election. After Bush finally hangs up his ten gallon hat and international reaction gets more hostile (including big demonstrations and UN protests) the Israeli army may have to stop acting like German troops outside the Warsaw Ghetto. It’s got so bad it can only get better, can’t it? A two state solution will be written off this year as unworkable with so many settlements having been built, especially with Likud in power. A one state solution with Israelis and Palestinians in some kind of government is probably the only way forward. As likely as Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness smiling and getting on with running Ulster in some semblance of normality…

3) The first 100 days will show if Obama is all talk or not. I think because so much election money came from the grass root supporters he’ll be a surprisingly progressive president who will do something about Health Care, closing Guantanamo, signing Kyoto and partly greening the American economy and addressing unemployment and inequality which threatens to send America into another Depression. If he doesn’t, expect men to ride around on cars with running boards clutching machine guns and bootlegging whisky. Foreign policy will be more of a mess with Afghanistan doing to the US and Britain what it did to the USSR, unless a lot of money is spent buying up the opium poppy harvest and paying for tribal loyalty. Al Qaeda inspired attacks escalate as Bin Laden's body is recovered from a US strike on a remote mountain area in the badlands of Pakistan. Pakistan further destabilized and threatening to strike US forces on their border if attacks continue. Indian-Pakistani relations deteriorate.

4) Iraq held together this year not by the 'surge' but by big salaries given to the various factions will hold off from all out civil war as they are so united in getting the Americans out just now. The Israeli thing will preoccupy Obama who was smart to put Hillary in there as Secretary of State as she’ll take the stick when it unravels dramatically. Relations will Iran will get worse as attacks on Palestinians get to the stage where there are calls for foreign intervention.

5) US car manufacturer Chrysler goes bust. GM and Ford are forced into partial partnership and start

producing smaller less gas guzzling and electric cars. Research and development into hydrogen cars gets massive investment.

6) The pound and the dollar will weaken against the Euro as the US and UK pay for throwing everything at their banking crisis. Tourism to Britain booms as visitors from Benin and Senegal can afford to come and visit with African currency. A barrel full of pounds will buy an apple. Germany meanwhile has been craftily building its infrastructure, not having a housing bubble, speculating like drunk gamblers or throwing cash at their banks. They will slowly grow in power – Berlin is the city to watch. London will have a shabby Olympics and limp into the next decade with Boris Johnson tally-hoing at the head of the decrepit march oblivious to the capital's decline.

7) In the UK a close election will result in a hung parliament or a slim majority for Labour who will need the Liberals to survive.

8) Tensions with Russia reach a peak with gas and oil supplies used against former Soviet States and brinkmanship in Kaliningrad will be another early test for Obama.

9) Mugabi is kicked out – come on it has to be this year! This will then begin the recovery of the southern African region. The next decade will see Africa go into the kind of economic recovery that Asia experienced in the 1990s.

10) The Gulf Stream slows and cools as Arctic ice sheets melt at faster pace, bringing another cold winter in Britain. Expect winter markets on a frozen Thames within a few years. More hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones. An earthquake hits Istanbul.

11) House prices drop another 10% before bottoming out. Some big building companies go bust alongside holiday firms and airlines such as Iberia.

12) While a bad year economically there will be hopeful political developments. The Israelis have sent troops in since I started writing this, but there will be a creeping realisation this year in Israel that military force cannot solve the problem. Current worship of the free market shifts towards more redistribution and sustainability, essential for the long term survival of the planet and, more importantly, capitalism.

So not all doom and gloom then. Enjoy 2009 and if you have any predictions or thoughts on these, leave a comment or email. Cheers!

Britain has gone mad

War rages in the Congo and the UN are forced to retreat putting the lives of millions at risk. In Afghanistan Britain's 4th occupation of that ragged nation looks like ending the way the previous colonial ventures did as we cling on to a few streets in Kabul. In America there is hope of a black Democrat removing the lunatic Republicans from power. In India bombs kill dozens in Assam. Around the world people brace themselves for a possible 30s style Depression. And what have the headlines been here for a straight week? Two comics make a dirty phone call to a man who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers back in the 1970s.

Britain has finally gone mad. Maybe its because house prices have fallen by 17%. Maybe its the prospect of a Jarrow March of estate agents, bank clerks and telesales callers. Maybe all the binge drinking has just unhinged us all. Whatever it is this country is crackers.

Imagine travelling back in time to 1929 a few days after the great crash and finding that the news papers and conversations for the whole week were all about Fatty Arbuckle phoning W.C. Fields and telling him he's slept with his grandaughter and broadcasting the conversation by wireless. And then finding that everyone, even Herbert Hoover, was obsessed with it. The granddaughter in question is in a band called the Satanic sluts, is a self-confessed swinger and.... see I'm doing it too, I've gone mad.

It's a bright, cold, sharp October. The leaves have turned and are beginning to fall, its really beautiful. It's half term and Tom and Isobel don't want to go for a walk of more than ten minutes because they are happier curled up in front of a video. In a couple of years we could be scrabbling in mud for grains of rice in a tin shack in one of the shanty towns that spring up around Bath. I'll be trudging all day in shoes with holes in looking for work like something out of a Steinbeck novel. Isobel will be at my side looking up me hungrily. Then, just as in The Bicycle Thieves I'll crack and commit a minor crime, like stealing a can of cider, a get chased by an angry mob through the streets of Bradford-on-Avon. So with that future in mind I'll let them stay in front of the video a bit longer.

It's Halloween tonight and Tom has invited his friends round to watch Star Trek and dress up as Klingons. In five days it'll be Guy Fawkes and if Obama wins we'll go out and watch a firework display, drink a hot cup of mulled wine and toast America. If he loses we can all kiss our arses goodbye so we might as well throw myself on the bonfire.

See you on the other side. x

'Summer ' 2008

As you may have read the skies here are dark with pinstripe-suited gentlemen leaping from investment banks as we apparently (and inevitably) enter the crash of the century. Our children are out at dawn every morning foraging in the fields by the river for blackberries, windfall apples and wild mushrooms so that we can maintain the necessary calories to remain alive. I am frantically engaged in boiling jars and filling the garage with preserves of every variety and enough home brewed beer and cider to see us through to 2018. I’ve calculated that the last Depression lasted ten years so I’m making sure we’re stocked up on a decades worth of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart videos from Oxfam to watch while we stuff ourselves with raspberry coulis. The foraging has its risks mind. In August in France we were very proud of ourselves when we gathered a carrier bag full of girolles mushrooms in the forest one morning for breakfast. We checked that the peculiar looking, curly, yellow mushrooms were as edible as our guidebook said with the pharmacy before frying them in butter and wolfing the lot.

The next morning we went out and gathered another bag full of the evil looking girolles and made a large omelette with grated goats cheese. It was absolutely delicious – even Isobel ate two giant slices of it - and we proudly took over a smaller bag full of them to the neighbour as a gift. She took one sniffy look at them and said ‘No they are not girolles.’ With a gulp with asked if they were edible and she replied, ‘I don’t know, but we don’t eat them’. This quickly wiped the greasy, self-satisfied grin off our faces.

With the pharmacy closed and alert to the possibility of immediate kidney failure we went home and waited for the end (thinking of the story linked here). Fortunately, when we woke up alive the next day we were able to discover from the pharmacy that they were lactarius deliosus and quite edible. This hasn't stopped us from feasting on giant puffballs the size of sheep, Ceps and other delicacies from the wilds of Westwood or Paillange, but there's now a dialysis machine on standby.

If you made the mistake of returning to the UK this summer you will know it was even more of a washout than last year. Deluges, floods and hurricanoes have marked August out as most dreadful British summers of all time. It rained a fair bit in France too, but we had enough sun for it to feel like summer, even swim a bit, except in the evening when a woodfire was necessary to prevent the chattering of teeth.

Back home it seems like only a few weeks since I put the winter jumpers up in the attic and here I am huddled in the kitchen in my letterbox red and most unflattering fleece. Tom has started secondary school and is enjoying it. Sarah is now on a 0.6 post at Wiltshire College so there’s a bit more stability. I am really behind schedule but still enjoying being the oldest student in Britain. The Emirates seem like a distant hallucination – a good regular income, a large house with no storage issues, a social life at weekends, a giant and almost empty swimming pool, guaranteed barbeque weather and ahem, childcare. It’s just impossible here for two people to work and to send your kids to school without them going feral, or taking out a second mortgage and working twelve hours a day.

We still love it here, but it isn’t easy and the Lilliputian dimensions of English homes can quickly lead to ugly territorial disputes and cabin fever. I was up in Glasgow last week and was reminded how much more space the Scots have. No wonder Edward Longshanks sent in the infantry. The Merchant City has got to be one of the best square miles in Europe. Okay, so you can still be knifed in Govan but in Glasgow City Centre you can get a sensational glass of Shiraz and enjoy it beneath glorious twelve foot ceilings, candlelight and fine Nordic design. It makes Bristol look like the shabby wreck of a city it is. Between a succession of useless British governments and the Luftwaffe the south of England is mostly a shambles, except way out in the sticks where town planners and Heinkel bombers couldn’t reach.

Right, its late and time to watch Sexcetera or whatever hard core porn passes for television these days at this hour on British television. The ‘watershed’ is no joke in 2008.

Write soon with the news,

Yours in moral outrage.

David

PS: I include a pic of Portsmouth's 'Burj al Arab' - hilariously diddy and budget version of Dubai's beachfront hotel.

Spring 2008 - Welcome to the New Depression

Well, it looks like the end of the road has finally arrived. After a freezing winter in which we huddled under duvets watching television wearing jumpers and blue nylon thermal underwear - spring finally arrived last month. The thermometer crept above 10ºC and exactly eight months after we had phoned to place an order for wall insulation the company arrived to do the work. Thanks guys.

And then, just as the park is full of beautiful pink blossom and you can go outside in a tshirt, the doomsday predictions made two years ago all come true at once: oil at $135 dollars a barrel, food prices going crazy, the American economy disappearing into the toilet. It’s a rerun of 1970 when a decade of spending billions dropping bombs and screwing up working class and black kids in Vietnam caught up with Uncle Sam. You can only hand out so much money to the pigs at the tough of the defence industry (Cheney being the biggest pig of all) before someone has to pay for it, and now we all have to pay for it. And still they want to attack Iran. (See the Real News link on the left for more on this)

If McCain gets elected, as looks more and more likely, he’s just enough of an arrogant hot-tempered shit to really finish the job in the Middle East. This is the man who got tortured in Vietnam, supposedly, yet is happy to give the nod to torture in Guantanamo. He still refers to the Vietnamese as “gooks” to his journalist pals - a fact that didn’t endear him to a number of Asian leaders when they finally got to read about it (in the one US paper that could be bothered to cover it). He’s the man who bravely leads 'the fight against the power of lobbyists', yet has around 50 lobbyists on his election team, one of whom represented the Burma generals. He’s the man who has voted against banning assault weapons, who will refuse on principle to even speak to the Iranian leadership (making him, possibly, even more of an areshole than Bush). He has eight homes across America and was bankrolled into his political career by a rich second wife (he dumped the first one after she was badly hurt in a car accident), but we are expected to believe he’s a ‘maverick’ Republican. Oh yes, like George Bush was supposed to be a ‘compassionate Republican’. Piss off. Don’t believe a word of it. Just check their voting record to see what any of these tossers really stand for.

So we’ve got this tortured seventy-nine year old bastard to look forward to, and a smarmy public school boy to take over from the gibbering neo-Thatcherite Gordon Brown who thought last year he could steal Tory thunder by robbing the poorest in the land to fund a tax cut for the rest. The British economy is looking very shaky, we’ve blown all the North Sea oil money on God-knows-what so we’d better start digging up our garden to grow some spuds. The only good news is that nobody can sell their house so we won’t have to listen to any of those torturous after-dinner conversations about house sales.

Apologies for the rant, it’s out of my system now.

We’re all fine by the way, ..er, how are you?

McQueen family sporting the New Depression look shortly before the landlord's bailiff (far right) threw them onto the street.

November/December 2007

Halloween seems a million years ago - the first months of autumn are fabulous - smoky smells, candlelight, the nights' drawing in'. Jams, pickles, cider, homemade beer and rosehip wine. Confident that the winter won't be that bad or that long.




Happy days.

.....It’s more than a year and a half since we left the bright, warm sanctuary of the Emirates for the dark fridge-freezer known as England. Picture, if you will, a lonesome figure stamping his frost-bitten feet at 6am on Avoncliff station, coughing a lungful of icy steam, dressed from head to toe in charity clothes and cursing another late train. This miserable wretch tells you all you need to know about coming back: expect grinding poverty, inhuman weather and a dilapidated transport. infrastructure that is the laughing-stock of Europe.

You’d think we had emigrated to Eastern Europe in the 1970’s, except there’s more inane advertising, trilling mobile phones, soaps, porn, celebrity obsession and dumb American films. I know I’ve made some fairly rash comments about how great British telly is, but 18 months in and we’ve caught up with eleven years worth of repeats and the pleasures of Dog Borstal and Have I Got News for You are beginning to pall.

This winter, while much less rainy than the appalling summer and quite sunny at times, has also been bitterly cold some weeks. Then our house plunges into sub-zero temperatures the minute the central heating is off – so we switch it off for two hours and hop about in scarves until we can take it no more. For Christmas, Sarah kindly bought me royal blue thermal underwear and another for herself to make ‘working from home’ more bearable.

But on the bright side….

We have had a gas fire put installed in the living room so the children don’t have to cling to the radiator in the evenings. This made Christmas really cosy and we watched lots of rubbish and poisoned ourselves with chocolate, food and drink in an orange tinselly haze. And it was great having a real Christmas holiday and the excuse to over-indulge. On Boxing Day morning at the in-laws I walked miles into Savernake Forest with Nog in a desperate attempt to burn a few of the million calories of the previous days. We saw seven grey deer standing quietly in the shadows who then dashed off when they saw us. The countryside is still beautiful, even in winter, except at 7.45 in the morning when it is raining, windy and pitch black and Nog needs to do his business.

Workwise, Sarah is now doing three jobs – at Bath Uni, at Wiltshire College and writing for an ESP textbook. I’m working part-time at Bournemouth while trying to research which is not an easy balancing act. The pay for both of us is cack, but it’s fine because we have enough to eat and can take out any frustrations by screaming at the children.

We spent New Year in London with Sarah’s brother and sister and saw in 2008 playing parlour games and drinking wine. I disgraced myself by falling asleep on the sofa at ten minutes past midnight. It was impossible to shift my snoring bulk despite the combined efforts of the family so there I stayed until I woke up at 3am, alone, hungover and in the dark - covered in a blanket like a tramp under the arches. Altogether a delightful start to the year.

Other news? Tom is going sub-teenager: subtly intransigent, sarcastic and weird, or annoying, or both. Actually he’s great, but just tries to wear down those who oppose his desire for continuous self-gratification. It is a great burden being aspirational parents - we try to foist self-improving activities on our children rather than allow them 24 hour access to shoot-em-up Star Wars games and CBBC. Radio 3 blares out educationally as Isobel dresses her Bratz © doll in the latest prostitute outfit. After evening screenings they have to discuss Buster Keaton’s contribution to the silent comedy oeuvre before we can slump in front of a violent, sexist Bond film. Isobel enjoys doing a seductive dance to accompany the nude female silhouettes pirouetting on the barrel of a Walter PKK pistol during the credits. Isobel turned seven this week and we had a swimming pool party - very Al Ainesque (except Trowbridge pool isn't quite the Intercon).

Now to the embarrassing review of my predictions for 2007, most of which were wrong…

In 2007….

1) Iraq descends into full blown civil war. Militias fight army and police and British and US forces. Regional powers drawn in further as US and UK begin pull out, which will be completed in three years. Iraq is now a breeding ground for massive regional war within a decade involving Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon etc. This will come as soon as Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear power plant which could happen in 2007. No, if we are to believe the hype Iraq has got a bit better – but the last sentence is still likely in 2008. (0)

2) Castro dies and Cuba changes quickly towards becoming US `first choice for senior citizen dance classes, cigars and (within five years) prostitutes, crack and casinos. Your last chance to sample socialist paradise. South America builds coalitions with Africa, China etc against US interests. No, Castro is alive if not well. (0)

3) New Orleans hit by another hurricane and more damage to low lying areas drives away the last of the poor and the black. Real estate sharks buy up ruins and rebuild luxury accommodation and huge Dutch style tidal barriers are built for the wealthy WASPs who now make up the bulk of New Orleans. No. (o)

4) El Nino hammers Central America and Florida – hurricanes and mudslides cause havoc. Oil production hit badly in Gulf of Mexico – oil touches 100 dollars shortly before Wall Street ‘readjustment’ hits markets and oil price falls back to 70 dollars. Russia using oil and gas as strategic weapon for influence in Europe forces Britain to consider reopening coal mines. Look out for petrol from coal (1980s South African technology revisited). Russian and UK relations hit new low with tit-for-tat diplomatic explusions and some very threatening but funny insults from Putin about Gordon Brown. Yes on 100 dollars a barrel and Russia-Uk relations. (1/2)

5) US and UK debt catches up with us and house prices fall by 20% in three months. Unemployment rises as it dawns on everyone that we don’t produce anything in the UK anymore. The British companies who have outsourced production now outsource their management and HQs to tax free havens like Dubai, Singapore, China. The German economy (where they still make stuff) steadily grows and will be at the centre of power in a rag bag EU where Britain gets poorer by the year. Invest in pork belly. Grow vegetables in your garden. Not…..quite ….. yet. German economy is powering ahead –watch them this year. House prices have fallen but it will be 20% in 2008. (1/2)

6) Electronic books hit the market – Perspex sheets that can be folded in your pocket display print–style pages that rearrange as you change/download page. Like a PDF on plastic that doesn’t cause eye-strain. No.

7) Bombs in France indicate beginning of new Al Qaida European campaign. Brussels and Rome also targeted. Prominent British politician assassinated. No.

8) Blair suffers health problems and leaves with tail between his legs over Iraq and corruption allegations over party donations. Brown just as unpopular as Blair as everyone realises it is he who has been selling our last state assets all along. Labour support crumbles so badly it can’t muster enough party members to mount a decent election. Cameron wins in 2007/2008 by a narrow margin and is forced into coalition. The compromise is that the House of Lords becomes a directly elected (by proportional representation) second house rather than a cushy number for party donors. No on Blair’s health, yes on Brown’s popularity. Let’s see on Cameron, I still think he’ll lead a hung parliament or a narrow majority. (1/2)

9) As Nostradus predicted in the Fifth Night of Darkness a huge dragon shall descend in the East breathing fire and leprous fumes. Mel Gibson is booed at the Oscars. Kate Moss falls from a balcony at a party and breaks her back while her husband Pete Doherty goes to another party. Prince William whacks a photographer. No. (0)

10) A huge ice sheet drops into the ocean in Greenland and everyone realises we are really fucked. Britain starts emergency reforestation – and EU subsidies move from animals to trees. Every farmer has to plant five trees per acre. Aviation duty of 50 pounds in 2007 budget, 100 pounds in 2008 budget. The Green party proposes digging up non-essential roads and replacing cars with mules and dog carts. The slow return to British cottage industry and Medieval working practices begins. All feast days are holidays, 3 day working week (four hour days). Plastic shopping bags banned. Paperless office enforced, condoms recycled, candlelight across the UK as energy bills become unpayable. ITV stops stupid cheap gameshows under Grade and begins to bounce back. Madonna adopts a girl from China to complete her set and then divorces Guy Richie in 2008. Well, yes. Ice 8 times the size of the UK melted unexpectedly in the summer of 2007 way, way ahead of computer predictions. Energy bills have risen dramatically. ITV is bouncing back a bit. The rest is wishful thinking. (1/2)

= 2/10 rubbish!

For 2008.

1) Recession for the UK. Acknowledged by March, fairly serious by October. Pound almost level with Euro by the end of the year. House prices down 20-25%.

2) Close race for White House. Hillary will beat Obama but lose narrowly to McCain who will be dogged by poor health as President.

3) Electronic tagging offered for your children (in case of kidnapping etc). Like dogs, prisoners and children will be the first to get the rice sized micro transmitters that one day (within two decades) everyone will have in the earlobes and which will double up as mobile phones/communication devices/ personal PCs.

4) More wierd weather – very cold weather hits Europe in the winter and more floods in UK.

5) Dubai has tallest tower in the world and shortest HCT conference on record.

6) Britney Spears is committed. Andy Kershaw is released from prison and goes teetotal.

7) Mugabi replaced as ZANU leader. (I can’t believe he’s still there)

8) Oil falls to 80 dollars as world recession hits.

9) Flares and handlebar moustaches are back. The spirit of 68 and a whiff of revolution in the air.

10) Scotland moves closer to independence which will come within 5-8 years.

Post your predictions in comments below folks. Have a great 2008!

September/October

I have moaned a good deal about rain in recent months. September and October have made up, just a bit, for the crap weather we had the rest of the summer in England. It has been beautiful - sharp sunlight days with cool breezes tinged with the smell of bonfires. I've been walking the dogs with a 71 year old neighbour who has explained the difference between rosehip and hawthorn and pointed out where you can can find good elderberries or sloes. She has supplied recipes for jams, pickles and wines and the greenhouse and garage is stocked to the rafters with apple and blackberry jams, fiery pickles, sloe gin, gallons of home brewed beer, rosehip wine and my latest discovery - homemade scrumpy.

I suppose it was only a matter of time living in the west country before I discovered the true genius of scrumpy.

Recipe for Homemade Scrumpy

Ingredients:

Apples
Water


Pick apples from park or garden - windfalls will do. Don't wash (you lose the natural yeast on the skin) - leave for a week until the skin gets a bit wrinkly. Core and mash up apples in water. Leave for two weeks in plastic laundry bucket. Strain and leave liquid for another two weeks in bucket. Siphon into demijohns and seal. Leave four more weeks. Bingo - you are a drunken wurzel.

It's that easy. I'm not talking about the sweet fizzy stuff you drank as a teenager and then threw up again. I'm talking about cold, flat, cloudy and deadly potion sold in demi-johns with improbable labels. I'm hoping the home made stuff will rival Westons a scrumpy I have becoming alarmingly partial to in recent weeks. I know it's special from the early sips I've had.

There's that and the prospect of sloe gin at Christmas with stilton and elderberry pickle. Hmmmm.

It was Tom's 11th birthday in September and he celebrated by shooting up his friends at Laserquest in Bristol. Absolutely brilliant. Then we were outnumbered by about fifty 9 year olds who trapped us on a balcony and the lasers were crisscrossing the room like something from Battlestar Gallactica. Pure adrenaline. BTW - I have been reliably informed that the latest TV version of Battlestar Gallactica is a critique of American imperialist disasters in Iraq but as I don't have Sky so I can't check it. Can anyone confirm this?

The sad news from October is that Nelly is no longer with us. She has always been strangely aggressive with other dogs and this has become worse in recent months and she started to get untrustworthy with people. She bit a lady at the kennels she was in for two nights before the summer and after long consideration we decided we couldn't take the risk any more.

The children were very upset as I took her to the vet one day while they were at school after Nelly went ballistic at a dog in the park and almost turned on me. We tried training and even paid for a dog psychologist but I suspect that Nelly always had more desert dingo than dog in her and reform was not really ever going to happen. While we mourn her passing Nog seems untroubled and possibly rather happy that he's getting more scraps from dinner, fuss and attention than before.

I'll sign off now - write with the news please.

BTW if you like African beats like Dollar Brand check Gilles Peterson's show this week - its one of his best:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/gillespeterson/

August 2007

Driving down to France is an endurance test relieved only by the astonishment of how good food can be. Last year Sarah drove with the dogs and I flew with Tom and Isobel, arm still recovering from Al Ain hospital tomfoolery. That excuse wasn’t going to wash this year so I kept Sarah company on the long drive down and Irish Granny was responsible for our delightful children on the Easy jet route to Lyon. Some people love driving huge distances, others enjoy watching cricket, listening to the Archers, or eating at Pizza Hut. They are all nuts.

Our friends who live very nearby in France have worked miracles on the ruin with a budget you might replace two windows in England with. It now has working bathroom and kitchen with enough hot water to keep 13 guests happy … or at least fairly clean. It has beds with duvets. It has new floors, ceilings and stairs that don’t unexpectedly give way with rot. You can now walk around the house without the serious risk of plunging to your death, except one hangar where we occasionally had to keep dragging young children back from a lethal precipice onto the garden below. It even had a woodburning stove with a temporary chimney out of a window. This came in useful in the first week when we remembered how cold it can be at 950 metres above sea level in freezing mist. One night we watched an old (fabulous) Chaplin talkie called Limelight and my mother who was wearing four jumpers and a coat as the fire crackled pathetically at the other end of the house said how much our house reminded her of life in rural Ireland in the 1950s.

This was the week when we were a little spooked by the sound of large country rats on our roof at night, or the discovery of several beautifully patterned grass snakes in the wilderness of nettles that was our back garden. The children also had fun chasing bats from the upper galley at night. We soon made short work of the nettles with a few days working the scythe and we decided that the snakes would keep the mice and rat population at a manageable level. Our biggest job was the colossal pile of wood at the back of the house which we sorted into slightly less massive piles of good wood to keep for the fire and rotten wood to burn. In the third week - with the help of unsuspecting friends who thought they had come to France to relax - we had a monstrous bonfire and burned a wicker man (sounds more occult than burning a 'guy'). A large gaggle of wild haired and dirty children laughed demonically as the guy’s stripey black and white French style t shirt and twig ribs burned with an unearthly roar.

I have painted a slightly alarming picture here but we had a really good month especially after the first week when the weather got much better. Despite working continuously moving piles of wood and walking in the countryside we came back fat as ever from the delicious wine and cheese and other food delights. The kids had great fun and we saw lots of friends and family. It’s a great place for reunions because there is so much space and it is so secluded – the kids call yell away. So if you have the nerve for roughing it in the hills of the Auvergne in August with unlimited supplies of baguettes, goats cheese and Ricard and two overweight hosts, you know where to apply.