The Latest Buzz

Britain’s butterflies are in decline.  The boffins at the charity Butterfly Conservation have blamed this not only on the long, cold summers lately, but also on the continued deterioration of suitable butterfly habitat across the rural landscape.  The spread of agricultural pesticides and herbicides is bad enough, but apparently a host of otherwise presumably sensible people are ripping up perfectly good lawns and putting out ‘decking’, quite as if they are some Yankee inbred named Laribee J. Farragut IV who thinks he is on a catamaran anchored off Grand Bahama whether he is or isn’t.  British butterflies are being sacrificed so people can cook up a 'barbie' (not the doll, I hasten to add) during these non-existent Indian summers. 

(The Other One rather rudely informs me that I must change this to ‘First Nations summers’ or ‘First Peoples summers’, or perhaps ‘Canadian Native summers’. I will reply only that I was cavorting with shamen and shawomen on tribal land before she could say ‘ga ga goo goo’ properly, let alone ‘Tontasathna'neta’.)

Bees are also in decline – globally, but more so in Europe and North America.  Without their sticky-footed pollinatory prancing, a third of the crops we eat would need to come up with another method of getting jiggy with it.  Like the butterflies, wild bees are threatened by various environmental factors, including the lack of habitat (natural or otherwise) and increased exposure to rather unsavoury man-made chemicals.

In fact, you can almost add any native British wildlife to the words 'in decline' and there will be a number of Google results to support this – the first few being legitimate research studies.  The main cause seems to be loss of habitat and the use of pesticides.

A long, drawn out debate, I'm sure.  I'm not here to debate what's wrong.  I'm here to figure what to do about it and do it.

To top it all off, I'm fresh out of garden retreat, now that The Other One has taken to doing Tai Chi (or whatever the bloody hell) in the garden, even if she has to wear several fleecy base layers in which to do it without freezing to death in the gutsy, you heard me, gutsy winds we've been having lately.

Truly gutsy

I want to help Britain's native wildlife the best I can.  We're already pretty self-sustained, even down to the gin-making (see The Blog of Grog), but we don't have much of the right sort of vegetation to encourage bees and butterflies.  The newly Tai Chi’d garden is a fairly formal one – perfect for tea parties, but probably not great for the humble bee.  It's also wonderfully manicured, which isn't going to encourage the butterflies.  And the garden borders have already been planted up for the spring with the perennials, the annuals and the hardy spring flowers.

Furthermore, after spending so much time up on the battlements, I do rather miss them now that they don't need any attention.  How about a little retreat at the top?

I am, of course, speaking of creating a wildlife/biodiversity green roof for Airnefitchie.

As a New Year's resolution, I promised to be even more ecologically aware and this will be a big step in the right direction, as we still hum and haw over whether to get a small wind turbine AND solar panels, or just solar panels, or just a wind turbine. And if solar panels, photo-voltaic or hot water or both.

Green roofs are vegetated layers that sit on top of the conventional waterproofed roof surfaces of a building.  They have numerous benefits, such as reducing storm-water runoff (which may not be a particular problem in our rural setting, but it is rather handy in built-up areas susceptible to localised flooding), reducing energy use (always welcome in a castle), increasing biodiversity and wildlife (see above), and my personal favourite, increasing the lifespan of the roof itself, by protecting it from UV light and temperature changes.  Given what I recently spent repairing the battlements, it would be nice to have to not replace them again anytime in my lifetime.

Never again!

The type of green roof I plan to construct is a ‘wildlife roof’. These are designed to replicate a habitat for particular species, or to create a range of habitats to increase the array of species which may inhabit the area.  I would rather like to encourage the bees and butterflies in their decline.  Not to decline.  Oh, you know what I mean.  Maybe a skylark or two whilst I'm at it.

I intend to add a green roof to the cap-hoosie, and a second one to the sloping roof behind the battlements; quite as if the hoosie had just popped up from underneath a garden – but, you know, on top of a castle.

Using the Green Roof Centre's website, run by the University of Sheffield, inspired by Tim's Terrace and David's Extension DIY case studies, and calling Barry, our tame Structural Engineer, as my consultant, I took a trip to the local hardware store and went shopping.

The Landie became laden with lots of funny-sounding items such as polythene root barrier membrane (a double-layered one with a layer of copper sheeting in-between to make sure the roof doesn't grow into the roof), a moisture retention mat, sedum matting, and stainless steel grips to keep the garden on the very steeply pitched roof of the hoosie.  I intend to nick soil from our other garden.

The weather was rather nice yesterday so I got stuck in, with Barry on hand to help and hold the ladder.  Some abseiling equipment was required where the roof was suddenly just parapet with no walkway, but Barry seemed to have no aversion to dangling helplessly off a scruffy castle as he planted grass.

As the sun set, I was watering the newly planted green roof, leaning over the edge of the battlements attached, rope round my waist, watering can in one hand a gin and tonic in the other (PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME).  A rather pleasant experience really, and a lot more fun than ‘calming’ Tai Chi.  I could hardly wait to have my morning tea up here.

This morning was beautiful.  The green roof has survived the night and the flowers we planted were still there.  Nothing, indeed, has slid off the roof and plummeted to the ground below in the style of a holidaying Briton (see Plummeting).

I took up a deck chair and my cup of Earl Grey (lemon, no milk, as God intended) and watched the sun rise a little bit higher.  As I sipped away, watching The Other One get to grips with the Archer or Warrior or something, I heard a very heartening sound.  A very small bee was buzzing about one of the flowers.

I sighed audibly.  Perhaps I should take up beekeeping?

Looks like good, clean fun

Prodigal Sun

The door knocker went ‘thud’ yesterday and Smeeton nearly had a heart attack when he went to answer it.

For who was standing there, clad in unlaced spiked Doctor Martens, ripped leggings and an oversized Pink Floyd t-shirt?  That's right.  The Other One.  (Taking her cue from Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne’s eldest, she refuses to be mentioned by name in these pages.)

She grunted something about having the baby at home in its ancestral land, which is probably all the rage in California.  After all, Peter O’Toole (who is in point of fact from Leeds) popped over to Dublin for his.  On top of which, one apparently has to pay for maternity care in the US, so she's decided to move home for nine months and have the baby in Scotland where it's free, and her parents have a castle.

As we had closed up her room semi-permanently (i.e. with bricks but no mortar), we had to put her up in a guest room whilst we coaxed the colony of bats into Alistair's old room.

After that, it was off to the kitchen to remove all the foods The Other One can no longer eat for one reason or another.  Henry and I put our feet down about the wine and other alcohol.  Out went the brie, liver paté and caffeinated hot drinks.  Or rather, she thinks we threw them out.  What really happened was Henry and I had a fantastic midnight snack, and as a residual benefit now have a stash of Earl Grey in our bedroom.  Smeeton is going to use his ancestral thieving skills to obtain some tea- and coffee-making facilities, akin to those in hotels and perhaps the very same ones.  It will feel like camping in our own house, but without the aggravation of a tent.

Even though it's not Spring and we officially turned the heating off at the weekend, The Other One complained it was cold and draughty, so we had to turn her bedroom radiator on (after checking none of the pipes had cracked or been eaten by mice in her absence) and keep the fire going, that is, after firing uncle Haldenstovare’s 4-bore goose-gun up the chimney to clear out all the soot.

Jolly punting weather.

Then we all had to go the nearest ‘health food’ shop and buy all sorts of weird and 'healthy' things, including something called dried acai berries, and vitamin D – in an oral spray.  Though Henry managed to sneak in a bottle of organic gin, with a royal warrant, so perhaps it wasn't all bad.

All these exhaustive and exhausting preparations being finished, naturally she sits in the sitting room reading Melody Maker with her feet up on the antique French-polished chess/coffee table.  Smeeton’s harrumphing was, no doubt, visible from space.

After a bit of ‘creative accounting’ regarding how long she's been in the UK (definitely at least a year, yes definitely – only a holiday to America in that time – Holidays don't count?  Perfect.  Then, yes, definitely been the country for at least a year), her booking appointment with the midwife is now on the calendar.

And now it's a matter of waiting, I suppose.  At any rate, that's all The Other One seems to be doing.  She's not helping out much about the house or on the estate.  She said something about having ordered a ‘step machine’ online and waiting for it to arrive so she can keep up with her fitness regime.  Step machine?  There are eleven different flights of stairs in this house, each with its own unique degree of twist, angle of slope, and amusing traps for the unwary.  Can't she just use those?  Or go walking up the nearest Munro?

A Munro is probably safer.

Pregnancy has definitely changed since my time, largely, into a vast laundry list of dos and don’ts where a mere handful of old wives’ tales used to serve.  Reading The Other One’s voluminous NHS bumf – for goodness knows she won’t – I’m stunned that our three didn’t come out even sillier than they are.

Posthumous Refutation

We don’t go in for wakes much in the Scottish Episcopal Church, but my Uncle Porpy (who died a few days ago) insisted in his will that we have one for him.  This is typical of his insensitivity.  Only somewhat do I regret referring to him as an ‘incurious puritanical git’ in these pages last week.  Knowing him was, to put it bluntly, a strain; and being related to him was at times insufferable.

It could have been worse, I suppose.

How well we can all recall the time, during an estate-boundary dispute with the MacMelvins, he not only armed us all with .410s (down to the age of nine!) but called out the county militia.  It was on his watch that the roof of the North Range fell in, and (on a separate occasion) that the so-called Temple of Dionysius on the far side of the loch burned down.  It was citing Porpy’s pig-headedness that Smeaton’s father (then our head keeper) unceremoniously quit and emigrated to Australia; and it was during Porpy’s financial management of my own income that the said income was halved.  To top it all off, while Porpy was managing the estate (in the antipodean absence of Smeaton the Elder), our population of delicious grey partridge fell by 40%, even as the numbers of the odious grey squirrel rose by a similar amount.

Yes, that's right, you heard me, 'odious'.

To say that Porpy was one of the least-liked members of our family, or indeed the whole county community, would be an understatement.

The wake, then, therefore, held a number of surprises.

For one thing, Old MacMelvin’s grandson came.  He not only bore us no apparent ill-will, but he said that Porpy’s ‘robust’ response to the land-grab (which he freely admitted) had caused his grandfather to abandon an even more audacious scheme that would have involved diverting the course of the Fitchie Burn past his own drawing-room windows, to the permanent disadvantage of our home farm.

I had just taken this information on board when a now-fiftysomething village lad named Iain apologised for smoking in the Temple of Dionysius, to its probable destruction.  We’d all known the fire was an accident caused by smoking, but just assumed it was Porpy’s damnable cigars.

We had never known him without one.

No sooner had Iain departed with skinful of Laphroaig, cig in paw, than I was approached by a ninetysomething surveyor of Ancient Monuments.  This elderly gentleman was unknown to me, but he said it was a great shame that Porpy had ‘carried the can’ for the North Range collapse; when in fact he (the surveyor) had told my great-grandfather it was about to fall down in 1938, some ten years before Porpy was born.

Then Smeaton’s mother handed me Porpy’s old carnelian signet-ring, which had disappeared around the time Smeaton the Elder had gone Down Under.  ‘Where on earth did you find it?’ I barked in surprise.  She hummed and hawed a bit but then admitted that over the years, Smeaton the Elder had stolen a whole bushel basket of Porpy’s jewellery; and now that both parties had passed on -- Smeaton of old age in HM Prison Geelong, State of Victoria -- she felt she should give the family back the one piece she’d been able to salvage from the whole unfortunate affair.

They say the gaol is haunted by the stories of where he hid the ring whilst incarcerated.

Our reminiscences were interrupted by the hearty condoling of our accountant, Mr. Ingram, who said, ‘Poor fellow!  Remember those racehorses?’  I replied truthfully that I did not, in fact, remember any racehorses.  Ingram went on promptly to explain that down to 1977, half of my personal income was tied up in a large syndicate of racehorses, formed by Porpy’s uncle Baldy just after the War.  The problem was, half of them died in ’77 of equine infectious anaemia, and the other half had never won any races in the first place.

I was just on my way out when a meek tug on my sleeve almost announced the presence of Dr. Moir, a local wildlife biologist who comes up to about my elbow.  To my very great surprise, he commended Porpy for his estate management.

‘Whatever do you mean?’ I cried. ‘On his watch, the partridges fell by two-fifths!’

‘But outside the estate,’ Moir mumbled, ‘they fell by three-fifths.’

If this story has a moral, I suppose it is, Don’t be irritating.  Irritating people get blamed for everything.

Now you tell me!

The key thing about class is...

The key thing about class is, it doesn’t change much: one does not yo-yo up and down Britain’s social scale because one has turned 40, or lost a job, or won the lottery, or gained (or lost) a taste for going to the opera or to football matches.

Although you can now enjoy both simultaneously.

Or so I thought.

That is, until Professors Mike Savage FBA and Fiona Devine OBE, abetted by the BBC, revoked the class system and replaced it with a new one.

Apparently, having for several hundred years been a matter of education, occupation and taste, class is now entirely a matter of age, personality, and mortgage size.  As such – and in stark contrast to the day before yesterday when we were all happily pootling along in the upper-middle class – my father, my uncle Porpy, my son and I are now members of four different social classes.

What balderdash!

If any of us were going to qualify as ‘elite’, I’d have said daddy, what with him being an earl, and indeed that’s how he came out in the survey.  After that, however, it gets rather complicated.  My son Alisteir, you see, is now the ‘emergent service workers’ (the absence of any actual job notwithstanding).  The factors that appear to have been decisive in assigning him to this class include that he likes playing rugby and listening to rock music, and that we have not bought him his own house, on the theory – in which Alistair himself concurs – that the East Lodge is perfectly sufficient.

Although, he really needs to let us fix the windows – or at least put some in.

Porpy, meanwhile, is something called ‘technical middle class’.  The mysterious term ‘technical’ aside – and they don’t seem to mean ‘nominal’ – this new class seems to consist of incurious puritanical gits who are ‘established middle class’ in all but opera tickets.  I would (and frequently have) gladly put Porpy in another room, or at the far end of the table, but hardly in a class by himself.

As for me?  I am now ‘traditional working class’.  This is apparently because I am friends with my cleaner, electrician, farmhands and postman but do not know any software designers.

This, Professors Savage and Devine, will not do at all.  If, for instance, I fired our housekeeper and had a falling out with Bill the postie, I would instantly become ‘established middle class’; and, if flushed with the possibilities implied thereby, I signed over the East Lodge to Alestair without waiting to die first, he would instantly become a ‘new affluent worker’ (any actual employment notwithstanding).

As such, I freely offer you…

The Great British Class Calculator Follow-Up Questions

1. You have stated that you are friends with an office manager, a call-centre worker, a secretary and an accountant.  How long ago did you hire each of them, and how many floors of the office-block that they work in is owned by you or one of your relatives?

2. Under cultural activities, you have answered that you ‘Go to stately homes’. How many nights do you usually stay?  How many weekends per year?  How much 20-bore ammunition do you typically get through?

Ah!  You almost got the cultural visitor!

3. You have answered that you have savings of £0.  Is this because you recently blew it all on cocaine and ski bunnies in Gstaad and have not yet asked your trustees for more?

4. You have said you listen to hip-hop music.  Has this ever caused you to be blackballed from White’s or the Reform Club, and/or thrown out of Blake’s Hotel, Mayfair?

5. You rent your house.  Is this because you expect within five to ten years to inherit a landholding in Dumfries and Galloway that is comparable in size to Dumfries and Galloway?

I had a few more but must dash.  There is loud hip-hop music coming from the East Lodge and I’m becoming concerned about the George III giltwood settee.

 

I may still be able to save the armchairs.

The Blog of Grog

Just before she left the country again after Easter, our dear daughter Sylvie mentioned some nonsense about her parents partaking of too much gin.  And, bless me, as we waved to her departing dinghy from an undisclosed location on the wild, rock-bound coast of Buchan, I shouted a hoarse promise that we would not buy so much in future.

And we won’t.

I'm going to make it instead.

This means that I will be able to keep a promise made to a daughter and still drink the amount of gin to which I have become accustomed.  Everyone's a winner.

Accordingly, I hit the research decks.  Anyone with a plastic pot and a tap can make strawberry wine or cider, but gin requires some finesse – and who better to provide it than the Airnefitchie household?

By the 11th century, monks in Italy were flavouring crudely distilled spirits with juniper berries.  It was used, without noticeable effect, as a remedy for the Black Death.  The invention of gin is credited to Franciscus Sylvius, a Dutch physician.  By the mid-17th century, several small Dutch and Flemish distillers had popularised the re-distillation of malt spirit with juniper, anise, caraway, coriander, and so on.  (On reading this back I realise I have no idea how small or big they were, so will assume I meant the size of their operations and not their bodies.)  There were some 400 distillers in Amsterdam alone by 1663.  We did always like the Dutch, Henry and I.

But that is surely enough history.  How about the gin itself?  How can one make it?

According to the European Union there are four categories into which different styles of gin are legally differentiated: Juniper-flavoured Spirit Drinks, Gin, Distilled Gin and London gin.  And the minimum bottled alcoholic strength for gin, distilled gin and London gin is 37.5%.  It can be a little rougher in the States.  There are also three different ways in which one could produce gin: pot distilling (the earliest method, involving a fermented grain mash or malt wine from barley and other grains, redistilled with flavouring botanicals); column distilling (of high-proof neutral spirits from a fermented mash or wash using a refluxing still, such as a column still, and then redistilling this concentrated spirit with juniper berries and other botanicals in a pot still); and compounding (simply flavouring neutral spirits with essences and/or other 'natural flavourings' without redistillation).  The last one is not, however, considered proper gin.

Popular botanicals for flavouring gin include lemon, bitter orange peel, anise, liquorice root, saffron, frankincense, coriander, nutmeg, and cassis bark.

After a quick check in the tractor shed, I found a nice batch of ethyl alcohol 'of agricultural origin' (as suggested by Wiki).  I'm sure it has an initial strength of at least 96% ABV.  That'll save some time doing any initial distilling and I could move straight onto the redistilling with the botanicals.  Now, where's my Coffey still?

Ah, there it is!

Originating in Ireland, improved by a Scotsman and further improved by another Irishman, a Coffey still is a continuous still consisting of two columns.  The first column has steam rising and wash descending through several levels.  The second column carries the alcohol from the wash, where it circulates until it can condense at the required strength.  The still behaves likes a series of single pot stills, but it's just made into a long vertical tube.

During the dark days of prohibition in America, my dear departed great-great-uncle Beaver was living just inside Quebec border with Vermont, and ‘cashed in royally’ (in his quaint phrase) by making his own whisky. His first step was getting out the tin-snips and making his own Coffey still.  It's been handed down through the generations, gathering dust all the while.

I'm starting to wonder if there's anything not in the tractor shed.

A quick polish and check of the pipes later, and our still was deemed adequate for the task.

I pour my ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin into the wash, to be carried by the second column (the rectifier) to the first column (the analyser), in which the wash descends through several levels of steam.  It will all circulate until it can condense at the required strength.

I think.  My grandfather told me all this after sampling one of his creations.  I was just a small girl at the time.  I may be remembering things a bit hazily due to the prevailing alcoholic vapour.

After a wee while, I collect the condensed alcoholic spirit from the still.  What did I have to do now?  Oh yes, re-distill with the necessary botanicals.

I make a 'gin basket' to be suspended within the head of the still, which will allow the hot alcoholic vapours to extract the lovely flavours from the botanicals.  Into my gin basket I throw the necessary juniper berries, a bit of lavender, lime peel (no pith) and some frankincense (because I am fresh out of myrrh, and anyway, why not?).  Away we go again with the redistilling.

Whilst we're waiting, did you know that the name gin is derived from either the French genièvre or the Dutch jenever, which both mean 'juniper'?  Fascinating.

Are we supposed to let homemade gin age?  I think I saw an old whisky barrel in here somewhere.  Maybe I'll try some now and age some for later.  Yes, that's what I'll do.

One barrel put in the back of the tractor shed with a faint date scrawled on it gives me a sense of pride.  Maybe we'll open it to celebrate Sylvie's civil partnership, or her wedding once the laws change.

We do love a good nuptial.

Either way, unfortunately, I'm lacking in tonic.  Ferreting about didn't reveal any.  So that's what the tractor shed doesn't have.

A quick word with Alistair produces cinchona bark, instead of synthetic quinine, from I-dare-not-ask-what horrifying residue of a gap year spent shagging his way up every mountain in Peru.

With this, and a bit of lime, lemongrass, sugar and Pellegrino I have a tonic of sorts.  I then spot some Fevertree tonic water in the utility larder – damn.  Oh well, that'll save me making more!

I make a lovely homemade gin and tonic for Henry and myself, adding a bit of lime peel and a sprig of lavender, and we have a taste.

I'm not sure what happened next.  I started writing this on Wednesday and now it's Friday and I haven't the foggiest where Henry is, and the dogs keep whining at the treasure chest in the entrance hall.

I wouldn't go in there if I were you.

 I wasn’t meant to distil it twice was I?