Man Down

We have a house, we have a very old house in the country......and the drains are blocked.


This week, I have been mostly in our garden watching the excavation of a deep trench by two cheerful men from Dyno-Rod fortified only with Earl Grey tea laced with organic fruit sugar. ("tastes like washing up liquid")

Dyno-Rod. Dyno-Rod Dyno-Rod. Does the name conjure up for you a national squad of trained and uniformed drain-busters, gradually working their way up the Dyno-ranks?  Dear Reader, if you think that then you, are as mistaken as I was: it's a franchise.  You order Dyno-Rod, you get a couple of blokes from Bexhill who paid £40,000 for a bright red van. And why not?

First off, they prised up the ancient manhole cover on the terrace ("yeah, it is gull-poo, yeah, sorry about that"), and then with the clang of cast iron still ringing in our ears the three of us gathered to looked gravely down into the inspection pit. Professionals to the core all mention of the unpleasant contents within was politely eschewed, as two expert pairs of eyes, and one amateur, carefully sized up the direction of the foul drain.

It ran down the slope directly toward the only obstacle on my lawn: my carefully-level 12 foot trampoline... of course it did.

The trampoline had to be shifted. The three of us grabbed the sides and on Dyno-Rod's smooth count we heaved, manfully. The contraption rose from its moorings and we grinned triumphantly to each other, brute force triumphs over nature..

"OK, let's move it ... which way?"
"Up the slope!  let's go, 1..2...3... keep going.. keep going.. bit further..bit further.. MIND THE MANHOLE!"

Gull Down

A marital dilemma..

An infrequent evening alone, sans children

Pic - Aerokev

a consequent table-for-two at the poshest restaurant in town, our at-home pre-dinner bottle of Cotes du Rhone quite nicely half empty
Mrs Botogol and I were on the point of leaving, just minutes from our rendez-vous with gastronomy, when the phone rang

 "It's Gull Rescue, Mr Botogol, we can come out to you after all. We're on our way - with you in five"

"It was Gull Rescue, dear",  I explained, "they can come out after all. They are on their way now"
"But Alibert, our table is booked for... three minutes' time"
"I know.  Hmm.. there's only one solution", I said, "One of us must walk down to the George, claim our table, and then settle down to wait in the wing-backed leather chair in the lounge by the roaring fire, with an apple bellini .... while the other stays at home and helps chase an injured gull round the garden in the mud and rain"


I looked at Mrs Botogol, and Mrs Botogol looked at me.. a marital dilemma..
"I think", said she, pausing elaborately, "you'll want to take one for the blog"

-*-

"Well there you go", said the man from Hastings Gull Rescue, as we approached the angry, cornered bird, down by the compost heap, under the trampoline "that's one of your Scandinavian gulls".
I wondered how he could tell
"They are completely different!" he told me, astonished; it was something to do with the head. "Now then, don't worry, they can't hurt you, just get a bit closer... move veeerrrryyyy slowly..  don't worry..... FOR GOD'S SAKE KEEP AWAY FROM ITS BEAK"

We caught it quite quickly, and likely saved its life: the town foxes don't miss a gull with a broken wing on a February night. I thanked the brave catcher "I won't shake your hand, if you don't mind - never a good idea to loosen my grip" and Hastings Gull Rescue disappeared into the night, a £20 donation the richer.

I surveyed the gull-poo all over our paving stones..  a job for the morning I reckoned,  and hurried off down the High Street to rescue Mrs Botogol.  I found her quite content, well into her second bellini.

Rye Christmas

More Rye Yule, really.  There seems to be something, something old, something sinister, something pagan perhaps about the Rye Christmas Parade that stirs the Gods: for each year they send rain. Perhaps they are tipped off by prayers from the Kindly Ones

At the front of the parade strode the town cryer, stern faced under an umbrella, looking quite unlike the familiar, welcoming soul who announces the wedding party to thrilled tourists on a Saturday morning.

Following him: giant puppets of wire and papier-mache glowing with inner light, each accompanied by shadowy black-clad children peering out from rain-sodden hoods, and no little donkeys, oxen nor sheep neither: but bright, ungainly mermaids, centaurs, gryphons, orcs and chimeras,

And then at the heart of the procession: the Rye Drummers , blown in the sea wind, dressed in black and red, faces painted, drums adorned with skull and cross-bones, they hunched into a circle, backs to rain and the crowd, hat brims dripping, in their midst a sweating soloist as, red-faced, black-faced, grim-faced they sounded out the rythms of Saxon Rye when the sea pounded at the land-gate causeway, and the French raided and stole the church bells, when Old Winchelsea stood, still, in Rye Bay.

And it wasn't about the children, either: even as Father Christmas approached, waving and hohohoing from an ersatz american limousine, the Rolf Harris-sound-alike MC, in a gold lame jacket made sure to puncture the spirit of Santa, slurring suggestions of his half-pint too many. Beside me a mother gripped her daughter's hand tightly, a whistle blew and the drums restarted.

Afterwards Mrs Botogol and I retired to the steamed-up Apothocary, its drawers with hand-lettered promises of Hemlock, Foxglove, Monkshood and Laburnum
"Well, they need to sort it out", opined a local shopkeeper, warming his hands on an espresso, "is it supposed to be late night shopping or not? We need to be organised".

I gotta house in the country...

I am not a number, by pinkangelbabe

The nice thing about our house in the country is that - actually - it's in a town.

An ancient town.

So while we are 70 miles from London (and quite beyond the reach of google streetview) we are nevertheless - in extremis - never more than 100m from a double espresso.

Not that it's all so sophisticated as that, mind: it's also rural. On Sunday, walking 15km of the 1066 Country Trail we picnicked in an apple orchard, tiptoed past a somnolent bull, sighed at a dead sheep, admired, awestruck, a pale and silent, eerie and creamy daytime owl, and at lunchtime found ourselves in a pub of quite unexpected charm. We sat outside in the garden with the smokers but buying a round in the Sunday-roast-infested table-packed interior I saw a blackboard: "From 4-6pm today" [it said] "the Fling".

"What is it? Some sort of traditional game, rustic and charming, yet competitive and violent?" I asked the barmaid, hopefully

"No", she replied, "He's a one-man band. He's very good"

We discovered a previous engagement, and pressed on.

We were back home in time for a Chilean Semillon-Chardonnay in our late-evening-sun-soaked garden. A long way away from Canary Wharf.

===========================
Rye, East Sussex
Apothocary
Queens Head, Icklesham

In the country

picture by Andrew Stawarz

Weary and footsore, we paused to rest at the very lip of the Cotswold escarpment.

The evening light had that dreamy, golden quality of a perfect English day, and we could see for miles. Far beneath us a real, live steam train crossed patchwork plains and centuries; and either Patagonian physics had spread to Gloucestershire, or the air was ozone clear for I could make out flocks of sheep grazing the slopes of the Malvern hills twenty miles away.


In the sixteenth century, so local legend has it, Thomas Cromwell sat just a few yards from our resting place and watched the righteous fires of the protestants consume Hailes Abbey where in happier time his friend Stephen Sagar had been Abbot.

Five hundred years on, in more peaceful times, we rested against a low gate set in a brand new, spanking-smart, dry stone wall. A Narnia-door to nowhere, at first glance the pointless gate merely connects two fields, but look sideways! ... it stands exactly at the mid-line between two newly planted avenues of trees that march from the field behind, two miles or more, down the escarpment, through the village of Wood Stanway, across a wood, all the way to the simply ludicrous but awesomely splendid Stanway Fountain, the largest gravity powered water jet in Europe.


The Stanway Estate was leased by Hailes Abbey to Richard Tracy in 1533, the very year of Henry VIII's divorce, with the writing on the wall for the Catholic Church in England. The Lessor was none other than our well connected Abbot Sagar who evidently understood not only the way the national wind was blowing, but also local politics, for when the Dissolution Act of 1536 was passed, who else was appointed head of the commission to dissolve Hailes Abbey but one Richard Tracy.

Sagar held out, negotiating terms, for three years, before he and his 21 monks finally acquiesced on Christmas Eve 1539.

The Abbey and its estates were eventually sold for a total of £539, and one can suppose that as both sitting tenant and vendor Tracy's purchase of the freehold of Stanway was on not unfavourable terms.... and that neither was Abbot Sagar disappointed with his pension of £100pa (His monks, you ask? ... £8). And now, get this, Stanway has remained in the Tracy family ever since. In these sort of deals is won possession of our green and pleasant land.

The last time we walked that way we were soaked to the skin, and it was miserable and misty.

Today it was just beautiful.

Our House...

picture by Florinda©

(our new house)
... is in the middle of our street.

Which is good because within 100 metres of our front door are no fewer than two different DIY stores. One of them is very small and very expensive. The other is quite a lot smaller but just a little bit more expensive. I am their best customer (both of them)

The nearest B&Q is eleven miles away.

So, on Tuesday, after the tiny DIY store sold me a washing machine waste pipe extension hose for only £34.99 (don't ask - it's a temporary measure) but didn't have any washing machine waste pipe extension hose connectors I went on to the small store, where the assistant looked at me entirely blankly and invited me, very cordially, to search the shelves for myself and, please, to buy anything that might possibly connect two such hoses together and if it doesn't work then you can always bring it back, except that the computer is down so I'll write you a manual receipt so that Alice - she isn't here now, but she'll be here after lunch - realises what it is, is that OK? But anway if you just tell her you're the new people in Sally's house she'll be fine about it.

Before me in the queue was a lady of a certain age. "You can leave a message on my London number", she said. "or you can call me here! It's IDEN 600. Or...it used to be anyway"

STD dialling arrived in the 1970s

It's weird outside london.

I bought two small pieces of plastic (one was free) and forty-seven jubilee clips (no flies on me) and just thirty-six later hours the the washing machine was working.

Today we got broadband.

Education Special

On Friday evening Mrs Botogol and I had dinner with four teachers, all from the same school. Worryingly: three of them taught me when I was at the school myself, many years ago.

Frighteningly: the fourth is younger than I am but, just like the others, had taught at the school for more than twenty years.

With all of them so thoroughly steeped in the education system, and my mysterious incomprehensible job in the city, I had wondered if we would have anything in common but I needn't have worried: in an intriguing bout of role reversal, as the evening wore on I lectured the history teacher on the battle of Borodino and the economist on Idea Futures while they regaled me with stories about what it is like to own a racehorse. I guess we were all trying to impress.

Then on Saturday the Botogol family went en masse to the Cheltenham Literature festival. That's right: more school.

Well, that's what happens when you go and get educated: one moment you're throwing babyfood on the floor and tantrums in Tesco, the next you're in the third row of Cheltenham Town Hall listening carefully to Roy Hattersley's opinion of Stanley Baldwin and Britain in the interwar years. Or smuggling a sly syllepsis into an otherwise grammatically undistinguished blog. The first sign, I reckon, is watching Blue Peter: it's all down hill from there.

Anyway: the festival. In the end there wasn't any poetry at all, gay or otherwise: in the morning we all went together to DT and History; then after lunch (we were all hot dinners) we split up: while I'm not claiming that the education system is dumbed down or anything, let's just say that Mrs Botogol and I had Add. History followed by Comp. Lit, while the Lower Remove had a spare and went off early to watch to semi-final.

If truth be told I was a tiny bit jealous; but I quickly thought of a way to get my own back:

"Haven't you got any homework to do in half term?" I asked my youngest, "that you should be doing this afternoon?"
"No, Dad, I've just got one piece, I don't need to start today"
"Oh, what do you have to do?"
"I've got to write a play in two acts, about environmental issues"

Might as well leave it to next week, then.

Walking in the Rain

About fifteen cold, wet and very-muddy miles along the Cotswold Way we reached the precise spot where in 2006 our hosts (so they were telling us) had encountered a naked hiker. The children looked around eagerly, hoping for a repeat sighting, as if the walker were a permanent feature of that section of the Cotswold escarpment but, like a badger, he was nowhere to be seen, and to be fair it was hard to imagine weather less conducive to nude rambling.

The rain hardened, I drew my hood in around my face. My boots were heavy with red earth and sheep-poo, I had long-since zipped up my ventilated arm-pit holes, so I closed my eyes and imagined hot, sun-baked earth.....while I listened to the children's questions.

"So he was just walking along, naked? Did he say 'hello'?"
Silly question: of course he said hello. I'm not sure if it's a countryside thing, or a rambling thing, but everyone on the Cotswold Way says 'hello'. The first day I had naturally assumed that our local hosts actually knew all these people, before Mrs Botogol put me right '"No, stupid, they are just being friendly". I liked the sound of that and the second days I was like Crocodile Dundee I was that friendly. In fact, I reckon I'm a chameleon, the way I fit in: last week throwing thundery glances at a chic gay theatre in London, this week throwing cheery 'Good Mornings' at ramblers on a national trail. Only my lack of poles betrayed me.

"No he didn't, he just walked by quickly" (Aha..not a real rambler after all!)
"Could you see everything?"
"No he held his hands in front of him as he walked past"
"Did he have a ruck-sack?"
"I couldn't see what type of sack he had, the way he was holding his hands in front..."

Altogether we walked 25 miles. It rained for the entire first day, and most of the second. I only fell over once but when I did it hurt a lot and because of the rain, the blood didn't really clot. On the way we did 4 geocaches, and we bought 43 doughnuts, muffins, buns and mars bars in Broadway; but we didn't go to any pubs because we were were too wet, too muddy and too numerous.

In Stanway we saw the largest gravity-fed fountain in Europe and high, high up on the hills, at Belas Knapp we ate ginger cake over a 4,500 year burial chamber where excavators have found 38 skeletons over the years; all of them, according to the audio-guide - all of them hikers who attempted the long climb from Winchcombe in inclement weather while wearing inappropriate footwear.

There were only 23 of us; a mixture of old friends and mutual strangers, but because it is a very small world one of the strangers turned out to have been to school with Mrs Botogol. Of the 15 adults four have indescribable jobs, four work for the government, six work for themselves and one is retired. Only one had a second pair of walking boots - dry you see - to wear the second day. Another carried an umbrella all the way - and had a spare brolly in his rucksack - which he didn't share with anyone, not even when we stopped for lunch.


"I guess you'll blog about all this when you get home", opined our host, later that evening, curry eaten, red wine finished, the barrel of beer considerably emptier than it had been when we all arrived.
"I'm not really sure", I reflected, "that you'd all want to read about yourselves",
"You could disguise our identities", he said, "and jazz us up a bit? Steal our best jokes? Put words into our mouths?"

"Yes", I said, "Well, yes, I suppose I could"

In The Country

We were in the countryside last weekend - Mrs Botogol and I - on our way back to London after a romantic weekend away, and we had this idea: why not visit a proper Farm Shop and buy some goodies to take home for our supper? You know the sort of thing: fresh mushrooms with moist soil clinging to the base, home-made high-strength cider, dark red well hung organic beef, individually crafted ravioli containing smoked venison and artichoke hearts. That sort of thing. The sort of thing you get from Farm Shops, right?

The trouble is: Farm Shops in the countryside simply aren't as rural as the ones in town.

In South West London the farm shops and farmers' markets feature cheery, red-faced sons of the soil who wax enthusiastically about their terroir, their traditional methods, the injustice of DEFRA subsidies and the importance of knowing-where-your-food-comes-from. While they ramble they press tiny organic tomatoes into your hands, before weighing out a pat of butter on brass scales. They wear latex gloves to handle the produce. They call you 'Sir'

In the countryside farm shops are staffed by sullen-faced tattooed rustics, moonlighting from Homebase, who don't know celery from celeriac and call you "Yeh Wha?". They have freezers with manky-looking scallops, they microwave their pasties, and they don't-know-where-their-food-comes from.

We selected Bombay mix, beetroot and turkey twizzlers. Our assistant was sooo slooow on electronic cash register that we abandoned the the whole lot on the belt.

It's nice to be back home