Along the lanes of Devon

One of my nieces, who lived in London but came to Devon on holiday with her family, thought that Devon was where you went when you died. She had confused the words ‘Devon’ and ‘heaven’.

    Other people look on the countryside as a litter bin.

These photographs were all taken along the lanes near where I live. One walk. A normal day.

Last week when I was waiting in the building society I picked up the local paper and read about a cow which had died after swallowing a discarded crisp packet. They go for the salt apparently.

This morning

A calf on its side.
Swollen stomach.
Flies on its eye.
Dead.

A cow -
its mother -
standing over it.
Waiting.

Sloe gin

Here is my recipe for sloe gin. Unfortunately you do have to buy the gin to mix with the sloes, which is expensive, but the resulting liqueur is deliciously plummy, sharp and sweet at the same time, and a glorious viscous red.

    The sloe gin you make this autumn will be ready for Christmas so you can use it for Christmas presents. I gave a glass to my sister once when she came to stay with a nasty cough and the cough disappeared. Nigel Slater puts it in his plum crumble. I’ve been known to have a nip in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.

    So there you are – a multitude of uses.

Sloes are wild plums, fruit of the blackthorn tree. They are ripe now, but stay on the trees for a couple of months, so no rush.

    As you pick the sloes, put them in the freezer. This softens the skin and enables the fruit to meld with the gin. It also means you don't have to gather them all at once and only have to pick a few at a time from each place so can leave plenty for the wildlife to eat. If you try eating them raw yourself  however they will shrivel your mouth – they are unbelievably sour.

    Pick the fruit blue and slightly soft (ripe) rather than green and hard (unripe) but don’t worry too much about the odd leaf or twig getting in. It all gets sieved eventually.

Blackthorn is called 'black' because of its black bark, particularly apparent when the white blossom comes out in the spring. The blossom comes out before the leaves and is the earliest to do so. I’ve seen it out in February, a heart-warming sight at such a bleak time of year. Both the pictures below were taken in April however, one last year and one this year, with the blossom later than usual after two hard winters.

Recipe (at last)

300g/10oz sloes (straight from the freezer is fine)

150g/5oz white sugar

600ml/1 pint London gin

Combine the ingredients in a large wide-mouthed bottle or jar with a screw lid. Shake the jar gently every so often for a few days until the sugar has dissolved and then put it somewhere cool and dark. Have a look at the jar once a week or so and give it another shake.

    Sieve the liqueur into bottles when you want to use it and put the sloes on the compost heap. (I’ve tried eating them but there’s too much skin-to-flesh so they’re rather dry and chewy.)
    Either way (with or without sloes in it), the sloe gin will keep for several years.
   

I’m afraid you do have to use the dreaded white sugar. Brown spoils both the taste and the colour. Unprocessed white is fine however.

    And don’t try to economise by buying cheap gin. That spoils the taste too. Whatever ‘London’ gin is, it seems to work best.

At the start of autumn

The wispy fruits of old man’s beard, a wild clematis.

    This used to grow all over the chalky soils of Kent’s North Downs where I lived as a child, but is not so common in Devon. Another name for it is travellers’ joy, perhaps because the young leaves used to be made into a poultice for tired feet and lotion for saddle sores.

    Most of the plant is poisonous (except the leaves, I think).

Blackberries, yum, at their best now before the flies find them or they start to rot (although with the recent rain they're already going soggy). To me, their taste is the essence of autumn, but at the moment I have to remember to keep my right hand for dog-treats and dog-lick and my left hand for me and the blackberries.

Hips, the fruit of the wild rose.

    According to Richard Mabey in Food for Free, rosehips contain twenty times more vitamin C than oranges. They were gathered in the War, when there was little imported fruit, to make syrup. This was then available from welfare clinics for mothers and children, as well as for sale. I remember it from my childhood in the 1950s, still being distributed for children along with the dreaded (disgusting) cod liver oil, spoonsful of which we were fed regularly.

    If you have a lot of time (for all the straining), you can make jelly with rosehips, combining them with either apples or haws.

Haws, the fruit of the hawthorn tree.

    These and other wild fruit and nuts help to feed birds during the winter, so never cut hedges at this time of year (although, sadly, many farmers do). The best time to cut hedges is in January or February after the fruit has gone but before the trees and bushes start to sprout and the birds to nest.



What I'm reading/watching

In my teens and early twenties I was consumed with travel fever. After a year spent working my way round Australia, however, the fever abated. I realised that it wasn’t so much travel fever that had afflicted me as the need to get away from my family and establish myself as independent. Australia obviously did that (up to a point). One place I would still love to go though is Iceland.

    According to Frog’s book about flags, Iceland is almost half the size of the UK but has a population of only 280 thousand (whereas the UK has a population of nearly 60 million). According to Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason the lakes in Iceland ice over in the autumn and if you fall into one you die within minutes. In the countryside, a blizzard can arise from nowhere and take a child out seeing to the animals with his father. The men have names that sound as if they belong to Tolkien heroes, sheeps' heads pickled in sour milk are a traditional delicacy, and the prospect of winter casts a blight over everyone’s souls. What more could a girl want?

    Indridason’s most famous book is Jar City (I love that title), also published as Tainted Black, but I haven’t managed to find it in the library yet. Hypothermia is a later title in the same series, which is about a police detective called Erlendur. It is beautifully translated and as near as I’ve managed to get so far to that country.

Last night, while Frog was doing archery, I watched a film called Julie and Julia, recommended by a niece. It was about blogging, the love of good food, a tall woman and wanting to be a writer. I wonder why she thought of me.

    It was nothing ground-breaking but a pleasant way to spend an evening, with Meryl Streep in fine form, and was apparently adapted from a book of the same name.

A book which kept me awake most of Monday night and which is also to be made into a film is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Set in Mississippi in the early 1960s, it tells the story of that stultifying, not to say atrocious, place and time through the eyes of two black maids and a young rich white woman. Riveting, heartbreaking, funny. I only hope the film does it justice.

Yesterday I drew up a list of strategies to help my writing. One of them was to stop reading for a while. I am a compulsive reader, and I know that filling my head with other people’s words is not conducive to producing my own. (Stopping reading is also recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, a book I mentioned earlier, in March (‘Artists’ dates’).)

    This afternoon, when I got back from rushing around Exeter doing errands, I just had to lie down and rest. (It’s probably an age thing.) I put the new regime into practice immediately and didn’t pick up a book as I usually would. This post was the result. Let’s hope I can extend the effects to novel-writing.