Yurt Dwellers of Butcombe

I had a call from Mark Newman in the week and he wanted to sleep in the yurt on the weekend. We were intending to take it down for the winter but decided to leave it up and make a night of it on Saturday. I called Cath and Lyndon and asked whether they fancied coming over, having a meal, vast amounts of alcohol and sitting round the fire until the early hours. Once it was all arranged I resumed my normal pottering around the garden.

Back to putting stepping stones into the chicken pen somewhat impeded by the idiot chickens who are determined to inspect everything I do as closely as possible, especially Spacker who sat in the hole that I was making for the paving slab, on the paving slab, in the barrow and momentarily on my back when I was trying to manoeuvre the paving slab into place.

The others congregated on the barrow and provided commentary getting very annoyed with me when I dumped soil into the barrow and then getting very excited as they had something new to pick over.


Just as I was finishing, Oscar (Ocean's boyfriend), turned up with his new computer. I abandoned the chicken pen and spent a happy afternoon setting up the computer.

When Helen came back from the car boot sale I started on dinner, now Cath has four kids and Mark was bringing friends so I made a massive pot of pork vindaloo. This of course was the cue to start drinking home made wine and listening to Gaz Brookfield far too loudly.

No sign of young Mark and by six o'clock Cath and Lyndon had turned up with no kids, Ah well pork vindaloo for the foreseeable future. In fact looking at it I had a vast lake of meat, I might have overdone it slightly.

We had dinner and repaired to the yurt, with a small amount of reluctance on Cath's part, mitigated somewhat by the array of alcohol we were taking with us.  I had lit the wood burner earlier in the afternoon and the yurt was toasty.

Helen had sorted out a chair for Cath and she decided that it was comfortable after all. We were sat round drinking wine when there was a knock on the yurt door, not an easy thing to do on a canvas door, and Oscar's head poked into the yurt, closely followed by his dad, Chris.

They had come to pick up Oscar's computer but stayed for a glass of wine and a chat and some irredeemable photos
How come Oscar and his dad both look cool and I look like some sort of balding stoned homeless person? This is a rhetorical question I'll have you know.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5. Just Go Ahead and Die Quietly

Image
< Previous  -  Next > We have many preconceptions about cancer, these are fed by a deluge of slightly inaccurate information from books, magazines, television and most of all these days, bloody wellness influencers.  I am starting to come to to the conclusion that there is a Darwinian imperative lurking in the pernicious trend of believing every fucking thing that is on the internet rather than a proper scientific double blind trial conducted by people who have been studying their field for years. The conclusion is this, we should encourage this trend as much as we can as it will thin out the herd for the rest of us. Apologies, cynical grumpy old man came to the fore a bit there, lets get back to cancerous inaccuracies, watch any series on the TV and a protaganist will get cancer, they will be rushed to a hospital that is the only one willing to try a new procedure, the cancer will be removed and then we will see them celebrating with their tearful relatives.  ...
Read more

14: Well, you can live on it, but it tastes like shit

Image
< Previous   | Next > It’s the end of week 5 of chemo and radiotherapy. Not much has happened of note. My life has distilled down to 4 distinct things, work, radiotherapy, a soupcon of television and sleep. This does not make for very scintillating blog writing.   To pick up from where we left off, Helen and I had staggered to the car overburdened with Fortisips and returned to Butcombe like medically challenged Father Christmases, laden with gifts that no bugger in his right mind would want. We had many people round for a meal on the Saturday night and I cooked a tofu and mushroom curry with coconut cream. I supplemented this with Mediterranean Rice and Lentils as the amount of people coming kept exponentially increasing until I lost count. There was a certain amount of uncertainty on my part as I couldn’t taste the curry and had to rely on other people to taste it and tell me whether it was OK.  I on the other hand was reprising Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee...
Read more

13: Abandoning My Principles

Image
< Previous | Next > It’s a Thursday and I am three weeks into the cancer treatment.  The first week had been pretty uneventful, I felt a little nausea and there were some changes happening in my mouth and throat that I had not ordered but nothing that startling. What I definitely have not ordered is what is happening to my sense of taste, to be frank, it appears to have fucked off never to be seen again.  What is the most disconcerting is the food that I find the worst is my own.  By this I mean that I am the principal cook in the Acheson-Crow household and do nearly all the cooking.  At age fourteen my daughter decided to become vegetarian and from then on very nearly all the food I've cooked has been vegetarian. I couldn’t be bothered with doing two lots of meals for the sake of a bit of meat. To be fair, during the 90’s I was almost completely ‘brassic’ and at one point was existing on exactly £10 a week for food, which, even thirty years ago, was fairly dr...
Read more