35 Be careful what you write about...

apple pressing, samhain & fly strike

Apples, again
I began this post a few days ago, thinking that I’d post it for Samhain. Events have conspired, as they say, to keep me occupied in one way or another with the land we tend and family, so I’m late. I won’t write much about Samhain here as I have now posted articles on all 8 of the Celtic festivals in the Wheel of the Year section, but since we have celebrated it, albeit in a low-key way, over three days now (All Souls in the Christian calendar on 31st October, All Saints – Toussaints here in France – on 1st November, and The Man’s birthday, which coincided this year with lunar Samhain and the dark moon on Saturday, 2nd November) I’ll add a note or two here.

First thing is that I have been writing this blog for a year, now. I began just before Samhain, the Celtic New Year and perhaps the most significant of the solar quarter and cross-quarter dates, the thin-veil inward time, liminal and reflective, exactly at the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.

During some hard times this year Substack has kept me going with writing (and via the reading of others’ blogs; see my recommendations, and there are more to add). I want to thank those of you who have signed up to follow my writings In the Beautiful Middles of Nowhere. It means more to me than you can know that you read it, ‘like’ my posts, comment, restack them, or email me, as several of you do.

I started small; early on, I was dithering about whether to import my mailing list of hundreds of people with whom I’ve worked for 33 years of holistic/psychospiritual writing courses (‘Fire in the Head’), eco-bardic courses (‘The Wild Ways’), and/or mentoring; or who have read my books and contacted me. I had ethical concerns about importing all those names and email addresses without their permission; plus not everyone who’s attended my courses is interested in our eco-culture project here, which is the main content. In the end the decision was made for me by a technical issue. The result of this is that I started with no subscribers; so to arrive at more than 330 in a year feels good. Thank you.

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‘In the Celtic Tree Calendar, this month is Apple month,’ I began this post, last week. Well, we’ve moved out of Apple and into Reed (Robert Graves), or in my own tree calendar Blackthorn, month. Most days, one way and another, however, we’ve been collecting, prepping or trying to find new ways to cook apples from both the Bramley orchard and the old orchard in the Home Meadow where the two dessert apple trees (the rest are cider apples) have given prolifically this year.

Appropriately for the apple connection between Samhain and the Blessed Isles of the West, the ‘Island of Apples’ of the Otherworld, we spent Samhain eve, the 31st, taking 100 kgs of windfalls to the mobile press, having collected them with the help of our friend Sam, who has himself borrowed our tiny home press to try his luck with some of our cider apples.

Via the water bath, the escalator, the crusher, the juice and pulp separator, the filter and then the heating to pasteurise the juice before packaging it, we now have 66 litres of the very best apple juice I’ve ever tasted, pressed mainly from cooking apples with about 1/7th dessert apples. (Unfortunately, it’s sealed in plastic pouches; we could find nowhere where we could use glass bottles, and I try very hard to avoid plastic products.)

Questions and doubts
There is a huge amount to do during harvest time on the land here, including foraging for a few mushrooms, an embarrassment of chestnuts (recipes in the next post), and many walnuts to dry. We’ve had a lot of rain, which has impeded much of our harvesting.

The last few weeks we’ve also been demotivated after the loss of our beloved young dog Bran. We were a tight family unit of two humans, two dogs (siblings). Our own actual human children, three between us, have grown and flown, and the dogs came with us to our new life here. There was a profound bond between us all – albeit non-verbal with the dogs (a relief, sometimes!), and the sudden loss of one of them has fractured something, and let in all the doubts and difficulties already lurking at the edges of our apparent paradise garden.

I won’t say ‘there’s always a serpent in paradise’, as the snake, so demonised in the Christian church, was and is a sacred symbol, connected with wisdom, to pagans (and was also symbolic of pagans and paganism, crushed by the heel of the Roman church). And it wouldn’t in any case be true: our garden here is idyllic and fruitful; it’s our perceptions that are off-key at the moment.

But…

What are we doing here? Is our organic vegan growing project that takes up so much of our time and lives really more than simply a way of feeding ourselves, while we tell ourselves we’re part of a global resilience network that is pioneering ethical and sustainable ways to live on and with the earth, as all the planetary crises seem to arrive at once and threaten more of the future? Does it have anything to offer to the local community? And – more pressing on a personal level – given that I’m burnt out and there is in any case much more to do here, ongoingly, than either TM or we both together possibly have time and energy for, what does this mean for our future?

So we are entering beautiful autumn – much mist, and some afternoons of that golden slant light below dark cloud that pierces the heart – distracted and somewhat down. Beautiful though parts of Finistère are, we also miss the soft and lovely Westcountry of the UK, my home forever and TM’s for the last 50 years; that, and the stone house that TM built. It doesn’t help that TM doesn’t speak a lot of French. On the positive side, we have no near neighbours (and our nearest ones in any case are good friends), we tend land that we couldn’t possibly have started to afford in the UK, and there is minimal traffic on the roads and the tranquillity of no noise.

Nonetheless, there are things here that, no longer in the wonderful ecosphere of the Forêt de Huelgoat which is where at a deep level I belong, we find hard. For instance, we live in the middle of an arable area, almost entirely maize for the vast and fast-growing indoor population of pigs, veal calves and poultry. As you will guess, my being vegan and very concerned about animal welfare and all the suffering humans cause them, not to mention the fact that we’re organic growers and these crops are probably genetically modified (most of the world’s corn is) and certainly heavily sprayed, this is a constant reminder of the things we most hate about modern industrial agriculture.

To the south and east of us, and to some extent the west, is woodland; a few acres of it go with our holding, and are forbidden to La Chasse. But la chasse, hunting, is an integral part of French rural culture, and despite the woodland belt into which no one enters except an occasional stray hound, I see fewer wild animals here than I did in Devon, though we do have an occasional pine marten and now and then we see a deer or two, and a rare hare. Recently the hunts in Finistère have been given permission to kill up to 5000 wild boar this winter (there are signs of boar occasionally, but 5000?). On Thursdays and Sundays in winter we don’t walk the dog on the footpaths through the valley because of the hunt. The only good thing one can say about it is that at least they mostly eat what they kill, unlike much of the hunting or shooting that takes place in the UK; and at least the animals or birds were free range and wild.

Nonetheless, despite all this, walking down our lane with the dog we remember that we do still live in paradise; and how many people can say that?

Samhain sunrise

And then, yesterday, I dragged TM off to the coast for his birthday. The sun came out and the beaches were almost empty.

And I was happy as I’d forgotten how to be this summer: these Atlantic beaches are (bigger) mirrors of the childhood ones to which I walked, cycled, or rode with my little half-wild native pony. TM cheered up, too; and the dog loved it. And we came back to a beetroot, chestnut and chocolate birthday cake: an experiment that worked very well.

That ‘being careful what you write about…’
In post 32 I wrote about our veganic growing, and part of our not keeping animals being about feeling I couldn’t take on any more animal care, as a result of the stress of too many years of breaking my heart over sick or dying animals (not to mention humans). Just days after I wrote that post, our dog Bran became suddenly and seriously very ill. I’ve written about that since, so I won’t go there now, except to say it was of course another heartbreak.

And then just last week I also needed to help my friend and nearest neighbour deal with an incidence of fly strike in her two sheep. Oddly, they were a pair of little black sheep – just as in the photo at the top of post 32; the only difference being that where those two were Hebridean lambs, these two are their cousins: little black Ouessant sheep, from the island off Finistère known as Ushant in English.

They are not my sheep. But still, I had a(nother) sleepless night: anxiety a) about their welfare, as fly strike can be truly nasty (the maggots hatched from blowfly eggs can burrow into and eat the sheep’s flesh, especially around the backside), and b) about the fact that we would have to use heavy-duty chemicals to kill them. In the days when I was an investigative journalist I wrote about the terrible impact on animals, the humans who administered these mandatory chemicals, and the environment of organophosphates (nerve gas) and organochlorines commonly used, at least previously, against warble fly and bot in cattle, and in sheep dips. I decided not to look up the chemicals in current use. But I find I can’t cope any more with such ethical dilemmas: suffering, and possibly seriously ill, sheep against the use of toxic chemicals? Lose-lose situation.

But always the birds
… cheer me up. A pair of swans has joined the single one on the lake. And it’s flocking time of year: starlings, fieldfare and redwing in the meadows and berry trees; jackdaws, pigeons and rooks on the ploughed maize fields. On the coast we walked round a headland at the very low spring tide to another empty-of-humans beach that was clearly Gullsville. Either side of the vast numbers of various gulls were two large flocks of what I imagine must be sanderlings (I couldn’t get close enough to see). This; at least this.

Thank you for reading these ramblings. In the next post, I want to take a look at veganism and the many aspects of our current crises it addresses. I know some of you reading this blog are already vegan; I know some of you are interested, if hesitant; and I know some of you would like to give it a go but don’t know where to start, or fear it’ll be tasteless or not sufficiently nutritious. Others of you may be firm omnivores. Whatever your preferences, I’ll offer you some of the recipes I’ve been developing in relation to the many sweet chestnuts that I’ve been collecting and shelling the last few weeks.