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Cooperation is the key to so much

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

Well, that’s done. A dangerous month, October; scary too.
The gilded gods awoke from summer slumbers in capricious temper, moving their furniture and throwing bolts between sunbeams. Walnuts rained down from the shaken trees and I popped some in my back pocket on damp dog walks, forgetting about them until I sat down.
Between torrents we took a nightfall stroll to the recently silent ravine and bone-dry swimming hole to hear the roar of the river and peer through the gloom at three delirious ducks. The summits of pink meringue storm clouds loomed once more from the east, the lightning flashed again and so we turned for home, hearing wild boar in the hazel shadows beside the puddled track.
I did the rounds of the animals, and in the quagmire of the chicken-run a rock had appeared. I skidded to avoid it and it lumbered away; a juggernaut toad.
Warmth and water – the first moisture since May – have transformed the parchment map of Iberia. Grass has grown several inches and the swelling olives weigh the boughs towards the sward a little more each day.
I have been flitting between farm and mill, my head clogged with the challenges or looming olive harvest, wine making and the battening down of hatches, but more so with family revelations from the past.
First, though, I promised last month to tell of our commitment to that vital creation, the “modern” cooperative and its inherent principle of pulling together and sharing, adopted in villages across these mountains a century ago where communities are now fighting to survive through the chaos of the pan-European recession. The village cooperative we belong to consists of about 40 families.

Cooperative is a word – an ethos, a way of life – rising rapidly in the public conscience even in the hot-house capitalist nations like my native United Kingdom, now the dusty, dated throne room of Thatcherism. Thank goodness.
Before this turns into an essay of angst about gross greed and excess, and the betrayal of core values not least the family, fundamental reasons for the current crisis both economic and social, I should look to the positive.
Cooperatives and the growth of social enterprises are showing they can help bring the vital reform of economics, globalization, and social justice. As John Restakis states in his book Humanizing The Economy – Co-operatives in the Age of Capital, the co-operatives form the most powerful grassroots movement in the world.
The cooperative is as vital here in the Priorat mountains, as anywhere in the world, historically so.
Curious, too, how it now swells with importance in Britain where there are housing initiatives and an increasing number of social enterprise endeavours, while on the high street The Cooperative, now a burgeoning bank too, grows in significance, alongside the largest employee-owned company in the UK, the John Lewis Partnership.
Maybe in this age of social re-evaluation the principals set out in 1844 by the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society will come to the fore a host of community ways, encapsulating as we have experienced here first hand a wonderful foundation for bringing people together.
I fear, though, that this UN International Year of Cooperatives, the championing of a society-saving idea, may have been lost amid the crush of bleak news. Did you know, for example, that there are more than 800 million members of cooperatives worldwide, providing more than 100 million jobs (20 per cent more than multinational “big” business)?
Asha-Rose Migiro, the Deputy Secretary-General, made the point. As the world witnesses growing public discontent as a result of the financial and economic crises, she made plain how the international community could learn from the cooperative movement, which balanced both economic viability and social responsibility, “offering a model for harnessing the energies and passions of all.”
“As self-help organisations, cooperatives are inherently people-centred. They not only meet material needs, but also the human need to participate proactively in improving one’s life.”
With the olive harvest just a few weeks away we are trying to tidy our lives. The great sunflower heads and crate-loads of nuts had been gathered and the wood store was half-filled before the deluge. In the farmhouse there has been a significant culinary development. Quico (Keeko) has finally left the building, replaced by Italian Guido.
For many a moon we have aspired to a new cooker. Maggie produced feasts on 45-year-old Quico, but both he and we knew his time was up. Getting him to light required me to kneel and beg with my head in the oven, the door to which (when he decided to play ball) never closed properly so had to be propped with something heavy. Now we are able to check our appearance in the reflection from the spotless stainless steel of a Smeg semi-industrial range. Blimey.
Notice I didn’t say Quico had gone completely. I was for a swift end, but compassionate Maggie thought he might be useful (the gas rings at least) for farm helpers residing in the old caravan, besides which he now stands. I am glad.

So to my abiding thoughts of East Anglia.
Beside me there is a box that we carried with us from Aldborough in Norfolk 12 years ago. Inside there is a small oil painting of a Suffolk glade with shepherds sitting on a log. I blew the dust off it to show two artists who were staying in our cottage and I have since been unearthing a little more of its story and, to my surprise, more of my family’s history.
But the fundamental mystery remains – who painted it?
It was gifted to my great-grandmother, Sarah Baker, in the 1880s when, as a young girl, she allowed an unknown artist to paint her portrait. She had been raised on a farm somewhere between Rushmere St Andrew and Woodbridge in Suffolk.
Sarah probably took it to London when she married a Devon shoemaker called Huxtable who ran a little shop in Peckham. They had a son and two daughters, but at the beginning of the twentieth century both father and son died of consumption in the same year, so Sarah and her daughters returned to Suffolk.
One of the daughters, Ellen, married a Tom Kirby in Woodbridge, where they settled and had a baby, my father. So what is the Norfolk connection?
Sarah had remarried and had another daughter. The marriage was, to put it bluntly, a disaster, so much so that my grandfather Tom deemed it necessary to give up everything and whisk his wife and newborn son, his mother-in-law and her daughter away in secret to distant Holt in north Norfolk, to start again, renting a council house, 4 The Fairstead, for £1 10s a fortnight.
There were further great ructions and estrangements that I will not bore you with, but in searching for any records about the painting I have unearthed from the bottom of one of the old leather cases of family records some faded postcards that have enabled me to chart the subsequent life of my great-grandmother Sarah and, possibly, the painting.
Her daughter from the failed married, Winnie, later ran the restaurant on Wymondham railway station. She and Sarah lived nearby, then moved to Norwich, and during the second world war and until Sarah’s death were at 60 Heigham Street, a stone’s throw from the first house I bought. Countless times had I sat in a traffic queue waiting for the Dereham Road lights to change, staring at that terrace, and I never knew. How much more do I still not know?
Keep well.
Next month – One of Ella and Joe’s teachers is to speak at a meeting in England.

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Tags: Bulk olive oil, catalonia, cooperatives, extra virgin olive oil, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden

Indelible days and the deep truths of life

Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

What a Mother’s Garden month – scorpions, Royal yachts, hoopoes at the door, underwater wonder-world, and Alaska stories of a boyhood adventure that would grace a great novel.
The domes of the fig trees framed by our bedroom window and cast with the first blush of morning, stir in the stillness. Long-tailed tits, collared doves, sparrows and a raucous magpie feed on the fruit, while on the ground a bold pair of hoopoes strut about pecking at the debris.

These weeks of ripening teem with life and colour and more subtle hints of the seasonal cycle. The wheelbarrow handles are still too hot to touch if left out in the sun yet pony Petita’s winter coat is already half-grown. The soft nights persist and we continue to sleep with windows wide, but on daybreak-dog-walks Kirby diligently forages for logs, kindling and cones.
Stuart Dallas and James Proctor, now at Aberystwyth and Canterbury universities respectively, have been for their fourth summer sojourn on the farm, flailing axes at stubborn logs, chugging about on the tractor, stacking old bricks and catching up with all the news.

We gave them a day off and set off for the sea, to a secret cove, and the youngsters immediately went in search of sea cucumbers and other aquatic wonders. Stuart, with his mop of black hair like a young adventurer in an Enid Blyton novel, took underwater photographs of Ella and Joe in the deep blue, then we picnicked and talked of the Famous Five and W E Johns’ Biggles until ants invaded the food basket. I told them how in May we welcomed to the farm the grandson of the pilot on whom the Biggles’ character was based.

When we took our Norfolk helpers to the airport there was time for a detour, so I headed for the old docks of Tarragona on the off-chance of seeing a classic yacht or two. Goodness me. Nestling against the quay was Nahlin, the Clyde-built, 1930 blend of luxury (six guest staterooms with en-suite bathrooms, a special ladies’ sitting room, a gym and a library) and notoriety, now restored to the beauty of the days she sailed the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean with King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson aboard.
Just a month into his reign in 1936 the new monarch announced he was going to set sail for the summer on the Nahlin with Mrs Simpson – a voyage that abandoned protocol and on which Edward most certainly weighed the abandonment of the crown to marry his American mistress. That December he abdicated.
James and Stuart missed the scorpions, though. After 11 years without a sighting on the farm, two have appeared in a matter of days.
The first was seen crossing the lane on to our parched meadow. The second, dead as a Monty Python parrot, was floating in the spring water when I descended the shaft to check on the level. As far as I can tell it is a Buthus occitanus or common yellow scorpion. What next I wonder.

Now for tales stranger than fiction.
I told last month of Maria Soler Benages and Joan Barceló Castellvi who lived and farmed here for 40 years, and of the joy of gleaning seeds of the past. It is hard to believe what we have since learned of the man who built the end tower of this house, who blasted with dynamite to create the great water reservoir and who had a devoted pet pig called Chucha he’d fattened but couldn’t bear to slaughter.
He was, I fairly assumed, a village-born lad (correct) who had followed the typical rural path into agriculture, happy with the horizons of the sierras and with little knowledge of what lay beyond. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Before I tell you, can I say that the revelations, told to us by his grandson, have rekindled an aspiration. Both back home in Norfolk and equally here in this Latin backwater I harbour a hope. Maybe one or more of you share it and, somehow, a lasting and inspiring solution can be found.

Throughout life we encounter people but we rarely have the time to understand them or to appreciate their lives. Is it not so? The light in their eyes shines all the brighter in their frailty, in the Indian summer of reflections, yet frequently we don’t delve and all too soon they leave us. How I wish I had asked.
New generations surge, riding vast waves of technology that seem, with all the focus on communication, to curtail conversation, social contact, recognition and respect between young and old. The immediate and transient is drowning out enduring wisdoms and fascinations. Life journeys and the hearing of them have little value until it is too late.
Gentle, rosy-cheeked broad-Norfolk Reggie would wander into our former village garden and we would pass the time of day across the teapot. As we sat Geoffrey might shuffle determinedly past en route to the community centre, a man dedicated to public service and deemed a tad too officious because of it. They were anchored in that community and the simple assumptions of their character and accomplishments stemmed from what was obvious. They had lived rooted, rural lives and were notes in the vital rhythm of quiet Norfolk.
How humbling to hear, subsequently, of Reg’s time as the master builder entrusted with the care and endless upkeep of Norwich Cathedral, and of Geoffrey’s bravery and endurance as a Chindit, fighting behind Japanese lines in the unforgiving jungles of Burma.
My idea is simple. I call it The Life Chronicles, and it is something we can entrust to the young people across the United Kingdom and these valleys. For a small sum we can give young people in the last years of schooling, in those days and weeks after exams and before summer holidays, the guidance and the fulfilment of asking, listening to and recording life stories.
For example; one school, one camera, ten lives recorded annually, 15 minutes each; a digital almanac to be held by the library service; hundreds of lives each year, thousands in a decade; a simple, fascinating communication between generations; an invaluable record.

Back to Joan Barceló Castellvi. He was a fiery boy, by all accounts, and his conflict with the village teacher came to a head when he was nine, circa 1895. He ambushed the schoolmaster and pelted him with eggs.
His parents sent him to Barcelona to work in a bakery. He stuck to the task for a year and then vanished. Nothing was heard of him for 15 years. Joan had headed north on foot and, working here and there to earn scraps, he walked for two years until he reached Marseilles. He joined a ship and sailed the world, and within a few years was a seaman on the US Coast Guard Cutter The Rush, patrolling the Bering Sea off Alaska.
He visited his family here, told of his adventurers, brought them gifts, then returned to Barcelona, set on continuing his life in America. As we waited for the ship, he met and fell in love with Maria. The ship sailed without him.

So, how can we begin the English and Catalan – global even – life chronicles? Think on, where ever in the world you may be.
Keep well.

Oh – a thought. Do you know anyone who might be interested in my blog? Send them the link – http://mothersgarden.org/blog-2.

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Tags: catalonia, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden, spain, wildlife

When the past comes to life

Monday, August 27th, 2012

I’m not easily stunned these days, by fiesta firecrackers at my feet, by a snake curled in the flower tub beside the front door, by the blunderbuss volleys of mountain thunderstorms.
But Josep Sancho Barceló and his cousin Dolors have brought an enduring bewilderment to our home in the echoing valleys of The Priorat.
We, like you perhaps, grow increasingly sensitive to history: maybe because we will be history too, one day. Whatever the workings of the mind, living somewhere with mysteries (which means everywhere, naturally, but especially in antiquated abodes), makes me wonder at length about context, legacy and if life ever really ends if we try to remember.

Who laid those dry-stone walls? Who lived here? Who washed their clothes in the pool and scrubbed them on the angled stones outside my office window? The pieces of the impossible puzzle that is Mother’s Garden, a vast jigsaw of timelines and souls, lies scattered in the conscience.
Like all ancient houses that have no wealth of records, all you possess are local histories handed down, worn stairs, old keys and your imaginings. It is not much to go on. Now, as I write and stare, I know that the swathe of limestone skyline that fills the window beyond my computer had once held the eye of Maria Soler Benages as she washed dishes in the old stone sink. And I can see her face.
First, though, let me take you back to our first fleeting understandings of how life must have been for the last people for whom this gorgeous space was home before it was abandoned in the Sixties. We acquired the farmhouse and overgrown acres in 2000 from a family who had made the building weatherproof but had never lived in it. They had bought the derelict farm in the late 1980s as a place to spend a day or a weekend away from their bustling lives in Tarragona, capital of the Costa Daurada.
They did enough, thank goodness, to arrest the decay, re-roofing the house and barn, restoring a basic water supply and septic, and re-establising a kitchen of sorts. And along with the vast front door key they passed on to us photographs of how it had been when they had first encountered it – long forsaken with ceilings open to the skies and yawning, rotten doors that led to evidence of spirits, entombed in cobwebs.
Everywhere across these valleys there are the sorrowful faces of vast stone farmhouses where, through broken windows, you can see how time and weather have torn the heart out of them. Some have not been inhabited since the bloodletting during the 1936-39 civil war. Like the great wherries sailed by the Broads water folk, they are the vestiges of a lost existence, the guardians and vessels of life stories and experiences that we race away from with ever increasing velocity. If only dwellings could speak to us.
That would have been Mother’s Garden fate, but for Enric and Nuria from Tarragona. They gave the farmhouse new life and then gifted us the chance to live somewhere exceptional and habitable, with the golden opportunity to leave our mark with further restorations. As for the echoes, we have gleaned stories but nothing so certain and so moving as what we have learned in recent days. Josep from Barcelona and Dolors from Andorra, now in the seventies, arrived arm-in-arm in 95 degrees of Saturday morning haze, their smiling eyes blinking with emotion and, perhaps, apprehension as to how the foreign owners of a key landmark in their lives would welcome them.
We were racing to get the cottage ready for new guests and it took a moment for the significance of their visit to dawn. Within the hour an astonishing chapter in the story of our home was unfolding, and after a flurry of Facebook and email exchanges we now have precious photographs of Josep and Dolors’ grandparents who farmed here for 40 years from the 1920s – Maria Soler Benages and Joan Barceló Castellvi, pictured with their dog in front of the barn. The quiet emotion we feel as a consequence of this very personal insight can be measured by the degree to which this place has drawn the smiles, tears, blood and sweat from us, how it enraptures still.
The gleaning goes on, but we know now that Joan, born in the village, married Maria from Badalona, near Barcelona, and they settled on the farm and raised two daughters, Maria and Juanita. One of their first endeavours was to build the bassa, the vast circular reservoir behind the house, where so many of the villager’s pensioners recall swimming when they were young. During the collapse of the republic and Franco’s Fascist retributions the family took refuge in the village convent and stayed there for six years, Joan labouring on farms to earn just enough to keep that other wolf, hunger, from the door.
Eventually they were able to return to their own land and in the subsequent decades an assortment of snaps of family gatherings were taken here, featuring Josep and Dolors as toddlers gathering armfuls of wonderful memories that they have clearly treasured all their lives.
Maria and Joan are pictured above, sitting outside the barn, next to a painting of the farmhouse from all those years ago, painted by their son- in- law we understand, with the vast pergola that was destroyed during a violent storm. How good to have this image of them.
As I write, I keep flitting to my email to see if either of the cousins can tell us what happened at the end of their grandparents’ time here, how the house fell into ruin, and to ask where they are buried so we may go and pay our respects. For sure I will have more to impart in September.

Meanwhile we pant. The final weeks of August, among the busiest of the year for us, have been the hottest and toughest we have know in 11 summers, with daily temperatures in the high 90 degrees Fahrenheit, night discomfort at circa 75 degrees and wildfire fears off the scale. A week ago it was still 93 degrees at 9.30pm.
Thank goodness it is never knee-bucklingly humid here. The regular stillness, locked with heat, drowns out the world as loudly as the whisper of an occasional airing-cupboard breeze through fig and iris leaves. Like the hour hand of a clock, this unremitting Mediterranean summer advances imperceptibly towards September and the easing of the baking bonds, as the sunflowers symbolically hang their heads, glory finally gone.
Do you recall the many close scrapes of our Norfolk springers Charlie and Megan? Well, their equally mad pocket-rocket replacements Tilly and Ted also keep hauling me out into the midday sun to search for them through hazel groves, vineyards and woodland. You would think, given the temperatures, they would have more sense. You would think I would too, but like the hapless owner of Fenton, the Richmond Park deer chasing Labrador whose disgrace has been witnessed by millions on YouTube, I can never stand idly by. He has my deepest sympathy.

Time to go. One last, important footnote. We are members of a 95-year-old farming cooperative, and have been working with the little village mill for seven years. As the world marks the Year of Cooperatives I will tell you next month why we think this movement of cooperation is so important – here, in Norfolk, across the globe. And we are very happy and proud to say that our olive oil has just won another gold star in the UK Great Taste Awards. Keep well.

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Tags: catalonia, extra virgin olive oil, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden, spain

Wet eyes and dry earth

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Life flows and ebbs. It is a summer when life at Mother’s Garden has spun from the fast flowing stream of existence into a pool of deep reflection, with vital and sad reasons to weigh the days.
There is a sense that it is a time of change, upon us and still to come.
First, let me tell you about our dog Blanca; ours for no more than six weeks. It is a sad story tinged with guilt.
Blanca panted up our drive early in June having managed to free herself from a neighbouring farm. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the last.
For nearly two years we heard her bark, sometimes for great lumps of time through the still night air, and on several occasions she escaped and made her way to Mother’s Garden, sending our dogs into a frenzy. We challenged the farm owner over her care – she was contained within a derelict 50 metre building – and he affably explained that although he was looking after her for the friend of one of his children he loved her and assured us she was well fed and watered. He pledged to change her location, but we later discovered this was merely to chain her to a wall with only a crude shelter of old feed sacks as a refuge from sun and rain.
Somehow she freed herself again. This affectionate brindle boxer, called “White” because of her four white feet, arrived painfully thin, her encrusted eyes besieged with flies. The smiling farmer followed her up our track several days later with a leash in his hand. We sent him packing.
Our vet came and immediately judged Blanca was suffering from acute anaemia and canine leishmaniasis, a blood parasite disease transmitted from sand fly or mosquito bites, with the consequence of a host of health problems, not least renal failure. This can be treatable but is incurable. But, given the evidence of her skin ulcers and severe weight loss, it was possible Blanca’s kidneys were already too damaged to save her.
While we waiting for the results of the blood test we treated Blanca’s anaemia and she rallied, craving attention, playing ball with the children and making her peace with our three dogs. For several weeks we dared to believe she would pull through. But no.
Her kidneys failed, the reignited light in her eyes dimmed, she stopped eating and drinking and the vet returned to end the suffering. Wiping away tears, we buried her in the middle of a terrace near the top of the farm where we hope to plant more olive trees one day. It will be known as Blanca’s Grove. If only we had allowed Blanca to stay the first time she came to us.

While the rains fall and fall on northern Europe we look to the clear skies, our feet on parched earth. The dryness is not extraordinary this time of year, but it is never easy, and we are starting to hear stories of rural houses in other areas where wells are running dry. Not so here, thank goodness, for our little valley is more verdant, with subterranean water courses bring life from as far as the melting snows of the Pyrenees. All the time, effort and great cost in excavating our ancient spring has proved this.
Just five metres down water bubbles from the rock at the rate of 2000 litres an hour. Not that everything has gone quite according to plan. The overall rate of flow must have diminished a little during this arid season, because the level is a centimetre lower than the buried pipe running down to our reservoir, so while an interim mains-fed pump purrs away and water gushes I am exploring the options for a little solar pump to keep things flowing independently during dry spells. It will be a small but significant step along our road to self-sufficiency. Should a current writing project bear the fruit we hope it will in 2013 and 2014, then solar panels for house energy will be firmly on the agenda to add to our existing hot water panels.
We will prevail: How far we have come since I crawled along the tunnel into the spring cave and first contemplated life without the constant gift of the spring. As well as Zeppelin courgettes at the heart of our lush garden we also have skyscraper sunflowers as a consequence of this return of moisture.

Maggie continues with her art forms – ceaseless, caring labours of provision that cast such wondrous natural patterns and colours. The beauty of her flower essences, in this case pomegranate,pictured above, is no accident. She lays the blooms and leaves on the spring water with such consideration as to create a magical circle that deserves to be, and will be, a picture on a wall.
Meanwhile, the bottles of dreamy elderflower cordial wait in line on the kitchen table, while the pan is cleaned in readiness for the bubbling scent of plum jam to fill the room. Goodness abounds all around right now, with golden oriels forgetting their timidity to feast with the rest of us on the ripe figs that weigh branches to ground beside the house.
Such things help take the mind off the economic storm clouds that crowd the horizon. Here in Spain prospects continue to spiral downward, and it is hardly surprising. Recently there was one particularly bleak day when the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, still bearing his expression of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a German juggernaut, reneged on a pledge and shoved VAT rates up to 21 per cent.
You will no doubt be aware that he is aiming to save 65bn Euros (£51bn) as part of a deal with Eurozone leaders (bossed by Merkel) to help rescue Spain’s banks. Eurozone finance ministers have agreed to provide 30bn Euros (£24bn) for Spain’s troubled banks by the end of the month and to give Madrid an extra year – until 2014 – to hit its budget targets.
In another round of austerity measures Rajoy announced higher taxes and cuts to unemployment benefits, union pay, and civil service perks. It was clearly not his hymn sheet, because tax rises were a measure his government had previously argued against amid concerns that it would deepen Spain’s recession by stifling consumer spending. Er, Yes. As the BBC’s Europe editor Gavin Hewitt succinctly put it “The measures will test further the patience of the Spanish people – pledges only recently made have been broken”.
Thank goodness, then, it is the season to sit out on the street in the cool of an evening, away from the incessant TV news of financial meltdown, and to talk of life within reason – the impending fiestas, the gathering of families in the villages for the holiday season. The public swimming pools in every village sparkle with laughter. Elders, mostly women, sit under the trees watching over the little ones. They have known of far far worse times and their heartbeats are steady, their doors and arms always open to family and friends. Older children wander home in twos or threes for lunch with wet hair, towels over their shoulders, to return for more frolics after sustenance and siesta.

As I write, Joe Joe is there at the pool, having stayed overnight at the home of his friend Joan, pronounced Jo-an.
It is a summer of special significance for our son.
His primary school’s farewell concert featured many special moments, not least a moving sequence of photographs featuring each of his peer group, who are all moving on to high school in September, sitting on the school stairs or floor reading to a much younger child, passing on the joy of literature.
And the school witnessed something else, equally uplifting. Joe Joe and two school friends, Josep and Arnau, all members of La Corranda dance troupe, performed a mesmerising, gravity defying, tambourine rhythm dance in the school plaça that brought the crowd to its feet.
The boys repeated it a day later, down on the quayside in Tarragona harbour, where region-wide dance companies had gathered and where the priceless moment was crowned with applause that rolled across the water to a vast 315ft super yacht. Apparently it cost £100m to build and is owned by someone with a fortune of about £6billion. But that only makes him the 81st richest person in the world.

Almost time to sign off. One last thing.
With Maggie away for a few days and Joe on another sleepover, Ella and I decided to dodge the catering dilemma and (once all the animals were tucked up) to spin down to the sea at dusk to seek out a Chinese restaurant. Halfway down the mountain I remembered where there was one, near to our favourite, Cuban beach bar, just across the road from the sand and wide promenade. People were out in number, as usual, drifting along in gentle conversation, or cycling, or just sitting and savouring the magical twilight as the darkening sea flickered with the reflections of distant lights across the bay.
When we parked we noticed about 30 senior citizens had gathered along a curve in the low wall that mirrored the great canopy of a pine tree mushrooming from the prom.
We sat on the restaurant terrace, enjoying our meal, amused by the effect of a parked 1950s split screen Volkswagen camper van on most of the men, me included. Then Ella pointed out the group of pensioners under the tree.
They were line dancing, which seemed from where I was sitting to be, entertainingly, to the accompaniment of the Chinese music wafting through the restaurant.
After our meal we crossed the road and I sat on the wall close to them while Ella went to paddle in the ink of the night sea. Promenaders of all ages slowed to watch the dancers, and more than a few, young and young at heart, began to swing their hips, some slipping off their shoes to share in the happiness. I didn’t need to move to do that.
Oh – our August shipment of newly bottled, fresh olive oil is now in the UK, in readiness for summer salads, as I promised to let some of you know. May the sun shine on you all and the Olympics. Keep well.

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Tags: extra virgin olive oil, flower essences, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden, spain, wild flowers

Meltdown? Well it’s getting hot

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

June, like the continent of Europe, huffs and puffs, blowing buckets and bags like tumble weed across red earth patterned with the dancing shadows of fig leaves. Temperatures nudge towards 34 degrees Centigrade (93 in real money, if you deal in Fahrenheit like me, like the older Spaniards who still value things in Pesetas) and the dogs and frogs wake us up every night.
It is as if nature is shaking Spain and other economies, the UK included, from the daydream of blind excess, of living far beyond means.
The question often comes – how bad is it, living in (as the UK media paints it) such a desperate nation? Spain is, after all, the test tube of the moment in an explosive Europe.
I will tell you, from the perspective of our privileged remoteness.
You know, of course, that Mother’s Garden is in tiny, relatively closed, mountain county of one small town and 22 villages. So you will appreciate, too, that roots here are deep, like those of the vines, and there is a simple rhythm to all things, centred on family and the great outdoors, that resists the prods to race with the winds of innovation and accumulation. That is true of great swathes of this spacious nation, more than twice the size of the UK with only three quarters of the population.
With that caveat I say this: Despite the depression and the camps and protests in major cities, I truly sense the Catalans and the Spanish in general are living with a level of pain and dire long term economic prognosis that might tip the scales in other nations. There is deep anger. There is a movement for change – the youth-powered “los indignados” (the indignant) – that has yet to galvanise a critical mass but still might. But there isn’t a sense of widespread desperation that shortens fuses to a perilous degree. There isn’t within the scope of my radar that anxiety, even fear, about social fracture, that brittleness I feel sometimes in Britain.
That may come. In the bank there is a booklet of properties for sale – all repossessions. Fuel and electricity prices are climbing, education and health budgets have been slashed, and the unemployment rate among young people is now 50 per cent. As in every community across the continent, there is bafflement over the financial detail of the fiasco, but a shrewd idea of the root cause, and disillusionment with the career politicians and their Wallace and Gromit grins while they try to wallpaper over the word written large – GREED.
In the bread shop the baker smiles, as always, and lists to the assembled the vital things in life that do not have a price. It is the general philosophy here in the Latin mountains, where far greater hardships are within living memory and where the rock-bed of family is the foundation of all. The older generation has to a great extent resisted the pandemic of consumerism and they continue to bumble about in the old Renault 4s, between the wealth of their vegetable gardens, chicken nesting boxes and their simple homes.
For their children, with families of their own now, smarter cars, flat screen televisions and mortgages, the worries are there for sure, but they still live close to home and they have the security of community, finding invaluable comfort in it. The talk in the bar is not so much whether the Euro will survive – it has to – or how deep the austerity will be, but humour and the common conversations of friendship and family (and football).
Push the economic topic and they will shrug with resignation rather than revolution. The facts are as obvious here as anywhere. The obscene feasting at the top table of the world economy had blinded the gross bürgermeisters as to how far they could push consumerism and load many people in the “wealthier” nations with debt and, inevitably, gross stress and anxiety.
The comment has been made that while a few have lived like kings the majority have been made to feel like idiots.
Another friend, who is helping us replace the kilometre long phone line to the farmhouse, shouts with a wicked laugh from the top of a ladder that the Spanish are bandits who will never conform.
“We are different,” he says. “They have to remember that. We live our lives how we choose not how they tell us.”
His childhood puts the current so called crisis in perspective. In 1970, when he was 14, Fascist dictator Franco was still in power and the Catalan language had been banned and culture stamped on for more than three decades. The economy was feebly trying to find its feet. That year there was a knock on the door and his father, a critic of the regime, was taken away and never seen again. For years his mother went on a fruitless nationwide search for his body.
So while Rajoy, Merkel and others stumble about in the rising heat trying to save the Euro and their skins before going home to their well-watered gardens, the proletariat are hung out to dry. If it wasn’t so painful it could all the makings of a cheesy television drama. Maybe it will one day.
Someone we know in England has lost her job. She went home, locked the door and ploughed through several bars of chocolate while watching countless episodes of The Waltons.
Where is there comfort in witnessing an American family living through the Great Depression in the 1930s? You would be surprised.
We have just bought the first 50 episodes on two DVDs. The benefits are threefold. First, both Maggie and I happily remember being addicted as children to The Waltons when it first ran in the early 1970s. It was a Sunday evening treat in our separate households and millions of others no doubt. Second, it has triggered the same rhythm with our family now, with us all curling up together on the sofa to be transported to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Third, it may be syrup-ly sentimental, but there is something uplifting about the gentle glow of a strong family living simply and happily through meagre times rather than the incessant radiation from the modern furnace of materialism.
You probably know this already, but for the record the Waltons, about a couple with their seven barefoot children and the two glorious grandparents, ran for nine seasons – totally 221 episodes.
John Boy, the eldest child, tells of the challenges and traumas of that time, all overcome through the fortitude of unity, and there is much truth in it. The creator of The Waltons, writer Earl Hammer, drew from his upbringing in Virginia during those dark days, and it is his voice you hear in reflection at the end of each episode.
The worth is in the sentiment. Drawing water from the deep well of our elders who have known of worst times and know in equal measure how to live through them is what counts now. Here at least.
Let’s move on, up the track to the top of the farm to near the power line where the whistling bee eaters gather en masse as sunset; yes, bee eaters like the one that created a stir last month when it was spotted in Norfolk close to where I grew up.

The stone plopped with baritone depth. An echo of water-wealth barrelled up to our faces peering down into new opening to our spring. A life force has returned to Mother’s Garden.
We are not brimming with glee quite yet, but after weeks of hard labour and wonder at old wisdom we are flowing again, at the rate of about 500 litres an hour. When we have replaced the ages-old clay pipe that runs across the farm, part clogged with silt and roots, we expect this will rise to 1000 litres and the bill to nudge far beyond €5000. Ouch. But what choice? Water is life, and we have done enough, we hope, for the benefit to run through many generations.
In May I told of our hair-pulling anxiety after the spring ran dry, of a narrow shaft, tiny tunnel and blocked cave, of what looked like an insurmountable problem beneath this land. I went down there about ten times in total, on the last occasion curtailing a meeting in the cave when a very brave local expert was trying to explain to me how he would clear by hand the great mound of debris stemming the flow.
No way, I said, reversing out. The roof had collapsed once and could do so again. There was no option but to get a digger and excavate the whole area.
So we did, in dramatic style, with a JCB digger clawing away earth and rock, to a depth of 5 metres. First the cave appeared, then the tunnel. It dried my throat to see what little force it took to break the earth’s resistance.
My Dad, who died in March, knew well enough the value of water and would be content to know his legacy paid for the work. For two years he drove a water truck across the parched landscape of North Africa, being shelled and strafed as he searched alone for clean wells on his relentless mission to help quench an Army’s thirst. His part in Hitler’s downfall concerned the thing that some say future wars will be fought over.
There has been one disappointment, however. I said last month that at the back of the cave there appeared to be a man-made arch of rocks. No so. It was the edge of a great seam of sandstone patterned with surprisingly regular faults. There was no hoped for revelation. But what remains amazing is how, an age ago, someone had burrowed their way to the exact source of our spring.
Once the digger had done the heavy work we laboured with spades until water bubbled up from the ground beneath us. We were spot on. Our friend Antonio said we were most fortunate. How wise and kind our guide, the spirit of the tunneller.
The happiness is not ours alone. The well-watered vegetable garden shines with growth. In the old wash pool outside my office window the resident male Iberian green frog proclaims his contentment day and night. What a racket. There is at least one female in there too, but any tadpoles are going to find it tough given the appetite of any fish that survive the visits of the kingfisher. Oh the circle of life.
The frog, meanwhile, takes rides on the floating polystyrene seed tray, nudged along by one or two goldfish. Hand on heart, I have seen this several times now.

Must go – but two important oil footnotes. Sales of our fresh olive oil are climbing and we have just shipped another 500 litres to the UK, so if anyone would like some get in touch via our contact page. Second, our online shop has had a wobble which we are trying to fix. Sincere apologies to anyone frustrated by this.
Keep well.

Posted in Bulk olive oil, Fresh olive oil, living abroad, spain, Uncategorized | 1 Response »
Tags: catalonia, Euro crisis, extra virgin olive oil, living abroad, mother's garden, spain, Spain economy

Walls imbued with happiness and song

Monday, May 28th, 2012

Do you sense that walls are a store of echoes? Moments arrive and never really leave. Places seem to absorb the good and the grim and then hold them, emitting the essence of happenings.
I am acutely aware of this on entering an old building. Maybe you are too. Perhaps it is simply imaginings, but that first feeling rarely passes. The Mother’s Garden farmhouse enveloped us with welcome the first time we brushed aside cobwebs and opened the shutters to let in the light, and the happiness and goodness are still as warming and rich today as that first illumination.
Down the track, next to the wild flower meadow, people have carried laughter and contentment into our holiday cottage, and now there is song too. The abandoned water reservoir beside the pool, reconstituted with stout roof and glass doors as a dry space for good things, is flooded with tuneful voices forever more.
Fourteen people had come to Sing Away with teacher Teresa Verney, in a week jewelled with fulfilment and fellowship, swallowtail butterflies and glorious surprises.
Towards the end of last year I told of our and Teresa’s plans – inspired by our mutual friend the Jane Stevenson of Creature Comforters for whom Maggie makes some Bach flower remedies – to somehow combine Teresa’s great accomplishments with her Sing For Joy groups in Norfolk, England, with the happiness of here, and so it came to pass. Within days of the activity holiday idea being aired it was fully booked and our handwringing began. Would it work?
At the end of the seven days the assembled had gifted their echo and also sung spontaneously upon mountain tops, in a wine cellar, a church, a Syrian restaurant and in the former home and garden of a famous sculptor that’s now a sanctuary for the rare Mediterranean tortoise. Proof positive of the joy that can come of finding your voice, sharing, learning, eating, talking, drinking and laughing long and loud: Add to that taking long works, bird watching, standing and staring and scenting your hands by running them through herbs.
As for those glorious surprises, well, what can I say? Jim and Sarah Woodhouse, who live within the scent of the North Sea close to where I free-ranged as a child, are close friends of my godfather John Bell, the link being Lancing College, West Sussex, where Jim was headmaster and John was a master for 32 years. John had lodged with my parents at the start of his teaching career at 53 years ago. Then we discovered that Sarah is the founder of a charity we wholeheartedly endorse – it is called Right From The Start – which is committed to underlining the need for a loving and secure environment for children at the earliest stages of their lives and so create a similar core benefit within families and communities. How fundamental is that? Please have a look at the Right From The Start website.
I was just absorbing all of that when it emerged in coffee-break conversation that violinist Sarah Chadwick, who both sang and played at Mother’s Garden, is connected to two people I have the highest regard for.
Sarah is the niece of the late Roy Clark, author of the definitive Black Sailed Traders (1961) and one of the small group of leading local figures including Lady Mayhew and Humphrey Boardman who worked tirelessly to the save Albion and hence keep the story of the Broadland wherries alive. I wrote a small book about Albion in 1998 for the Norfolk Wherry Trust and the first words within it are, fittingly, not my own but Roy’s.
I talked to Sarah of my appreciation of him, and how his work was among the inspirations for my novel Count The Petals Of The Moon Daisy. I explained that the book is about a violinist and that another touchstone for it had been the pastoral music of English composer Herbert Howells. Oh, she said. She had studied at the Royal College of Music and knew him. This is when I had to sit down. How I wish I had met him. He died in 1983 leaving a legacy of glorious works. When we make the film of Moon Daisy – yes, we are getting closer – the entire score will be drawn from his compositions.
So you see, I found the voices all the more enchanting, in song and word.
The singers went home and I wandered in the company of a nightingale. Diversity and pace; perhaps these are the keys to logging experiences, so long as we stand and just be once in a while to properly gauge circumstance and detail, to register our place in time and to remind ourselves to use that time better; to acknowledge the obvious that, somehow, some days, we do not see; to break our gaze from the mollifying collectives of some surreal diversions headed by the dire and (I pessimistically believe) encouraged anxieties of image, possession, economics and, ironically, time.
I am sometimes blown over by the rush of the human race, with people all but busting blood vessels to keep up with whatever they will dream up next to keep everyone paying. Is life truly satisfying when it amounts to a line of expensive and “awesome” funfair rides where you sweat to buy the ticket then just sit like a plum pudding?
Sorry. I just think everyone craves less of more, with time to live and give.
Now for news of a tight squeeze. What is adventure without a little terror?
I’m in a hole….well I was a few hours ago; more than four metres down an ancient chest-wide shaft cut into the red rock, to be precise, trying to fathom out why our spring has stopped.
I already knew from a “never again!” descent a couple of years back – remember? – that at the bottom of the shaft a tunnel barely big enough for a toddler had been painstakingly chiselled into the hillside. So I crouched, took an enormous breath, muttered a few foul oaths and paddled along it.
Five metres from the shaft there had been a great collapse. A pile of rocks and mud was blocking not only my way forward but also the flow of spring water. Roots dangled from the dark void above, and my feeble torch could just pick out a great space beyond the fall.
I backed out at a rate of knots and climbed into the sunshine to tell a visiting friend how scary it was. He immediately volunteered to go down with a camera. Mad as a box of frogs. Sure enough, the photographs showed what looked like a man-made stone arch beyond the rock fall. Who? How? When?
The dilemma is what we can do without disturbing what could be an important site. We figure there can only be about three metres of rock and earth above the cavern, making it highly dangerous to drive a tractor or even walk above there. And, as I said, the water to our bassa (water store) has ceased. Doing nothing is definitely not an option.
So I have just taken expert advice and within the next few days we expect to be carefully clearing above the rock fall, opening and unblocking the spring and taking a clearer, safer look at the arch and what lays beyond it.
Close to that point we have a most unusual terrace wall just before the summit of the farm, comprising of right angle lumps of rock bearing the remnants of lime render, as if they had been taken from a ruin. You know what I am thinking…….
This fertile valley has been peopled since Palaeolithic times, and the evidence is scattered everywhere. To site a dwelling on this gentle rise, close to water, would have been an obvious choice. Oh for the gift of time travel.
Just a few days before I descended into the blackness I and the family climbed the valley wall into the light to look over the timeless pattern of life.
We passed a pink man in a white vest and weathered jeans carved the loamy red earth with a mattock. His narrow terrace and the rhythm of his labour snaked towards us between the babble of the river and the silence of the forest. We were rising into the peace.
After downpours, double rainbows and thunderbolts the clear air overflowed with colour and life. We slowly zigzagged up the face of the limestone ridge, absorbed by the dappled-shade-delicacy of the moss and the fern amid the host of nature and its perfume, contentedly lost for words, lost in time. With late shoots of wild asparagus sprouting from our fists we walked along the top of the ridge as man and woman have always done, until we found a suitable ledge on which to contemplate and picnic. Bliss.
I will relay news of the spring works next month with tales of Nartists in residence too, but meanwhile leave you with another treat, for entomologists and all lovers of wonder.
As you stand in the horse corral, dusty as the High Chaparral, four to five staggeringly large hymenopterans fly figure eights around your ankles. They are 4cm long scolia flavifrons, black with two yellow bands, known to some as mammoth wasps. Nectar gathers who are as large as the carpenter bees that are working the wisteria outside the back door right now, and seemingly just as unaggressive, they are parasites of the rhinoceros beetle which perhaps explains their unceasing dance close to the horses.
Since Spook the Anglo-Arab steed arrived we have the best roses in the valley and have been able to gift sacks of hhuu, as my mum would call it, to neighbours. The juggernaut beetles have been lured by the dung fragrance too, so the circle of life spins on.
PS: I now write a small weekly blog for the small business blog http://sme-blog.com/ should our fiscal trials, tribulations and the merry dance of earning a living at Mother’s Garden be of interest. Anyone who is doing their own thing or is thinking about it might find the site helpful.

Posted in Garden, holiday cottage, living abroad, mother's garden, Nature, spain, Uncategorized | 2 Responses »
Tags: catalonia, entomology, Garden, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden, spain

My April of remembrance

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Squalls and sunshine; legions of broken clouds shunted westward by a pepper wind; double rainbows two days on the trot; a myriad of wild blooms reigned over by the poppies; the intoxicating beauty of Mother’s Garden as, brimming, I stare at one of life’s great milestones.
Am I really so old?
During the long month of April I have stood and sat in places – not Catalan but English places – that flood memories of childhood with the clarity of Holt Hills’ spring water, specifically my seventh year. Some formative things you never forget: These are mine.
Dad died on March 18. On April 5 we carried him into St Andrew’s Church, Holt, in the far East of England, in the green folds of north Norfolk, filling that crowded space with music and an ounce of mischief, just as he had done as a 12-year-old in 1932, straining to reach the pedals of the organ.
Earle Kirby was 91: A man of music and smiles, a composer of courtesy and comical raspberries, of immovable opinion and unerring loyalty to family and friends as strong as his allegiance to the bright side. “I won’t be beaten, boy,” he would say with a beautiful Norfolk lilt, and he never was.
He had been a one sock up, one sock down child, a free bird of those Spout Hills, devoted to his mum and dad, Tom and Ellen, of The Fairstead on the Cley Road, a boy and man wedded forever to his town. He had raced through its alleys and along its streets on his cycle with neither tyres nor seat, scrapped with other cubs under the long-gone water tower on Shirehall Plain, and he had marched home down the High Street after five years at war in North Africa and Italy.
A few days before his funeral I went home. I drove through dappled shade along the much diminished road where I had puddle-jumped in red wellies, been towed on a sledge behind a car and had considered in all security that the whole world was houses nestling in woods that ran to heath and endless sea.
I stood between gateposts, took a deep breath and knocked on the door of the house which Dad had designed and which I left when I was six. I sat again on the very same stair where I had said to myself, arms wrapped around my knees, “This is 1965 and I will never forget it”.
Within days of that moment my family was irrevocably broken. My equally dear mother took me and my sister to live in the neighbouring town of Sheringham, four miles away. In the dark corners of confusion and discord only one thing was clear to me. Dad was left behind.
In adulthood, long after the consecutive 500 Saturday afternoons and evenings we spent together after the separation – when every second counted and an unbreakable bond was gilded – came just one solitary mention of his then desperate struggle with suicidal thoughts.
But he would not be beaten. No.
That house in High Kelling, like the road, had shrunk, but I could remember every inch of it. Echoes bounced off the walls. How, when now I can barely recall what I did last week?
From there slowly on in to town, gliding past the seam of trees through which my mum would push me in a pram along a path long lost to undergrowth. Left into Grove Lane, hearing somewhere the whining gearbox of the old pale-green Ford Anglia Dad called Lilly, choosing at the last second not to stop at his bungalow home of 44 years but to press on past the flint wall of the old workhouse, to park and walk to the Hills.
There is another great sweep of flint wall there too, high and mighty on the bank above the spring pool, rising steadily from its beginnings at the entrance to Hill House beside Holt Methodist Church at the zenith of Letheringsett Hill. That towering curve of stone and brick would hold my impressionable eye every time we walked the vale, the greatest unexplained thing I had ever seen, filling me with wonder and foreboding as what could possibly lay beyond.
All scale is lost with years, but not feelings.
Fat oaks now stand where once we would scream down on sledges, sometimes into the brook that is full of reflections.
I never knew Tom and Ellen. They were gone before I was a year old and are buried in the cemetery on the Cley Road, just on from The Fairstead. I pointlessly sought shelter from rain under a hawthorn, then, protecting my gift of daffodils, dipped my shoulder and pressed on towards them, up the path the way Dad would run home from school, to stall at the back of the garden I have no memory of but now know so well. Water on my face I pulled photographs from my mind, all found in a box in the bottom of Dad’s wardrobe; My Nan in her deckchair by that door, a tray of tea on the grass, Dad holding his new cycle, Grand-dad beside the chicken coop. For whatever reason, perhaps unmanageable loss, Dad had never taken me there, never retraced those steps. I stood and tried to piece this part of me together. Maybe nothing ends if we remember.
I didn’t intend this blog to be so raw, but that is how life has been, and that does not mean bleak. It is the common crossroad, in my family’s case with the greatest blessing of a very long, fruitful life. There has been sun as well as rain (not least the phenomenal care of everyone at Sun Court Nursing Home in Sheringham), and just before Dad was laid to rest with my step-mother Eve it was so good to honour in my rambling epitaph his heart, humour and that refusal to be beaten. I even blew a raspberry.
When tests finally proved that this one-time Norwich cinema organist, Royal Artillery veteran, car paint specialist, music teacher, co-founder of the North Norfolk Aeromodellers and member of the Last of the Holt Summer Wine was unable to see where he was going and the DVLA took his beloved driving licence away there were no complaints.
His solution was an electric cycle that would do a hair-raising 25mph. I couldn’t watch and I certainly couldn’t argue. And when after an alarming couple of years the rapid onset of glaucoma meant even he decided it was all getting a bit risky for the good people of Holt there was a plan C.
“I’m goin’ into production, boy.”
“What do you mean Dad?”
“I’m goin’ to make bird tables.”
“Um…how exactly?”
“I’ve bought a tabletop saw. Now stop your worryin’. I’ve thought it all out. I’ll do it by feel.”
He died of old age, by the way, with all his fingers attached.

FOOTNOTE: My apologies for the late arrival of this post but, perhaps, the reason is obvious. Watch this space for news of a different nature in the coming week. Best wishes to all, and thank you for reading. Martin.

Posted in living abroad, mother's garden, Norfolk | 5 Responses »
Tags: catalonia, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden

Loose leaf tea and fine literature

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Ah, the ethereal contentment of loose leaf tea and fine literature.
Since November 10 we have spent an hour every Sunday morning wandering the fields and lanes of 1930s north Suffolk, England, in the irresistible company of Adrian Bell; living with him, lost in the colours and truths reflected in his eyes, walking in his measured stride so as not to miss a detail.
My selfish gift to Maggie on her birthday was the trilogy of Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree penned by the columnist – nuggets of English pastoral writing and as treasured on this farm as much as the volumes of Lilias Rider Haggard, Ted Ellis and William Dutt. (Google them).
A dawn dressing-gown-and-wellies excursion to the chickens and horses while the tea brews, a minute nursing the wood-burner before back into bed to read to one another on the one morning when we try to cease worrying about the common, endless demands on time.
How good to read again Bell’s thoughts on what fulfils; how a pony and trap can hasten the real world into our conscience far swifter than a car ever will; how the morning rhythms of lamp and fire lighting ignite the spirit to face the day.
And coincidences fly up from the pages. Bell writes of Lapwings, now endangered but of which great clouds fill my childhood memories, wavering like blow leaves above the rolling fields of the north Norfolk coast within the salt scent of the North Sea. We read, we remember, and within days we spy four Lapwings on a hay field just a mile from Mother’s Garden, our first sighting during our eleven years here.
For there is, happily, some harmony between that life and this, where at arm’s-length from nauseating commercialism we are gifted immeasurable, timeless wonders to ponder and learn from, in tandem with the pains and rewards of bending the back to touch life and work the land.
We are one chapter from the end of The Cherry Tree, an aching thought, but I have asked a friend at BBC Radio Four to help us track down a recording of Martin Bell’s programme about his father, broadcast about five years ago. Did you hear it? And to steady our pace throughout the year we will next read Apple Acre (1942), Sunrise to Sunset (1944) and The Budding Morrow (1946), with the store of Bell’s later books to draw on after that.
The Swallows will race by from Africa any day now, for the birding has begun, fanned by the unseasonably warm, dreamy air. Wildfires are flaring across this parched peninsular (in March, for goodness sake) and we must balance this fear with the beauty and the awakening. The return of feathered melodies that faded away in October; the shocking exultation of a murmuration of Spotless Starlings spooked from the meadow; a Mistle Thrush on a pruned vine; a Sparrowhawk dining at the foot of an olive tree while a Short-Toed Eagle circles; the star bursts of almond blossom; the contentment of our horse and pony who have an acre of woodland and vineyard to graze.
Better still, our Kingfisher obligingly hangs around my office window; two Great Spotted Cuckoos condescend to be admired, drawn, it seemed, by the sound of paint being scraped from old shutters; and a pair of Sardinian Warblers flit between their nest in the choicia shrub beside the barbecue and a our vast fig tree where they hop about, hunting for bugs.
Then, when you think all is done that day comes the glory of the crystal night where Venus dances with Jupiter in the west, and easterly Mars makes us curious.
For half way there is “Curiosity”, the largest and most advanced rover we Earthlings have ever sent to explore another world, whistling along at six miles a second and due to land on our neighbouring red planet in August. Is this really a precursor to a one-way manned mission to the red planet within the next 20 years? Any volunteers?
While living the day we look back as well as forward.
Needing to recharge, and with nephew Yan agreeing to take up the reins, we wandered off to the coast for two nights, just an hour away, to savour the loneliness of sands that in summer pulse with near naked humanity, and to take an ages-old step into the past.
At the northern end of the smile that is Altafulla’s bay, just down an anonymous, short, walled path guarded by a squat palm tree, are the remains of a great Roman villa, Els Munts, one of the most important in all of Spain because of its size and the opulence of its decorations, including vast mosaics, gardens and two thermal baths.
It was a dwelling for six centuries, summed up in one lump of stone. At the end of a well-preserved mosaic walkway you can see where stairs once rose to the long-gone second floor. The first step, a foot high when laid, sags in the middle, half worn away by the footfall of residents, guests, servants and slaves.
How to get a handle on history, to measure it, sense it? Is it in a pupil’s conscience merely the length of a lesson, or as long as it takes to memorise a date? We sprint out of the school gate and that uniformed world into the heady immediacy of life, fuelled in a twentysomething chapter of immortality by the sense of it being our time. Now, as I wander happily downhill at Adrian Bell’s pace, I ponder what I have missed and I lament my weakening eyes. I am hungry to stare.
The low terrace of old white cottages built on the shoreline by long-gone fishing families is a charming front to some typically bland Spanish urban architecture. The crush of summer veils the truth, that on so much of this coast the magic has been swamped by so much mediocrity, laid bare by the cold honesty of winter. And this planning disharmony seems to drown some people’s sense of respect for the environment, with our rocky headland walk and imaginings of ancient beginnings strewn with the debris of idiots who couldn’t give a damn.
Whether it is here, Hinkley, Helsinki, Hownslow or Hull, can we collectively agree to stand tall and challenge anyone who couldn’t give a damn?
We walked on, jaws locked, to a tiny bay where Romans had carved rectangular blocks out of the rock and where, now, beards of grass-green seaweed ebb and flow. Again we left the present and ran our fingers across the past.
Let’s change the subject.
Anyone who lived through it should remember that ferocious UK gale in 1987 that flattened forests, stirred up a rainstorm of roof tiles and put the fear of God into everyone, and yet for all the mayhem is best remembered because of a BBC weather forecaster’s reassurances.
Just before the mayhem he had assured the nation, in response to a woman who’d phoned asking if a hurricane was on the way, that it wasn’t, and that Spain would get it instead. The storm veered north, 3 million homes were damaged, 15 million trees were uprooted and 19 people died.
Among the shocking images was one of a block of five garages – those little lines of adjoining, flat-topped buildings where the British keep their beloved cars….or not. A gust had torn the roof off in one lump and from the helicopter circling the devastation a photographer had gifted the world a spy satellite view of the contents.
Yes, you are right – there wasn’t a car in any of them. One was spotlessly clean and as empty as a politician’s promises. The other four, however, were stacked to the absent ceiling with things that “might come in handy one day”.
The relevance of all this is our 200-year-old farm Catalan barn; large as a house, and (you guess correctly once again) full of “stuff”. Or rather it was, because we have finally taken to the recycling centre a ludicrous number of glass jars, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, vinegar, children’s broken toys, perforated irrigation piping and an ancient sack of bread flower (lost and forgotten beneath the pile) that had turned to stone.
The vinegar had been lined up in a collection of dusty containers between the snow tyres and the yellow anti-freeze for the solar hot water system ever since our first winemaking attempt had gone horribly wrong. Delusional, we had wondered if it might improve with age.
Three hours, two rats’ nests and a dust storm into the task, Yan waved a carrier bag of something in the air.”Ay, Ay!” he said, looking inside again, his eyebrows completing the circle of his grin. “Beaten Rasquera to it have you?”
For those of you who haven’t had a whiff of this story that made the UK newspapers, the village where we buy our Christmas turkey is making plans to plant out 12 acres of cannabis to beat the economic crisis.
In our case the bag in question contained dried oregano if you must know, wedged underneath a couple of broken – but repairable – beach chairs. We do not grow pot.
The mayor of Rasquera’s plan is to free the 900-strong community of a whopping €1.3million debt by cultivating marijuana for a personal use cannabis association who will pay €54,170 a month: Heady stuff, in my case for two reasons.
Are small Spanish towns and villages really sliding into that degree of debt? Blimey. And what exactly is the legal situation for such a radical project because it’s seems to be without precedent? I sense a storm brewing….
Mind you, just be grateful they haven’t shortlisted your neck of the woods for the $22.3 billion EuroVegas resort – a Vegas-like strip of 12 hotels, dozens of restaurants, a convention centre, three golf courses, a stadium and six casinos, modelled, unnaturally on the neon outcrop in the Nevada desert.
Spain has been chosen because of the climate and (maybe, no probably) the recession, in that the American creators are said to be looking for hefty concessions from a national government that is sufficiently desperate for jobs and investment.
It seems both Barcelona and Madrid are the finalists. For once I want Madrid to win.

Keep well.

Posted in birding, living abroad, mother's garden, Nature, Priorat, spain, Uncategorized | 1 Response »
Tags: birding, catalonia, living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden, spain, wildlife

Static attack (and I don’t mean the cat)

Monday, March 5th, 2012

There has been something in the winter air at Mother’s Garden, and it hurts.
Strangely, as the clear night temperatures in the Catalan mountains slid to minus 10 after a mild January, the ache of brittle cold was not adorned with jewels of frost. Instead the startling absence of humidity caused sparks to fly.
The static here has been alarming as well as painful and has added to the disconcerting realities of no rain and economic squall. Opening or closing a car door was accompanied by a blue flash and curses. Taking off a jumper was enough to illuminate a dark room; kisses came at too high a price.
There has been talk of extra-terrestrial activity or nuclear meltdown, but it has been, hopefully, just a particularly barren spell of hydrogen-bonding, the likes of which we have never experienced before. You know – not enough water molecules to reduce the air’s resistance, so static charge builds up on objects and people. (No, I’m not entirely sure what I mean either, but there are clever trousers among you who do).
The dry Sere wind from the west, the dominant force most mornings, has refused to yield to more humid afternoon wind from the seaward east, and there by lies the disharmony.
The harnessing of wind power is the bold focus in this corner of Spain, with hundreds of turbines within a 30-mile radius of us, and I want to tell you about that another day.
Perhaps, though, we should all look again at Nikola Tesla’s ingenious theories of a century ago regarding the capture of electricity straight from the atmosphere. In 1910 he designed a system to harness the power of lightning, that dramatic discharge of static electricity which is an alarming, unifying fact of life for we Earthlings.
I’m reliably informed that the average lightning bolt contains a billion volts at 3,000 amps, or 3 billion kilowatts of power, enough energy to run a major city for months. As I am sure I have relayed before, we have far more “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” moments here than in the UK, and there are 16million lightning storms worldwide a year. I really don’t like them but would be happy to hear one if it heralded rain.
May this parched winter have been broken by storm by the time you are reading this, and the thirst quenched. The earth is desperate.
Extreme times indeed, with a deathly dryness to reflect the social climate as the pepper wind of economic recession begins to find cracks in that powerful, rural Latin resilience. The pervading chill of unemployment among the young – running at a numbing 47 per cent – is, along with sickening health and education cuts, carving a canyon between the vulnerable and the insulated.
The safety net is the seam of simplicity that still runs through village society, where stoicism is personified by the oldest generation who remember far worse than this and who, vitally, remain at the heart of many families. Their gardens, like the families, grow and nourish because they are close by and they are able to tend them.
Encapsulating the weight of everything, the timeless Fonda hostel and restaurant in town has finally closed. The door has been boarded up and the flaking shutters have been pulled closed, sagging like the wings of a dead bird. It was a place from a fast fading past, glorious in its ungarnished contrast to the present, with, glaringly, no future. Its closure was inevitable but still a shock.
Perhaps in more positive times someone will step into the void left by the elderly proprietors, rekindle that charm and preserve the key, simple essence of it, once a world living far beyond its means navigates a path through the debris of shocking excess.
Perhaps an attitude founded on the Latin family and community-orientated resilience will prevail, that we will all find a way to recalibrate what is important, and that the air will cease to be charged with injustices.
The questions come thick and fast from the homeland about how hard it must be to live here right now, given what a financial muddle Spain is in, and I am loathe to answer; because the societies are different and, subsequently, so are attitudes, even if there is a collective continent-wide nausea at being misled. Forgive me, though, but it seems some people’s fuses are considerably shorter in England. I was going to tell you of a grim altercation at Luton Airport, but I think I have said enough.
We struggle to stay afloat and grow weary as each day fades, but this life remains so full of opportunities and rewards, and we are healthy, ever hopeful and grateful. All I know is that around the corner there are always more bridges and all we can do is cross them when we get there.
Just to the front of the farmhouse, but not so close to home, Tilly and Ted’s terrier world has undergone a significant reformation. Their run was diseased with dog-size escape holes in the inadequate chicken wire, all plugged by me with anything that came to hand, from clumsy weaves of waste wire, to old window shutters from the tip. It was a disgrace. So visiting nephew Yan has rebuilt it, incorporating chain-link fencing to defeat the canine Houdinis.
And while he was at it he lopped off the fat, dead fig limb above their lodging, revealing what we already feared – that the old tree had all but been eaten alive by the termites. They had flowed along vast arteries to the heart of the tree, and we have known for some time that rats, long evicted, have gnawed a chasm among the roots.
The sadness is that the long branch that has now gone once supported the children’s swing during our first years here, but while the vast girth of the old trunk decays another young tree grows right beside it, bark beside bark, large enough already to give the shade the dogs need in summer.
Tilly and Ted are farm dogs and reside in their shack each night after exhausting excursions when they tear about chasing fancies. They are our dark-hours early warning radar, but too finely tuned it turns out to afford us many nights of uninterrupted sleep. We figured there were two reasons for this beyond youthful exuberance.
We will never be able to stop the wild boar snorting and giving off distinct aromas, but perhaps we could do something to make the mad mutt’s sleep lest fitful. The penetrating cold, despite their deep bedding of straw and blankets, was a factor, no doubt about it, so it was time for some pyjamas.
Actually, Ted’s looks more like a Nordic ski jumper, which he considers particularly fetching, but Tilly is living proof that dogs can be embarrassed. We don’t see why – the pattern on her jimjams has a certain heraldic quality, with matching red sleeves and neck. Either way, the incidence of midnight madness has diminished considerably, and all we can hear now is their great aunt Biba snoring on her armchair in the office.

As always, we send happy thoughts and best wishes from the Garden. I will write again soon.

Posted in Garden, living abroad, mother's garden, spain, Uncategorized | No Responses »
Tags: living abroad, martin kirby, mother's garden, spain

Our fresh olive oil now in Canada and America

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Do you live in Canada or America? Would you like to try our fresh, top award-winning extra virgin arbequina olive oil?

New harvest olive oil straight from the village mill here in The Priorat, Catalonia, Spain, will be arriving in Toronto – where Maggie was born – any day now for immediate delivery to private clients and chefs.

We have teamed up with Dos Cielos Privado of Toronto to bring make Mother’s Garden arbequina extra virgin olive oil – awarded the top 3-star gold standard in the British Great Taste Awards in 2011 – available for North Americans who appreciate the finest, healthiest food that is bursting with flavour as well as goodness.

As in England, we are giving people the chance to enjoy fresh olive oil as we do here in the Mediterranean – 100 per cent extra virgin, from a single village cooperative mill, in the beautiful Priorat mountains where the groves have been tended for thousands of years.

Just contact us now and we will arrange for Dos Cielos Privado to get in touch.

This is what Colin Webster of Dos Cielos Privado, Toronto, says about our olive oil.
“It the best 100 per cent arbequina olive oil that I have ever tasted.”

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: And we strongly urge everyone who loves and understands – or wants to understand more – about the finest, freshest 100 per cent extra virgin olive oil to read Tom Mueller’s vital, intelligent and engrossing new book Extra Virginity: The Sublime And Scandalous World Of Olive Oil (Amazon in US). The American writer, based in Italy has laid bare the story of one of the world’s more important and wonderful foods.

Posted in America, Bulk olive oil, Canada, Fresh olive oil, Great Taste Awards 2011, mother's garden, New harvest olive oil, olive oil, spain, Uncategorized | No Responses »
Tags: America, Canada, extra virgin olive oil, mother's garden, Tom Mueller

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